Two Books on the Black Revolution
Safiya Bukhari's The War Before & James Yaki Sayles' Meditations on Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth
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Montreal - The Certain Days Calendar Committee and Kersplebedeb Publishing are holding a Black Revolution Double Book Launch on March 19th 2010, starting at 6pm. The book launch will be co-sponsored andhosted by the Concordia Co-op Bookstore - 2150 Bishop Street, Guy-Concordia Metro. The books being launched are Safiya Buhkari’s The War Before, and James Yaki Sayles' Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Following readings from each book, there will be a discussion of local efforts around U.S. political prisoners and prisoners of war. Erica Meiners, Associate Professor of Education and Women's Studies at Northeastern Illinois University and a longterm anti-prison activist, will speak on the ongoing ravages of the prison-industrial complex, and its relevance in Canada. Light refreshments from the People's Potato will be served.
- Two books about the Black Revolution -
The decades after the Second World War witnessed successful revolutions against colonial rule around the world. Struggles against national oppression took place on every continent – including within the borders of the United States, in what Che Guevara described as “belly of the beast.” Millions of people worked in a variety of ways against the ongoing destruction of their communities and societies by a racist and colonialist white power structure.
It was within this context that the Black Freedom Struggle engaged in its definitive 20th century confrontation with racialized capitalism in the U.S.A. Hidden from popular histories of the Sixties and the Civil Rights movement, the reality on the ground was that there was a war. Hundreds upon hundreds were killed, tens of thousands spent time in prison – and some still languish behind those bars. More than that, communities were destroyed, entire cities emptied, as white America and its government set about murdering the Black Liberation Movement.
Safiya Bukhari and James Yaki Sayles were two revolutionaries who participated in those fateful clashes, who found their calling in the struggle, and who would devote the rest of their lives to the liberation of their people – and of all people. After decades of struggle, Safiya Bukhari died in 2003 at the age of 53. James Yaki Sayles spent almost his entire adult life in prison; he had just been released a few years earlier when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in 2008 at the age of 59.
In February, two posthumous volumes were published, making the words of these fallen freedom fighters available for the first time to a wide audience. Published by The Feminist Press at CUNY The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther Keeping the Faith in Prison, Fighting for Those Left Behind, traces Bukhari’s lifelong commitment as an advocate for the rights of the oppressed. Following her journey from middle-class student to Black Panther to political prisoner, these writings provide an intimate view of a woman wrestling with the issues of her time—the troubled legacy of the Panthers, misogyny in the movement, her decision to convert to Islam, the incarceration of out spoken radicals, and the families left behind. Her account unfolds with immediacy and passion, showing how the struggles of social justice movements have paved the way for the progress of today.
Co-published by Spear and Shield Publications and Kersplebedeb Publishing, Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings by James Yaki Sayles is not a legal case history or a personal memoir, but a series of historical writings spanning a thirty year period, and culminating in Sayles' unfinished examination of Fanon's work, and its relevance to revolutionaries confronting post-neocolonialism today.
At a time when we are instructed to keep our eye on the man in the White House and others who have “made it” and been integrated into the “American Dream,” Bukhari and Sayles’ words speak for and to those for whom the world’s only superpower remains an “American Nightmare.” In an age where there are more Black men in U.S. prisons than in U.S. colleges, where years after Katrina New Orleans has been rebuilt as a tourist attraction for the middle classes, and the U.S. continues to wage war on peoples around the world, these are two volumes to detox your mind, to help you keep your eye on the prize.
- BIOS -
James Yaki Sayles spent almost his entire adult life in prison. In the 1970s he was a leading figure in the New Afrikan Prisoners Organization, he would serve as Minister of Information for the Republic of New Afrika, and also worked in other, less public, groups. He was also an important theoretician of the continuing need for New Afrikan Revolution and the realities of New Afrikan Nationhood, writing under a variety on names, including Owusu Yaki Yakubu and Atiba Shanna. He died of lung cancer in 2008.
Safiya Bukhari joined the Black Panther Party in 1969. Imprisoned for nine years, for charges related to the Black Liberation Army, Bukhari was released in 1983 and went on to co-found the New York Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition and other organizations advocating for the release of political prisoners. She died in 2003 at the age of 53 years of age.
For more information about The War Before, please visit http://safiyabukhari.com.
