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candelibri 's review for:
Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson
by George L. Jackson
challenging
reflective
sad
slow-paced
I appreciate feeling how I grew along with Jackson as I followed along with his letters over his decade of imprisonment.
For someone filled with so much righteous rage (if at times it felt a bit juvenile - he was picked up at 18), it is eye opening to see that white hot anger hone itself into a constant smolder and direct itself with discipline.
If at the beginning he sounds misogynistic to his mother and sisters, you can see the growth he undergoes when you compare the letters he writes to Angela Davis and someone named “Joan”, as well as his lawyer, Faye.
There are desperate and despairing letters to his father where you can see him searching for his place in his new radical world, trying to save his father which is reminiscent of liberal children trying to speak to their MAGA parents.
By the midpoint, we are treated to essays to his lawyer on his views on capitalism, depression, as well as the carceral system and towards the end, we see him begin to come into his own (he is only 28 now) with stunning and, more often than not, tender, letters to Angela Davis and Joan, discussing not only the resistance but their womanhood and his love and respect for them, a marked difference from his early, youthful letters to his family that indicated women needed to know their place.
All in all, we are treated to a brief glimpse of someone that was taken from the world too soon for too little but made the most with the little he was allowed by a system bent on his destruction.
For someone filled with so much righteous rage (if at times it felt a bit juvenile - he was picked up at 18), it is eye opening to see that white hot anger hone itself into a constant smolder and direct itself with discipline.
If at the beginning he sounds misogynistic to his mother and sisters, you can see the growth he undergoes when you compare the letters he writes to Angela Davis and someone named “Joan”, as well as his lawyer, Faye.
There are desperate and despairing letters to his father where you can see him searching for his place in his new radical world, trying to save his father which is reminiscent of liberal children trying to speak to their MAGA parents.
By the midpoint, we are treated to essays to his lawyer on his views on capitalism, depression, as well as the carceral system and towards the end, we see him begin to come into his own (he is only 28 now) with stunning and, more often than not, tender, letters to Angela Davis and Joan, discussing not only the resistance but their womanhood and his love and respect for them, a marked difference from his early, youthful letters to his family that indicated women needed to know their place.
All in all, we are treated to a brief glimpse of someone that was taken from the world too soon for too little but made the most with the little he was allowed by a system bent on his destruction.