Woe is Me: Friendship in the Time of Genocide by I. Augustus Durham

Simone DrakeWoe is Me: Friendship in the Time of Genocideby I. Augustus Durham | @imeanswhatisays | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
August has always been black. One of the blackest people I have ever known, my mother, was born on the 12th. Though this piece is not about her, I think often about how she, and my father, understood friendship. My mother and her best friend, Aunt Dianne, only became so after a chance encounter in the second grade; my father always said he did not want a lot of “friends”. In fact, I can only ever remember him calling two people such; they have since passed away. Dianne Cook, Thurman Jefferies, Ivory Fisher—these people amounted to being my parents’ woes.
This #BlackAugust, reminiscing on my parents and their friends, I recall George Jackson as son, that brother in Soledad, writing his father, Robert Lester Jackson, in August 1965. This moment as the golden anniversary +1 of these epistolary moments signals that his life should be celebrated now, and that this piece is a sign of good luck akin to an extra candle on a cake. Nevertheless, what puzzles and endears George to me in that first letter is that he, no different than in others, refers to his father as “friend”. In the midst of psychological trauma, ever gesturing to freedom, George renders himself vulnerable to a sociobiological hybrid:
So, my friend, I started conducting these experiments with myself. Why can’t I rid myselfof the sorrow and emotion that awareness has brought me? I get rid of the self-destructive force of error and ignorance only to be torn and miserable by what Idiscover. It happened that I knew all along that some imbalance did exist, or I’ll say afew imbalances existed, that disallowed me from progressing further in my development.I put my head in my hands and wondered why do I make myself sick, why can’t Iovercome this, maybe I’m just human after all? I believe that is what got it! I am what Iam, and that’s all I am. I knew this morbid depression must have some humanexplainable cause, an imbalance somewhere. The mind and body cannot be separated, aphysical imbalance can precipitate effects that could eventually lead to some mentalimbalance. Too much sleep, too little, the wrong kind of food, too much, too little, toomuch reading in the wrong position, too much study, or too long an application to onesubject, results in imbalances, conflicts, struggles. I was looking for a solution from onedirection only, when no event, no effect in nature, has a single cause. It’s a collection ofcauses! So I look at myself and I discover new ways of knowing myself, seeing andplacing myself in the vast scheme. The struggle is almost over, my friend, complete andharmonious development can be mine, everyone’s. Only one-fourth of the sorrow in eachman’s life is caused by outside uncontrollable elements, the rest is self-imposed by failingto analyze and act with calmness.
I quote at length here because . . . just because. I understand George’s words to Robert because I too conducted an experiment with myself, and became torn and miserable by what I discovered:
I do not drive. If I am with friends late into the night, they often drive me home, that is if I do not catch an Uber. What I noticed is consciously, especially if the friends are persons of color, I get out of the car after arriving home, and say, like clockwork, “Text me that you got home all right.” This self-experimentation is because we are all living in a time of genocide. I do not use that hashtag because it is asinine.
I say “all” because in the very state in which I currently reside, the police killed an unarmed deaf man for “speeding”, him likely not hearing their vehicular alarms to pull over—Daniel was someone’s woe. His death elicits woe. Although he was not “black”, his death marks him as someone who died en soledad with countless other black lives who benchmark the ongoing genocide that happens on this soil, whether Sandra Bland or Philando Castile. In other words, Daniel’s “black life” mattered. These names are drops in an ocean. One would think that lessons have been learned from previous genocides. Alas, here we are.
My woes are me; I, them. And it engenders woe to think about a father-as-friend contending with the gravity of his son’s letters being the only physicality he can grasp instead of his warm body, or that after a night of woeful mirth, the next time I see a friend may be in a casket. Friendship in a time of genocide is real. This is likely why I, and I would encourage you, can and should remove “friends” from the “circle” who ain’t never loved (me). When you realize that someone who calls you friend, and vice versa, treats animals better than you, you comprehend that three-fourths of sorrow George theorizes. Hence, this analysis is an act of calmness.
Concurrently, if my life can unexpectedly be snuffed out, I want to know that I loved, and spent time with people who loved in return. This is why, during a recent visit home, when my father told me and my siblings we meant the world to him, I imagine that my father—as transparent as it is to say, even typed—may have become my friend.
I want to conclude with something that may seem counterintuitive, albeit crude, that I think can, somehow, do some work: Shawn Elliott has a ditty called “Shame and Scandal in the Family”. It is a comically sordid tale of lies and deceit, potential incest and cuckoldry in Trinidad; the chorus—“Woe is me/Shame and scandal in the family.” While the shame and scandal in this family deals with the aforementioned vices, what the song equally provokes is everyone’s relationality to others. This is to say, inasmuch as a stranger, with or without authority, who could hypothetically be my “parent”, can “end” me, s/he could also “end” a friend who might be my “brother” or “sister”. One then reads the song’s protagonist doing precisely what George accomplishes in the self-experiment: looking at himself and discovering new ways of knowing himself, seeing and placing himself in the vast scheme, even if said scheme is a hamlet in Trinidad. Therefore, in order to counteract the troubles of the world, its woes, I have to know myself and then work ever harder to encounter me in my woe.
This indeed is working on excellence.
+++
I. Augustus Durham is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in English at Duke University. His work focuses on blackness, melancholy and genius.
Other essays from I. Augustus Durham:
KING Me: Soul for a Black Future
Mr. White! *said in echo*: Charting the Black(ness)