Aesthetic Accountablity and Maroonage by A. Shahid Stover

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#6, MARCH-MAY/2019

Maroon Comix: Origins and Destinies, edited by Quincy Saul, (Oakland, PM Press, 2018).

As a collaborative work of emancipatory aesthetics between Quincy Saul and several artists including Songe Riddle, Mac McGill, Seth Tobocman, Hannah Allen, Emmy Kepler, and Mikaela Gonzalez, Maroon Comix attempts to introduce the idea of maroonage through Art towards informing contemporary potentialities of grassroots resistance against Empire. This is done in the form of an oversized graphic novel meant to visually communicate the weight of ongoing Black liberation struggles by locating their geohistorical genesis in Revolt against the systematic enslavement of human ‘being’ imposed by western imperialist power.

It is precisely against this systematic enslavement of human ‘being’, and the global order it literally subsidized with blood and capital, that Maroonage consolidates fugitive registers of human subjectivity as a condition of possibility towards both a rebirth of human community at the margins of Empire, and a renewal of human community characterized by a constant movement away from historical epicenters of advanced neo-liberal capitalist hegemony and as such, at the margins of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society.

In one sense, Maroon Comix can be read as an illustrated companion to the collected writings of Russel ‘Maroon’ Shoatz entitled Maroon the Implacable [1] that was also edited by Saul and Fred Ho (R.I.P.). Shoatz’s Maroon the Implacable finally publishes several classic essays in book form like “Black Fighting Formations: Their Strengths, Weaknesses and Potentials”, “The Real Resistance to Slavery in North America”, “The Dragon and The Hydra: A Historical Study of Organizational Methods” and “Liberation or Gangsterism-Freedom or Slavery”, which are notoriously difficult to find, because until recently, they had been only accessible in the form of pamphlets distributed throughout Black radical literary underground outlets of culture and social activism.

Based almost exclusively on its inclusion of those four essays alone, Maroon the Implacable situates itself alongside Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye, Huey P. Newton’s To Die for the People, Jalil Muntaqin’s We Are Our Own Liberators and Look For Me in the Whirlwind by Sekou Odinga, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Shaba Om and Jamal Joseph, and can justifiably lay claim to being yet another contribution to Black liberation theory from an exemplary generation of freedom fighters who emblazoned the socio-historical horizon of their era towards genuine emancipatory praxis at great personal sacrifice.

Now, although some freedom fighters like Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt (R.I.P.), Dhoruba Bin Wahad and Sekou Odinga eventually managed to get free based on a potent combination of factors, beginning with their legal innocence, supplemented with concerted grassroots activism, strategic brinksmanship and focused campaigns of protest-as-resistance, to this day Shoatz remains a political prisoner of Empire, and along with countless others including Mutulu Shakur, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, Sundiata Acoli, Veronza Bowers, Ed Poindexter, Romaine ‘Chip’ Fitzgerald, Kamau Sadiki, Kojo Bomani Sababu, Ruchell Cinque Magee, Leonard Peltier, David Gilbert, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Robert Seth Hayes and Jalil Muntaqin, their sacrifice should never be forgotten or taken for granted.

Indeed, to somehow subsume their struggles within an overall narrative of ‘civil rights’ driven assimilation into, or cultural nationalist escapism out of, the imperial mainstream is among the gravest of disservices one can do. None of them are prisoners because they adhered to reactionary paradigms of integration or separation, which are both easily subsumed within the normative gaze of a western imperialist continuum. Rather, they remain political prisoners of Empire precisely for engaging in modes of emancipatory praxis that transcend both orientations of integration and separation towards geonational potentialities of authentic egalitarian human community. In this, the insurgent trajectory of their lived experience speaks to both the challenge and the possibility of maroonage.

According to Saul, the carefully illustrated pages of Maroon Comix “are stories insurgent against singular History, armed with art. Not a chronology but a collage; a pattern and a program that reflects maroon realities.” Such “maroon realities” however, prove to be quite difficult to translate artistically, even when conveyed through the aesthetic medium of an oversized graphic novel. For although truly and refreshingly “armed with art”, at times throughout the book that same Art falls prey to some disarmingly static visual depictions of historical figures and events which at least merit the type of epic action portrayals that the medium of graphic novels is extraordinarily suited for.

