Last month, I attended a dance performance choreographed by Tony Johnson, a local dancer and friend of mine. The piece explored black identity in America through both historical and contemporary movements. In one particularly powerful section, Tony stands teary-eyed before the audience as Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice bellows throughout the room recounting his entrance into the civil rights movement.
“The telephone started ringing and I picked it up. On the other end was an ugly voice. That voice said to me, in substance, “N****r, we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow up your house."
I’d heard these things before, but for some reason that night it got to me. I turned over and I tried to go to sleep, but I couldn’t sleep. I was frustrated, bewildered. And then I got up and went back to the kitchen and I started warming some coffee, thinking that coffee would give me a little relief. And then I started thinking about many things. […] And I got to the point that I couldn’t take it any longer; I was weak.
[…] And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness, stand up for justice, stand up for truth.’”
In a conversation following the performance, an older man reflected on how hearing about the phone calls to Martin Luther King Jr.’s home moved him.
“Yes, the calls were threatening, but they were calls,” he said. “And I am reminded of the idea of vocation, of a calling, and I can’t help but think about what calls I am receiving, even if ripe with the promise of violence, that are calling me to do what is required of me.”
His words affected me as they suggested that to arrive at fear means to arrive at the place where you're called to act. Like many Duke students, I feel committed to the idea of making the world better, but I often feel confused as to what “better” entails and what my exact role is on the “making the world better” team.
While grabbing coffee with one of my professors, I told him about my difficulty in coming to know myself and my calling in the world. He reassured me that everyone has different callings at different moments in their life. He shared an anecdote about a former long-term relationship that ended because they had incompatible activisms.
“The way we discussed it, using a Biblical metaphor, is that there are saints and angels,” he said. “The saints do the immediate work: feeding, clothing, sheltering people. But the angels, they have to proclaim the news. She was a saint, but I was an angel, so I left to go pursue my work and she stayed to do the ground work. One’s not better than the other, just different, and sometimes we do different activisms at different points in our life. At that point, we each needed to do our own necessary work.”
This notion of saints and angels stuck with me. I wrote it down in my journal as a leftover from our conversation for me to chew on later as I continued to roll over the same question: what calls did I need to listen to in my own life, and what answer did they require of me?
Then, yesterday, I woke up to the news of the murders of Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad and Razan Mohammed Abu-Salha. Threats of violence that hung in the air during the adhan controversy suddenly were concretized in reading about these three Muslim students who were shot by their own neighbor.
In attempting to process the Chapel Hill shooting in light of recent reflections on the nature of activism and vocation, it was difficult not to raise the question: what about the martyrs? What about those who do not receive the opportunity to do the saintly or angelic work? For those for whom the world is not a safe place, their bodies often become the sight of violence and revelation. “Martyr” in its etymology quite literally means “witness,” suggesting that to be the victim of violence is to bear witness to what is often unable to be revealed otherwise. It’s a tragic and unfair trade for the sake of testimony.
I remembered the threatening phone calls to Martin Luther King Jr.’s home that must have made him stop cold. I remembered the muffled pleas of a man who couldn’t breathe while in a chokehold. I remembered Deah, Yusor and Razan. All calls in my own life that I may have heard but not listened to.
Violence in its revelation can either compel us to act or scare us into submission. It is only natural when we hear these calls to hesitate to answer them because they ask too much of us. But the thing about “making the world better” is that it requires a commitment not just of work but of sacrifice. For some, that sacrifice is felt in physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. Sometimes I feel so much sadness at the state of the world that I want to burst, and I can only imagine what it must feel like for those who are constantly engaged in this struggle whether they want to be or not. For others, it is a sacrifice of their lives. But when those sacrifices are made apparent to us, when we receive these calls, I hope we answer them even though they are scary, even though they demand too much of us. I want to live in a world where we answer them.
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