Mustafa Ahmed, an internationally recognized Toronto poet and musician, poured his grief into words after his older brother was shot dead downtown earlier this week.
“They killed my brother in the very community I gave my life to, here’s my faith on a platter,” Ahmed, also known as Mustafa the Poet, wrote on Instagram Thursday. “I hate this city.”
His 36-year-old brother, Mohamed Ahmed, died after he was shot inside a car near Sherbourne and Shuter streets around noon on Tuesday.
“Tomorrow I bury my only older brother on the day I was born,” Ahmed wrote, “Even in my dreams you were always leaving.”
His poems, which he began penning by the age of 12, detail Ahmed's childhood spent surrounded by poverty and violence in a Regent Park housing project.
Ahmed is no stranger to the grief that comes with violence. His friend and community organizer Yusuf Ali was shot dead in 2014. Four years later, another friend, Smoke Dawg, was fatally shot in front of a nightclub on Queen Street West.
His debut album “When Smoke Rises” and documentary “Remember Me, Toronto” confront gun violence and the resulting pain he endured when his friends were murdered.
In his recent post, Ahmed’s heart-wrenching words are accompanied by photos of his brother – one featuring the two smiling in front of a birthday cake topped with two candles – paired with the line, “The ground is missing. I have lost the way.”
The poet recounts their childhood together beginning with memories at 6 years old. “When you showed me your wounds in our stairwell, you traced them with your finger, I found a hero in your enduring,” he writes while chronicling his feelings of failure, “I spent so much of my life trying to keep you alive and I failed, I failed, I failed, I failed.”
“I’ve grieved, I’ve grieved, but no war could prepare me for your leaving, will I die having withered from all the pitying? This isn’t a life, what I’m in-more longing to live.”
