Tag: The Wire

The Autobiography of Omar

The first time I saw Michael K. Williams’s memoir in the bookstore, I devoured the main chapter on his character Omar from The Wire. I thought that was most of what I’d want to read.

But then I started reading from the beginning. And kept reading. And reading.

Mike tells his powerful story in a compelling, humbling, and vulnerable way. From childhood to adulthood, he wrestles in view of the reader with his family, identity, joys, insecurities, ambition, addiction, and what it means to come back home and give back to one’s community.

There are gems throughout the book. For example:

What most people don’t realize about addiction is that it is in you before the drug even shows up. That’s because the drug itself is not the problem; it is a symptom of the problem. The drug is the culmination, the final step—not the first.

And:

If you push something down, it’ll find its way out. You can’t run from it. Jay-Z says we can’t heal what we never reveal. And it’s true. You can’t heal what you never reveal.

In talking about a powerful encounter with Reverend Ron, who showed him God’s love:

It didn’t happen right away, took years in fact, but Reverend Ron was the beginning. I started to see myself as worthy of his love, of that congregation’s love, of God’s love. It all started there in that New Jersey church.

But:

It’s not like boom I was saved and clean all at once. There’s not an addict on the planet who it’s like that for. Being an addict means forward and back constantly. It means saying no again and again. That’s why someone who is clean for thirty years can still call himself an addict. They’re always one choice away.

Especially poignant is Mike’s description of the ebbs and flows of his addiction throughout the five seasons of The Wire, including his emotional response to the show’s conclusion:

It was like in Forrest Gump when he decides to stop running across the country and everyone following him just kind of stops too and wanders away. I felt like one of those people. Like, What do I do now? It wasn’t even about the next job. It was Where do I get this feeling again? How am I going to reach in and get that feeling? That drug, that Omar drug, that shit was powerful, and I didn’t have any legs to stand on. I didn’t know who I was because I had stopped doing work on myself.

The reader does see how much progress Mike made in his life in loving himself and loving others. His self-love is an amazing counterpoint to this truth he articulates: “Every addict, every alcoholic has a self-loathing; we bathe ourselves in that.”

Having learned to love himself—even in a society that in many ways still does not love young black males well—Mike gave back to overlooked communities.

We have to get back to the idea of the village, figure out how to mend our struggling families in the community. Give them culture, respect, connection, the experience of dreaming and hoping. The permission to dream is so important. The permission to love yourself is so important. You don’t have to get scarred up in your face and go through endless rehabs and almost die and overdose to finally understand that you’re worth something.

Scenes from My Life is a heartbreaking and inspiring read. Rest in peace, Mike.

 

 

Thanks to Crown Publicity for the review copy, given with no expectation as to the content of my review.

Omar Comin’…. (for real, this time)

A long time ago I promised you:

Coming soon to this blog… some interaction with The Wire. Stay tuned.

I showed you the cover of this book:

 

The Wire

 

I’ve read a chunk of it, and more than half of this book, too:

 

Source: http://hub.jhu.edu/
Source: http://hub.jhu.edu/

 

(Find it at Amazon here.)

From the product page of publisher Johns Hopkins University Press:

Did Omar Little die of lead poisoning? Would a decriminalization strategy like the one in Hamsterdam end the War on Drugs? What will it take to save neglected kids like Wallace and Dukie? Tapping into ‘The Wire’ uses the acclaimed television series as a road map for exploring connections between inner-city poverty and drug-related violence. Past Baltimore City health commissioner Peter Beilenson teams up with former Baltimore Sun reporter Patrick A. McGuire to deliver a compelling, highly readable examination of urban policy and public health issues affecting cities across the nation. Each chapter recounts scenes from episodes of the HBO series, placing the characters’ challenges into the broader context of public policy.

So far the main thrust of the book is to (mostly convincingly) suggest that decriminalizing (or “medicalizing”) drug use can go a long way to advance public health. More specifically, there is a call to keep non-violent drug offenders out of jail and get them into treatment options. I’ll have more to say on the matter when I review the book–which really will happen this summer.

So, yes, patient readers, more on The Wire is coming to Words on the Word.

The Wire: Lester Freamon’s Dollhouse Miniatures Matter

[SPOILER ALERT: I talk about events from Season 5 of The Wire below.]

 

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In The Wire, Lester Freamon says, “All the pieces matter,” which is the best and most succinct summary line of the whole show.

Series 5 ends with McNulty looking over Baltimore (the whole) and then pans to a closing montage of all the players (the individual pieces) before going back to city skyline (the whole) again.

Appropriate as McNulty has basically been the city’s puppeteer in Season 5.

 

The Wire Season 5Anyone who’s seen the show all the way through gets that it’s about the pieces-and-whole dialectic, and about understanding the city as a complex, unified system, linked together by interconnected sub-systems.

What two characters best understand this? It seems McNulty (who is the character privileged enough to close the show with the long, longing look at the city) and Freamon (who loves seeing how pieces fit together–his bulletin board is evidence of this).

What just hit me, though, is that Freamon’s interest in tiny dollhouse pieces that then fit together into whole unified sets is a sort of microcosm of his interest in how networks and systems (like drug rings) have individual pieces that all fit together. Even in his hobby the writers portray him (intentionally?) as someone who has an interest in “all the pieces”–in this case, miniatures. He is a “systems guy,” through and through.

Lester Freamon DollhouseAnd, his working at a “pawn shop” could be an echo of or allusion to the “pawns” on the chessboard that D’Angelo uses to describe how the pieces each play their part in the game. Different meanings of “pawn,” but still could be related.

My conclusion? McNulty, though he’s a “gaping [jerk],” maybe sees the system better than anyone else. And Freamon, just as he does with dollhouse miniatures, is able to navigate it more deftly than anyone else.

In that sense, though they both end up very much outside the system (i.e., no longer police), the pro-systems thinking show casts them as its ultimate heroes.