By Ayo Adene
You know just yesterday, mum was telling me about this family that has 2 kids living abroad, and both kids have become estranged, and now the parents are praying about it, and asking other people to pray along.
The news was that one of the kids was on drugs, and the other had joined bad gang.
Bad gang? What is that? I think, it’s mostly code-speak from parents when they know they’ve fucked up but prefer to project their inability to secure their child emotionally and morally on to others.
See?
A bad gang is a group of broken kids who stand up for each other when nobody else does.
They are family when there’s none else.
Yes there’s a lot of toxic habits going on in these alternative families we call bad gangs, but nothing the bad eggs didn’t learn from home or society, and nothing that isn’t really an adaptation to the harm that was caused in the first place, to make them unsafe at home.
No prizes for guessing who causes the harm that makes children unsafe at home, and become vulnerable to the open arms of alternative families, even bag gangs, so called.
Soon as mum shared that story, my bullshit detector switched on. I instinctively knew this was likely about parenting.
I reminded mum how too many parents replace the closeness, care and communication a child depends on to survive, with providing school fees and other material needs.
Broken parents who hardly love their own selves and so can not truly love another soul, but are forced to raise kids because parent is a degree like PhD, an emblem of arrival, instead of a task like mechanic, or pilot, or some high-stakes work that needs competence and training.
Imagine your pilot learning on the job.
No wonder so many human souls are falling out of the turbulent sky of real life. Yet human beings are more complex than planes.
There are too many stories like these around us, and every time, the narrative is that the kids have gone wrong.
It is never the parents fault.
In the case above, the praying mother has already sent something-million naira to the child to make them come home.
Only increases the odds that money was the original glue in that broken relationship.
But there are many things not even money can buy.
As for DMX, he was just a child when his own mum told him she was taking him somewhere. They were going to visit a place where children were kept.
It was a children’s home.
DMX’s mum took him there, left him there, and never came back.
The existential scream that emerged from deep inside the soul of that abandoned child is the gritty sound you hear on every single DMX rap. The ear piercing noise of painful rejection grew into a signature throaty snarl, and that was the discord he was trying to silence in his soul a few days ago when he was finally admitted into emergency care and placed on life support, for overdosing on drugs.
The first time DMX escaped that painful reality was when a trusted older companion laced a cigarette with both marijuana and cocaine.
The older friend who was influential at the music label coerced the up-and-coming rapper to try a cigarette. The teenaged DMX declined saying he never smoked.
As broken people break others, the adult companion insisted until DMXs defenses broke down just enough to try a manly puff of a harmless looking cigarette.
Whatever ecstasy the fledgling rapper entered into in that brief moment became the first time in his young life that he was devoid of pain in his soul.
It was a relief he needed.
Since the feeling didn’t last, he needed it again and again, until it needed him more than he needed it.
Many years later DMX broke down and cried for the first time on camera, when he remembered how a lifelong drug dependency had all begun.
You don’t know what it feels like to search for peace if you’ve never struggled to keep it.
You don’t know how precious joy is until you’ve lost yours.
You don’t know you can be scared to be alone, until being alone becomes the trigger for your demons, or bad habits, to return and haunt you to near death, or madness.
Til you’re no longer sleeping at night cos you’ve become too scared to close your eyes for too long, too scared to be defenseless and vulnerable, cos too many times in the past, bad things have happened in those closed eyed moments and you couldn’t rise up to defend yourself.
Now you’re defensive as fuck, and people interpret that as some kind of anger on your part, not knowing you’re just trying to stay alive and protect yourself from a tape of the past that never keeps playing in the present.
This is why people stay in church. Especially black people.
Religion is typically the only answer they know, and the education or medical systems are too colonial to be the cure.
Even therapy. Much of it is built around unrelatable paradigms opaque to the black soul.
According to his family and friends, DMX himself had a lot of therapy, but there are places in the soul buried so deep, it takes a complex series of rare coincidences to even bring them up.
Most times, ingrained trauma can’t be reached, and becomes personality, and then recurrent circumstance.
The fighting to stay alive, and adaptation to that, become the habits that people see and label as this or that.
The most practical advice is to prevent these things from happening in the first place.
Many of us are raising children, either ours or seeing other people raise theirs.
Too many grown ups are still using the wrong lessons they haven’t unlearned to raise one more generation.
These little DMXes in the making will grow up to be CEOs, leaders , pastors, maybe even millionaire rappers, or just somebody’s husband or wife, or a colleague in the office.
And broken.
Now is the time to stop breaking people. And the first step to not break others is to fix your own goddamn self do you don’t keep being toxic to the lives in your care.
And if you see someone being broken by someone else who hasn’t taken the time to fix themselves, say something.
If you have to, take that child away, and save the world one more generation of brokenness.
Know that there isn’t enough money, power, fame, success, not even religion in the world, to mend a broken heart.
So, I watched the press describe the death of the rich old white man who was the husband of England’s queen yesterday. There were endless suffusions of praise and accolades, even a humanizing story about a tough childhood including civil war, refugee status, abandonment and adoption.
A bit of common ground there, between the Duke of Edinbra and the Dark Man with an Unknown and Indefinable Identity, X.
But that’s where the similarity ends.
Philip grew up in palaces, profiting off untold and mostly stolen wealth, while spewing toxic racist & sexist filth, among other elite people just like him.
But DMX was raised by the street, and like many other severely traumatized persons, adopted an alter ego to escape from self: a rapping dog with a rough rasp, who hurtled to royal heights on the strength of his lyricism, delivery, relatability & sheer grit.
Good rappers come and go.
Only a handful leave god-like impressions in the souls of people who’ve never even met them.
Like Tupac. Like DMX.
There’s something inside these few that all of us, no matter how different we are, can feel, and identify with.
When they rap, they infuse their raw emotions into their music, and that translates into a truly personal message, in any language.
Everybody who knew DMX personally says the same thing: how warm and loving he was in person.
One tweet says it best. A junkyard dog on the streets, a stuffed puppy in real life.
His split personality was also why he was stellar in his movie roles, including Belly and Romeo Must Die. DMX could switch bodies at the speed of thought, from real self to stage persona.
Split identities are talent, but also a regular adaptation to trauma.
DMX lived life like a survivor on the ocean of mixed currents, longing for an oasis of peace.
Sometimes the winds blew too hard, and he struggled, maybe even sank a bit, but he kept on moving.
The waves were rough, as was his rap, but whenever DMX came up for air, he sounded exuberant.
The people who knew him and felt his embrace said he was full of enthusiasm. He was also angry a lot.
Extremes of emotional energy are a sign of the dysregulation we learn from surviving childhood patterns of constantly longing for & seeking care.
On Friday April 9th, as the waves of drug abuse and the years of abandonment beneath bobbed and smashed against his feisty face, DMX gave up the good fight, to go down for the last time, and never come up for air, again.
Now that he’s gone to sleep, away from this side of forever, I hope he’s found the peace he was searching for in every song, and like every dog, he’s running free.
From a Facebook post
