I felt, I guess, liberated
Political depression, the Attica Rebellion, and windows
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CW: Suicide, state violence, death, police murder, infanticide – This is a heavy one, so please take care when reading. For time context, I began this a couple of weeks ago and finished it today.
Attica, 2021
I have been crushed this week by a deep political despair and a feeling that the last few days, finally, will be what drives me from social media. My body hurts. My heart aches. This morning I woke up as if moving through sand, unable to do the simplest tasks of life maintenance, answering one single email at a time in order of most impossible to ignore.
My friends and I try to locate the exact source of our shifts into paralysis. Perhaps it is the murder of Sonya Massey, in her own home, after daring to call the police for help—an unforgiving calculation so many people are forced to make in times of great crisis and need: calling someone who might kill you when you have no other option. A cruel revelation following her death has been that her ancestor, William K. Donnegan, was himself lynched in the Springfield Race Riot of 1908. It is said the two were taken to and died at the same hospital. Time folds in on itself, reminding us that however many years later, the same systems of white supremacy continue to kill the same people.
I have not been able to bring myself to watch the video of her murder. I try my best to possess resilience and fortitude when to comes to witnessing and holding the brutalities of this world, feeling that I owe it to the people living them. That I owe it to the world to understand its capacity for both beauty and horror. I have sat and listened to people recount violences I know well other people have never even considered possible. Still, there are moments that bring me to my knees, and I am forced to stop the recording, close the video, and recover before being able to continue. This happened to me while reviewing transcripts and audio testimonies about Rikers Island, feeling my breath leave my body as people described finding those who took their own lives inside the jail, and how the guards let them stay there far too long, refusing to provide potentially lifesaving medical aid. This happened in a time and place I was unable to step away from when a woman I was tattooing told me the date on her arm was the birthdate of her son— “His father killed him three weeks later.”
This happened again this week while watching a medical professional working in Gaza give an interview about treating children with gunshot wounds from snipers. The sickening feeling in my gut became too much, and I had to stop watching, feeling as if I failed these children in my inability to merely witness their deaths, let alone stop them. I remind myself that these reactions are what should be happening; that they are proof these conditions are intolerable at any proximity. While driving back from the coast of Oaxaca earlier this year, we passed a motorcycle accident on the side of the brand-new, poorly illuminated highway. I was reading an article on my phone detailing the gruesome conditions in Gaza and looked up at the exact moment that we drove by the wreck, glimpsing a mangled body on the ground. The combination of the two sent me into an instant panic attack, one I tried to conceal from my carmates, instead leaning my head back against the seat and trying to count my breaths in the dark.
Something that, early on, helped me understand Palestinian armed resistance was my study of American prison rebellions. In watching friends uncritically celebrate and memeify Kamala Harris’s presidential candidacy, what has come up for me most viscerally is the downplaying of her role in mass incarceration: in denying clemency to people who were wrongfully convicted, in refusing trans people their medical care in prison, in criminalizing truancy and penalizing families. I understand that these systems feel large and abstract, but I wish so deeply that people could focus in on the truths of the individual lives held, derailed, and all too often ended by these processes of the prison industrial complex. Each of these single lives contains countless examples of unbearable injustices; any one instance should be enough to compel us to work toward the end of these cruelties.
It feels lately as if these newsletters are a running list of “things that made me cry this week.” One of those things was watching Ghosts of Attica, a documentary about the 1971 prison uprising that resulted in the deaths of 39 people at the hands of the National Guard, 29 prisoners and 10 hostages. The uprising was broadcast in real time by the media, who initially repeated the lie that the hostages were killed by the imprisoned men (only one, William Quinn, died from injuries sustained during the rebellion). Something I highly, highly implore you to do is to take time and read the demands of a prison rebellion, of any prison rebellion. They will break your heart in their simplicity. While their composition is acutely aware of the broad prison industrial complex and the need for its abolition as a whole, the immediate demands are things like freedom to practice one’s religion, improved food, educational programs— the most basic of human rights.
There is an image in the film that I won’t reproduce here of the prisoners (and I use prisoner intentionally here, as in held prisoner by the state) stripped naked, hands on their heads, and lined up in the yard. It looks exactly like images we’ve seen of Guantanamo Bay and, more recently, of Palestinian prisoners being tortured by “israel.” Watching people argue online that stopping the genocide in Palestine is a “single issue foreign policy matter” is devastating because the same has been and continues to be done to people domestically. Attica is one example. The bombing of the MOVE house in Philadelphia is another, as are the assassinations of Black Panthers executed by the state. In her memoir A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story, Elaine Brown describes the aftermath of the police assault on the party’s Central Avenue office:
“There were so many bulletholes that light from the front of the building shone through to the back. So many tear-gas canisters had been tossed into the building’s windows and doors that people passing by the building on the street still became nauseous and teary-eyed. The damage had been done by an army: the LAPD’s new, and previously unknown, Special Weapons and Tactics team, known as SWAT.”
