Ibn Kenyatta and Transcending The Cell Of The Self

Writing from ongoing experience with the incarcerated as a poet and teacher, Ralph Nazareth offers this detailed and moving critique of ibn Kenyatta’s collection (originally appearing in the journal Socialism and Democracy, capturing a stoic compassion and inclusive humanism comparable to the work and commentary of other members of the world's largest prison population, such as Mumia Abu Jamal and Mohamedou Ould Slahi.--RM

poems for an imperiled world

ibn Kenyatta

Xlibris (2014)

This slender but tensile volume of twenty-five poems contains “passionate songs” sung from “above and beyond the blues/but still underneath the top heap/of the bottom dung.”

Kenyatta, prisoner No. 74A3701, incarcerated for over four decades, strives “ever upward

always towards the light.” Ceaselessly soaring, he says, “mylife/mylife is/and mylife’s song speaks to me/‘Carry on!’”

His expansive vision is a testament to the courage of a man who consistently flies above the turbulence on the ground. Shaped by an acute awareness of human and planetary disturbances, he issues prophetic warnings about real and present dangers and exhorts us to “carry on” with love.

A Magisterial Defiance of Assumptions

One may be surprised to hear such a voice emerge from the exile of a long prison term. It would be natural to expect a man interminably immured to write with an edge—sharp, ironic, and bitter—to rail at the dark fates, at injustice and cruelty, at the scandalous abuse of power and the Law. It may perhaps be also reasonable to look here for an owning up to a darkness within—a deed, an irreversible loss of self and other, a terrible and prolonged disruption—and more—possibly remorse, or at least a hint of it, a deeply suggestive trail of a move to recover lost ground.

There’s little in Kenyatta’s work that satisfies these traditional expectations born of an unexamined set of assumptions about society and the system of criminal justice it has long maintained at grave material and spiritual cost. His poems, on the other hand, are philosophical and reflective, even magisterial, touched at times with the sadness at the self-inflicted wounds leading us to the edge of collective, planetary catastrophe. Perhaps the unfailingly lofty rhetoric and vision are precisely the result of the man having spent long years in the vise of suffering—a vision that has been wrung out of pain. Perhaps it is the deepest response to a living death.

Personal to the Planetary

In the ringing credo of his preface, Kenyatta asserts: “If we are to save ourselves from ourselves, that is, the planet from the worst that is within us, each of us must look deep within, first, if we are to stop the VIOLENCE: our overbearing self-interest: greed, lust, hatred, prejudice, larceny, jealousy, envy, etc. then we must reach out and ‘grab hold of the hand’ of one other human being in order to help spread the Word. Love. Peace. Respect.” He continues unwavering: “We must stop, look, and listen to the silent voice within our own hearts. the world is crying out to us. And Mother Nature is calling each one of us out—by name.”

Do not ask what this man did to deserve an unimaginably long term in prison. Do not ask what may be wrong with a blind system of justice that subjects humans to inhuman treatment. Raise yourself, this book seems to urge, to another level and see that you are stewards of a great treasure, a planet facing imminent danger, our “playground” spiraling down into a “place of contentious strife within a living hell.”

Kenyatta does not harbor “illusions” that his poems will have a world-transforming effect, for he knows all too well that only a few will heed the call to do the work needed to tend this “garden” and restore it to health. He merely offers his poems as part of his “humble expression of service rendered toward the Human Family, in my own way.”

A Global Womb Scorched by Hubristic Suns

Those of us who will take the time to listen to Kenyatta will above all else hear his call, more urgent than stern, often poignant, to take responsibility for our lives. The boundaries of what we narrowly see as criminal behavior get vastly expanded in Kenyatta’s profoundly humanistic vision, which warns us against the arrogance of “our god-creating heads.” Unlike the evil functionaries at the Nuremberg Trials who, to a man, said, “I am not responsible,” Kenyatta would have us see that we are all responsible for the ecological holocaust raging all around us, the denudation of the earth, the “injured womb.” Our “projections” and our captivity “within our own ‘event horizon,’” our hubris at thinking of ourselves as “our own suns,” our all-too-blind flitting in the “amniotic darkness of our inner self-cocoon” lead inevitably to little more than “a made-up and make believe world we call human life/where we are its soul-creators of our dreams as well as our nightmares.”

