Text/Book, the Toronto Standard‘s books column, is written by Emily M. Keeler and Chris Randle, plus occasional guests. This month’s is Tamara Faith Berger.
Revolutionaries live how they think. Often, they even look how they think. I admire this transparency, this violence of self-construction, because it seems to be the opposite of submission and subterfuge. So I’ve been reading books like Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, Vera Figner’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist and Ulrike Meinhof’s Everybody Talks About the Weather… We Don’t. In her 1987 autobiography Assata (Zed Books), Assata Shakur broadens this picture of the revolutionary by recounting the Black liberation movement’s struggles in America during the years of FBI disinformation campaigns. Shakur analyzes amerika (always de-capitalized and laden with the totalitarian k) through the lens of slavery. “If you ask me,” she writes, “a lot of us still act like we’re back on the plantation with massa pulling the strings.” In 1970 she joins the nationalist-Marxist Black Liberation Army (BLA), and by 1973 she declares war on “all forces that have raped our women, castrated our men and kept our babies empty-bellied.” Black revolutionaries, says Shakur, do not drop from the moon.
Assata instantly stunned me and kept me. The book opens with Shakur shot in the clavicle, paralyzed in one arm and chained to a New Jersey hospital bed. Detailing her endless sham trials, Shakur writes in vivid flashbacks that describe her extreme curiosity alongside her reckoning with self-hatred. By thirteen years of age, Shakur relays her precocious assessment: “It was almost impossible to go from one corner to the next without some white man hissing at you, following you, or jingling the money in his pockets.”
Shakur’s accounts of her humiliations as a young person are some of the most affecting I have ever read. After running away from home at thirteen, she ends up penniless in the East Village. A transvestite named Miss Shirley helps her get a job as a barmaid because she’s a “fox.” When Shakur tires of pretending to be an adult, she sneaks back to her neighborhood to hang out with her old friends. On one of these visits she meets a boy who invites her to a party at his place. This party, however, is full of boys. “Where are the girls?” she asks, though immediately, she knows: the boys are going to “pull a train.” Shakur struggles against the gang, but they call her a bitch and tell her to shut up. “I couldn’t believe they could be so heartless,” she writes. “It was a nightmare. They were arguing [about who was going to go first] and carrying on as if i wasn’t even human.”
An ashtray is knocked over. The boy says his mother will kill him if the house gets messed up. Shakur picks up a vase and throws it at the wall. Then, she picks up a lamp and threatens to throw it into the mirror. “My mother’s gonna have a fit!” the boy screams. Shakur demands that the boys get an adult to help her. They call her a crazy bitch but let her go. “We have all been infected with a sickness,” she writes about the attempted rape, “that can be traced back to the auction block.”
When I read Shakur’s stories of her Black nationalist becoming, I too am convinced that white supremacy persists, whether in a dream-like sense (white human selling-raping black human on a block) or a completely lucid and quotidian one (Trayvon Martin). Slavery is an infection of our DNA. The so-called post-racial world created by electing a Black president is a lie. One of the most wrenching anecdotes in Assata brings this original sickness festering inside us to the surface.
Shakur is about eleven years old, sparring and flirting with a classmate named Joe. When Joe asks if she would “go” with him, she feels uncontrollably repulsed. “Did he really think I would go with him and ruin my reputation forever?” When Joe asks again, Shakur stammers until she says: “You’re too black and ugly.”
Although she is instantly sorry for her words, Shakur knows at that moment the depravity she’s internalized. She quite literally forces herself to change her mind, to never again think the words “black” and “ugly” together. “Of course, I couldn’t undo all the years of self-hatred and brainwashing,” Shakur writes. “But it was a beginning.”
Shakur’s psychosexual experience of racism throughout Assata is expressed in phonetic disgust, culminating as freethinking revolt. When Shakur hears the news of Martin Luther King’s murder, she hallucinates slicing open the sheets of KKK men amidst rioting in the streets. “You wanna be a ghost? You wanna look like a ghost?” she chants to herself. “I’ll make you a ghost.” Shakur desperately continues: “The store windows are filled with shit. You can’t exchange Martin Luther King for shit in the store window. Smashing windows will do me no good. I am beyond that. I want blood. The tanks are waiting to crush the resistance, squelch the disturbance. i think i have my period. Sweat is rolling down my legs… The television is wet with crocodile tears… I’m tired of bulletins. I want bullets.”
I wish that all of our speech could be as concentrated and as urgent as this. Shakur wants to carve up the colonized brain into pieces — to pickle.
After six years of community and revolutionary activism with the BLA, Shakur realizes that her phone is bugged. She can’t leave the house without two FBI agents on her ass. The papers accuse her of armed robbery. It is 1976 and Shakur, now a powerful, vocal African-American revolutionary, must go underground. One morning, in transit evading the pigs, Shakur decides to dress up as a “poor Black woman.” She wears a lord-have-mercy-looking wig, thick nylons and hand-me-down clothes. She ends up on the subway, spooked to discover all the poor Black women going to work. Everyone is wearing the same wig. Shakur is devastated: “A whole generation of Black women hiding out under dead white people’s hair.”
This is the bleak image the book leaves me with. Even though Shakur continues to struggle, her disgust and devastation are what remain. The revolutionary who has come into her power all at once embodies and rejects the act of subterfuge.
“Such horrible things have been done to us,” Shakur concludes. “It is really too much to comprehend.” And this is the power of Assata: to identify the incomprehensible and fight without murdering it mercilessly.
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Tamara Faith Berger lives in Toronto. Her recent book is Maidenhead (Coach House Books). You can find her on Twitter at @TamaraFaithBerg.
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