Shaka Senghor

Shaka Senghor has won multiple awards, published a best-selling memoir, taught at the University of Michigan, and runs his own business. He is a father who wants the best for his children. He is also an African American man who was in prison at age nineteen and spent seven years in solitary confinement. His father’s letters sustained him in jail. Writing changed his life. His Letters to the Sons of Society is written to change the lives of his sons and the lives of black youth everywhere. For Senghor, nothing is more important than our children.

A lot of people believe in a divine power; others believe in the power of nature; but to me, the greatest power that drives our world is the love we have for our children.
from Letters to the Sons of Society by Shaka Senghor

Senghor reflects on his experiences and draws lessons. The letters are deeply humane, with sensitive insight, affirming and hopeful, universally applicable. I was very moved, my heart aching.

Senghor shares his own story of growing up middle class in Detroit, running away from home to escape abuse, and becoming embroiled in the drug trade. He was raped, shot at, and at age nineteen killed a man and sent to prison for nineteen years. He writes of losing his humanity and hope in prison until the support fellow of inmates helped him. How books and meditation and writing a journal changed him. Then, the difficulty of reentering society as man with a child’s experience of the world. He shares his story to honor the men he had left behind in prison. He tells about the daily struggle to speak honestly, affirm himself, and deal with the legacy of trauma. In 2017, his memoir Writing My Wrongs became a best seller. His activism brought attention, and he writes, “Think about this, my dear son. I had been let out of prison in 2010 and told that I’d be back in six months. Now I was slated to go to the White House just five years later.” “Things change,” he assures his son.

In prison he began to writing a journal. “It felt like an act of mediation,” he writes, that brought an “overwhelming sense of joy.” A pamphlet on meditation allowed him to learn to let go of what he could not control. “Letters saved my life,” he writes to his son Sekou.

Senghor helped create Men of Courage, a grassroots organization centered around storytelling.

There is so much to learn from this book. It is a confession in the literary sense. It is about the power of love. It is about the reality of prison. It is about race. And about the power of storytelling.

I was given a free egalley by Random House through NetGalley. My book review is fair and unbiased.… (mais)

​I find it hard to imagine what life might have been like if I had been born in one of several hardship areas in the world, whether it be living under the Taliban in Afghanistan, under ISIS in Syria, or in one of the poor inner-city neighborhoods like in Newark, Camden, or Chicago in the U.S. Even though I have read magazine and newspaper stories about life in inner-city ghettos of today, with their failed schools, excessive high school drop-out rates, fatherless families, widespread drug use, high crime and murder rates, poverty, disproportionate incarceration of young black men, etc., I truly don't believe I can fully understand what it must be like, trying to break the bonds of poverty while living in that environment.

One way to appreciate it (if that's the right word) is by reading Shake Senghor's recent memoir, "Writing My Wrongs". In his book, he discusses his troubled youth in Detroit, his becoming a drug peddler, being shot as a teenager, his two decade imprisonment for 2nd degree murder, and his ultimate transition to a writer, counselor for troubled youth, and a family man after his release from prison. His story was one of changing from a bright young student to a homeless 14 year old, then living in the streets and supporting himself by selling drugs. He starting carrying a gun for protection, and soon after used it during a confrontation and killed a man. After being convicted of 2nd degree murder, he spent almost 20 years in prison, seven years of which was in solitary confinement. Hardly a model prisoner initially, he ultimately learned to control his temper and street-tough ways, in part through reading books from the prison library. Following his parole, he became a speaker, a counsellor, a writer, a family man, and a useful member of society.

The story is told in a now-and-then manner, alternating between the present and his past life. While some writers and editors seem to like that style, I favor a more ordered and chronological presentation, but that's just personal preference. Even though there's some time adjustments to make while reading, it's not a serious distraction to the story. "Writing My Wrongs" is a story of one man’s redemption, and it's a moving story.

… (mais)