This year, in February, for the second year in a row, I attempted to observe Black History Month as a holy month.

I had many inspirations for this idea, among them Black Iftar, started in 2018 by Samira Abderahman., which seeks to bring together Black Muslims during the month of Ramadan for community and fellowship with one another. The idea is that Black Muslims, like Black people in every walk of life, benefit when they can spend time with one another in spaces that explicitly welcome them and help them to feel safe in their worship. It was a brilliant idea that took off quickly, and I was blessed to be able to witness its growth over the past few years, as photographer and participant.

My own roots in worship are Christian. I was raised Seventh Day Adventist, a denomination whose focus, at least in the wings with which I was most familiar, was on Old Testament practices like keeping the biblically-decreed Sabbath Day (Saturday, the seventh day, hence the name), abstaining from consuming pork or shellfish (I was supported in my vegetarianism since I was five years old), and other rigors.

What it meant for me is that I was at church a lot. From Friday night to Saturday night was the Sabbath, which meant no consumption of anything secular was allowed. No secular TV, movies, music. No going shopping or hanging out. Every Saturday in church we’d recite Exodus 20:8-11. I remember it word-for-word to this day:

8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:

10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:

11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

Church service started at 9:00 am with sabbath school, went through to the 11:00am service, which lasted several hours, then we’d break for a couple hours before AYS, the evening service. During the break, my family might go home to eat, or perhaps take a nature walk together. Though I was born in New York, I grew up in the American south (Alabama, Georgia, then Florida) and was fortunate to have ready access to forests and beaches, sites rich with plants, insects and critters of all kinds. I loved nature, and because there was nothing else to do on these sabbath days, I reveled in all I could discover in it.

It’s probably because those experiences with nature were so deeply connected to a holy day that I’ve never made much of a distinction between nature and God. Even as I matured and learned scientific explanations for the way things are, I always returned to the wonder and reverence for nature foremost, and to the devotee’s care never to perceive man as superior to it. Behind all things man thinks of as knowledge, after all, there is the infinitely deeper Truth of what makes knowledge possible.

I stopped attending church regularly around the time I entered high school. The reasons for this were several, and not totally germane to this post, but suffice to say we’d moved around a lot, had settled as a family but economic concerns seemed most central. We moved from a one-bedroom apartment to a four bedroom house in a gated community outside of Tampa, with neon lawns instead of wise trees. We were one of two Black families in the neighborhood and our neighbors despised our skin.

The world itself was changing. It was the turn of the millennium. My father, raised Seventh Day Adventist, still went to church, and we kids still sometimes went with him, but all in all the sabbath had taken on a different feel. Eventually, TVs were allowed on, shopping and participation in culture just kind of happened, and with the exception of our genetic idiosyncrasies and what we remembered, we were indistinguishable from any other non-Adventist family.

My curiosity, meanwhile, never ceased its seeking. Those high school years were quiet, but they brought me to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison and Gwendolyn Brooks, they stoked my love for writing and basketball and the ever-growing desire to leave my little subdivision and live it up in a Real City. College showed me a real city could exist within several acres of a single neighborhood. My university library was my sanctuary. I read Ishmael Reed and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Rita Dove, James Baldwin—and that was just the tip of the iceberg!

Socially, I fell in with a group of Black creative folks. They were all part of the Africana Studies Club. They had cool accents, listened to Sizzla, Capleton, Bob Marley, watched Haile Gerima’s Sankofa over and over again, cooked vegetarian food and protested. I liked them immediately. I grew to love them when, that year, I signed up, on what felt like a calling, for a study abroad trip to Ghana. Over the course of those few weeks in the Motherland, I felt so deeply connected to my people, to nature, to God, and to the Light. We visited marketplaces, slave castles, checkpoints. I’ve never felt more human. I was in heaven.

When I came back, I added Africana Studies to my major. My friends taught me more in-depth about Rastafari, which struck me as profoundly similar to my own religious upbringing. It led me to look into the more mystical roots of the religious traditions to which I was connected. I read up on the Kabbalah and on the Gnostics, but what really got me was this book on the Sufi. I remember encountering in it that one of the Sufi sayings was “Take one step toward Allah, He will take ten toward you.” I don’t know why it struck me so deeply. I was sitting on a bench on campus when I read that line. I lifted my eyes from the page and took a deep breath. The air was fresh, the trees were joyful and I could hear the wind blowing through them.

In hindsight, I count that moment (along with the moment in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X where Denzel Washington, playing Malcolm standing at a Harlem police station where a Black man has been brutalized by the police, lifts a gloved hand to the rowdy crowd and they go quiet, obeying him like the sea obeyed Jesus’ “Peace, be still…”) as one of the formative moments of my appreciation for Islam. Many moments followed. I discovered Darwish and, via Borges, The 1001 Nights. I finished college, went to grad school (for Africana Studies), fell in and out of love again and again. I was directed to Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman. I lost friends and family. Every time a death came I returned to that book of Sufi sayings, recalling that one of the central meditations for the Sufi is the mediation on one’s own death, that one will die and the world will go on, as a mediation on God.

