Pain, Hope, Faith by Abdullah, Dawud, and Basheer

The ConTextos Authors Circle was developed in collaboration with young people at-risk of, victims of, or perpetrators of violence in El Salvador. In 2017 this innovative program expanded into Chicago to create tangible, high quality opportunities that nourish the minds, expand the voices and share the personal truths of individuals who have long been underserved and underestimated. Through the process of drafting, revising and publishing memoirs, participants develop self-reflection, critical thinking, camaraderie and positive self-projection to author new life narratives.

Since January 2017 ConTextos has partnered with Cook County Sheriff's Office to implement Authors Circle in Cook County Department of Corrections as part of a vision for reform that recognizes the value of mental health, rehabilitation and reflection. These powerful memoirs complicate the narratives of violence and peace building, and help author a hopeful future for human beings behind walls, their families and our collective communities.

While each author’s text is solely the work of the Author, the image used to create this book’s illustrations have been sourced by various print publications. Authors curate these images and then, using only their hands, manipulate the images through tearing, folding, layering and careful positioning. By applying these collage techniques, Authors transform their written memoirs into illustrated books.

This project is being supported, in whole or in part, by federal award number ALN 21.027 awarded to Cook County by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Pain Hope Faith

Abdullah, Dawud, Basheer

Body

Pain There’s two different types of pain we go through in life, emotional pain and physical pain.

Well, all my life I’ve been going through emotional pain. I always felt like I was being the outcast of the family and that made me go through the darkest corner in my head.

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As I kept aging, the emotional pain I was going through was pushing me further in the dark and the only thing I thought would work was drugs. So I turned to drugs to stop the pain, but it didn’t do nothing but cause physical pain and that pain just turned into rage because that’s really what pain is. If you don’t release it the pain and the rage just keeps adding up and the more it adds up the worse the outcome will be.

So don’t be afraid to vent to people or cry. It’s cool if you cry, whoever said men don’t cry, shidd all you gotta do is ask them what they’ve been through in life and what they’re going through now.

I bet they don’t like it because we can never be painless, because pain never end it just subsides till something happen like death or a heartbreak or being taken away from your family for years.

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What made me feel like the outcast of the family is being left out of things. My people were doing things as a family like going out to eat or other places to have fun. Nobody ever told me nothing like I didn’t exist and that made me feel like nobody really cared about me.

Do you know what was going through my mind?

A lot of bullshit that a child or teenager should not have to think about. Now guess who was right there to help me get through the emotional pain of being left out. Drugs!

The pain I’m feeling right now is pain I thought I’d never feel. Being locked up for years. Everybody who said they’d be there for me left me when I needed them the most so I had to find something else to take away the pain because the love is not there no more so this is my way of controlling my pain by writing it down on paper. I’m tired of fighting pain with pain and pain with drugs and pain with struggle. This way lets me release my pain and let people know why I am the way I am.

When I was a kid growing up, my uncle passed away. It left me with so much grief and pain that I couldn’t hold it in, so I got to fighting people at school and fighting my friends I was hanging with.

I just wanted somebody else to feel my pain, so that’s what I was doing, dashing out pain.

2019 was the worst year for me because I was in so much pain. I didn’t wanna tell nobody anything. I didn't want to vent to anybody. All I wanted to do was take pills and smoke weed every day to stop my mind from going in different directions. I blocked everybody out of my life and started going downhill at a faster rate, then April 26, 2019.

My second child was born and it helped take some pain away.

The pain don't end heart froze, body hurt all this pain I've been feeling man I just wish it would stop I'm only 23 but feel like I've been on Earth longer than my pops surrounded by death, you can be with somebody in the same day they can be dead so look around and appreciate everybody that's still here cuz death bring pain and pain bring more pain now look, I'm fixing to give y'all a sample of how it created my pain it started from losing my uncle and it's still going cuz I'm away from my family when will this pain ever stop, huh when I'm dead in a box nope, it's just going to pass the pain to someone close to you so let me be the first one to tell you this pain will never stop.

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Hope Becoming a ward of the state is like stepping into a different realm. Having to have supervised visits with my mama like she was a criminal or a danger to us was painful. It was those visits and hugs from her, my brothers and sisters that gave me hope. Hoping to be home as a family again and there’s always something that could snatch that little hope that could mean so much to you away from you. For me that’s driving away at the end of our supervised visits.

Getting older me and my sister, Kaela, would always go to these job programs together. One day we weren't able to complete the program and weren't able to get paid for partaking in the program either. I can’t actually remember why or if I just so badly wanted to blame this hurtful day on someone on the other side of the double doors. Leaving out of the building, me and my sister were in a heated argument about how we don’t care about each other. I do remember seeing her say, “Y'all don’t care about me,” with tears in her eyes and me saying something similar back, “I’ve been on my own my whole life. I don’t need y’all.”

Crying and confused as to why me and my sister, my best friend, were breaking down in this hopeless world. “Don’t call my phone, don't say nothing to me,” she continued, all the while still crying and yelling. If this was a cartoon, we both would have tears springing from our eyes and puddles at the bottom of our feet. “I don’t care," I yelled back.

She started walking up 73rd. I stood there for a minute, watching her walk away.

Then I started walking down Stony Island. There we were, both of us walking away with our hoods and our heads down, crying and feeling like our matter to the world just didn’t matter.

Making things straight with my sisters wasn’t about talking about the situation.

It was about understanding that harm wasn’t meant or the truth is just that. The truth.