For more information about Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, please visit http://www.kersplebedeb.com/meditations
For more information about the Certain Days Calendar Committee, please visit http://www.certaindays.org/
For more information about the Concordia Co-op Bookstore, please visit http://www.co-opbookstore.ca/
When: Friday, March 19th 2010; 6pm
Where: Concordia Co-op Bookstore, 2150 Bishop St. • metro Guy-Concordia
Tel-: 514-848-7445
For more information regarding the event, please email info@kersplebedeb.com
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Volume 61, Number 9
We place these articles at no charge on our website to serve all the people who cannot afford Monthly Review, or who cannot get access to it where they live. Many of our most devoted readers are outside of the United States. If you read our articles online and you can afford a subscription to our print edition, we would very much appreciate it if you would consider purchasing one. Please click here to subscribe. Thank you very much. —The Editors
February 2010
An Untold Chapter in Black History
Safiya Bukhari
Safiya Bukhari, who died in 2003 at age 53, was a leader in the black liberation movement from 1969, when she joined the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party. She later co-founded the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, the Jericho Movement, and other organizations advocating for the release of U.S. political prisoners. The War Before is available from The Feminist Press (feministpress.org).
ESSAYS ON:
February is “Black History Month” and, coincidentally or not, the shortest month of the year. Every February, we admire the approved panorama of admittedly phenomenal African-American leaders, martyrs, and icons—yet the stories of the vast majority of black people in this country, living and dead, remain untold. This is especially true of the lives of militant black leftists, the people who came to realize—because they had no other choice—that the founding principle of this country, “liberty and justice for all,” was a lie, premised on centuries of slavery, capitalism, and the supremacy of white “culture” over their lives. And once they saw this lie for what it was, they dedicated their lives to calling it out and opposing it.
One such person was Safiya Bukhari, a pre-med student with a middle-class background, who, in 1969, decided to join the Black Panther Party. She later joined the Black Liberation Army and spent nearly nine years in prison. The remainder of her life, after her release in 1985, was dedicated to other political prisoners, mostly black and mostly forgotten, many incarcerated since the years following the demise of the Party. Safiya wasn’t primarily a writer; she was an organizer who consistently examined and occasionally wrote about her work. In this 1991 essay, excerpted fromThe War Before—a collection of her writings, which I edited and is published by the Feminist Press (2010) with a foreword by Angela Davis, afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal, and preface by Safiya’s daughter Wonda Jones—Safiya examines another little-known aspect of black history: the psychological damage inflicted on black militant activists by the U.S. government and its counterintelligence programs.
—Laura Whitehorn
I was nineteen when I joined the Black Panther Party and was introduced to the realities of life in inner-city Black America.
From the security of the college campus and the cocoon of the great American Dream Machine, I was suddenly stripped of my rose-colored glasses by a foray into Harlem and indecent housing, police brutality, hungry children needing to be fed, elderly people eating out of garbage cans, and hopelessness and despair everywhere. If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I would never have believed that this was America. It looked and sounded like one of those undeveloped Third World countries.
Between 1966 and 1975, eager to be part of the fight for the freedom and liberation of black people in America from their oppressive conditions, thousands of young black men and women from all walks of life and backgrounds joined the ranks of the Black Panther Party. They were met with all the counterforce and might of the United States war machine.
Not unlike the young men who went off to fight in the Vietnam War, believing they were going to save the Vietnamese from the ravages of “communism,” the brothers and sisters who joined the ranks of the Black Panther Party, with all the romanticism of youth, believed that the rightness and justness of their cause guaranteed victory. We were learning the contradiction between what America said and what it did. We were shown examples of the government’s duplicity, and we became victims of its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), an all out, multiphasic war designed to stifle dissent in America in general, and in the black community in particular.
We came into the struggle believing that we would prevail. Because our struggle was right and just, we said, “We shall win without a doubt!” All we had to do was present an organized and disciplined united front and be determined to gain our freedom by any means necessary, and our victory would be assured.
We theorized about what we were up against. We marched, sang, and rhetoricized about the implications of being “in the belly of the beast.” We dissociated ourselves from anything or anyone that had been close to us and regurgitated the bravado about the struggle being primary—that, in order to win, we must be willing to sacrifice mother, father, sister, or brother. We embraced all of this in much the same manner that the drill sergeant in the Marine Corps psyched up the recruits to fight in Vietnam.
