On a phone call the other day with a new friend, Zay, we ended up on the topic of religion. “Did you attend madrasah?” I asked her, referring to the Arabic schools that offer primary and secondary education where subjects like the linguistic characteristics of Arabic and Islamic theology and jurisprudence are taught.

She responded yes, but that she no longer remembers most of the things she was taught there. “I can still write my name in Arabic, I can still write Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem, and oh, yeah, I can still write some of the 99 names of Allah,” Zay said.

Zay’s experience is reflective of people of my generation in the southwestern part of Nigeria, where I’m from. Most only attended madrasah when they were young, before dumping it when they emerged more fully into life. Some, like Zay, told me they ran away from madrasah because their teachers, or ustadhs, flogged them too fiercely. But others told me that they dropped out to focus on their Western education, which they knew was the more economically sound path.

For me, balancing these two schools of knowledge has always seemed normal and natural. Growing up, I attended Western school Monday through Friday and attended madrasah on Saturdays and Sundays. The reason my experience was different was thanks to my father, who spent his life promoting Arabic and Islamic learning in Nigeria. The more I’ve learned about his efforts, the more I’ve realized why it meant so much for him to encourage Nigerians to be proud to speak Arabic, and study at madrasah, rather than let this education fall by the wayside in a country where there is little profitable motivation to pursue it.

In the 1960s, the author’s father established the Arabic studies school at the family house in Iwo. Courtesy of author.

Growing up, I knew, even as much as my mother tried to conceal it from me, that my father had died when I was still in her stomach. As I got older, I started to ask for more information. When I was 10, she pointed at an old landscape photo that hung above the window of our living room. In the picture, my father, a Black, plump man, is standing amid Arab men, smiling. Later, when I was 15, I came across an undated, self-published book my father wrote, titled “The Presence of Arabic Language and the Religion of Islam in Southwest Nigeria.” In the introduction, he observed that Christian missionaries were “snatching the children of Muslims into their English schools in order to get them to abandon their religion and take up their religion or believe in any other religion.”

To understand what he meant by this, it’s important to understand the history of Islam and Christianity in Nigeria. Both are understood to be colonialist ideologies because Nigeria, before it became Nigeria, had its own traditions. But both belief systems have permeated Nigeria thoroughly (today approximately 51% of the country identifies as Muslim and 47% identifies as Christians).

My father was likely writing in the 1950s, at a time when more students began to leave Arabic schools for English schools. The Christian missionaries, my father posited, were able to sell them on a Western education because it promised them more opportunities for advancement. Arabic studies, at the time, only promised to teach a better understanding of how to worship God—seemingly at odds with a growing and modernizing economy. He recognized that if something didn’t change, it would put the study of Arabic and Islam on a path of gradual erasure in the Nigerian educational system. So, he thought: Let me establish something similar in Arabic so as to attract back the Muslim children.

In the 1960s, he began this work, establishing his own Arabic school, which originally started at the family house in Iwo, before it took on a modern classroom-based learning setting in 1962. He called the school, which I later attended, Markaz Shabaab–l–Islam, or the Islamic Youth Center. Other scholars in the region, like Sheikh Adam Al-Ilory, created similar educational programs to build standards and structure around Arabic studies at the time.

The author’s father (middle) with the students of his school. Courtesy of author.

Despite their work, the present structure of the Nigerian education system offers fewer and fewer opportunities for advancement for those who attend madrasah. That’s why, though the number of Arabic students produced every year in its junior schools equals, if not exceeds, the number of students produced in Western schools, the drop-off point that follows for secondary school is steep. Unlike madrasah, Western schooling offers students an opportunity to dream of, for instance, attaining government or white-collar jobs. When students finish madrasah, there should be something equivalent in the system which guarantees them an application to higher institutions, for instance, without sitting for external examinations, to incentivize further Arabic study.

I think about what it would look like if Nigeria valued Arabic education more and rewarded the efforts of those who are still passionate about learning the language. It is not about Islam, the religion, but Arabic itself, because faith is different from knowledge, just as a Western education is different from Christianity. The way I see it, for the Arabic language to have permeated our culture so thoroughly since its introduction in the 11th century through the northern part of the country, disseminating through trade and migration with North African countries like Egypt and Sudan, makes it even more deserving of study. This is especially the case in a complicated region like the southwest, where our Indigenous language—Yoruba—does not share similar phonemes with Arabic.

