Literature in a Locked Down Land
Working class literature is alive and well and living in prison. It is “well” not in the sense of being contented and happy but rather of being vital and impassioned. And it is imprisoned not just in the sense of being locked behind bars but also of being locked into poverty. Some prisons have walls of iron and stone, others walls of economics and racism. It is their efforts to escape from this second prison that get most inmates incarcerated in the first. As Mumia Abu-Jamal said, “I’ve been in prison my whole life.”
The life-constricting pressures in both types of prisons can crush some psyches and produce diamonds of art and wisdom in others. Struggle: A Magazine of Revolutionary Proletarian Literature has been publishing the diamonds (along with some glass) since 1985. Reading it is to rediscover the power of art to give us insights and inspire us to action, an invigorating change from the vapid musings and trivial subjectivity that pass for “literary” these days. By showing us the multi-layered oppression surrounding us and the strength of the human spirit caught within that, Struggle is contributing to a culture of resistance and eventually of revolution.
For example:
Doing Time in Folsom State
Sleep slips away like tendrils of fog
before a Lompoc Valley breeze, a morning
sun dawns upon another moonless night.
I amble aimlessly, wandering twisted corridors
inside a convoluted mind seeking the solace
of an earthly slumber, yet find myself lost
amidst the wreckage of yesteryear: a Bermuda
Triangle existence where disappearing smiles
vanished without ever leaving a trace
upon a heart hardened by aloneness.
The passage of time mocks me as I search
for my truths, though I dread their discovery.
Thus, I find comfort in lies: origami constructs
of paper figurines dancing in the funeral pyre
like marionettes dangling from a hangman’s noose.
My Country Does to Thee
Your children walk barefoot through raw sewage
Behemoths lumber through your streets
Spitting death and destruction to ancient icons
Armed men burst into your homes
Terrify your women and children
Take a father and uncle a cousin a brother
Hold them in bondage
Humiliate defile torture
Through your land sacred rivers flow
Tigress—Euphrates birth of civilization
Brown people of the desert
I grieve for your suffering
And for the soldiers
Who just want to go home
But are trapped like you
In a fatal conflict not of their making
I would rather walk or ride a horse
Than rob you of the black sea
That lies under your ancient sands
This feeble pen seeks justice for what you suffer
I spill only ink you spill your blood
If the world be brave and not tremble
At the action of this teenaged nation
It would rebuke this brutal war
Declare perpetrators war criminals
All predatory war are criminal
Against peoples of the world
Like all empires of the past
This one too will have its fall
From Captive Audience
I write my poems for the homeless and friendless,
parched by the sun of the searing day,
freezing in the chill of the callous night
as the cold slices skin like razors
and indifference multiplies
like malignant cells.
I write my poems for the working people
slaving in the heat of the cavernous foundry,
humping crates in eternity’s shipyard,
coughing in mines deep underground,
farming our food and harvesting life,
laying bricks at the noise-drenched construction site
like Sisyphus pushing his boulder
up that lonely hill in hell.
I write my poems for the prisoners
living out their lives in concrete closets,
in rows of chicken-coop cells,
dreams locked behind steel bars;
they traded their lives
for liquor store cash,
and now they pay the price
as the years blend together
and disappear like dirty water
down a shower drain.
The March on Washington, 1963
Twenty-four years have passed
since my heart first pulsed with hope
for a better world
when I saw those black youth marching,
arm-in-arm, their faces bold and clear in purpose,
under the trees beside the pool
at the Lincoln Memorial.
I didn’t really listen
to the melodic words of Martin Luther King;
they seemed to be a little rhetorical,
not quite down-to-earth enough
compared to the vibrant, rebelling
life on the march, the young people
arm-in-arm, under the trees,
chanting, singing—militant choirs, their
voices welling up from the long years of black resistance
and bursting forth into the air that day
in a pure joy at seeing
half-a-million faces
dedicated to burying racism.
I didn’t listen at all
to the pompous, empty oratory of Walter Reuther;
inexperienced as I was, it revolted me nevertheless.
I saw even then that it lacked
the depth and resonance to express the lives
of the oppressed and turbulent people;
I didn’t even much like
the uniform, stale, detached slogans
on the unions’ perfect picket signs;
I sensed in them something bureaucratic,
not poetic, and I demanded poetry
to express the feelings of the people.
But I loved the faces of the workers,
warm, resolute, lively, varied,
experiences of great depth evident
in the lines on their faces, in their unevenly
developed muscles, and I noticed
that the hundreds and hundreds of buses of workers
carried the most vivid variety of people—
they, more than anyone else at the March,
already trying to live out
our belief in equality.
I was too naive to notice
a slight difference in tone
in the speech of John Lewis,
the young SNCC field worker from the rural South
who knuckled under to the big shots
and, moments before he spoke,
hastily removed all militancy from his text
and lost any chance
of presenting a radical alternative
to innocent but questioning
characters like me.
I was also too ignorant
to question the absence of Malcolm
who would have scourged the union hacks
and official black “leaders”
With a fiery exposure
and sent an insurrectionary spirit
running among the gathered masses
like a flame sweeping across
a spill of gasoline.
There were many things I missed that day,
many a lesson that went past me,
but that one fragrant blossom of hope
embodied in those singing, marching youth
and in those hundred-thousand united workers’ faces
changed my life for good.
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William T. Hathaway is an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. His latest book, Radical Peace: People Refusing War, presents the experiences of war resisters, deserters, and peace activists in the USA, Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Chapters are posted on a page of the publisher’s website at http://media.trineday.com/radicalpeace.