It's Black August, a month of commemoration, action, and learning in response to the murders of George and Jonathan Jackson. I saw Sing Sing in theaters last week and cried (add it to the running list), especially at the historical footage from past theatrical stagings in the prison. An irony that has always struck me is that if you google Sing Sing, you’ll find reviews for the East Village karaoke joint of the same name. Had a wonderful time celebrating a birthday here. Great specials on drinks and varied song selection. The absurd contrast between the fun of belting out Bon Jovi songs with friends and the brutality of a prison mirrors, to me, the tiktok remixes of politicians whose policies are (by their own track records) in our worst collective interests.
In the insistence that this Black woman in particular will save democracy there seems to be a convenient forgetting that there is, already, a Black woman running for president: Claudia De La Cruz on the Socialist ticket, as well as a forgetting that Cornell West is already running for president as an Independent. Seeing the mobilization for Kamala Harris as Democratic candidate is difficult not because I begrudge people their desire to defeat a fascist Republican opponent, or to slow the processes of right-wing backlash, but because I wish that together we could dream of more. There is so much energy and so much need between us all. The Kamala Harris campaign has raised $310 million since her presidential candidacy was announced, and hundreds of thousands of people have mobilized their support. I think of what could be accomplished with that same money and energy elsewhere: fair housing, social services, drug treatment, debt relief, and environmental preservation, to name a few.
Recently, I come back again and again to a video of protestors in Kenya smoking tear gas. In the video, the man takes a huge hit off the canister as if it were a benign party bong, defiantly and coolly exhaling the toxic gas at the camera before handing it to his comrade. While my second thought upon watching is, of course, what is that doing to his lungs, the image of unbridled fearlessness has become addictive. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve looped the video. I’ve done the same thing with images of Bangladeshi protestors taking over the Prime Minister’s residence and seizing her belongings once she fled to India amidst the student uprising, zooming in on an image of a smiling young man in a backpack cradling a rabbit in one hand and flashing a peace sign with the other.
A few times I day I notice my exhaustion and reluctance to do anything at all and a conscious thought occurs to me: I’m depressed. As if it’s a surprise each time rather than an obvious conclusion. The thought that follows it is often: it’s about time. As in, how have I managed to stay functional throughout all of this?
“The heart breaks are endless but we are still lucky because we are alive and we are loved and we know joy,” texts my friend Life. “I know we have to keep going, it helps no one to let it kill the spirit.”
One of the verbal shifts used to mark the shifts in intimacy and consciousness between the men of Sing Sing is that they begin to address one another as beloved. It is a small change within the overall narrative arc, but a significant one. The moments that most move me in reviewing historical documents of the Attica Rebellion are the ones where the men describe feeling free for the first time in years. Frank “Big Black” Smith describes it as “a feeling of being born again.” What sustains me at times of low morale like these are what I’ve taken to calling windows— apertures, ruptures, or brief openings into an otherwise, as Christina Sharpe names it. These windows are reminders of the fact that despite brutality, despite what seem like impossible conditions, people are able to seize joy, cooperation, and unity in struggle. In contrast with the violent end of Attica’s uprising these moments are even more heartwrenching, but lose none of their power; in contrast, they live eternally with the sprit and fire through which they were initiated, reminding all of us to strengthen our will to fight.
Attica, 2021
Mutual Aid: Leila, a very special friend of Flower World, is fundraising for her family in Gaza and Cairo. Please support them here.
Reading this week:
· Ladin Awad READ: ANGER – Interjection on Sudan via Montez Press
· Like a Bag Trying to Empty: On the Palestinian Prisoner and Martyr Walid Daqqa by Kaleem Hawa on Parapraxis
· Interrupting Criminalization’s independent abolitionist study curriculum, a great place to start if you want to learn more about transformative justice and divestment from policing.
· Critical Resistance’s zine on Attica (full PDF here)
Sing Sing is based on Dramatic Escape, a documentary produced about Rehabilitation Through the Arts and their programs in prisons in New York State.
The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto, 1971
Some of the images in this newsletter are from Attica, a 2021 documentary. It took me three tries to get through it, even after watching Ghosts of Attica. A caution that it’s an especially difficult watch.
A paper I worked on with my dear friend Scout Silverstein has been published:
“A qualitative investigation of tattooing as an adaptive appearance investment: positive body image and eating disorder recovery in a predominantly transgender and gender expansive sample.” All credit to Scout for the hard work and writing, and I’m grateful to have played a small part in its creation. Thanks as well to everyone who participated in the focus groups and shared so generously. :)
Excerpt from this oral history interview with Frank “Big Black” Smith on the Attica Prison Rebellion: “I felt, I guess, liberated.”