I moved to Chicago after grad school, where I reencountered Islam in altogether new registers. The history of Black Islam in Chicago is deep, as deep or deeper than any other American city’s history with it. The Nation of Islam has been headquartered there since the 1930s, and for this reason among others the city has housed and nourished the most widely-known Black American Muslims in history, from Malcolm X to Muhammad Ali to Louis Farrakhan. Every major Black Muslim movement has had some connection to Chicago. Furthermore, the city’s so segregated that it has been able to maintain for more than a century a Black metropolis, in which all manners of transcendent historical meanings take place, even from its very founding. It is a city in which the Black prophetic tradition has always been alive. No story of Black America is complete without Chicago.

Perhaps it was because I was away from my family or because I was living in a “big city” for the first time, perhaps it was that in Chicago, as in Alabama, you might be walking along the street and encounter a seer who would tell you your life for the cost of just a moment of your attention, or perhaps it was all the ways I wanted to love the Black people I saw and fellowshipped with, the spiritual weight of that love, that led me back to a meditation on the holy that passed through Islam’s black registers in Chicago.

I struggled a lot. It was difficult to find a footing whose magnitude matched the yearning I had to help bring something to fruition. And the brutality of the environment wore me down. I taught high school. For a charter. During a teacher’s strike. Because if I didn’t, how could I be certain that someone who cared as much as I did about these Black students would? There was so much death, and all of it seemed ours. Obama was in office. It felt sometimes like the most epic, transcendent moment in history, and at other times like a very intentional attack on Black minds. I learned a lot, the purest of which were like echoes of my earliest experiences with the holy, shaped more fully as I aged by the role I had to play in the holy as a Black artist.

After showing my first solo exhibition of art, which was informed by those years of experience, and after the Trump inaugural months, which were as bad as they seemed they’d be, after protests in the streets and bearing witness to new communities flourishing with youthful vigor and the promise of the highest stages in the world, I moved to NYC in October of 2017. Alone again, but in the state of my birth (I was born, after all, in Binghamton, though we moved south early), I returned to my interior. It was in the structure of that first year in NYC, where I engaged and was led to engage my deepest self exploration yet.

God has a way of making you put your money where your mouth is. The Quran warns against those who become believers then stray when times get tough. My relationship with the formalities of religious practice has been, since those high school years, rather loose. I can be seduced by the philosophers’ questions, by the inclination to doubt when tested. These last 2 1/2 years have been about that give and take for me between doubt and belief, the world and God. For much of that time I was jobless or freelancing, money was very short, and isolation became my companion. I kept up Ramadan where I could, but never got to a place where I was fasting every day like someone who had been raised in the practice. I photographed Black Iftar, I attended some services, and I made the effort to read the Quran end-to-end.

Then, last year, in the dead of winter, I had an idea. I wanted to know what it would be like if, instead of the normal Black History Month platitudes, I made a disciplined effort to return to the holy works in the Black canon, to fast and pray. As a Black American, I thought, those holy works are the narratives and the spirituals, the speeches and essays, and later, the visual and performative arts, all of which in some form, by calling for Black liberation in some way, gesture toward the nature of all creatures to be free—and the specificities of their experiences meant that this calling for liberation was for all humanity passed through our people. Looking at it this way brought the Black prophetic tradition into a new light for me.

Listening to the spirituals, I heard communally-revealed scripture. I heard old things interpreted newly for the realities of our experiences. Reading the narratives felt like sitting in the presence of elders who’d been through various proto-versions of antiblacknesses we experience daily in contemporary times. Their insights struck me with a feeling of a total truth akin to what I’d feel playing in the forest as a child, or what I felt when studying scholarly interpretations of the scriptures I’d learned as a kid. Though I’d encountered the major narratives (Equiano, Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, etc.) in college, to revisit them alongside others who I’d never read before clarified and amplified the central questions of their experiences.

So I decided to do it again this year, and every year for as long as I live. But in addition to that, this year (which, I guess, this post was supposed to be about from the start), I’m going to really try to observe fasting each day of Ramadan. I know this is going to be hard, considering we’re in the midst of a pandemic and a spiritually lacking regime that tests all of our faiths on a daily basis. I don’t know if those things make it harder or easier to, for instance, meditate on an inevitable reconvening with the Most High. But I do hope to check in on this blog from time to time with how I’m doing, in part to keep myself honest, and in part because the anxiety of living in this world only looks to be exacerbating with each passing day.

My apologies for any typos in this. Be on the lookout for more words in the coming month.