My Fathers and Hip-Hop Taught Me About Self-Care as A Black Man

If cancer and trauma are hereditary, is it not my responsibility to do everything in my power to ensure neither my children nor I have to suffer?

“I never cried when ’Pac died but I probably will when Hov does / And if my tears hold value / Then I would drop one for every single thing he showed us,” Drake raps on his 2009 single, “Fear.”

It’s unsettling, to think of Jay-Z’s eventual death, however far off or unannounced. There’s a long-running joke among rap fans that he ’raised’ a generation of us. He’s a paragon that’s weathered the harsh conditions of an aggressive industry. He inspires people to dream beyond their current station and, more recently, to make strides in their emotional growth. He did that for me. So it’s much easier thinking about my own death than Hov’s, whichever comes first.

Fear of death in rap is a topic deeply explored, picked apart, and put back together. The fear of the unknown and past regrets finally catching up. “Look now, I’m praying that I make it twenty-five / They be calling doctors for my health / And ’no’ is kinda hard to say to drugs / I been having problems with myself,” Isaiah Rashad raps on “Heavenly Father,” taken from his Cilvia Demo mixtape, followed by a hook, “Heavenly Father why you so far away?” Entry to the ’kingdom of Heaven’ was an idea based on merit. And for me, someone who was nothing short of a delinquent, fear struck.

“I didn’t kill my mother; you will not kill me,” my mum would say to me sometimes, metaphorically. Of course, a Nigerian mother can wield the fear of God, if pushed hard enough and I’m sure she meant it, from time to time. But even when I found myself in situations where altercations have gone left, I realized I could’ve been the cause of someone’s death in a scuffle, all because of my own fear of it. They were cries, albeit the wrong cries, for some kind of investment in me from those that were charged with shaping my future.

“When I die, fuck it / I wanna go to hell” is no longer a thought process I share with Biggie Smalls, mostly because my beliefs have changed and the concept seems too black and white. Then again, distance has allowed me to live the full, debaucherous life a young person should. But it was also freedom. It was crippling being raised a Christian, and it was always about the faith but I lacked little of it in myself, so how was it possible to have in an omnipotent entity?

Then I started to pay closer attention not just to men in my life, but famous Black men also and the routine of a number of them dying well before their fifties. In the past few years we’ve lost Bernie Mac, Big Syke, Luther Vandross, Charlie Murphy, Phife Dawg, and Prodigy to diseases and cancers. It’s easy to become desensitized to death and perhaps even more so when it’s a celebrity. There are times I’ve shrugged off the passing of others, not because I didn’t care. But with death as routine as breathing, eventually it became easier to see it as a necessary step in life. But they all died before they reached sixty, all too soon, especially when compared to their white peers.

Statistically, Black men are more likely to suffer from health issues such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer. These issues affect Black women also—in reality, such rates are higher. These are public health issues, because of the hostile environments Black people across the world have had to endure, that have simultaneously been caused and ignored by the white supremacist societies we live in. Our diets are not anything to write home about either. They’re passed down to us: It was my dad who took me to KFC while my mum did everything she could to keep my sister and I away from it. The fried chicken prevailed.

Rick Ross, whose weight has been parodied for years, dealt with the painful realities of health catching up to you—earlier this year he was hospitalized, although the cause is still murky. “Shout out to all the pears,” he proclaimed in an interview with radio DJ Tim Westwood in 2014. But beneath the memes was a man who had come to terms with his own mortality. After all, it was his album Teflon Don, which had the hit, “Live Fast, Die Young.”

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Both my grandfathers died in their sixties due to tussles with prostate cancer. Their West African diets, heavy with salt and cholesterol, suggested they certainly lived fast, although they ate slow. On some days, I reckon with the idea their health tussles may become my own. I was seven when my paternal grandad died. For the funeral, my parents traveled to Lagos and Ibadan, while I remained in the UK. My other grandfather—simply ’Grandad’ to me—I saw every few years, when he’d fly from Lagos, where he lived, to visit us in England. As a child, I wasn’t aware that those visits were for cancer treatment. He died when I was eighteen.

I forgot the last words Grandad told me before his death. They came through a phone call from Nigeria, where his voice and body were succumbing. At the time, it was as though death had picked up the phone and gave me fair warning of my fate, if I were to follow the men before me.

At Grandad’s funeral in Igbajo, the town where he was born, everybody was in high spirits. Apart from the women who were left to clean up his mess, most folks loved my grandfather, and so they gave him a fitting farewell. The pallbearers did the traditional dance with his coffin on their shoulders. If one of them misses a step, I thought, I don’t want to be around for the despair. But these men were professionals. Their specialty was carrying the dead to the other side through dance.

Ironically, the funeral was the only day during the trip to Igbajo that wasn’t mired by misery. For the rest of it, I met family members for the first time, like my great-grandmother. She was unaware her son had just been buried, to spare her from heartbreak. Whereas she knew too little, my other family members knew too much. They decided now was the time to air out family secrets and grievances, when I’d only hoped for peace during my first visit.

I thought of the jar of coins my grandmother kept for me and my sister when we were kids. It was her “spending money, when I take you to Nigeria,” she said. For years, she held this dream. And now, finally realized, in the winter of 2008, the circumstances were anything but. It’s not uncommon for a diasporan kid’s first trip home to be for a death and a celebration of that life no longer with us. I’d be a fool to have hoped my first visit would be an exception to the rule.

It’s not uncommon for a diasporan kid’s first trip home to be for a death and a celebration of that life no longer with us.

Mortality needn’t be fear-inducing. I’ve always thought that the villains in films who chased immortality hadn’t lived full lives. For many, the fear of death can leave us desperate to cling on. The amount of children my grandfathers had definitely suggests they lived full, but messy, lives. I say messy because of Nigeria’s imperialistic, paternal culture that ripped fathers from their children before they came into the world.