Kenyatta is a teacher who feels no need to apologize for his didacticism. In fact, his doomsday perspective—that we are on the edge of planetary- and self-extinction—makes it imperative for him to speak. And fulminate he does, a veritable voice in the wilderness, as he presses us to redeem ourselves by seeing through the “pseudo-games of mesmerism” of the “devil-mind… disguised as flesh and blood,” the fatal “self-imposed imprisonment.” He refuses to back off from his unrelenting critique. His wailing is suffused with a world sorrow, too big, almost uncontainable, in the face of which the pain of his own incarceration does not seem worth even a passing mention. His prophetic task is to bring all his fury and passion to make us see our Public SHAME:

…haven’t we for too long now been fighting and slaughtering one another

over the same old divisive theologies of religion

over the same squandered national resources

the same impoverished and land-mined territories

the same chemically laden food supplies

the same oil slicks in already polluted waters

the same blood diamonds and tarnished gold

                                                            AD NAUSEAM

                                                            (“Joy Ride”)

The Motionless Explosion of the Moment

As we come under the sway of Kenyatta’s doleful catalogs, we sense at a level deeper than immediate despair, a spiritual instinct which heals divisions and points to an integrated being founded on hope, respect and love. Just as we have no one to blame but ourselves for the “gathering gloom,” we have no need for an agency save the one that stems from our own will to fully enter the freedom of the moment.

Kenyatta’s vision, equally open to excremental and redemptive elements, hence mature and tough, rises to rhapsodic levels as he exhorts us in his poem “Imitation of Life” to bend all our forces to the kind of retrieval our lives depend on for meaning and sustenance:

in spite of the unspeakable wretchedness that is felt as our lives

in spite of all the physical horrors ever to be visited upon human flesh

in spite of our deepest longings for our invitational respect toward Death

we still must will ourselves to live for just one more moment

to relish the baptismal wholeness in its “motionless explosion”

let life live its own moment-to-moment is-ness

it stills any run-on fears that may stalk the empty corridors

of a self-imprisoning mind

which can only entangle itself in its own

ever-impending and self-made web called time

and so now with a cleared vision we can do this we can scale this summit

we must will ourselves to live just one more day

and then to repeat this same feat again and again

and to mark each experience as being a new beginning

in our hopes that a possible change will arrive

and Faith will find us worthy

Lest we mistake this fervor for an all-too-easy transformation of the myth of Sisyphus or an illusory act of cheering ourselves up as we stare into the impending storm, Kenyatta warns in “The Waterbearer”:

but to consciously live out each moment to moment of each day

requires such supernal strength and courage

like that of the great Waabazee River of Ifundiland

which spurns the attractive force of gravity

by initially flowing its waters upstream

on its perennial journey to the sea….

Defying Panoptic Gravity

To learn how to walk amid adversity, and to continue to walk in the face of the apocalypse, Kenyatta says requires that we practice the art of “defying gravity,” an art one masters, if at all, by a “cleared vision” which helps us “act always ‘as if’ everything still mattered in this life/even if she or he inevitably saw no hope in physical matter itself/for the sun hasn't given up on us yet/and neither has the moon.”

Simone Weil

What makes it possible for us to believe that “everything still mattered in life”? How do we defy gravity, which we must do if we are to walk, and continue walking, that is, if we are to be fully human? Kenyatta alternates between the poles of the agency of self-will and what he names in “Prayer Beads” the “caring power called Grace.” Reminiscent of the assertion of the great French mystic Simone Weil who said that grace is the act of coming down without weight, Kenyatta’s statement of belief, at the end of a sequence of poems that have taken the reader through the desert of the spirit, holds that ultimately human agency must be seen to be part of a larger web of forces. In this web we, small “as a tiny grain of sand blown across the Kalahari,” are upheld by the entire Universe, hence unburdened of our own specific gravity, a universe whose story is no larger or more glorious than “your story and my story/and all our stories,” yet without which our stories are incomplete and, like Yeats’ center, “cannot hold.”

