Listen to my words and hear my signal of distress. I’m not just writing a statement. It’s an SOS. I’m running out of gas. I’ve almost nothing left. We’re losing ground thinking what we’re doing is our best. The movement at this juncture is failing this test.
If all we have is this cycle of our people taking action, then facing the brunt of state-sanctioned violence and hope for support during their time held hostage, it’s not enough. If we can muster money for lawyers to negotiate our surrender and get them rich, these agents of the state, this is no better. If paying the state millions for our people to survive inside and communicate with loved ones is our best, our imagination is stunted. We cannot limit ourselves to the confines of the box the state has given us. We cannot work with the ones causing the problem, No! We must do more, do better.
Reaching into hell and pulling those the state has damned from the depths. This is no easy task, tattered, torn, burnt, and charred, one might get, but to break chains of bondage and defy those who would call themselves authorities of us and hold demean over us, it is worth it. To tell the state, No! you cannot have that one. You may not hold freedom’s son, daughter, brother, father, mother, wife, sister, none. None you may keep. For those you steal away, freedom we’ll pursue, to the depths of hell.
And this is hell. Each day we burn, licked by the roaring flames of the state, entombed in this concrete belly of the beast. Every day is a feat to survive. Every action the state takes against us is violence. These $6 phone calls, that should be $3, but because GTL is allowed to rape our families’ pockets, taxing $3 just to double that, that’s violence. The hell we endure goes beyond monetary exploitation, and it doesn’t matter what state you’re in. Under Nikki Haley’s stewardship, South Carolina only gives two meals on the weekends, brunch and dinner. The current Trump-backed candidate says “pack them four to a room and feed them roadkill”. A very moderate stance when you consider these penal colony death camps and what we endure, a slow genocide. It matters none where you are. Some have the audacity to say the federal prison is better or this state is worse. No. Hell is hell. A plantation is a plantation. Because bondage and slavery is bondage and slavery. Whether your plantation is akin to Toni Morrison’s sweet home depiction, or the antebellum super planters, or the ones that forced us to build railroads and trains bites and bridles in our mouths with the tacit threat of lynching for fun, or being strung up head over a fire to boil our brains – plantations are plantations as a death camp differed from a work camp only in how prolonged your death may be, your end is the same.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a political prisoner, politicized prisoner, or a victim of state-sanctioned poverty and circumstances that forced you into acts of survival they criminalized to ensure your demise. It’s a death march, a slow genocide. The end is the same whether you were shuffled into the gas chambers or the ones picking the bodies clean as bid by your captors. Choctaw, Cherokee, Navajo, or Apache, the state, violence, genocide, and subsequent seclusion on reservations by way of colonization in hopes you’d wither and die and disappear into the collective memory black hole of this fascist state is the same end. Prison, detention centers, reservations, work camps, death camps, plantations – all genocide. There’s no difference.
And if you recognize these as such and believe support is our best, then you do not overstand what we’re talking about. You listen, but don’t hear. You care, but don’t feel it. Being here to help isn’t the need, but recognizing this shit is killing you too, and fighting, is. Four people died in SCDC last week. One suicide, one heart attack, two other cancers. This menial food is poison. The conditions, hell. From here to Oregon, to Cali, Washington, New York, Illinois, these straights are dire, and we need action.
You will not be able to run down these walls without a tank, and noise demos aren’t explosive enough alone to open these cages. We can’t let this be the end for us. This cycle of action, criminalization, kidnapping, ransoming, negotiated surrender, and held hostage in the belly of the beast for decades in hopes for release. Abibifahodie means African liberation. Yohuru Sasa means freedom now. Not yesterday. Not in a decade. Sio. No. Sasa. Assata said “it’s our duty to fight and our duty to win””. Ushindi. Victory is the only outcome. But we won’t achieve Ushindi through the state’s allotted means. Only by burning and scorching our hands, digging deep into the pits of the earth, risking life, and limb can we pull out those the state tries to claim. Imagine the actions if our people knew that should they be caught and captured, this is not the end. Imagine if they knew they could evade capture and continue their action because the people got them.
The Underground Railroad smuggled people out of hell to what they thought was freedom, but only a different place than hell. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, but reverse. The Haitians had no illusion of a free north, their only recourse was liberation or death by any means. And that’s our state of being. Liberation or death. Not just for us in these pits licked by flames, but for you in the frying pan, who can be cast into the fire for anything, given the proclivities of the state. There is no free North, no freedom here in America, no innocence either. Everyone is a part of the problem, and everyone can be a solution too.
The map was plotted by our ancestors before. We know what to do. These are plantations, and those who liberated us from plantations in the past were criminalized and demonized. We shouldn’t shirk that, because either you’re an activist or a criminal. Doing the hard things, the things that need done will elicit labels and brandings. The state will call you everything They are. Terrorists, violent, rioter, criminal, but nothing that you truly are. Revolutionary, radical, liberator, or the people. This is because history can only be understood backwards. What is a criminal act today will be resistance in time. What is terrorism today will be liberatory in time. An act of treason today will be revolution in time.
Hear my words. Feel my meaning in pain. This is an SOS. I’ll call to do more. Do better in your best. Do the hard things. Think outside the confines of what caused the problem. Do better than our best. I want to be free. I want to see us all free. I don’t want to write letters and support for decades those I love who, out of love, risked it all. I want to reach into hell and raise those souls out of bondages and flames and never let the state lay claim to another one of us.
Love, rage, and solidarity, siblings.
Malik Muhammad (https://malikspeaks.noblogs.org)
