This year on Father’s Day, I showed up to my father’s house empty handed, much like he’d shown up to mine my entire life. When he asked what I had planned for the afternoon, I shot out random activities, “Let’s just lay around…go for a walk? Ride bikes?” His eyes lit up. “Do you really want to ride bikes?” I reluctantly agreed, though in the back of my mind I knew I hadn’t ridden a bike in 5 years.
The beginning of the ride was rocky but easy enough. We rode down the sidewalk to the park, and around the Hudson River. It was all going fine until he led me onto the main road. As we drove towards oncoming traffic, fear gripped me. I yelled out, “Dad, Help me. I don’t know how to do this.” He looked back startled, wondering what had caused my sudden panic. Eased by the realization it was only nerves, he allowed me to ride ahead of him and led me back onto the sidewalk.
What seemed like such a simple interaction immersed me in the grief of memory and sweetness of nostalgia. In that very instance I was eight again, diving into the deep end of the neighbor’s pool, calling out for my father as the water rose above my head, reaching out for his strong and steady arms to guide me home to the shallow end. In that same moment, I was eighteen again, running full speed home from the avenue away from a trailing car filled with drunken men. This time, I had not called out for my father, not then nor for many years prior, as he and his strong arms were nowhere to be found.
Today, it seems easy, perhaps even righteous, to dream of a world without men. What could be more noble than paradise sans patriarchy — a world absent emotional manipulation, sexual violence, self-loathing, financial insecurity, and the relentless traumas of fatherhood.
Too many times I’ve sat around with girlfriends in the warmth of their embrace, far from the needlepoint of heartbreak or danger of bodily invasion, and asked, often times aloud, “What are niggas even good for?” We’d laugh heartily in agreement; they too were dreaming of a world without men.
Patrick Zachmann. The Town of Kayes. Image courtesy of Magnum Photos.
But the truth is…we grew up in that world. It was rare when I visited the houses of friends that there was ever a man present. If they had fathers, they were at best always working, and at worst, complete figments of a domestic dream bygone, only to be seen in dusty mantle portraits or yellowed scrapbook photos. For a while, I was one of the lucky ones who got to see my father on alternating weekends. We would ride bikes, swim, and barbecue. But when I turned adolescent, that world vanished, and manhood became a rerun episode of the Fresh Prince, a stinging cliche, and yes — another dream.
Though I grew up in a world without men, it was not a world absent misogyny. At every turn there was some walking shell of a man ready to put his full ego up on me. Whenever I witnessed ‘manhood’ it was always in the worst way: raw and unrefined emotional terrorism, lack of personal accountability, an ever-present urge to destroy that which does not conform and dominate that which is deemed ‘other’ into full submission.
So I took those moments, which came to haunt me with their specter of terror and disappointment, and wished it all away. And for a long time I dreamed of a world without men, until that day one came and swept me off my feet. Despite the hurt of yesteryear, I found love in this new and unlikely place. This man was protective, resolute, warm, solid, thoughtful, industrious, and kind. And when his manhood showed its ugliest self, embodying that same destructiveness I’d always feared, it would instead transform that energy into one of renewal, cleansing, and clarity that made room for me to grow.
When I saw his pain, unearthed and ungendered, I realized the thing that hurt me had hurt him, too. I knew that having lost his father at a young age, he too had survived in a world without men. I watched him in quiet moments of loving frustration, when he tried to express his feelings but did not have the words, coming undone by the same choking hands of masculinity. I believe in those moments he too wished it all away.
Love held up the mirror that broke the confusion, and I realized what I had wished for, what he had wished for — was not a world without men, but a world without pain. That pain that had always dressed itself up in cheap cologne and shaving cream was no longer a special pain, but an ordinary pain jumbled up in the Big Pain, all the hurt in the world stretched over all time and all people. I realized we — me, him, my father, the whole of us — were bound together not simply by this pain, but by a strong desire for its absence. And that desire, the radical possibility for a new kind of freedom, that became the dream.