Shaka Senghor and his 10-year-old son, Sekou, end each day with a set of affirmations.
“I’m great,” Sekou says. “Yes, you are,” his dad answers.
“I’m awesome,” Sekou says. “Totally,” his dad answers.
“I’m amazing.” (“You amaze me every day.”)
“I’m thoughtful.” (“I see that in everything you do.”)
“I’m loving.” (“I feel loved by you so much.”)
“I’m caring.” (“It staggers me how much you care.”)
“I’m funny.” (“Actually, you’re hilarious.”)
“I’m smart.” (“Everyone says it.”)
“I’m a soldier.” (“In the war for love.”)
“I’m a warrior.” (“You will change the world.”)
“I am Sekou.”
“No matter what the world tells him, he has a compass that can never be shaken off center,” Senghor told me. “It’s just a consistent reminder that this is who he is.”
They started the affirmations when Sekou was 18 months old. Before his words flowed so easily. Before he could repeat them by heart.
“Twenty years I’d lost,” Senghor writes in his new book, “Letters to the Sons of Society.” “There was no time to waste.”
Sekou was born shortly after Senghor was released from prison, where Senghor served two decades for second-degree murder. Senghor’s older son, Jay, now 30, was born shortly before Senghor went in.
His book is a collection of letters to each of them, but also to any of us.
“As I was shaping up the things I wanted to share with them,” Senghor said, “I realized between the lives of my biological sons exist all these sons.”
He wants to engage them — enlist them, even — in the making of more just, more loving world. He wants to offer his whole story, even the parts where he fell short.
“In all these letters, I have tried to instill in you both a sense of wonder about the world, a hunger for love, not for violence, and permission to go and seek out the very best of our planet,” he writes.
“We spin along it for such a brief time, and I don’t want you to ever feel the burdens I felt, never know the fear I felt, the sense of dislocation. Black boys and men must forge a new path: one in which tears are cherished, love is paramount, and friendships are real and deep. Those in our community who struggle with addiction or abuse or neglect must be covered with healing hands, hands that you willingly reach out to all and any. I lost twenty years to a system that thought I was irredeemable; but somehow, through literature and letters and words, I was able to find a way out of the darkness into the light of the past decade.”
Senghor has spent the decade since his release mentoring young people and advocating for criminal justice reform. He guest lectures at universities. He wrote a bestseller, “Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death and Redemption in an American Prison.” His TED talk has more than a million views. He met President Barack Obama. We had to reschedule our interview to accommodate Oprah’s schedule — they just recorded a “Super Soul Sunday” podcast together.
His work is optimistic. In an age marked by cynicism and sorrow, I see his words as the courage to imagine a better way and the willingness to activate it into existence.
It’s hope, and it’s hope that’s been put through the wringer.
“Prison has a way of skewing all things — the brutality all around you, the sense that your humanity is somehow on hold or contingent upon others,” Senghor writes.
And later, “Our judicial system isn’t set up for men and women to return to society health and whole. We are expected to fail — urged to do so, in fact — and for all the political will in the world (and there isn’t much of it), it remains so hard to create a positive life after prison.”
He talked during our interview about traveling to Germany to learn about prison reform there. He cried with a guard, he said, when she expressed shock that American prisons commit people to solitary confinement.
He writes about solitary in a letter to Sekou.
“Isolation is inhumane,” he writes. “It causes profound damage to human beings. No one leaves there without deep scars; no one.”
He compares it to the forced isolation so many have experienced during the pandemic. Not as an apples-to-apples example, certainly, but as an invitation to contemplate community, belonging, loneliness, the need to see and be seen.
The book ends with one of the most gorgeous passages I’ve yet read. I won’t spoil it, in case you want to read the book and save the end for the end, where it rightly belongs.
But I’ll tell you that if you want to peer into a heart, if you want a story of brokenness and healing and fury and redemption and humanity, if you want to envision a different, better way forward, Senghor’s letters are a beautiful place to begin.
———
Shaka Senghor will be in conversation with Chicago-based writer Lolly Bowean at 8 p.m. Eastern on Jan. 20 for a virtual Family Action Network program that is free and open to the public. More at familyactionnetwork.net/upcoming-events.
