Carolyn Jack

When assistant professor, author and punk musician G'Ra Asim was in the third grade, the world as he knew it turned upside down. Seeing everything from a startling new angle switched up the course of his life.

 

During that year, his father accepted a new job. In what felt like an instant, a "bifurcation" happened, splitting his life into before and after, Asim explained over the phone from St. Louis, his hometown, where he teaches English at Washington University. He said, "I actually think about that moment a lot."

 

Before the change, Asim and his family had been urban dwellers, "living in a part of town where Black folks are relegated," he said. His dad, a journalist, worked for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; his mother ran the Pamoja Theater Workshop. They sent their son to private school. Then the Washington Post hired his father and the family moved to Silver Spring, Md., an upscale suburb of Washington, D.C., where young G'Ra went to public school.

 

The change shook the child deeply. It wasn't just that being uprooted felt scary to an eight-year-old, that he couldn't imagine at first what the new place would be like or how his family would live. It was that, once in Silver Spring, his view of himself completely flipped: Used to living a culturally rich life in an economically straitened neighborhood, used to feeling he belonged, Asim suddenly found himself among strangers in a largely White, well-off community that saw his color but, weirdly, didn't credit him with having had a true, Black, inner-city experience because he spoke differently than the stereotype they expected.

 

"I was made aware right away that I wasn't a credible representative" of the Black urban community to them, he said. To his classmates, his family's education and tastes meant that he must have come from a rich, privileged place, "an idea that was hard to pop." Believing him wealthy, the people around him talked about the Black community he had been part of in a way that "other-ized" it, Asim recalled.

 

So though he felt very different from his classmates in some ways, they didn't see that difference: They saw a Black person, but not the Black person he actually was. The surreal effect of this was to make Asim's quasi-acceptance by them another kind of rejection.

 

The effects proved lasting. Always a person who tended to keep his feelings private, he outwardly adopted a neutral expression, his default setting in the face of what he heard and saw from those around him. "It sort of led to my inclination to suspend judgment," he remembered, "because I have so much experience with people who couldn't reconcile" his image with his experience. "It made me more skeptical of the cover of a book as a basis for judgment."

 

In short, "I think I retreated," he observed. "I became a lot more interior." As an emerging writer and musician, he felt there were benefits to this. "Being a person who is tune with their interior thoughts is good for an artist." But, "I think it took me a long time to figure out where I felt comfortable."

 

It came as a surprise to him that academia might be the place. Though he said he regards himself as having been less that a great student as a youth, Asim clearly had intellectual and artistic leanings, having been raised in a house pervaded by his parents' enthusiasm for, and expertise in, writing, performing, musical theater and current events. But feeling misplaced in Silver Spring, he saw himself as better off outside of institutional structures and believed he could operate best as free-ranging intellectual.

 

"Obviously a bit naïve," he said, wryly.

 

Still, he gave it a try. Punk music helped. It appealed to that rebellious, not-taking-your-word-for-it side of Asim's nature. He had always liked music, but had never participated in it until his father brought home a guitar that one of his friends didn't want anymore. At 15, Asim taught himself how to play it. At about the same time, he began to understand - thanks to what he calls punk music's attitude of "moxie over mastery" - that he could contribute to music even without being thoroughly trained in it. That summer, he scraped together a band and they all learned enough material to put on a house show in his basement.

 

"I've been doing some version of that ever since," he said.

 

The punk band he's in now, called babygotbacktalk, is thriving. So is Asim. But as that 15-year-old, his situation in Silver Spring continued to mess with his head. He pushed back at teachers' accepted wisdom, refused to comply with the routine demands of his studies, made poor grades. Yet eventually, after trying college a time or two before it really took and experimenting with some writing jobs, Asim realized that he needed to be in a community of people like himself who were asking questions and maybe looking at the world in unusual ways. Academia does tend to attract outliers, he noted: "I just followed the 'Eccentrics This Way' sign." 

   

Being forced to see himself in the (not-so) fun-house mirrors of other groups' misconceptions made Asim an acute examiner of his own thoughts and reactions about society and its issues. That and his love of words led him to the MFA program at Columbia University in New York City and the stream of up-to-the-minute, sociopolitical essays he's had published since, in media ranging from Guernica and BOMB magazines to Salon.com, Slate.com and the Boston Globe.

 

Most notably, his changed perspective generated his first book, Boys n the Void: a mixtape to my brother (2021), that laid out for his actual youngest brother his perceptions and cautions about growing up in the dangerous nowhere-land where American culture and society have tried to keep the young Black people they view as a dark, scary, faceless mass – a land where the skeptical punk-music counterculture may offer a young Black man the only path out and toward the freedom of his own individual, creative, intellectual selfhood.

 

Writing and music have given Asim two different ways to tap his insights. His writing process is the more cerebral. In writing prose, figuring out what he thinks seems to be a totally present-mind exercise, he said. But when he writes songs, "things come out that genuinely surprise me. That process tends to excavate stuff from the subconscious." For him, the tune comes first and then the words pop up, expressing thoughts that make him go, "'Wow, I can't believe that was percolating in there.' It's like the thoughts of someone else."

 

Change has galvanized him intellectually, but it has also matured him emotionally. Over time, he's learned that he can cope with big change more effectively than he used to, whether it's going back to college at 24 – and finishing magna cum laude – or returning to St. Louis for a job after many years of being away ("a strange homecoming – hard to get a bead on this city this time around").

 

No matter how uneasy new circumstances make him, he said, now "I feel like I can absorb that much more calmly because I know the first part's always the hardest. If you've decided that you're a person that's interested in growth … you see discomfort as sort of the price of growth."

 

You have to leave your comfort zone and make a new one, Asim added. Doing the familiar "is not in the service of self-improvement."   

 

 

G'Ra Asim plays bass with the band babygotbacktalk.

Photo by Michelle Menonna