Though my father’s struggle was a long time ago, his determination inspires me today; he started his Arabic studies at a young age, learning the rudiments of the Qur’an from his paternal grandfather, Sheikh Bukhari. To learn modern Arabic, he traveled to different Arabic-speaking countries. His first trip, to Saudi Arabia in 1942, came at a time when such a trip necessitated taking camels and horses. When such transportation was not possible, he trekked on foot. What made it worth the struggle? I think the answer is that faith and a thirst for knowledge can be chronic.

Before I read my father’s book, I was unconsciously starting to throw myself wholly into Western education, because that’s understood to be the path to thrive in the country. But his writing has helped me recognize how important it is to not throw away his work, and this legacy of being a student of two schools of knowledge.

The final pages of my father’s book include three photographs. The first is a group picture of my father and his first set of students at the Islamic Youth Center. Tiny in the picture, he looks way younger than the photo my mother first showed me of him. The second picture is of him, flanked by older men, robed in Agbada, embroidered, traditional Yoruba attire. All of them wear caps and firmly-knotted turbans. The caption under this picture reads, “a picture taken by friends and well-wishers as send-off for Al-Hadj Ahmad Muhaly Al-Bukhary on his trip to Mecca and some Arab countries.” The third picture is an isolated picture of the first building in the school my father established. A wooden signpost rests against the wall of the building, the door and the windows shut. The caption below the picture reads, “Here is the picture of Islamic Youth Center in Iwo.”

Staring at these pictures, I wonder if my father knew that all his hard work would make a difference. But the more I look, the more I am certain he knew that the school he built would. It was his way of ensuring that he could share his wisdom and teachings with generations to come—offering inspiration to me and others who continue to matriculate through that door captured in the photograph.

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Is it normal to wonder how you didn’t wind up more of a mess?

As a man, I sometimes find myself asking this question. As an American, I’ve met my fair share of masculinist jerks. Like the father berating his “loser” son—the kid had just lost a wrestling match—in a public restroom. Like the dudes who heckled me for walking my dog while wearing pink shorts. These are the men that make men look bad, though sometimes I worry that they’re just most men, full stop.

How then did I come to be spared (I hope) from masculinity’s more toxic trends? My feminist parents deserve some credit. Ditto my propensity, born of book-worming, for imagining myself as other people. My physique, lanky as a praying mantis, kept me out of the nastier sports.

To these I’ll add emo music, the soundtrack to my teen years, when I tried on new selves like so many pairs of socks.

What, you may ask, is emo? “Emo” is short for emotional, though my friends captured the genre in four words: “whiney white boy music.” Think Death Cab for Cutie. Google or Wiki will mash up adjectives in search of a definition: confessionalist, sensitive, hardcore, punk. Subgenres and regional schools proliferate, but to my amateur ears, emo means one thing: lovelorn dislocation from girls, popularity, and joy. Lyrics swoon, guitars moan, and band names broadcast—in the thickest of ironies—absence or loss.

Take these telling examples, provided here with a gloss: The Promise Ring (no doubt broken), American Football (our kind didn’t play), The Anniversary (preceding a break-up), and The Get Up Kids (no thanks, we’ll sit this one out). These were my mixtape heroes and masculine lodestars in the 1990s skinny jean scene of Cleveland, Ohio.

What did they teach me about masculinity? About life? That my hopes would be dashed, I’m guaranteed nothing, and girls will probably find someone else. This might sound like a common enough lesson, but it matters more when you grow up—as I did—white, hetero, suburban, and male. American culture raises our kind to Everest-like heights of entitlement. About sex, success, or art. Emo music bred some of that out of me.

As a virgin with a Walkman, I didn’t loathe girls I wasn’t dating; I moped. At concerts with my fellow mop tops. Finding melody to answer the “misery” of my day.

