For a core group among my friends, The Autobiography of Malcolm X was formative reading. We read it as teenagers and the book became foundational to the different ways we learned to live with the politics of race and culture. Malcolm and his life represented for us an education that we sensed only for its obvious absence in our regular schooling. Books and writers like these, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time being another example, made critical race theory important to us in profoundly pragmatic ways: it permeated our lives, our creative work, our activism. It continues to do so. This was not mere high theory; this is a practise of resistance that we live because this is the world we inhabit and the inequities we recognise.

I remember how thrilled I was when I first read the book. When I was younger, I badly wanted heroes. I wanted to read about people whose lives stretched further than my own. I wanted their energy, that surety of an early death preceded by a life that had been worth living, worth dying for. Malcolm possessed all the traits I wanted to find in myself: intelligence, charisma, force. And he was angry – a beautiful rage, sharp and disciplined.
We were all of us, this handful of people among my friends, angry adolescents, angry in specific ways. That anger stays with us still, making Malcolm X, or rather the memory of reading his life, integral to the ways we continue to relate to and function in a fundamentally fucked up world.

In a few weeks, I will be presenting on the book in class. I’m excited, but also nervous, because I’m not entirely prepared for the internal messiness that this subject threatens. I’m going to ensure my essay is dry and impersonal in order to disguise how intensely private this revisiting actually is. Re-reading it is forcing me to think about how I’ve changed over the last few years, how I relate to my friends and their work, and, most messily of all, how I feel about faith.

Malcolm X’s life, to say nothing of his murder, is blatantly a study in the intersections of faith and politics, which should make that topic easy to discuss, but it’s something I don’t want to present on, because being Muslim foregrounds certain subject positions that I share with Malcolm. But I’m conflicted about all those positions and so, because unprepared, unwilling to pretend coherency.

Years ago, reading about Malcolm’s hajj and his subsequent adoption of Sunni Muslim values made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Now I am mostly bemused by that section of the narrative, some days even alienated. Now that upswing in the text strikes me as too easy, too neat and clean. How long, I wonder, could he have sustained that serenity? I can no longer take for granted any peace Malcolm may have found after his hajj. At seventeen, it seemed romantic and entirely fitting to me that he performed the pilgrimage and returned a better man. Given that I cannot pretend now that I would definitely have that same experience (and I mostly suspect wouldn’t), I can no longer be uncritical about who Malcolm became, how his politics changed after the hajj.

And speaking more politically, whereas his assassination once struck me as the thrilling end to a life that had reached its apex, I am convinced now that Malcolm had much further to go. He would, for one thing, have become more attuned to the intricacies of intra/intercultural Muslim identity politics, which would have led him to radically revise the glowing opinion he had of the Saudi monarchy. He would have learned soon enough of the country’s systemic oppression of its imported labour force (most of it from South and East Asia) and of its complicity with American imperialism.

The fact, though, that Malcolm died while at a spiritual high means he occupies a unique position in contemporary Muslim cultures. I’d like one day to research how Malcolm’s legacy has been appropriated not just by African Americans, but also by North American Muslims (insofar as we can consider those groups distinct, which they aren’t). Both groups tend to present him fairly hagriophically and I want to study how this simplification works within contemporary Muslim identity constructions. What function does Malcolm serve for young North American Muslims, many of whom are not black? What complacencies has his adoption by Muslim pop culture engendered? How have his politics been neutralised in order to fit into the history of Muslim activism constructed by young North American Muslims? Whose ends are being served by the kind of hero-worship that unequivocally accepts Malcolm as a fixture in North American Muslim heritage?

But before I study those things I want to think about my own relation to the Muslim community, to what extent I do or do not identify with/in it, how my position within it implicates me in my readings of his life, and what narrative limits I have unknowingly internalised as a result of that position. I will need, for this project to be feasible or coherent, to develop a language that adequately addresses (my (lack of)) spirituality and the way literal reality gets skewed in discourses of faith. The fact that I lack that private language is perhaps not a huge issue, academically speaking anyway, but I’d like it at least somewhat resolved before I start.

I need also to make sure that despite my discomfit with the narratives of identity and history construction that define contemporary Muslim cultures, I do not trivialise the anxieties that make those narratives so important to so many Muslims – especially since I used to be one of those kids, someone looking for specifically Muslim activists. That I no longer am is a result, in part, of having worked through those identity issues. Yet however much I claim that those issues are “now” “resolved,” they continue to be important to me because I can never entirely escape the person I once was.

In the meantime, I think of the friends I have who continue to identify this book as important to them and how differently they’ve incorporated their experiences reading it into their life practices, how different these friends are from each other and from me. Despite those differences, however, this book and this dead man highlight so many of our shared angers. I’m not going to reduce Malcolm X here to an easy metaphor for the reasons I call these people my friends, but the fact remains that the man’s name does make us nostalgic in similar ways, that it reminds us of a past when we were angry enough to believe in a blinding sort of future. I have moved away from that particular conception of the future and some of us haven’t, but Malcolm provides one frame through which we recognise how similar our frustrations continue to be.

As for my presentation, according to the abstract I wrote last week, it will be an examination of Malcolm’s pedagogy. My bibliography, exciting and daunting me by turns, includes Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire. I’ve been meaning to read both for a while now, so I am preparing to fall in love and hard.

I am the ballot in your box,
the bullet in the gun,
the inner glow that lets you know to call your brother “son,”
the story that’s just begun,
the promise of what’s to come
- Asheru: “Boondocks Theme”