A review by frogwithlittlehammer
Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur

funny informative reflective

4.25

It is one thing to expose the brutal and prejudiced realities of black people especially in relation to the United States “justice” system and incarceral complex. It is another matter to feel as though the horror of what Assata experienced is The Thing that makes her an extraordinary case or a notable woman. Because I feel like what a lot of people get out of this book is almost pity porn. What is it that makes pity so gripping to the outsider, one who is completely removed from experiencing the pain? They say that pity is akin to love, I’m guessing because through the hierarchization that pity creates, you are able to feel close to someone or some concept by way of superiority. But I don’t believe that being captivated by something is the same as being empowered by it. Assata talks about being called to revolutionary action emotionally versus rationally. Because as humans, “emotional versus rational” tends to be the agreed upon duality that is behind any call to action. Why those are antitheses, I’m not quite sure—but it faintly imbues sexist and gender binary reinforcing undertones. Anyway, she identifies strongly with the latter. “Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory.” But I think ironically, for a lot of the readers of Assata, the brunt of the celebration of the book is a product of emotion, and something about that is unsettling. 

I’m not denying that she is a beautiful writer, or saying this isn’t a phenomenal piece of writing. The book is funny, flowing, sharp, and her thoughts on the schools of cowmmunism of the era and whether their frameworks were conducive or a hindrance to progress was insightful (and have become only more cogent over time!) But when I read stuff like this, a work that is revered and where blackness is an irremovable and defining characteristic of the story, I am always struck by the power that the black narrative can harness in America, whichever end of the reactionary spectrum it invokes. The grandeur of its historicism can’t be the answer, as Native genocide was the founding of the US itself. Could be that it’s a numbers game, as black people made up the bulk of the minorities in the mid century. Or perhaps it’s the social stratum of oppression, and it’s a collective phenomenological guilt that many Americans are beginning to feel. What makes countless black stories break through the academic ceiling and into gen pop, while we see very select Latino, Asian, and indigenous best-sellers? Truly, I don’t mean to be critical, but purely dialectical. 

Though at the same time, it’s personal too. It’s not exactly a hurting, but maybe I’m coveting something that is intangible, or maybe it is plain bitterness. Towards the sheer solidarity that ontologically exists (redundant?) in being black in America. This is an unimaginable concept for asians, I mean, there is a reason why Jay Capsian King calls us, “The Loneliest Americans”. The narrowing margin of being the “next ones to become white” is nothing but a forced perspective, looking at something as if it is linear when in fact it transcends our plane of what we understand and what we can change. Buying into the Escheresque illusion only furthers the distance—fulfilled through seated complacency, competition with one another, and the fear of being reprimanded for being radical. 

All that is to say, this book is bigger than its contents. I both liked it and I didn’t like it. The reading experience was a strange one, where I was thinking much more about the audience’s interpretation of the events of her life, more so than the events themselves. Is that dissociating , intellectualizing, or astral projecting-cum-freedom (à la her friend Eva)? You tell me.