Of course, I wasn’t miserable, not really, but I’d found a community to help when I convinced myself that I was. Emo music offered me the first taste of a collective subculture, a “we” built not of chest-thumping aggression but of angst-laden melodrama. We swapped physical strength for hyperbolic introspection. We sang together in the little basement of our misspent desires. When the Get Up Kids crooned that “I’ll cry until I can’t see the whites of your eyes,” I knew, then and there, that boys could cry, and it could be cool.

Dorm poster cool. Chuck Taylors cool. Studded belt cool. I remade myself in the emo star’s moody likeness. Was a trip to Hot Topic involved? I’m afraid it was. Did I style my haircut—swoop of bangs to curtain one eye—after Bright Eyes’ frontman Conor Oberst? There are 35mm prints to prove that I did. He and emo’s other singer-songwriters seemed to hop, fully formed, from tour vans. They wrote lyrics that circled back—like black hair dye in a hotel sink—to their own vulnerability.

Photograph of the author as a young man leaning into emo’s “angst-laden melodrama.” (Image courtesy of Kerry Farrell)

In retrospect, vulnerability was emo’s greatest gift—at least for this male devotee. Vulnerability is anathema to traditional masculinity. Vulnerability, exposed or expressed, will get you mocked, maligned, or beat up. But emo’s lead singers wrapped vulnerability in Western shirts and suede jackets. Vulnerability shined from the band logoed-buttons we wore like merit badges down the straps of our shoulder bags—men could wear shoulder bags!

There was, I now see, a backward logic to this little salvation. I drew strength from emo’s overt vulnerability. I eschewed male violence while hugging the mosh pit’s softer circumference. (I never quite jumped in.) I met girls while listening to songs about not meeting girls. I still remember one who, mid-song at a Built to Spill concert, looked me in the eyes and tousled my hair. Was she high? Was she flirting? I spent the whole set trying to find her again in the crowd. (I failed.)

Was emo a panacea to toxic masculinity? Surely not. Was it feminist? I wish. The critic Jessica Hopper writes movingly of the women in emo songs; they’re just “vessels redeemed in the light of boy love.” Emo’s vulnerability, she notes, admits no “empathy, no peerage or parallelism” for girls. I don’t dispute it, but in the slow and ongoing project of my male self-improvement, emo offered a way out. From social isolation and depression. From a physical fight.

Thanks to emo, I took up cross country, inspired in part by Four Minute Mile (1997), an early Get Up Kids album that featured, on its cover, a track star in knee-highs having a smoke. I discovered another band called Track Star. These songs kept me running. And running kept me confident. That I could just flip the bird to my bullies. That I could flee.

In time, emo offered a bridge to richer, more nuanced art. In college I discovered poetry, my life’s work. Is it any wonder that an emo kid fell for poetry? As McSweeney’s notes, Emily Dickinson can sound awfully emo—“I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you – Nobody – too?” Rainer Maria, a female-led emo trio that met in a poetry workshop, took their name from Rainer Maria Rilke. My own collegiate poetry workshops taught me how much I needed to mature. And stat.

I’ll offer one example of this, and one alone, which I’ve quoted to students whose bleeding hearts leave stains on my floor. The year was 2001. I’d submitted my first poem—a love elegy, no doubt—to my professor David Baker. “What is this, Derek? Over dramatized teenage angst?” David asked. “It reads like Shelley on a surfboard.” I’ve known David, a marvelous poet, long enough to thank him for this intervention. Long enough to realize that “Shelley on a surfboard” is a solid definition of emo. David helped me see, to quote Rilke, that I “must change my life.”

“Men at forty learn / Learn to close softly / The doors to rooms they will not be / Coming back to,” writes the poet Donald Justice. True enough, I’ve found, but less so in an era when old infatuations are just one click away. It’s easy to revisit my emo adolescence, which I’ve done a lot since my son tip-toed into middle school’s hall of mirrors. In the quiet hours before dinner, with my finger above the play button, I wonder: should I give him a tour of my youth?

The answer to this question is obvious to any parent: please, don’t. So too are the reasons why: because he’ll spit back much of the culture you offer; because he needs to discover his music and his masculinity, not yours. Thankfully, his life offers countless opportunities to do so, and his parents aren’t yet so “sus” as to be fully ignored (sus [adj., chiefly teenage]: suspicious, old).

