On resistance... Part 2

What inspires us to resist

Last week, we began our exploration of one of three central themes in Assata: resistance, radicalization, and revolution. Resistance, which appears front and center in Assata, speaks to its centrality and the role of shared texts in our efforts toward liberation. Within the larger narrative of resistance, Assata provides two examples of texts that offered crucial sustenance during some of the most painful and intense moments and inspired her to keep going, to resist. One of the texts she shared, Invictus by William Ernest Henry, speaks to the profoundly personal nature of resistance. While a second, If We Must Die by Claude McKay, speaks more universally to collective struggle.

Whether from the vantage point of the personal or the universal, texts serve as touchpoints, reminders that we are not alone in the larger sense of our humanity nor alone in the collective struggle for liberation. 

In the spirit of sharing, as Assata Shakur shared what inspired her, we are both sharing what inspires us and extending last week’s invitation to share what inspires you to resist.

When we share what inspires us, we create community in the tradition that speaks to the personal and communal nature of our walk toward liberation.

—

From connease:

Won’t You Celebrate With Me by Lucille Clifton

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

If I’d considered this question three or four years ago, this poem would not have been on my list of poems that inspire me to resist. I had to grow into the knowledge that resistance can be and often begins within. In this poem, Clifton is so gracefully defiant. She speaks directly to a world she recognizes would rather her not thrive or even be. She declares subtly but deliberately that she is here and will not only insist upon but celebrate her survival. 

This poem resonates when I consider how our world daily tells me in ways subtle and overt that as a Black woman, I am not worthy of its care or even notice. In that context, like Clifton, celebrating the fact of my being is resistance in its most powerful sense. 

I am particularly enamored with Clifton’s use of the word, starshine and its juxtaposition with clay. The ethereal meets the earthly. I interpret this line as a nod to the magical aspect of our being, with starshine representing the qualities that have enabled us to make a way out of no way, over and over again, allowing us to survive and resist for centuries. 

War by Bob Marley

Until the philosophy which hold one race
Superior and another Inferior
Is finally
And permanently
Discredited
And abandoned
Everywhere is war
Me say war

That until there are no longer
First-class and second-class citizens of any nation
Until the colour of a man's skin
Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes
Me say war

That until the basic human rights
Are equally guaranteed to all
Without regard to race
Dis a war

That until that day
The dream of lasting peace
World citizenship
Rule of international morality
Will remain in but a fleeting illusion to be pursued
But never attained
Now everywhere is war
War

War in the east
War in the west
War up north
War down south
Dis a war

And until the ignoble and unhappy regime
That hold our brothers in Angola
In Mozambique
South Africa
Sub-human bondage
Have been toppled
Utterly destroyed
Well, everywhere is war
Me say war

War, war
Rumors of war
And until that day
The African continent
Will not know peace
We Africans will fight, we find it necessary
And we know we shall win
As we are confident
In the victory
Of good over evil

Good over evil, yeah!
Good over evil
Good over evil, yeah!
Good over evil
Good over evil, yeah! 

A fascinating fact about this song is that it actually functions as a text within a text; the lyrics formed almost entirely from Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I's 1963 speech to the United Nations. Selassie's speech namechecks white supremacy and anti-Blackness and expresses solidarity with resistance efforts in Africa, explicitly naming Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa. On an international stage, he pulled no punches in declaring the obvious outcome of global suffering, inequality, and injustice; war. In the mid-seventies, at the height of his popularity, Bob Marley set Selassie's speech to music, giving global exposure to the call for collective, global resistance.

Almost two decades later, in 1992, Sinead O'Connor chose War for her famous performance on Saturday Night Live, where she ripped up the Pope's picture in a fearless act of protest.

From Bob Marley's live, not to be missed, performance of War at London's Rainbow Theatre (linked above) to Sinead O'Connor's selection of the song to boldly call out the Catholic church, War sits firmly in the canon of music as a call to resist. It is a go-to song for inspiration and a reminder that the struggle for liberation is both global and universal.

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From Alan:

Caged Bird by Maya Angelou

A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind   
and floats downstream   
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and   
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings   
with a fearful trill   
of things unknown   
but longed for still   
and his tune is heard   
on the distant hill   
for the caged bird   
sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams   
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream   
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied   
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings   
with a fearful trill   
of things unknown   
but longed for still   
and his tune is heard   
on the distant hill   
for the caged bird   
sings of freedom.

I cry every time I read this poem, both for its meaning and for what it has meant to me. For me, it is the piece that speaks most profoundly to a longing - a longing for freedom denied. The caged bird sings of freedom because he has a voice, and he will continue to use his voice until his plea is heard. The caged bird sings of freedom because he knows he was created to be free.

I recited this poem when I presided over my first commencement ceremony as Dean of the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston. It was a call to our graduates to continue fighting, to challenge every form of oppression that continues to deny our freedom. I went on to read this poem at every commencement ceremony that followed through my last ceremony in 2022. For me, this will always be the poem that answers the question of why.

The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go. 

I initially wasn’t going to select another poem, but when I read connease’s first choice, Won’t You Celebrate With Me, I immediately thought of The Fish. When I first read this many years ago, probably in college, I didn’t think much of it. But when I came back to this many years later, I understood something that I hadn’t understood before. I understood that the victory spoken near the end is not that of the narrator for having caught the fish, but rather the victory is that of the fish for having survived capture after capture, for having escaped someone who wished to kill it again and again. There is a moment of connection that comes like an epiphany and all the narrator sees is rainbow, rainbow, rainbow. When I read this poem, I feel something that I don’t entirely understand but it makes me want to keep fighting, and for me, that is the greatest feeling that art can evoke.