Minutes after the news of world heavyweight champion
Muhammad Ali’s passing hit the headlines, an avalanche
of obituaries and eulogies came down with a cathartic
momentum – which is more a sign of people coming to
terms with their own loss than the enormity of the news
itself.
There is no eulogizing Muhammad Ali. There are not
enough words, tears or sighs. Usually you feel a hole, an
emptiness in you when someone so towering like Ali dies.
But this time, I look inside and there is a sudden volume
in me demanding attention. What is this? Where does it
come from? What does this mean?
I was born in 1951, right in the middle of Muhammad Ali
century. Why does he deserve an entire century named
after him?
Look at the spectrum of powerful public figures around
the world that might lay a claim to it. Half of them are
mass murderers like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, or those who
dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They
don’t get to define that century.
Purity of his soul
But there are also scientists, artists, poets, novelists,
dramatists – each one of them with a legitimate claim on
defining an enduring aspect of that century.
Pablo Picasso taught us how to look, James Joyce how to
read, Fanon how to fight, Che Guevara how to defy,
Gandhi how to change, Kurosawa how to see. But none of
them has an extended shadow beyond the light they had
cast upon this world.
Muhammad Ali towers over them all because he became
the definition, the personification, of our inborn
innocence – an innocence we all lose as soon as we enter
into a full consciousness of the terror we live as adults in
a deeply flawed and enduringly unjust world.
we need him we can take him out and unfold him for
the whole world that he was.
In him, in his soaring intelligence and in his beautiful
mind, in his poetry in motion when he was in the ring,
and in his rebellious grace when outside, we see the
innocence the world has so terribly lost and so
desperately seeks.
Grace and poetry
He fought the most vicious distortions of the very
timber of our humanity – hypocrisy, racism, militarism
– with a noble anger he tucked inside his sublime sense
of humour.
Even when he was punching his rivals in the ring, he
was doing it with grace and poetry. He danced for his
opponent like a ballerina, sang for him like a lyricist,
and before they knew what hit them, they were
knocked out.
He emerged from the depth of an entire history of
spiteful racism and slavery in the United States to
redefine what it means to be American. There was the
whole gamut of militarism, racism, and conquest on
one side and on this side was Ali and all he
represented, contesting what it means to be
American.
US boxer Muhammad Ali lying on the ground during
the 15th round of his bout against Joe Frazier in New
York, March 1971 [EPA]
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All other looming characters of that century made a virtue
out of their presence in the midst of the troubles we lived.
Ali bathed in the nastiest stormy seas of our world with
the purity of his soul intact.
There is a reason we persist in abbreviating his name:
From Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr, to Muhammad Ali Clay to
Muhammad Ali to Ali. We need to wrap him lightly like a
talismanic assurance and carry him with us inside so when
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