They Call me Driss and My Hearts an Honorarium

I am Idrissa Akpomo Ekundayo, but my given name at birth is Christopher Len Cephas. I am the second of six children, but I am my father’s first son.

Growing up in the inner city of Cincinnati, OH from the age of seven and being the first son in the Ben Cephas household came with its lot of responsibility. It meant, tending to our dogs, doing yard work (weeding, planting, mowing) and it also meant being the first to fight whenever issues arrived for my siblings or for myself. I have been forged with a level of discipline, a work ethic and toughness only circumstance and pressure could have imbued.

Bond Hill is like every other black neighborhood. The anger and aggressive nature in which parents and their children possessed there in Bond Hill was something I had previously been foreign too. So much pent in frustration and noise. Mental noise, was something I had not experienced the first seven years of my early life living at a dead-end street on Laurel Ave. in Hartwell. My first baby steps were protected, surrounded by secluded woodlands, a creak with clay bed and a huge apple tree.

From the first, I was shaped by the smells and sounds of nature and then at the age of seven I had been given the challenges of the inner city as a rites of passage. They say it takes a village, but what’s not talked about, is mentality and what’s being nurtured within a broken community’s groupthink. Transitioning into that world took its toll on not just me but my older sister as well and between the two of us – one of us is still in the streets, the other – looking for a better way.

I was a guinea pig of sorts. I was the first to graduate high school, go to the military and graduate from the university. I was the first to go back to Africa on holiday and I’ve even facilitated performance art workshops and performed in London, England at the L.I.F.T. Festival as a part of the ensemble for the project entitled “Skeleton’s of Fish.” But, when I think back fondly to my early life, one of the most memorable moments would be in summer. I don’t quite remember the year but, I was in my early teens… I can remember, the summer before and the summer after the Crack epidemic hit.

That summer before, there were trees and we played baseball, football and tumbled in the park. We were always on our bikes and playing, running through the streets. After crack hit my home and neighborhood, I remember significant changes occurring in both. The first thing I noticed – most of the trees were gone, I attribute that to police presence for the sake of visibility. Then gangster rap and gangs came, and I liked it. I remember a boy I looked up too, Bret, showed me his knife, intrigued but apprehensive. I can remember sitting on the swings at the neighborhood park with friends just after swimming and tumbling when we were approached by a group of older boys who asked if we wanted to make some money. That was the first time I saw crack cocaine. I watched the crowd walk away and my friends left me with a head hung low swinging alone. Many of my childhood friends have passed on. Those that are still living look like skeletons, walking-dead, trapped between the patterns of using and dealing – a vortex of violence, prison and death. Those who have, gone straight, are stained by their past actions and scrape by, by any means.

Everything, I have done, every move I have made creatively, physically, even spiritually has been for the edification of spirit and in humble remembrance for those who have gone on before. Might not work for most, but the tool that have stayed my sanity in the midst of such chaos and prejudice, even through personal ignorance, is lifestyle. Diet and values are key and a testament to my will and fortitude. I truly want to find ways to help others navigate through the torrents and on to a more solid ground. It is my belief, that we all are victims, even the victimizer a victim. But, there are few of us who live in and are not a part of, ones who work as guides and healers, helping people to see their way through. This is my passion.

So when you see Christ Cephas/ Idrissa Akpomo Ekundayo - know, that I am a representative and what I do is in honor of the you, that you don't see.