Since Grandad’s death, I haven’t been back to Nigeria. But the plan is to go back next year and learn more about my heritage and family’s history. I can’t speak Yoruba, and neither can my sister, but it’s important that, for the continuity of family, I establish a connection. Embracing mortality, in this sense, is to prepare a way for my future children. If this cancer is hereditary, is it not also my responsibility to do everything within my humanly power to ensure, my children nor I, have to suffer?

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When I was eighteen, I jumped out of my bedroom window and onto the ground below to sneak off to a party. Luckily, I didn’t injure myself. But at the time, the outcomes of such risks seemed surmountable. A few months later, I would drive myself to the hospital with one hand, after breaking it in three places during a fight earlier that night. That was the age, I realize now, where all I wanted was to escape. There wasn’t an artist back then who could vocalize the rage I felt at that age quite like Ghetts, the East London grime emcee, then called Ghetto. “I’m known to swing, and not with my fists / I’ll tuck your crew in / I’m on the list, so don’t take the piss / That’s what you’re doing / I’ll try my best to not be aggressive / But it’s one of those days,” he spat on Kano’s “Typical Me.”

Now, a year out from my thirtieth birthday, I’ve been more conscious of the borrowed time I’m on. These are no longer the years where I can eat an entire bucket of fried chicken just to say I did it. There are days though, like the days Ghetts describes, when I say, “Fuck it. We all die someday.” That’s when I fear less, risk more. Nowadays, I’m more likely to pack up and leave and move elsewhere, knowing that there’s every chance of failing. Yet, I still do it. But I’d have a lot to consider if I attempted a stunt like defenestrating myself again, like I did at eighteen. The one thing, however, I’ve learned stumbling through my twenties is that I no longer want to take risks by putting blind trust and faith in others, without being aware of what motivates them to be around me.

At this point in my life, my body and mind tell me when they’re in need of better care, sometimes through drastic warning signs. When I collapsed at a friend’s house due to blood pressure, I learned that my body gives in to anxiety attacks in times of high stress. (My job at the time was definitely a factor.) It’s imperative that I find balance between living as I please while monitoring my diet and health. “One does not consume salt according to one’s greatness” as the Yoruba proverb states. After all, too much of anything can be deadly.

Now, I’m mindful of the foods I eat and how much physical exercise I get. I swim, box, run, work out, and play basketball just to stay here a little longer. Being cursed with the likelihood of a hereditary form of cancer certainly gives you perspective. I read a quote somewhere that finding healing for one’s self means that you discover healing for those that came before you. But I can’t mend the past or fix what cannot be put back together. My worry isn’t the men that came before me, but those that would come after. I see it as my responsibility to ensure that my family’s genetic trauma is at least lessened over time.

The “live fast, die young” mantra purported by rappers extends to a lot of Black men, who don’t often realize until death comes knocking just how precious, and precarious, life is. But since I’m not the only person to have lost someone prematurely, I also know how cruel it can be. “Looking over your life like ’what have I done’ to it,” Phonte eulogizes on “Cry No More,” following the death of his father. “Knowing your bloodline is the river that runs through it.”

My father’s health isn’t great either now. The years, and I, have taken their toll on him. As his own mortality is realized, so is the pain that comes with it. It’s humanized him in ways he never showed me before. When I began to learn of his childhood hardships, I also began to understand his character traits—and why they exist in me also. He passed down to me the silent but explosive ones too, the ones I never realized I inherited until we see our reflections in each other, fully grown and stood in front of us. With Phonte’s line, you could either look at it from the father or the son’s perspective, and it’d still be true.

Although Lil Wayne and his mentor/surrogate father Brian “Baby” Williams had a complex relationship, both business and personal, there was always going to come a time where the former would grow too big to stand in his mentor’s shadow. And for more than a decade, that was true for Weezy, and Baby was aware of that. But this summer, following Lil Wayne’s release from Cash Money Records, he and Baby made peace, so it’s possible. So there’s hope for reconciliation, my sons and fathers, that I believe in.

Without having a one-sided pissing contest with my dad, I’m in much better shape than he was at my age, just a year before he had me. Although I picked up the smoking habit he left behind when I was a toddler. It was seeing me pick up his cigarette butts as a toddler that prompted him to stop smoking. I wouldn’t say he failed; being who I am, smoking was inevitable. This could lead to an eventuality that I may not be able to escape the health issues the men before me where trying to keep me from. Nature loves a curveball. What I do know now is that the burden of responsibility to better the health of myself and future generations, falls on me and my other male cousins who share the same blood.

Living fast and dying young is a blind curse for those who can’t see beyond tomorrow. But it’s very easy to get caught up in a cycle of self-destruction when you have little hope for yourself. It’s only now that I’m beginning to see what life in my thirties could possibly be like, since it’s not far away.

Living fast and dying young is a blind curse for those who can’t see beyond tomorrow.

I believe in the spirit of ancestors, whatever form they may take. With my grandfathers being the closest of my ancestors to me, there’s divine spirituality behind the idea of taking lessons from those that have passed on and seeking ways in which life doesn’t have to be as painful, as it was for them. From the grave, or the other side, they are teaching me to live a full, rounded but healthy life as so their missteps don’t become my own. And being in the moment, as frivolous as that can sound, undeniably gives mortality and the cycle of death a little bit more substance.

“Little by little is how the pig’s nose enters the yard,” as the Yoruba proverb says. Or as Wayne told us on Solange’s “Mad,” “I remember how mad I was on that day / Man, you gotta let it go before it get up in the way.”