What was remarkable is how many people said, “I thought this couldn’t happen to you.” So many people told me they had heard me say that I moved to London because I feared state violence and believed that raising children under its threat required parents to live in terror, to teach their children how to behave like enslaved people in order to escape it. They told me they’d always thought I was being dramatic, exaggerating, illogical.
By you, they meant they thought it couldn’t happen to educated people, middle-class people, people who went to boarding school and Ivy League law schools, or people with passports they used to travel to Europe as opposed to shithole countries. They thought that privilege would protect people like me.
There was, and is, something uniquely horrible about that sentiment. I would hear it and realize that even after all these centuries of Black people being brutalized by White supremacy, White people still didn’t understand how pervasive it is, how it warps the lives of every single Black person in America. I realized how much of our pain was discounted by good White people. But most of all, it became shockingly clear how little value was placed on Black lives. Because what people were really saying, what they meant, is that those “other” people, those without privilege, somehow deserved to die. That in order for a Black life to begin to have value, it would need to be swaddled in privilege.
One of the most indelible moments of the nightmarish first week after my brother’s death was when my mother, family, and close friends were sitting in our lawyer’s office for the first time. One of the many horrible circumstances of my brother’s killing was that he was taken to the hospital, and no one had called us; no one called his family. He lay for hours, alone, in the hospital, and then was transferred directly to the morgue, as if he had no one who loved him. I remember telling the lawyers this, saying that we needed answers, saying that this was wrong. As if this were the worst thing. I will never forget how the lawyer, who had been soothing and hyperprofessional, turned to me and said, “You know these White people don’t care about you.”
I realized in that moment that the questions I was asking were predicated upon my belief that my brother’s life mattered, that our family’s grief mattered. Even after all I knew about how little value was placed on Black life, my reactions indicated my belief that we would be different.
Almost a year after my brother’s death, I am learning more about grief, about solidarity, and even more about courage. It takes a special kind of courage to parent Black children, a specific kind of defiance. I’ve just read a book called We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood. I loved this book, so much, because it reflects what feels most true to me as a mother of Black children, especially in this moment in which we find ourselves. There is no safe space, privilege cannot protect any of them, and running doesn’t work. According to the book, “our obligation is to leave the world better for them and to ensure that they are equipped with the tools that they need to fight. We don’t have the luxury of living normal lives. . . . We don’t live for the I. We live for the we.”
Today my son is six years old. All the baby roundness has completely given way to sharp bones and muscle. He’s obsessed with soccer and chess and riding his bike, and he’s thrilled that his head (it’s still enormous) reaches almost to my shoulders. But he still draws me pictures that say, “I love you, Mommy,” still asks me to carry him to bed, still wakes up with nightmares wanting a hug. We are still figuring out how to both protect and prepare him and his sisters for the world as it is while equipping them to fight for the world as it should be. I still haven’t told him how his uncle died.
One of the lines from We Live for the We will stay with me always: “We are raising children who were never meant to survive.” I feel, so deeply, that raising brilliant, courageous, Black children who will grow up to live lives in service while also feeling entitled to joy is a revolutionary project.
Chapter 13
So We Don’t Die Tomorrow
by Jessica Horn
Life, a friend of mine once declared, is a constant process of fighting against that which seeks to erase you from the world. It struck me as exhausting. To be forced into a perpetual defense, ever ready to write yourself back in or thrust your hand and stop your history from being obliterated before you have a chance to say, “That’s just not true!” But I have found myself—as an African feminist and a Black woman working in the worlds of global human rights and development practice—repeatedly doing just that.
I was in my midteens when a wave of crisis hit the Great Lakes with the hundred days that marked the genocide in Rwanda. I always felt an intimacy with this history, given my mother’s family’s location in Western Uganda, near enough to the borders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo to be implicated in their legacies of displacement. A poem that I wrote as an undergraduate reflecting on the United Nation’s use of wordplay to allow genocide to continue won first prize in a competition judged by my writing heroine, African American poet and essayist June Jordan. I felt “seen,” as we say on Black Twitter, felt an echo back from this accomplished observer of social beauty and political discord. During my master’s program I found myself revisiting this same terrain, spending several distressed weeks reading accounts of the language and metaphor used by génocidaires to describe the rape of Tutsi women.
I could never quite place a finger on what it was that drew me to the role of witness to brutality. I am not macabre in my tastes: I much prefer joyful experiments in creativity to engaging with the violence that punctuates so many women’s lives. And yet I have constantly found myself in these spaces of bloody disagreement, metaphorical armor acting as a buffer for my permeable inner landscape, trying to stop the most horrific stories from entering and wreaking havoc. And so in June of 2012 there I was, coursing through verdant landscape in a Toyota Corolla. Soukous pulsing out the windows as we swerved left and right on the winding road that led us away from Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, and toward Lake Kivu and the small bridge that marked the border between Rwanda and its giant of a neighbor, the Democratic Republic of Congo.
I was on a trip with a small group of African feminist colleagues for a practical solidarity visit to Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, the capital of one of Congo’s eastern provinces and a central node in the armed conflict that had emerged from layers of regional historical grievances, lucrative mining interests, and the reality that business thrives in chaos. “Women of the Congo” were in the process of becoming their own meme, a global salvation project, shorthand for the victimization of African women’s bodies and the presumption that all violence against women in conflict takes the form of rape by rebel forces. American celebrities had already begun their descent, with public fundraisers and dance-offs in London and New York and photo shoots with the brave women of this apparent epicenter of hell on earth. Panzi Hospital was at the core of this story—an increasingly visible experiment in activist medical care and survivor-centered medical response.
The air began to cool as we drove into the forested mountains. As I kept my motion sickness at bay, I thought about what we were driving ourselves toward. By the wisdom of international media, Congo was a land of death. But I could also hear the tone of my mother’s tongue rounding out the r in the name Zaire—as many east Africans of her generation still called it—the land of Lumumba. Birthplace of Congolese rumba. Of Franco and the TPOK Jazz tunes that I listened to on Sunday afternoons in my parents’ house. This land of La Sape, of sartorial flamboyance.