Angels with Dirty Faces. Walidah Imarisha
“Was he always like that?” I asked tentatively, eggshells crunching under my voice. “Was he like that in New York?”
“Oh I didn’t know him in New York. I only met him when I came out here. But we’ve known each other a long time out here. He’s a really good kid, not like some of these knuckle heads around here.”
I have come to learn everything I need of the truth I have now. It lives in my brother’s eyes, in his strong talented hands flaked by sun and harsh soap. I gather pieces of my brother’s truth and string them like beads to create a necklace, a talisman of protection.
* * *
I know prison is harsh, brutal, soul-crushing, and above all monotonous. The sheer boredom of being trapped with the same people every day, of having limited options—do I watch TV, listen to music, work out, write a letter, read a book, then do it all again tomorrow?
A prisoner told me upon his release, “It’s not the guards that got to me—I learned to shut myself off from them. It wasn’t the other inmates; most of them were cool and you learn early how to avoid the ones who aren’t. What got me lying in my bunk at night—staring at the ceiling scrawled with drawings and messages from past prisoners—was knowing that I had to get up and do the same thing every day, for 2,237 days. That’s when I felt myself slipping away: when I thought of it like that.”
* * *
I know the name Kakamia chose for himself, because I am the one who picked the name for him. I know what a sacred gift that is. A new name reshapes who you are and who you are to become.
I was given my name by my mother’s boyfriend at the time, a Black prisoner in California as well, in a relationship that consisted almost wholly of written correspondence with an occasional phone call thrown in. It was not the first, nor the last, relationship my mother would have with someone incarcerated. My mother has never been overtly political (except in her very vocal patriotic support of the U.S. military, in which most of our family is or was enlisted) but has always worked to support the voices of those who were marginalized and oppressed. Perhaps this is where I get my contradictions.
My mother’s boyfriend wrote to me after getting permission from her, wanting to introduce himself. We wrote to each other over several years, even after he and my mother were not together anymore. He was a Black father, filling the void of my own absentee father, whose yearly Christmas cards had long ago dried up by that point. My mother’s boyfriend was my mentor: my sensei in the ways of Blackness. He introduced me to deeper understandings of organizing in the U.S. by Black folks, and brought me the vastness of Africa. For once, I did not feel caught between two worlds, the white and the Black, as alien and foreign to both. For the first time, I felt I could claim my Blackness easily. There was a community waiting for me and finally I had found a guide to show me the way.
Even though my mother did not understand my need, she supported it as best she could. She felt my hunger for an identity I could carry comfortably in the crook of my arm, and she knew I would have to find that on my own. But while I searched history for my identity, a huge part of who I was stood in the kitchen on tired feet, cooking me dinner every night after working long hours, and praying quietly at night for me.
When I was fourteen years old, in honor of Kwanzaa, my mother’s boyfriend sent me my gift: a choice of three African names—a chance to be reborn. It was no contest for me. I slipped on Walidah Imarisha. Walidah means “newborn” in Arabic; Imarisha is “strength” in Swahili. I felt the name slide against my flesh like a second skin.
Like so many of us stolen children of Africa, searching for names and birthrights, I was trying to find something to make me into more than I was, to see what’s been inside of me all the time.
I have since learned the importance of names in prison, and of being able to choose what you answer to, in a place where you are a string of numbers barked at you all day long. One prisoner I wrote was incarcerated under the wrong name. He had someone else’s ID on him at the time of his arrest. That name (the false one on the ID) was the name under which he was arrested, tried, convicted, and held for fifteen years. He tried, every step of the way, to tell them who he really was. To this day, if you send a letter to his real name, instead of his alias, it will come back “No Such Inmate.” He has been stripped of the name his mother sang softly to him when he was a child.
So I took the responsibility and honor of renaming my brother seriously: as serious as the grave. I studied my Swahili name list, rolling words around in my mouth, reading and rereading definitions, and juxtaposing different combinations for the flavor of culture they brought.
Kakamia Jahad. The staccato of the hard consonants with the healing salve of rolling vowels. Kakamia: Swahili for “tireless,” never giving up, obstinate. Stubborn muthafucka. Jahad: derived from jihad: a word that strikes fear into Western populations. Misunderstood. It does not mean holy war. It means to struggle, to strive, to try one’s hardest to do what is correct.
Three years ago, Kakamia added my last name, Imarisha, to his. “It would be an honor to carry your last name, Wa. We’re family, after all, and this will show the world,” Kakamia’s voice crackled through the static of the prison phone line.
* * *
I know he moved to California, with his mother, his brothers and sisters—full siblings with different daddies, like my own. I know he was a manchild when he came to a state full of sun, where his mother hoped that the absence of concrete might help him grow straight and tall.
* * **
I know my brother’s body is landscaped with tattoos.
You can read his history, lived and reimagined, on his skin. He is a book written by an illegal prison ink gun made out of a hollowed-out broken pen tube, a needle pricked into one end. Blood clots around every word and image.
A grim reaper, scythe in hand, dominates his left arm. From his gang days he told me, when he was “Mr. Grim.” I have a picture of him at his junior prom. He is fifteen years old, body jutting out at all the awkward angles of that age, stuffed into a black tuxedo with a pink cummerbund and tie, to match his date’s Cinderella dress. His arms are wrapped around her, and his square jaw juts forward with a toothy grin. Her eyes dancing with a pink smile that matches the bows in her curly hair. I stare at this picture and wonder if the grim reaper is there as well, swathed in the pink cummerbund. Is he smiling for the picture too?
Bruce Lee is on his leg—“That’s one baaaaaad nigga!” Kakamia bellowed. He was completely unfazed when I reminded him Bruce, though amazing, was in fact Chinese, and also he should stop using the word “nigga” so much.
Another tattoo features an amateurish portrait of the rapper Da Brat, a now-forgotten splash in the pop culture pool. The original ink bled; the tattoo has faded over the twenty years it has lived on his skin. “Yeah, it’s gotten all fucked up… I’m gonna get that covered up; I just gotta come up with something,” he mused.
Like his life, he revises his tattoos, keeping the images and ink that still breathe true, and erasing facts that have turned into lies through the insistent passage of time.
Many of my brother’s tattoos have come after his incarceration. It is illegal for prisoners to tattoo themselves. I have met multiple men that have let my brother paint their flesh while on the inside. Some prison tats are crude and simplistic. Others, like Kakamia’s, are elegant and full of life. Kakamia brings the lightest part of him to his work, his imagination skimming their skin: sunlight on a warm lake.
Kakamia does his own tattoos when the only other tattoo artist he trusts gets sent to the hole. He feels the bite of the needle, creating hours of tedium where attention cannot wander, the stinging kiss a penance and a gift.
He bleeds for his art. He bleeds to remake himself.
The ink is created from a ballpoint pen if you want the quick and dirty way. The “professional” prison ink is composed of soot from burning toilet paper, wood, Styrofoam, and something like black chess pieces. These are mixed with rubbing alcohol and water; small stones are added in the mixing