Veterans of the War in Vietnam
In 1967 my brother came home from Vietnam. He looked good. There were no scars or missing limbs. We were ecstatic. His bedroom was next to mine on the second floor of our duplex apartment in the Bronx. In the middle of the night I heard agonized screams coming from his room. Not knowing any better, I went to him and touched him to soothe him. He instantly went on the attack. He grabbed me with one hand, his other like a claw. I don’t know what saved me; whether it was my screaming his name or throwing myself on him, but he came to himself before he harmed me.
That night, he told me about watching his entire platoon get wiped out; about gouging eyes out with his bare hands; about not knowing who the enemy was, and what direction they would come from the next time; and about some of the other nightmares of Vietnam. After that, we never talked about it again.
Before going to Vietnam, my brother had wanted to become a doctor. After returning from Vietnam, he could not stand the sight of blood. He drank straight gin continuously, like ice water, without getting drunk.
My brother made the horror of Vietnam real to me in 1967. I wasn’t to experience anything remotely close to that again until I joined the Black Panther Party and came to realize that you didn’t have to travel around the world to experience the ravages of war. The physical conditions of the Vietnam War were not present here. But, for those of us who had been raised to believe that America was the land of the free and the home of the brave, and who were now involved in a struggle for liberation and human rights for black people, the psychological conditions were just as intense.
We, Too, Are Veterans
We joined the Black Panther Party (and therefore the black liberation struggle) with a lot of hope and faith. We believed that the struggle would end for us only with our death or the freedom of all oppressed people. With the destruction of the Black Panther Party our freedom was still not assured, and we were left with no sense of direction or purpose—no one to tell us what to do next—and the knowledge that the job was not done. We hadn’t just mouthed the words “revolution in our lifetime”; we had believed them. We sincerely believed that the Black Panther Party would lead us to victory.
We had experienced the death and/or imprisonment of countless brothers and sisters who had struggled right beside us, slept in the beds with us, eaten at the same table with us. (As I write this, the picture of Twymon Myers’s bullet-riddled body flashes before my eyes. Shot [by New York City police] so many times that his legs were almost shot off. Then the desecration of his funeral when the FBI jumped from behind tombstones and out of trees at the cemetery, with sawed off shotguns and machine guns pointed toward the mourners. “This is your FBI! Get out of the cars with your hands in the air and line up in a single file with enough distance between each of you so we can see you clearly.”) Pictures pop in and out of our minds with no prompting.
Then there were the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, Sandra Pratt and Little Bobby Hutton, not to mention Fred Bennett,* the countless shootouts, the infiltrations and setups that left you leery of strangers or of anyone getting too close or acting too friendly. This left you constantly on guard and under the pressure of not knowing who your friends were and from which direction the next threat was coming.
Still, I think I’m one of the lucky ones. In 1983, after serving eight years and eight months of a forty-year sentence, I was released on parole. While in prison I maintained my commitment to the struggle for the liberation of black and oppressed people. What kept me going was knowing that the reason they were killing and locking up Panthers was to break them and therefore to break the back of the struggle. I was determined that I would survive and, one way or the other, live to fight another day. We languished in the prisons and watched the growing lack of activity on the streets and promised ourselves that things would be different when we came home.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as “an anxiety disorder caused by the exposure to a psychologically distressing event that is outside the range of usual human experiences.” Such events might include watching a friend die violently or unexpectedly; experiencing serious threats to home or family; or living under constant or prolonged fear or threat.
As I looked over the list of PTSD symptoms, I recognized myself. And it wasn’t just me. More and more, there seemed to be some kind of pattern developing in the behavior of my other comrades who had survived the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army.
Our intense belief in the rightness and justness of our cause, and that things would be different when we returned to the streets; our awareness that we are still alive while our people’s conditions have grown worse despite all our sacrifices—all this produces a traumatic shock to our system. This is the ultimate shock. We survived while others died. Despite all their intents and purposes, their deaths were in vain. The struggle hasn’t been won. I contend that these elements have caused us to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. We, too, are veterans.
