I
don’t know why, given where we are with dronefare, but I didn’t expect
the man making the announcement about Assata Shakur being the first
woman “terrorist” to appear on the FBI’s most wanted list to be black.
That was a blow. I was reminded of the world of “trackers” we sometimes
get glimpses of in history books and old movies on TV. In Australia the
tracker who hunts down other aboriginals who have, because of the rape
and murder, genocide and enslavement of the indigenous (aboriginal)
people, run away into the outback. He shows up again in cowboy and
Indian films: jogging along in the hot sun, way ahead of the white men
on horseback, bending on his knees to get a better look at a bruised
leaf or a bent twig, while they curse and spit and complain about how
long he’s taking to come up with a clue. And then there were the
“trackers” who helped the pattyrollers during our four hundred years of
enslavement. When pattyrollers (or patrols) caught run-away slaves in
those days they frequently beat them to death. I’ve often thought of the
black men whose expertise at tracking fugitives helped bring these
terrors, humiliations and deaths about. When I was younger I would have
been in a rage against them; not understanding the reality of invisible
coercion, and mind and spirit control, that I do now. Today, only a few
years older than Assata Shakur, and marveling at the unenviable state of
humanity’s character worldwide, I find I can only pray for all of us.
That we should be sinking even below the abysmal standard early
“trackers” have set for us: that the US government can now offer two
million dollars for the capture of a very small, not young, black woman
who was brutally abused, even shot, over three decades ago, as if we
don’t need that money to buy people food, clothes, medicine, and decent
places to live.
What
is most distressing about the times we live in, in my view, is our ever
accelerating tolerance for cruelty. Prisoners held indefinitely in
orange suits, hooded, chained and on their knees. Like the hunger
strikers of Guantanamo, I would certainly prefer death to this. People
shot and bombed from planes they never see until it is too late to get
up from the table or place the baby under the bed. Poor people
terrorized daily, driven insane really, from fear. People on the streets
with no food and no place to sleep. People under bridges everywhere you
go, holding out their desperate signs: a recent one held by a very
young man, perhaps a veteran, under my local bridge: I Want To Live.
But nothing seems as cruel to me as this: that our big, muscular, macho
country would go after so tiny a woman as Assata who is given sanctuary
in a country smaller than many of our states.
The
first time I met Assata Shakur we talked for a long time. We were in
Havana, where I had gone with a delegation to offer humanitarian aid
during Cuba’s “special period” of hunger and despair, and I’d wanted to
hear her side of the story from her. She described the incident with the
New Jersey Highway Patrol, and assured me she was shot up so badly that
even if she’d wanted to, she would not have been able to fire a gun.
Though shot in the back (with her arms raised), she managed to live
through two years of solitary confinement, in a men’s prison, chained to
her bed. Then, in what must surely have been a miraculous coming
together of people of courageous compassion, she was helped to escape
and to find refuge in Cuba. One of the people who helped Assata escape, a
white radical named Marilyn Buck, was kept in prison for thirty years
and released only one month before her death from uterine cancer. She
was a poet, and I have been reading her book, Inside/Out, Selected
Poems, which a friend gave me just last week. There is also a remarkable
video of her, shot in prison, that I highly recommend.
This is what solidarity can look like.
The
second time I saw Assata, years later, I was in Havana for the Havana
Book Fair. Cuba has a very high literacy rate, thanks to the Cuban
revolution, and my novel, Meridian, had recently been translated and
published there. However, this time we did not talk about the past. We
talked about meditation. Seeing her interest, and that of Ricardo
Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly, and others, I decided
to offer a class. There under a large tree off a quiet street in
Havana, I demonstrated my own practice of meditation to some of the most
attentive students I have ever encountered. The mantra: Breathing in:
“In,” breathing out: “Peace.”
I
believe Assata Shakur to be a good and decent, a kind and compassionate
person. True revolutionaries often are. Physically she is beautiful, and
her spirit is also. She appears to hold the respect, love and
friendship of all the people who surround her. Like Marilyn Buck they
have risked much for her freedom, and appear to believe her version of
the story as I do.
That she did not wish to live as an imprisoned creature and a slave is understood.
What to do? Since we are not, in fact, helpless. Nor are we ever alone.
I call on the Ancestors
by whose blood
and DNA
we exist
to accompany us
as always
through this lengthening
sorrow.
And to bear witness
within us
to all that we are
aware.
by whose blood
and DNA
we exist
to accompany us
as always
through this lengthening
sorrow.
And to bear witness
within us
to all that we are
aware.