Indeed, the book contains a sequence of intensely creative abstract portraits showing examples from a full range of maroon figures including Granny Nanny, Harriet Tubman, Dutty Boukman all the way up until the Black Liberation Army. And yet, why settle for portraiture at all, when you have an oversized graphic novel at your disposal to showcase modes of maroonage which would have been much better served by sweeping action sequences of them in direct conflict against those forces of injustice that sought to preserve human slavery at all costs?

Why show yet another version of Dutty Bookman at the now infamous Bois Caiman Voodoo ceremony which mystifies the genuine armed struggle of Revolt he incited and lead with sword in hand against western imperialist power which has never been artistically portrayed appropriately to this day? Surely, the Haitian revolution, the only true universal revolution in history merits more of the type of moving aesthetic depictions and action panels that would have made this an even more memorable work than it already is.

And yet, maybe that is exactly the point of Maroon Comix, for maroonage itself is not a glorious confrontation with established power, but rather the kind of steady day to day grind of emancipatory community building that can’t be captured in scenes of battle and is usually associated with the onset of socio-religious movements whose kingdom is indeed not of this world.

However, maybe we should blame Emory Douglass for setting such high standards of emancipatory aesthetics during his trajectory as Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party. His unrivaled depiction of Black community in Revolt against Empire unfortunately finds no worthy successor in these pages. From an artistic perspective, a tremendous opportunity to show an aesthetic rendering of emancipatory praxis is ultimately missed by the cognitively stable and didactic manner in which attempts are made to showcase a fugitive community that was itself socially ‘unfixed’ and epistemologically dynamic.

No one disputes that a relative social autonomy can always exist at the historical margins of concentrated imperialist formations of power. However, does maroonage introduce new potentialities towards constituting human community through emancipatory praxis against established power? Or does it encourage well trodden paths of perpetual flight from potentialities of emancipatory praxis? How does maroonage distinguish itself from being just another variant of cultural nationalism that reifies community models around archaic distillations of cultural paradigms as mythological fealty to a supposedly harmonious life before the disaster of coloniality in the Raw imposed by a western imperialist continuum?

Maroon Comix attempts to deal with this tension by accurately examining two distinct socio-historical modes of maroonage categorized loosely as “Treaty Maroons” and “Fighting Maroons”. Both orientations disclose bands of outlaw fugitive slaves forming autonomous community as a regularly occurring phenomenon during that era of direct human slavery as imposed by western imperialist power.

Indeed, treaty maroonage prevailed in conjunction with cultural predilections for a “settled life, rather than a belligerent and migratory one”, [2] even at the expense of ultimately running the risk of legitimating established power in exchange for a tenuous guarantee of uneasy social isolation which could collapse at any moment. In contrast, fighting maroonage deliberately provided “sources of insubordination” and “havens for fugitives” that “served as bases for marauding expeditions against nearby plantations and, at times, supplied leadership to planned uprisings.” [3] Still, neither “Treaty Maroons” nor “Fighting Maroons” deliberately foreclosed any conditions of possibility which might then necessitate the transformation of one into the other based on either survivalist need or emancipatory imperative.

Ultimately, Maroon Comix definitely succeeds as artistic resistance by conjuring up “in our minds the memories of moments when everything was risked and everything was at stake; to convoke those places where freedom conquered horror, and to summon that ancestral inheritance into the here and now.” And yet, a surprising lack of familiarity with the medium of the graphic novel itself, haunts this work by limiting its emancipatory potentialities of artistic transcendence.

[1] Russel Maroon Shoatz, Maroon the Implacable, (Oakland: PM Press, 2013).

[2]Herbert Aptheker, “Slave Guerilla Warfare”, To Be Free, (New York, International Publishers, 1948, 1968) p.11.

[3] Ibid.