You Don't Know Me

What he didn’t mention in his speech was that the deceased, Jamil, was a gang member. Yes, he was nineteen. Yes, this gang he was in was just a nuisance nothing gang at first, dealing in a bit of weed and doing little robberies or what have you. It weren’t no big man’s gang. It was a gang though and to those kids in that gang or in any gang, it was life. This is real.

They join these gangs when they’re just little kids and then the life gets them. They start with knives and at first the one with the biggest knife is the main man. Then it’s the one who actually uses the knife, he’s the main man. Then it’s the boy who kills someone with a knife, he’s the leader. And this is what their days become, grabbing for the top spot, who can outdo who, who can be the bigger man.

To you, it maybe sounds stupid. Little kids stabbing each other up over a bit of grass or whatever, but this is life for them. It gets in their heads and when it’s in it’s hard to get it out again. It’s like a disease that makes you think that this thing is real, not that thing, and that killing a person is okay. It’s not like they sit there thinking these things through. Nobody does. This is just their reality, like your reality is that it’s okay to waste your life working till you’re old and then to retire just in time to die. It’s all stupidness. It’s just that when you’re in it, you can’t see it.

What is real for these kids isn’t ordinary day-to-day life, getting up, going to school, swearing at teachers. It’s this fucked-up shit. This is what is real to them. I didn’t really know that before. I mean I could see they were travelling down certain roads. But I didn’t know why. I didn’t know it weren’t really a choice for a lot of them. These people you see on the news and politicians and what have you, they go on about this like it is a surprise to them that young boys in the life do this shit. But it ain’t a surprise. If anything, it’s a surprise anyone ever stops. These boys, their friends are like their brothers. They are the only ones they got, a lot of them, who even care they exist. Their mates are the people they go to when they’re in the shit and it’s their mates who get them out of it. And the gangs they’re in are basically families to them. And that is obvious when you think about it. A boy will be ready to take a knife in the stomach if he has to for his gang bruv and what is that if it ain’t family? I’m talking about a boy who’s got no dad. Who’s got a mum who can’t control him but who thinks that all he needs is to go to church to fix him out. An actual family who don’t give a shit about him. You take a boy like that, and trust me, they are all boys like that, then you shouldn’t be surprised he’s in a gang. The shit’s inevitable. But people don’t like to hear that. Because they want to make you pay for what you do. And don’t get me wrong, I’m all about people paying for making choices. But these kids. They ain’t choosing shit.

At the local school, I knew kids who were like eleven years old who would have bigger kids come up to them and be all like, ‘You should join our gang’. And if you didn’t, then someone would start some beef with you. Get you shook. And if you weren’t like strong in your head, eventually you would just go, ‘Yeah I’m in’. A lot of kids don’t want to be dealing with some next beef as well as all the other shit going on in their lives. And then there’s other kids. They ain’t got no head for maths or history or whatever, so then older boys would target them. ‘Yo blood, you ain’t going to be no CEO. What you going to do for paper when you leave? Clean the streets? You should come work with us. We give you paper right now. Just go do this little pick up for me …’ and rah rah rah. So if you got that going on in your school, what you going to do? If you have got some skills and you can handle yourself, like I could, you might be okay. But what if you ain’t? You got no choices. It’s either take a beating or you join a gang and get paid and get respect. And then it just becomes part of your life. It becomes a normal thing for a kid to sell drugs in his school. It becomes a normal thing for a kid to stab up some next kid for no reason. And once it is normal for you, you don’t have any reasons to change it. It just becomes life. Your life.

And I only realized this recently while I was in prison waiting for my trial. I been waiting a year for my case to get on. Remand they call it. And when you’re on remand that long inside four walls with nothing to do, you will do two things you might never have done before in your life. No matter who you are. Think about shit. And read about shit.