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Title: Remember the Fallen Author: Judy Clark Date: 1987 Language: en Topics: eulogy, obituary Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20070616162744/http://kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/profiles/balagoon/clark.html
Kuwasi. Now he's gone.
And its like his last loving joke on me, his last gentle bursting of my
egotistic bubble. Because i was all ready for a long, lingering heroic
battle against disease and death. Ultimately lost, but great tragic
courage and sharing. And he did it his way. Fast. Kuwasi was never cut
out to be a tragic hero. Or any kind of hero. He hated it and fought it.
And subverted many people's attempts to mould him into one or create a
myth with which to bury his real self. Which was simple human.
Simply lustful of life and life's sensuous pleasures – food, people,
wine and laughter. Lustful too, for battle against the enemy.
He hated hypocracy and I am writing this because i want to combat our
own need for hypocracy, for myth. Let's not make him bigger than life –
but simply human.
Let's not distort his ideology, but claim him as the anarchist he was,
who allied with New Afrikan nationalists because it was the best way he
saw to fight for the human rights and liberation of his people and all
people.
Let's not bury those parts of him - his kinkiness, iconoclasm,
individualism, because like it or not, they are part of what fed his
courage, his idealism and willingness to make his life the revolution.
For Kuwasi, fighting for Freedom and living free were one and the same
thing.
Maybe Kuwasi died so quickly because he got to that point, looked around
at the party that was planned for him and it sure wasn't one of those
wine and music and a million people rockers he loved and he escaped
before he could be trapped off.
Some people might wish .that Kuwasi died a more properly “revolutionary”
death, in combat against the enemy or at least from a more respectable
disease than AIDS. But AIDS is a scourge of the people, oppressed
people. Its endemic because those who suffer its wrath are mainly the
dispossessed, the hated, the marginalized. So the system has refused to
address it and has punished its victims. Many of our communities have
disowned our own in the face of it.
In this prison, (Bedford) women with AIDS are isolated into a filthy
ward mixed among other sick women whose germs will kill them. They are
punished double, disowned, humiliated, feared and hated. i am glad that
Kuwasi did not have to suffer that indignity, even though i greedily
wanted him to live longer, because i was not ready to lose him.
Did Kuwasi get AIDS from his transvestite lover, who he persisted to
love and insisted entrusting despite pressures and conflicts from the
rest of us? i would like to say "from those others" in the revolutionary
movements who hardly celebrated that part of his life. But having called
for an honest accounting i have to look at my own bourgeois moralism,
hypocracy and self-hating anti-gayness.
But Kuwasi was persistent and consistent in his own way. Kuwasi could
love women and men fully, freely, lustfully and most of all with such
generosity of spirit that it never felt exploitative.
He didn't live by the rules. Not society's or Christianity's or Islam's
or feminism's or the New Afrikan Independence Movement's.
But he did have principles and integrity and honesty.
He'd fight like hell for his positions - but if you convinced him he'd
change, and he realized that one's actions had to be consistent with
one's principles.
We used to fight furiously about his love of pornography, i can still
recall my fury at his exchanging short ice with one of the prison
guards! Yet i felt more comfortable, intimate and freer with Kuwasi than
almost any man i'’ve known. Comfortable enough to hug and kiss and
massage and play through our legal meetings in the county jails. And
.when he once said that for him making love could mean anything, could
mean playing footsies, as long as it was fun and with love, as he sat
there, gleefully massaging my bare foot in his lap, i .believed him and
was delighted and thrilled.
i am fighting the allure of putting my own stamp on Kuwasi, as though it
would be any more accurate than any others.
Only Kuwasi can define Kuwasi.
i hope people collect his poems and his theoretical writings, because
that will be the truest reflection.
All i can do is speak for myself. That's one of the things Kuwasi taught
me.
We are each ourselves and can only vouch for our own partial truths and
when we ennoble that into dogmas, or try to enforce or assume collective
assumptions through social pressure, we delude ourselves and will pay
for it in the end.
Kuwasi believed that and clung to his own ideology and dreams as
dogmatically and subjectively as the rest of us.
Which is to say, he was contradictory.
Like the rest of us. Human!!!