Months after being held hostage in Cook County jail. I was on the phone with my family. My mama and my sisters. My brother was off doing a six year bid. I was upset because they were poor supporters. Looking around, everyone else had everything they needed and wanted, except their freedom and I guess I expected the same from them. One of my sisters told me that I don’t even know her, that I haven’t been in her life to judge her on what’s going on in her life. The other one said I knew they were fxxxxked up before I came into her life, like I had a choice. But they were right. I knew they were my blood, but how can I expect and think they are obliged to step up to the cup and drop more than some change when we’ve been apart our whole lives?

To even know what a family is. My cup was empty, and I needed a lawyer and support.

Four years have passed. Every day I hope to go home. Every day I hope to see just a little light at the end of the tunnel. September 24, 2024 standing in the courtroom. Room 105 courthouse Markham. Surrounded by predators, I was the prey, the judge, prosecutor and my public defenders thinking back to what I told a special person in my life: “I gave up already.” I’ve been feeling empty. Nothing. My public defender looks and says, “They have an offer.”

This is what I’ve been waiting for, the moment that I would push everything forward in my life.

I replied by saying, “What is it?”

“35 years,” she responded.

“At 100%?” I said. She shook her head up and down, indicating yes. Hope, huh? Faith in anger surfaced, and I shook my head side to side, indicating “no.”

I thought about my family and said to myself, “Now I hope they see how serious this is.”

Three weeks later I called my public defender to talk about the offers they had, and my offers. But first it hit me. How could they offer me time and they don’t know a single thing about me? And I told her that. Her response was that the prosecutors don’t care about me, the only person that cares about me and my life is me.

I said they are going to have to start caring about someone and it might as well be me. She said they are not and my constant response was, “We’re still going to have to try.”

She said “OK.”

And all I have to do is hope they see me for who I am and hope God hears my prayers.

Words of encouragement were always what I needed to push through a situation. Hope is my gas for purpose. Purpose is the tank that holds hope. When you are all alone, you find something to live for.

For the first time ever in the state of depression, I told my sister I was irritated. Taking a jump to get a feel for her mental support and to see if I could get some words of encouragement, gas for hope, she asked me, “Why?” I said, “I’m all alone and I’m tired of being strong.” She replied, “You gotta stay strong. You’re going to catch your blessing.”

That was the gas for my hope. That was some hope.

Being different from the rest of your family comes with a lot of new emotions in a different light of things. That light difference gives purpose. My sister never said you’re not alone.

I'm here with you. She said that I gotta stay strong. I’m going to catch my blessing.

I’m not ungrateful or selfish, so I took it and put it to my purpose for hope. Smiling to myself, noticing the difference of light. My sister did what her light taught her BCH. I knew my purpose needed more gas. We hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

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Faith I’ve never felt more isolated than in the summer of 2020. COVID-19 had given life this apocalyptic feel. I had recently broken up with the woman I thought would have eventually become my wife. And the job I’d been working for the past year and a half was starting to become a prison. Adding sea salt to injury, I had gotten the position as a shipper because my dad had put me in tune with my uncle, who owned a shipping company in Houston. So the idea that I couldn’t leave created an illusion that my soul was trapped in a cell on the lower decks of Alcatraz.

In 90 days, from December 2019 to March 2020, I went from flying to Nigeria and meeting my long lost family, working things out with my ex, me and my mom being in the best space we had ever been in my entire adult life. To my whole existence taking a complete 180°. I felt like my dad would never understand what I was going through. How could he?

He grew up a million miles away on the other side of the Atlantic.

The closer I grew to my father, the further I grew apart from my mom. Up until this point my mother had always comforted me like a best friend. No matter how f-up’d my life was, she had a way of soothing my uneasiness. Even when there was no solution in sight, my mother’s humor would imbue me with a solid ounce of faith. Yet, in the beginning of January 2020 I sat across a small table from my mama in the Galleria’s lively food court. While she calmly, but sharply ripped me to pieces.

Moms divulged her disdain with my lack of responsibility when it came to holding my father accountable, for leaving her to raise me as a single mother. I was shocked, confused, and selfishly irritated. Here I was working a 9 to 5 barely making enough to pay the bills doing what I was supposed to do as a man and my mom was getting down on me in the biggest mall in Texas. About some stuff that happened when Tupac was still alive!

Things I didn’t have nothing to do with, let alone have any control over.

By the time my mom’s flight made it back to Chicago, almost all my beliefs landed with her.

Although it was a short week, mom stayed at my apartment. Our bond had managed to throw gasoline on me and my girlfriend’s already burning relationship. And the promotions my dad promised would be waiting on me when I return to Houston went up into flames too.

The only thing that was intact was my GPA.

I was two years from earning a bachelor's degree in digital filmmaking. It’s crazy how easily that one positive was drowned in a seemingly deep ocean of negatives. Those eerie nights when Netflix was on, but nobody was watching. Just me and this woman who just yesterday was my everything. Now all we had left was the smell of weed, empty liquor bottles, dirty dishes and the weight of too many unspoken words. The only thing you could hear other than the flat screen mounted on the wall was the sound of the two of us texting other people.

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My goals were clouded and the clear perspective I once maintained was dissipating like it was the rain in a thunderstorm. By spring it was like winter was starting all over again. Pops was giving me scriptures from the Quran, but I couldn’t see myself in the story of Moses. Musa is a prophet (Peace be upon him), I viewed myself as more of a crow. Something associated with darkness, misfortunate, and evil. Not a man of his conviction and belief, but a person who was blinded by ambition. I didn’t have enough patience for the buffering bandwidths of faith.

Abdullah, Dawud, Basheer I Am From Abdullah is from the southside of Chicago Dawud is from the westside of Chicago Basheer is from the northside of Chicago Even doe we are from different parts of the city We going through the same pain Trying not to lose hope And always tryna have faith of better days

Until the lion learns to write their own story, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter - African Proverb Copyright

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