Black in a white world
Assata - an autobiography Assata Shakur, Zed Press, £7.95 Reviewed by CERYSE FEAR 'IN 1857 the US supreme court three-fifths of a man and had no rights that Whites were bound to respect. Today, more than one hundred and twenty five years three-fifths of what white people ear'. These sentences - on page 243 - are really the crux of Assata: the story of Assata Shakur's upbringing in the USA, her 'throwing off" of the whiteness and white culture with together with other black revolutionaries from the Black Panther Party, against the awesome, evil power of the drop from the moon,' she writes. 'We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression. We are being ghetto streets... they are turning out thousands of us .. Brothers and sisters from all walks of life ... who are tired of suffering passively are joining our ranks.' Experience teaches you about
The beauty of this book is that it does not spit and snarl live. What young people's affairs are like. What the first generation of Soviet, as opposed to Russian, youth discussed. How political intrigues - from the lowest to the highest level of the party -developed, and, in Sasha's case, how they can get mixed up together. He also examines the effects of stalinism on individual bureaucrats, high and low, and of the self-censorship and self-delusion of their victims. Stalin himself is a central character, and the most convincing in the novel. Rybakov traces the private thoughts and theses of a man consciously building a regime, and his own position, on fear, and wraps his construction of Stalin's character around real historical events. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
R E V every other page. Assata just relates the story of her life in between recounting the barbarity of American justice. This is the story of a black woman living at
She writes painfully about what it feels like for a black child to be brought up in white, racist America. She describes the great what 'white' education really is -how they work hard to discredit and to wipe out our blackness from our souls. And, of course, completely brainwashed, and we didn't even know it; we accepted white value systems and we accepted the white man's view of trauma of what it is for black people, particularly women, to break out of a white culture in which we've been ensnared since long before the time of our conception, and to rebuild a personality, a life, a faith, a value system that is black - knowing full well that from the moment of so doing we will lock horns with everything and everybody in a remind myself that Black people in America are oppressed. It's necessary that / do that. People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal
Characters and stories fit more easily into fictional form than do hisory lessons or undigested marxist dialectics. That's not altogether a bad thing. You know it's a story. When it's good it can be interesting, compelling even. and if it's very good it can shed new light on an aspect of life you perhaps hadn't thought much about before, and can make you think twice.
Rybakov is well placed to consider the effect stalinism can have on people who live and work the system - their everyday dilemmas, their reactions, their relationships with people. He has done it well, too, using a strong story line (a mixture of historical saga with the more mundane concerns of the soap opera), to pull you along through the book.
E state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a Slave? problems of revolutionary organisation (or perhaps while preferring Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che or Fidel, ended up having to read Marx and Lenin to understand some of the speeches made by her comrades 'As far as I was concerned they were two dudes who had made contributions to revolutionary struggle too great to be ignored'.
There are sharp criticisms of the BPP: they had no systematic approach to political education (1 experienced acute feelings of deja-vu); criticism and strange titles (Huey Newton, the then leader of the Black Panthers, titled himself a Supreme Commander, and then changed it to Supreme Servant!) point is she makes a criticism, different approach. This is the point at which comrades developed a hearing impediment. attacks on the BPP from the US incessant raids on BPP premises by the police and the FBI - their calling card was usually a spray of bullets. Assata herself never had her phone disconnected for non- payment of bills, and soon she stopped receiving bills at all -He also poses some difficult questions for marxists: is there a logic, or dynamic of people and power which make bureaucratisation almost inevitable in any workers state ? What's to stop the local committee for the defence of the revolution or whatever, becoming little more than a KGB neighbourhood watch scheme?
As Rybakov pointed out, the psychological consequences of stalinism have to be elimimated from Soviet life. Presumably that's part of his aim in Children of the Arbat, and books like this can play their part.
It's a long book, and, in hardback, expensive. But wait till it's out in paperback - it's well worth a read.
courtesy of the FBI!
There were many times during my reading of this book when I unsconsciously fantasised that here in Britain we live in the last time I thought this, I consciously put the book down, and thought back (mostly a few months, and
She writes about her relationship with her lover and her agonising decision to bring yet another wretched black child into the world, while she was still pregnancy, the appalling health care for black prisoners and the ultimate pain of her four year-old daughter rejecting her - hitting her and screaming 'you are not read. The story of Assata's mis-trial and imprisonment on false charges will sicken. book was hope, despite Assata's closing declaration: "There was would one day be free. cowboys and bandits didn't own very simply - with love, with pride, with strength and courage, and with bitterness and pain, about being black in a white meaningful book I have ever read. Correction
We inadvertantly left out the name of the publisher of a book reviewed in our last issue The book was Tom Nairn's 'The Enchanted Glass' and the publisher is Radius. The hook costs £7.95. Socialist Outlook welcomes readers letters on
ny topic, preferably o
lot more than 400 word in length.
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