* All of these members of the Black Panther Party were killed by police or in inter-organizational battles provoked by COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program. See, for example, The Assassination of Fred Hampton by Jeffrey Haas (Lawrence Hill Books).All material © copyright 1949–2010 Monthly Review
Meditations on Frantz Fanon's
Wretched of the Earth:
New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings
by James Yaki Sayles
“This exercise is about more than our desire to read and understand Wretched (as if it were about some abstract world, and not our own); it’s about more than our need to understand (the failures of) the anti-colonial struggles on the African continent. This exercise is also about us, and about some of the things that We need to understand and to change in ourselves and our world.”
Like the revs that he most considered his teachers—Malcolm X and George Jackson—James Yaki Sayles grew up poor and found his maturity in prison, the place that Malcolm called “the Black man’s university.” A child of Chicago’s South Side streets, Yaki always just thought of himself as a blood, “just another nigger doing a bit” (to borrow the laconic words of one of the Pontiac state prison revolt defendants). And it was in the prison movement that he found his place in the battlefield. Although he made revolutionary theory his work, his life was rooted in a time of urban guerrillas and the armed struggle. Which makes his writing much more difficult to read, but with a warning of danger and commitment that is so often missing in these neo-colonized times between the storms...
Yaki soon became a leading activist in the small prison collectives in his state. First in the Stateville Prisoners Organization, which quickly grew into the New Afrikan Prisoners Organization. There were groups in Stateville, Pontiac, and Menard prisons, as well as individual members in other prisons outside Illinois and rads on the street. Yaki also became an influence in less public organizations.
One thing he never became was well-known. There were definite reasons for this. In part, because Yaki was a very private person who rarely talked about his inner life or childhood, and who never wanted to write about his own past to a curious public. Becoming a radical celebrity was not anywhere in his plans.
Yaki was also unknown because of the role he chose for himself. Much of his writings were not for the public, or even the community as a whole. Most of them were cadre teachings. Typically, Yaki wrote and spoke as a teacher for those already New Afrikan revolutionaries who were cadre. Those who had accepted the responsibility of being organizers and local teachers themselves. Although he was often repeating or underscoring basic political lessons, sometimes these were almost technical discussions. Craft discussions. In the same way that young Five-percenters proudly talk about, “i can do the math,” “i know the numbers.” And as such his words weren’t meant to be entertaining, and rads often complained of finding them as hard to read as some textbook. Far from easy reading. But it’s like, if you wanted to be able to design the flow of water through a hydoelectric plant or do brain surgery on an infant, at the very start you’d be cracking the books late into the night and studying for all you were worth. Yaki didn’t think that trying to transform society was any easier...
When Yaki started out in prison, he had amassed a real library of political and history books, together with magazines and files of documents and correspondence. And he spent hours and hours studying and writing. This gradually became more and more choked off by prison authorities. As he put it: “Inside it only grows worse, not better. Because they keep changing wardens, and every warden has to prove that they’ve made some change or new shit they can point to. Which is only more restrictions.”
By the start of the 21st century, he was limited to one thin cardboard case, only a few inches high, which had to hold any books, magazines, newspapers, notebooks, files, letters, blank paper, pencil and pens he had in his cell. And he had to work mandatory eight-hour shifts every day at the usual makework prison jobs (such as counting out and counting in the checkers pieces in the day room), which cut down on his intellectual hours. All this led him to decide to center himself on one major project which only required two books, a reappraisal and explanation of Frantz Fanon’s great revolutionary writing, Wretched of the Earth...
Here, Yaki is on a mission. To make up for the misunderstanding of Fanon’s politics that he and so many of his young rebel comrades once had. To help guide the study by newer rebels of this complex and difficult reading.
“i got out of Folsom & one of the first things i got was a kalishnikov ak-47, 7.62x39 … Needless to say, without the requisite consciousness, the gun & i soon parted company. The gun fell into the hands of invading pigs & i fell in the same hands. Was sent back to a cell … That’s when i got at the ’rad Atiba Shanna [aka James Yaki Sayles] & told him i’d been captured and why. He said, ‘i’d rather have one cadre free than 100 ak-47’s.’ It took me years to overstand & appreciate that one sentence. For this comrad has done more to de-criminalize and de-colonize my mind than any one person, book or event in my life.”
Monster: Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member
“Here is an authentic voice of the Black Revolution from the times of violent ghetto uprisings, re-learning the lessons of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Uncut, undiluted.”
Product Details
paperback
399 pages
published by Kersplebedeb and Spear & Shield Publications in 2010
ISBN 978-1-894946-32-2