Being in Baltimore has enabled me to view many aspects of my views, values, and insights in a whole different way. I have become and am now seen as a public intellectual, inasmuch as I occupy two spaces equally but different; community and academia. It feels like waking up in a strange room and things have changed. Many things have changed, not least me. The irony of feeling both liberated and trapped at the same time is a strange feeling, but one that I’m trying to manage. I can’t go back to what I was and I am not yet fully formed in terms of being re-birthed in a new form I have felt at times disconnected and dislocated, and wandered around in a liminal space waiting to make some kind of transition into something. Like many people I occasionally hover like a humming bird and at times being frightened to confront things that you have to let go of. In reality I am meeting new people, having new experiences, and have acquired fresh perspectives, not just about crime, but people. Ralph Ellison’s opening statement comes to mind:
'I AM an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who ' haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am l one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible; understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination - indeed, everything and everything except me:
Ellison encapsulates how I have felt during a trip that will be dissected, debated over, and at times dismissed as a voyeuristic gaze at another culture. In conversation with a good friend he made a comment about notions of invisibility and referred to this state of being as like a 12th man (Substitute) on a cricket team. I reflected on my own situation and realise how at times I feel like the 12th man. I was told that any new journey would be lonely, transforming, and at times uncomfortable. The desire to be a team player, but being relegated to the bench because your style of play doesn’t suit people is very painful. Flair, individuality, and operating outside the box, are all qualities that scares a team that have been playing the same formation and tactics for the longest while. I do not want to be invisible, but if I continue to settle for second best, compromise myself, or play into other people’s mindset, and then I am destined to sit on the subs bench. I keep coming back to Ellison’s prophetic speech. Why do I feel this way? Maybe I’m invisible to me and need to become more visible. I buy a new book ‘The New Jim Crow – Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness’ by Michelle Alexander. An amazing book founded on the premise that not only is race a key factor in criminal justice, but the contexts that led to the enslavement of African American’s has moved into the prison industrial complex. I smile and am grateful for Baltimore’s invisible citizens letting me into their lives. I know why I’m here. More importantly I know who I am.
Peace
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