📕 Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography
CULTURE
i must confess that waltzes
do not move me.
i have no sympathy
for symphonies.i guess i hummed the Blues
too early,
and spent too many midnights
out wailing to the rain.
i read this book a long time ago, or at least, i thought i did, because the text file i read in my late teens terminated at chapter eleven, right after Assata and Ronald Myers are acquitted.
And in reading the book completely this time, i found i'd been robbed all those years ago, of what appears (to me) to be the meat of the narrative: Assata Shakur's account of her coming in to consciousness of the world, contemplating it, and learning how to change it. i found her honesty refreshing, for many so-called revolutionaries tell tall tales of being shot out of their mother's wombs fully conscious, clutching an annotated copy of Das Kapital (in the original German, of course), which they studied meticulously over the course of their gestation, and having entered the world, they are ready to 'smash capitalism' etc.
Assata, on the other hand, is clear in expressing that she grew up with a sense of deep unease, but without knowing the coordinates of its origin. Certainly, she is aware of racism, but merely reflexively, as a consequence of experience, experience that awaited deeper contemplation. Only in her conversations with students from Africa does she come to learn of the complex structures of oppression she endures everyday. And on learning this, Assata digs deeper, studies, reflects, and demonstrates to the reader that what is not known can be learned. i think the clarity with which she lays out her initial ignorance and it amelioration is what makes Assata a revolutionary: she tells no lies, she exposes lies wherever they are told, she masks no difficulties, mistakes, failures, she claims no easy victories.
As an aside, there's a brief passage where Assata chides Huey P. Newton for delivering impenetrable speeches about the negation of negation at the Black Panther party office, and this is clearly intended as a criticism, however, no single sentence has ever endeared a historical figure to me as that one did. Huey Newton sounds quite wonderful, i will be tracking down these overly philosophical speeches as i continue exploring the history of Black Liberation in the United States.
i read this in memory of Assata Shakur, only to find i hadn't know her in the completeness she'd presented herself in for many years, and yet i'd admired and respected her. Now that i know her just a sliver better, i think i love her more, and i mourn her passing. At least we still have her prose and poetry to remember her by, she will live on, one way or another.