Take one recent decision with lasting social repercussions: what instrument would he wield in band? Our son chose the flute. He YouTubed a few lessons. His excitement lifted like a cool and resonant note. Then he came home with a hesitation: Only one other boy played flute.

We chatted as a family about gender and music. We asked him why some instruments seemed “manly” or “girly”; where do those flimsy presumptions begin? And aren’t those categories increasingly fluid, challenged daily by his non-binary friend? Mostly, though, my wife and I did what most parents do in a crisis: we turned to the internet for help.

There we learned that James Madison, an actual Founding Father, once owned a crystal flute. Can you get more manly than Madison? We learned that Lizzo played the flute too—had in fact played Madison’s flute while twerking. Lizzo’s coolness, my son intuited, needed no proof. Then we watched the now famous video. Then we watched it again.

Was this enough to convince him? What had we hoped to achieve? We know that, months later, he’s still playing. We know too that he now likes to perform. His audience: our good friends and their daughter, who captured the performance on her phone. His repertoire: the “Among Us” theme song, which—bless his heart—he’d memorized that week.

Whatever emo did for me, dear Reader, is nothing compared to this, one of masculinity’s more hopeful futures: a 12-year-old boy, woodwind in hand, shaking everything he’s got.

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My father was absent for most of my childhood and adult life. Not in the sense that he abandoned my mother and ran away. Absent in that he was unable to show emotion and could not initiate contact with me. My only glimpses of his inner thoughts came through a few sentences uttered casually over many years, and in one or two letters he wrote to me on aerograms, the lightweight paper for airmail.

The French have a word for it, le non-dit: the unsaid. It hovers around many families, regardless of the culture. In my father’s case, the culture was a traditional Chinese upbringing, the ingredients of which—in his particular family and with his particular father—included a systemic denial of emotions and grimly rigid ideas about dignity, respectability, and education. The potential for missed opportunities and lost relationships was enormous.

By the time I introduced my husband to my Chinese grandfather, he was no longer frightening. A skinny old man with thick glasses who shuffled about his home in his slippers, he was a former diplomat for the Kuomintang who wore well-tailored suits and was terrifying to me as a child: tyrannical, judgmental—you were only as good as the Ivy League school you would eventually attend.

This wasn’t just about university. My aunt—my father’s sister—had been repudiated as a young woman for daring to challenge my grandfather’s autocracy. The first time she ran away as a teenager in the 1940s she was brought home and then hospitalized for shock treatments. The second time she ran away for good.

The last time I saw my father he was lying in a hospital bed in Los Angeles, dying. As a child I had seen him at most once a year—my parents separated when I was 6. As an adult I saw him even less. When I traveled from Paris, where I live, to Los Angeles to see him in 2012 with my two children, he declined dinner with us and provided no real explanation: We remained awkwardly at his apartment for about 20 minutes and then left with my stepmother for the restaurant.

My sons were shocked and sullen. I watched them react the way I had for years, covering up my resentment and hurt with a shrug, angry with myself for once again being disappointed. Over time both my mother and my stepmother told me that he loved me, but that he was depressed and unable to express his emotions. Still, I felt they were making excuses for him; I was unwilling to see that his few attempts to make contact from within his shell were all he could manage.

But all the distress about my father that I had stockpiled inside over the years disappeared in an instant when I saw him shrunken and mummy-like in his hospital bed, his extremities swollen with fluid. He had been refusing food and drink for seven days. He was determined to die, and I admired him for his steadfastness.

Several years ago, my uncle—my father’s brother—revealed that my father had cut his wrists in the 1950s when he was a student at Harvard. At the time, my uncle was finishing up his Ph.D., and he and my grandfather brought my father back to Los Angeles, where my grandparents had settled after serving in various diplomatic posts.

My uncle does not recall any conversation with the Harvard Health Services and said he returned to his university, leaving my father alone with their parents. Shortly after that, my father returned to school as well. What transpired at home will remain unknown, as so much else was.

