Muhammad Ali

Incredibly sad to hear Ali had passed on, yesterday. As a young adolescent, Ali was a man I admired and idolised on a number different fronts: a man who confronted his anxiety over the future and over his inner self with a dedication to loving his own life and his own history; who was unrelentingly fierce in speaking his mind to authority, and who, when faced with the trauma and isolation of national disgrace and imprisonment, resolved to stand by his deepest beliefs and convictions.

I wrote a piece on Ali around a year ago - you can find it here

Ali’s actions were symbolic of the colossal weight of the energy within the Civil Rights movement, in which those involved appeared engulfed by the most simple, radical notion: that there is something more important than the self, something so condensed in love and empathy, that it breeds anger and even hatred. And without this bristling charge, is the notion of social change is not an empty cartridge: a gun without a bullet which, as we so often bare witness to in the political arena, offers little but a sharp pain to the ear? Ali’s refusal to enter the army represents the final threshold of political action, the point at which ‘political action’ transcends the limitation of the first word ‘political’, exploding through the realm of the personal, a force now as majestically creative as it is traumatic.