To be mindful of this radical inter-relatedness, Kenyatta realizes, is an imperative. In a brilliantly creative use of possibly the only image in the book that reminds us of his life under constant surveillance in prison, he pairs it with Mystery.

Thus:

anklebraceletmonitoring Mystery is this

we’re all under authority to get this

human life right

Not even here, where the oppressive machinery threatens to shackle the human with its iron grip, is Kenyatta willing to compromise his secular mystical vision, a deep earth spirituality, that seeks the nurturing reassurance of two hands, the cosmic and the human, holding each other in inextricable love, the only way “to get this human life right.”

Double-Consciousness In a Time of Resurgent Darkness

I’m writing this response to Kenyatta’s poems in the wake of the brutal deaths of Michael

Brown, Eric Garner and other besieged Blacks; the unveiling of the continuing horror at Riker’s Island and other penitentiaries across this land; in the era of mass incarceration, the “New Jim Crow,” and the systematic attempt at disenfranchising an entire group of people that was reluctantly brought into the body politic by the Voting Rights Act in 1965. In other words, I’m writing this in “dark times.” As a long-time volunteer teacher at a maximum-security prison in New York, I’m writing this with some understanding of the “dark places” we call our “correctional facilities.”

I feel the need to say that I experience a slight shudder of dissonance between the nightmare that is our criminal justice system and Kenyatta’s vision, formed in the dark coils of that gulag, that pushes us all to “get human life right.” Where dissembling in the name of survival is the norm, Kenyatta refuses to wear “the mask” crafted in the days of the old Jim Crow and memorialized in Lawrence Dunbar’s famous poem. Falling in line or shuffling along with those who “shade our eyes” and feed the culture of “grins and lies” is an option he forcefully rejects. Similarly, he pushes aside W.E.B. Dubois’ “veil” and chooses to stride into the open country of his soul, free of the “double-consciousness” and the sense of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others… the feeling of two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body…”

I’m searching here for a way to register my mild surprise and disappointment at Kenyatta not openly acknowledging in his work the excruciating weight of his life behind bars. That I am not able to take a definite stand regarding this apparent lacuna in his presentation of himself to the outside world must mean something, not the least of which is the unfathomable complexity of the way in which we human beings deal with our respective situations.

Love’s Abiding Patience

Last week when I was back at the prison, I shared this ambivalence about Kenyatta’s work with the men in my class. As always, they were provocative and perceptive in their response. But what one of them said stands out for me as the answer that should still my questions, at least for the moment. He said, “You know, Nazareth, you get to a point… well, you get to the point you’re just too tired to go over the shit year after year. You get over it. You settle down to something. Maybe you’ll call it love. And that’s all that matters….”

Now that I look back on Kenyatta’s poetry, it seems most likely that he has attained a genuine transcendence through whatever one may choose to name it—in his case, perhaps love in its many guises.

am i not also your Brother

am i not also your Sister

under the penumbra of an all-embracing Universal Love

The solidarity within human community is one of its faces. A union with the reality of the spirit is another. It helps Kenyatta to refuse to be reduced to a simple material existence, which runs the risk of being its own prison.

“Come out of the circle of time,” says Rumi, “and into the circle of love.” Perhaps that is what Kenyatta is doing, as he says, “in my own way.”

Ralph Nazareth, Ph.D.

Professor, English Department

Nassau Community College, NY
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Further Information:

Find out more about the current state of criminal justice, ending the school-to-prison pipeline and other reforms to the American penal system at:

Building Bridges--The Monthly Newsletter of the Prison Action Network (http://prisonaction.blogspot.com/)

On the Count--The Prison & Criminal Justice Report

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