18 July 2020
Dearest Fazal,
Saladho Hassan Ali is a woman I wish I knew. The character in her face is where I locate hope, a word I don’t use lightly or often. What she has seen in her life is held in her eyes. To be able to look so directly into the camera is the kind of knowing I wish to possess. She trusts you. I can imagine there is much in her life she does not trust.
You tell me that this portrait was taken on the day her daughter “fought off an attacker while collecting firewood.” You tell me that both mother and daughter were living in a Somali refugee camp in Hagadera, Kenya, in 2000. I had to look on a map to see where this camp is found, and learned it is the site of three refugee camps, Hagadera, Dagahaley, and Ifo, run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, as of 2019 hosting 211,365 refugees and asylum seekers, making it the third-largest refugee complex in the world.
I knew nothing of this, Fazal.
But if you asked me where Lake Nakuru National Park is or the Maasai Mara National Reserve, I could tell you exactly where they are in the Great Rift Valley and that I had been to both. I went to see flamingos and black and white rhinos after the U.N. Decade for Women gathering in Nairobi was over. The year was 1985. I was thirty years old.
This is my privilege.
I wonder Saladho Hassan Ali’s age. I cannot tell. The striped headscarf that frames her face lends further dignity to her presence. Not only do I not know how old she is, but to what time she belongs. She feels like a woman who has stared down death. A woman who has held each child she has birthed close and each grandchild closer knowing little can protect us from our fate, save God. I believe she is a woman who knows prayer.
Last night, we learned that John Lewis, the towering civil rights figure and congressman from Georgia, has died from pancreatic cancer. He was eighty years old. The face of Saladho Hassan Ali and the face of John Lewis share a similar nobility, that of facing the moment. Lewis had an unblinking faith in the future because he was committed to fighting for it even if he died in the process. Both hold themselves with a respect that is visible, formidable and vulnerable, at once. Humility is the bedrock of strength.
“Good Trouble,” John Lewis said to many of us. “Necessary Trouble.” He exemplified and embodied a fierce understanding of justice, dignity, and what radical love and freedom for all looks like. That he was arrested forty times before he was brutally assaulted while crossing the bridge at Selma and suffered life-threatening injuries, is a measure of his determination that the treatment of black people must change, even if it meant his death. And yet, as Karen Bass, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus said, “[He] remained devoted to the philosophy of nonviolence in his demand for equality and fairness under the law, even to this day, as America faces another reckoning with racism and hundreds of thousands around the world spark a modern-day civil rights movement against police brutality and racial injustice.”
One of the privileges of my life was meeting Mr. Lewis. It was April 7, 2003, I have never forgotten that date. America was at war with Iraq. The poets William Merwin and Sam Hamill invited me to accompany them to Washington D.C. to present 11,000 anti-war poems written by U.S. citizens to members of Congress that would be entered into the Congressional Record. The only members of Congress who would receive these poems were the members of the Congressional Black Caucus. No one else would even look at them, let alone embrace them as an act of civil disobedience with a pen.
Congressman Lewis received the pile of poems from W.S. Merwin wholeheartedly with his fellow colleagues, Elijah Cummings, Maxine Waters, and John Cornyn, among them. I don’t remember his words though they were eloquent. What I do remember was the magnetic force of his spirit.
“Look those who would harm you in the eyes,” he wrote in his memoir, Walking With The Wind. “Let them see your humanity.” John Lewis’s autobiography changed me. I often think about the story he told of being at this grandmother’s place in rural Georgia with his siblings and cousins. A hurricane was predicted. The winds were already blowing strong. John’s grandmother said, “Children, you must follow me for the duration of the storm, wherever the wind blows, we will walk toward it. When the wind threatens to lift this corner of the house up, we will walk toward it; when the wind walks to opposite corner of the house, we will walk toward it. And if it threatens to blow the house off its foundation—we will make a circle in the center of the house to hold the house steady.”
He said that for hours the children “walked with the wind” across the rickety floorboards, walking from one corner of the shack to the next, holding it to the ground. It was here he learned the lesson of working together in community, especially in times of danger and uncertainty. The house remained intact.
When John Lewis said repeatedly, “Don’t ever give up,” I can imagine Saladho Hassan Ali and her daughter have voiced these words to each other. Perhaps, this is one of the reasons her daughter was able to stave off her attacker. She wouldn’t give in or give up. She knew her strength.
The Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai lived a similar credo, to never give up, to work together. She remains one of my true heroes. No doubt, you know of her, Fazal. Her belief went beyond hope. It was rooted in action. Like Lewis, Maathai was beaten by police and suffered physical attacks for her protests against President Daniel Arap Moi’s government, including its plans to build a sixty-story government building in the middle of Uhuru Park in central Nairobi. She was jailed on multiple occasions for her resistance, also for contempt.
When she died in 2011, the Daily Telegraph reported in her obituary that her husband’s reasons for divorcing had been, as she said, because she was “ ‘too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control.’ ” And perhaps the court agreed. When she called the judges “either incompetent or corrupt,” they promptly slapped her in jail for six months for contempt of court.”
I met Wangari Maathai at the U. N. Decade for Women in 1985, not inside the conference, but outside. She was not part of any delegation. She was not on anyone’s agenda. She was her own sovereign speaking on behalf of Kenyan women who were gathering firewood and water eight to ten hours a day to feed their families. She was speaking about deforestation and the need to plant trees. She was speaking about the empowerment of women.
Wangari Maathai had founded a seedling organization in 1977 called “The Green Belt Movement.” Few were listening. I stayed. I heard truth being spoken. I saw character and courage and leadership. I left the formal meetings I was assigned to attend and followed her into the villages where women were gathering seeds in the folds of their skirts and planting them. I came home so inspired I started a tiny offshoot organization called “The Green Belt Movement of Utah.” Almost two decades later, in 2004, Wangari Maathai would become the first African woman and environmentalist to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. At that time, the Green Belt Movement was responsible for planting forty-five million trees in Kenya and seven billion trees through the United Nations program she sanctioned.
In 2005, I met John Lewis again, this time with Wangari
Maathai. She had invited me to attend the NAACP gathering in her honor. Both she and Mr. Lewis spoke about the imperative to act in the name of justice. Lewis spoke of civil rights as human rights. Wangari Maathai spoke of justice for all, and how the rights of women are intrinsically connected to the rights of a healthy environment—how social justice and environmental justice go hand in hand. Both of these icons were sowing seeds of a moral imagination.
I return to this portrait of a woman I do not know, but a woman whose eyes create a lens through which dignity and strength is found. For me, her presence creates a threshold of enduring grace in the midst of suffering. I see an indomitable spirit and at the same time, a weary one. After any fight, exhaustion follows. After exhaustion, you are introduced to your will.
It was thirty years since Wangari Maathai and I had seen each other. After she won the Nobel Prize, she came to visit us in Castle Valley with her son. It was a joyous reunion. We both wept. She said she was exhausted, but she knew her message of peace on behalf of women and the environment had to be heard. This was her calling. She also knew that after fighting so hard for the rights of both, when the open space of democracy revealed itself, she had to step inside it. She became a minister of the environment in Kenya.
To stand in one’s power, even when oppressed. To imagine a life for yourself that others said you did not deserve. To be defiant, dedicated, and determined to live a dignified life no matter how weary, no matter how far you must walk and for how long until you can rest. This is what I see in your portrait of Saladho Hassan Ali—and she led me to two other portraits of dignity and consequence in the name of Black Lives that matter.
The light on her face, Fazal, is transcendent.
With love,
Terry