Ahead of Akintola Hanif’s “The Other Side of Fear Is Freedom” at HYCIDE XPANSE on Oct. 9, a look at the space between Nina Simone’s feeling and James Baldwin’s accounting of what it costs to reach it.
For a long stretch of my life, I looked outside myself for answers that were already inside of me. I knew what I wanted to do. I let other people’s ideas, judgments and opinions determine how I moved, and it cost me time, energy and more tears than I care to count.
It took me years to understand what I was paying for. Freedom costs your fear, and there are no discounts.
In an interview conducted by Peter Rodis in 1968, Nina Simone was asked what freedom meant to her. She answered quickly. “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me — no fear. I mean, really, no fear.” She compared it to love, difficult to explain but you know it when you’ve felt it. Her answer contains the math. Freedom and fear can’t sit in the same place, so one of them has to go.
James Baldwin laid out what the deal requires. Speaking at San Francisco State College in 1960, he told the audience nobody gives freedom to anybody. “Freedom is something people take,” he said, adding that people are as free as they want to be.
Four years earlier, he had written about what the taking requires. In Partisan Review, Baldwin argued that real change breaks apart the world a person has always known, including the things that gave that person an identity. It means “the end of safety.” A person is set free, he wrote, only after surrendering a long-held dream or privilege without bitterness or self-pity.
Simone described what freedom feels like once you have it. Baldwin described what you hand over to get it. Most of us spend our lives somewhere between those two accounts, trying to pay in something other than fear. We offer money, titles, good behavior and other people’s approval. The counter keeps sliding them back. In this economy, you give up your fear and the false safety it promised, and you get your freedom.
The exchange is fair because it’s simple: trading comfort and the false safety it promised for your freedom. You can’t keep both. People who try end up stuck, holding a fear they call caution and a freedom they only talk about. I know because I was one of them.
The trade is painful. There is no way to know you’ve confronted your fear if you’ve avoided the discomfort that comes with it.
Confronting my fear gave me permission to act in my freedom, and to simply be. My fear held my audacity captive, telling me to wait and to check with somebody first. Once I handed the fear over, the authority came back to me.
This year, I’ve made the trade. I decided to trust myself at all costs, and I’m moving with faith, with the vision the Most High placed in my mind’s eye. Most days it’s uncomfortable. I’ve learned to read that as a sign the exchange is real.
“I think of myself as a fly on the wall or a mirror. I see beauty, I see resilience, I see regality, I see strength, character, morals, and style,’’ – Akintola Hanif
Brooklyn-born photographer and curator Akintola Hanif has spent nearly two decades building spaces where photography, storytelling, healing and community intersect. HYCIDE XPANSE is the latest expression of that work, but its origins are deeply personal. Hanif founded the immersive arts space after suffering a stroke, a period that forced him to rebuild not only his health but his approach to creativity and community.
XPANSE is more than a traditional art gallery. Dedicated to photography, media, mentorship and wellness, the space operates as what Hanif calls “a curated third space for critical thinking and aligned minds.” It is a place where artistic practice meets mindfulness, and where personal healing becomes part of community building.
If freedom requires us to confront what has kept us afraid, we must be willing to heal.
On Oct. 9, Hanif brings that conversation to HYCIDE XPANSE with “The Other Side of Fear Is Freedom,” an evening centered on the question of what becomes possible when fear no longer gets the final word.
The event runs from 6 to 9 p.m. at XPANSE on Halsey Street. Hanif is both the artist and curator. RSVP here and follow @hycide_xpanse on Instagram for updates.
Sources
- NPR: “What Happened, Miss Simone?” transcript: the quote’s wording.
- NPR: My American Dream Sounds Like Nina Simone: this one dates the interview to 1969, which is the source of the date conflict.
- James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (1961) ‘Notes for a Hypothetical Novel’