My grandparents also had a baby girl in between the births of my uncle and my father. My father thought she had drowned, but my uncle thought she died from an infectious disease. Neither ever asked their parents for details. Neither sought to contact their other sister—my aunt—who had been repudiated.

Who knew how my grandmother felt about the loss of her two daughters? She was my grandfather’s right hand, the perfect diplomat’s wife, there to serve. But she did have a favorite—my father, her youngest. This perhaps enabled him to feel, but also made him less tough and therefore more vulnerable. He would make several attempts to break free from his background, but his untreated mental health and the weight his father had placed on him would drag him down each time, ultimately bringing him back to his parents’ home to take care of them until their death.

I recently asked my uncle, a brilliant, well-known, and highly energetic neuroscientist, why he thought he alone had emerged from the family, seemingly unscathed. Without missing a beat he replied that it was because he had never lost sight of his beacon: the pursuit of knowledge. As a teenager he would read encyclopedias from A-Z. As the eldest son, he had also benefited from the little positive attention my grandfather had paid the children.

At first, my father followed an acceptable path and finished bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the sciences, before veering off course to explore what interested him much more: a Ph.D. in Art History. It is highly likely that this was the first time he studied something he enjoyed.

Before long he met my New York-born mother, an artist. She told me that at the time he was already suffering from what was then called manic depression. He had also said to her, “I always fail at the height of success.” Despite his psychological state, which he refused to treat until the end, my parents enjoyed interesting times in the early days of their marriage.

As a mixed-race couple in the late 1950s, it was difficult to rent an apartment in Manhattan; they were turned down by several landlords and could only find housing near Columbia University. After university, they traveled around Europe on a tiny budget and moved to Egypt, where my father had a fellowship. They lived the last days of cosmopolitan Alexandria; Europeans had already started to leave, fearing Pan-Arabism and the socialist reforms President Gamal Abdel Nasser was putting into place. After my birth there, my father took to his bed for a year.

My mother returned to New York with me, and eventually my father pulled himself together and followed her back to the U.S., where he became a professor of art history. His academic research was interspersed with episodes of depression and mania, and it became impossible for my mother to live with him; she moved back to Europe, taking me with her at age 4.

Although I only saw my father on occasional visits, when I did, it was always painful because of his utter inability to show affection. But he was not unfamiliar. I remember the speed and precision with which he peeled and sectioned a blood orange for me after school, removing every bit of pith, displaying the sections neatly on a plate. And we both loved cats, as did my grandmother. (My father told my stepmother only recently that my grandfather used to kick the family cat.)

My father took early retirement—his manic depression made a linear career very difficult—and he cared for his elderly parents in Los Angeles, tending to his mother with infinite patience. When it came to his father, it was obvious from the caustic remarks he made that he had ill feelings toward him. When my grandfather passed away, my father told me he felt only relief.

I think he also felt relief when he left this world a year ago. He had been in a prolonged state of depression for years. Life had been a long, painful struggle for him. When I saw him on his deathbed, though, what should have been obvious to me for years became clear: He had not necessarily wanted to be absent, but given his damaged emotional self, he was simply unable to communicate. Still, I felt such sadness at all the things in his life that never were.

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At first, I hadn’t been so sure. When my filmmaker husband casually dropped the question, “What would you think of moving to L.A.?,” I sucked in a deep breath and felt my panic rise. I’d long been happily settled in San Francisco. On the other hand, I wanted to be flexible and supportive. I would finish writing my book in L.A., and he could cook up his big film plans somewhere closer to the action.

No one moves to L.A. without having seen it already. The movies, the Beach Boys, Rita Hayworth, the Pacific Ocean. It all seems so familiar that even for new arrivals it feels a bit like coming home. I convinced myself so completely that all would be well that by the day we signed our lease–what I had come to think of as the day of the jacarandas–even I saw an aura of glamour in our plans. But in a small corner of my mind, I felt something else lurking. It wasn’t until a few weeks later, after the moving guys had piled the last boxes onto our new living room floor, that something lit the fuse. I started to weep, and then to sob. I sat on the floor and crumbled. I realized what I had done. I had followed a man in pursuit of his ambitions. And I’d let myself be uprooted once again by someone else’s Hollywood dreams.

