Black Battle, White Knight. Michael Battle
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(just possibly written by someone else if we feel the Spirit so moves).
>Above are thoughts for the day. For chapter 1, I’d tear into celebrity—its rawness, its tears and laughter, its relentless presence. This should give you the gift of your readers’ rapt attention. When you’ve looked at the photos, please just give me a reaction as to their usefulness. Ditto when you’ve broken into the box of memories. . . .16
This is not a static biography in which the biographer is objectively removed from his subject matter. On the contrary, this is written in my experience of looking for God and finding Malcolm. Although the sequence of dialogue and chapter flow is written primarily to reflect my encounter with Malcolm’s voice, it should be noted that my voice as the biographer has not been co-opted by my subject matter. In other words, I do not present to you a flowery work that only sings Malcolm’s praises. Malcolm’s own nature and particular voice would not allow such a biography anyway.
I am a Christian, and I care deeply about this identity. But I am also aware of how such identity has colonized and subjected others to horror and bloodshed. Likewise, I am an African American, and I care deeply about this identity. But it is an amphibious identity that I actually discovered when I went to Africa and discovered that I was an American; and yet, being in the United States made me feel more like an African. In order to understand my own development, these two identities have to be interrelated.
Most of my life has been spent in the discovery of how African-American identity and Christianity help us better see practices of peacemaking and reconciliation. I started this discovery with Desmond Tutu, an exemplar of someone who lives African and Christian identity together. In white society, Tutu profoundly negotiated how Christianity helps us better see practices of peacemaking and reconciliation. Such an exemplar has led me to think that one of the unnerving issues of contemporary theology is how scholastic and separated from the actual lives of people theology has become. This leads me to the organizing theme of my spiritual development: the formation of self through communal prayer. This is where Malcolm enters the picture. I needed a spiritual director. So, I have taken to heart the advice of the true sages of our day to make my own spiritual journey. I needed a spiritual director who could resist the pathologies of religion and help me not repeat the same old mistakes of religious oppression.
One of my chief concerns is: what is my particular vocation? What this question implies for me is the difficult matter of measuring what it is that I do when I lead in a religious world. Am I a dispenser of information? Do I disciple others into a communal theology? Am I a coach, coaxing the less enlightened into maturity? Or am I, simply, a mentor? Parker Palmer’s insight into these matters is helpful.
Then I ask the question that opens to the deeper purpose of this exercise: not “What made your mentor great?” but “What was it about you that allowed great mentoring to happen?” Mentoring is a mutuality that requires more than meeting the right teacher: the teacher must meet the right student. In this encounter, not only are the qualities of the mentor revealed, but the qualities of the student are drawn out in a way that is equally revealing.17
My answer to my opening questions about identity is to begin with my understanding of being a black Christian. It is this being that is crucial because it is a “being” in community. In sum, Malcolm helped me make sense of my amphibious-self through how I have been formed to be an African-American scholar, a priest, a professor, and a spiritual guide. The following is a statement of such development.
A Complex Self
To understand how my character corresponds with Malcolm’s, one must understand two particular identities: African and Anglican. In my African-American identity, I challenge some of the divisions that characterize theological and religious discourse today. One may see this challenge in my books on Archbishop Desmond Tutu.18 Tutu’s thought is grounded by religious experience in which God creates what is good by creating what is different. Consequently, there is no legitimacy in an apartheid narrative (itself a homogeneous theology) which forms people into believing that otherness—for example, racial difference—is the foundation by which one race may dominate another. Relating my African identity to my Anglican identity proves to be another challenge. Having lived for two years in residence with Archbishop Tutu in Cape Town (1993–1994), I, as an African American, experienced Tutu’s mode of theology firsthand. I was given the unique research experience of having complete access to Tutu’s personal writing archives. Having such access and living in an African community afforded me the opportunity to present African Christian thought and practice from original data. This was one of my formative experiences as a scholar to understand myself as an authority in African Christian spirituality. This profound experience, however, provides its share of curse in the midst of blessing.
The curse entails two aspects. The first is the difficult process of synthesizing African and Anglican identities in light of colonialism. This is an acute concern since I was ordained a priest in a colonial church, the Anglican Church, by Archbishop Tutu in Cape Town at St. George’s Cathedral on my birthday, December 12, 1993.
In light of the above, perhaps, one may begin to see the context of my development. Who I have come to be as a person cannot be divorced from my African and ordained Anglican identity. African identity is particularly charged from the outset as to whether negative, imposed identities—especially identities caught in the ambiguity of legitimate or illegitimate humanity—are to be accepted. To work against this ambiguity, there can be no concept of African and Anglican identities without full disclosure of their contingent, politically oppressed histories. In other words, to understand myself, I will also need to understand how one resists seeing me. Tutu helps me see this when he states, “Who you are affects and determines to a very large extent what you see and how you see it.”19 What I intend in my biography of Malcolm is to deepen my thought about the complexities of being human, especially in the midst of a hostile environment shaped by bad religion and colonialism.
The second aspect of the curse is in the toil of successfully presenting a spirituality from an oppressed people. The guiding idea behind my view of Malcolm is that he too toiled to present a spirituality of an oppressed people. For Malcolm, an extraordinary thing happened in that he both embodied an oppressed spirituality being gay and he chose an oppressed spirituality by identifying so profoundly with black people during the Civil Rights Movement. I am like Malcolm in such an embodiment and choice, but for me, my embodiment was being black and my choice was to be Anglican. Spirituality is needed to make both the embodied identity and the chosen identity toil synchronically toward the desired effect of reconciliation and transformation. Herein lies the salient task of my work on Malcolm, to expose to the world a profound life capable of synthesizing disparate identities.
Why Apocalyptic Four Horsemen?
As this book was being finalized, my editor wrote me that my apocalyptic theme kept him up at night. The haunting question was: why did I decide to use the images of the four horsemen (White Knight, Red Knight, Black Knight, and Green Knight) as an organizing principle rather than writing a more conventional, chronological bibliography? I shared this question with Malcolm, who wrote, “Regarding the four horsemen. They made me want to do the book with you! A conventional biography about me would almost be ‘missing the point.’ I am not conventional. Nothing about me is actually conventional. I am not a conventional priest or a conventional writer or a conventional gay person or a conventional civil rights worker! I am different, unique, I suppose one could say ‘queer.’ I believe the horsemen ‘form of organization’ does provide more insight into my life than a ‘mere conventional biography.’”20
A life capable of synthesis of disparate identities like the four horsemen is crucial for our world today, a synthesis that no longer measures a life through the typical dualisms (for example, black vs. white, male vs. female, rich vs. poor, Asian vs. globalism) that lead to competition and war. It is interesting how Malcolm’s life represented a struggle against such dualisms. Similar to Martin Luther King Jr., when one pursues civil rights