That had been the story of my childhood. My family had 13 addresses before I turned nine. At one point, we moved four times in 18 months. Time after time, my mother packed up a baby, then two, then three, and then toddlers and school kids and a house full of goods, to follow my handsome, narcissistic, and insecure father in pursuit of his ever-receding horizons. He worked in radio and television as talent. But he knew he was destined for bigger things–larger markets, better jobs. So he quit the ones he had and leapt for greener grass, which never turned out to be green enough. We were living in Wichita when he left us for Hollywood–which he knew was his destiny.

My father had grown up in Los Angeles, and his father, Leon Ceeley (his stage version of Seeley), was an actor who had landed one great role: Mr. Whitmore in the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races. I felt secretly proud of that family legacy, but it had also wrecked us. As we moved all across Colorado and then Kansas, my father was really chasing his father and his own Hollywood dream. He fed his ambitions on roles in summer stock and community theater, but they left him restless, unsatisfied. So the summer I was 12 he made one last try at Hollywood. He knew Clu Galager, he said, and Clu was going to help him get an audition. The whole family made the drive out west, and while my sisters, mother, and I stayed with relatives in Arizona, he went on to L.A. I remember the long drive back to Kansas as silent and tense. There was no more talk of Hollywood. And when we got home, my father packed up and left us for good.

The emotional plots of our childhood lie deeply rooted in our psyches and become the maps we follow as adults. I’d married a man who made movies, and now I’d followed him here. So in more ways than one, I had really come home. To my father’s home place, the source of his fantasies and the catalyst of my childhood suffering. His inheritance might have been the movies, but the bequest he’d made to me was a lack of roots and a memory of trauma that rose from the depths whenever I moved.

This was the story of the memoir I was writing, the one I planned to finish in L.A. I’d come to understand the toll my upended childhood years had taken. I ached for a sense of place but realized I had no deep attachment to anywhere, including Kansas, where I’d finally done my growing up. I hadn’t intended to make peace with my father, or to write about him. But he hovered at the margins from the day I wrote the first words of Chapter One, and by now he’d become a major character. But I still had the hardest chapters yet to write, the ones that would take me deep into the heart of my aching not only for place but for him. When he died in 1999, we hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade.

L.A. brought me face to face with the neighborhoods where my father had been a boy in the 1930s and 1940s. It seemed more than a coincidence. As the weeks went by and we settled in, it began to seem right. As I drove or walked through the city, I met my father at every turn. I often passed Hollywood High, where he’d gone to school. As I drove by houses from the ’30s and ’40s, I imagined he had lived in them during his own itinerant childhood (he’d had 17 addresses in L.A.). I thought of my grandfather when I passed MGM, where he had checked in for his scenes with Groucho. Every day brought me further into my father’s familiar world, the places that had shaped his mythology of self and the stories he’d told me as a child: Forest Lawn, Venice Beach, Santa Monica Pier.

Being there in the places that had belonged to the boy who would become my father turned me tender. It let me see him whole, in three dimensions. I came to understand that his suffering had roots in his own disrupted and often-moving family, and I came to understand the tug of L.A., the homing beacon that always lured him back from wherever we moved. Writing about his life in L.A., imagining him here, helped me forgive him, and then let him go.

I finished my book that first year in L.A. and then we stayed for another two. When my sabbatical ended, we began the long commute. For two years, I spent my weekdays in San Francisco, and my weekends, winter breaks, and summers in Los Angeles, learning by heart that long, straight stretch of I-5 in between. I had the joy of seeing the jacarandas bloom twice more. But no matter the season, whenever I neared the end of my drive, took the Highland exit and slowed into traffic, it always felt like coming home.

Buy the Book: Skylight Books, Amazon, Powell’s.

Tracy Seeley is the author of My Ruby Slippers: the Road Back to Kansas (2011). Her short nonfiction has appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner and The Florida Review, and her essay “Cartographies of Change” was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2011. She lives in Oakland, California and teaches at the University of San Francisco.

*Photo courtesy of ccharmon.

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