THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#19, MARCH-MAY/2024
We are missing the stories of women who are keeping life going in the midst of war. — Zainab Salbi[1]
The nature of this war assumes many different guises, sometimes overtly violent, sometimes economically restrictive, and still other times socially repressive . . . modern wars of US imperialism waged against Third World people have not all been completely military campaigns, but have also included social pacification programs, economic aid to reactionary regimes, political police extermination of legitimate opposition. — Message to the Black Movement: A Political Statement from the Black Underground[2]
Perspectives from an Arab feminist human rights refugee and an organization associated with a Black feminist revolutionary fugitive initiate this reflection on captivity and resistance. Raised during the 1980s war between Iran and Iraq (the United States secretly armed both sides),[3] Iraqi-American Zainab Salbi notes how women in Middle East war zones forge resistance by maintaining pleasure in their children’s lives and personal beauty in their own (one woman declares her desire to have contraband red lipstick so that when a sniper fires as she walks in public he will realize that he has just “killed a beautiful woman”).[4] A former member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA), an activist in the Black Underground, Assata Shakur maintains her innocence in the shooting death of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster. Her escape from prison rendered her a political fugitive and “refugee” in Cuba (the United States normalized relations with the nation in 2016). The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) engineered a counterintelligence program that hunted, imprisoned, and on occasion, assassinated radicals, such as Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in the December 1969 Chicago raid on BPP headquarters. That same federal police would place Shakur, with a two million dollar bounty on her head, on the 2014 terrorist list with Al-Qaeda, which suggests that ideological links have been formed in the policing of foreign and domestic threats.
Born in different generations and continents, under diverse political and cultural states of siege and violence, the narratives of Salbi and Shakur grapple with persecution, death, and grief. Pursuing fights and flights for justice, despite captivity and trauma, both women’s narratives recognize the unrecoverable years stolen or spent surviving warfare and murder. One woman, Salbi, is elevated from subjugated female to free citizen in her adopted nation (that the United States intervened, invaded, and de-stabilized Iraq triggering genocidal violence is context that might be underscrutinized). Another woman, Shakur, is forced into mutating positions of enslavement: from engineering sickle cell testing and breakfast programs in Harlem, while threatened by police and Cointelpro, through survival in a militarist underground formation as a “slave” rebel, to being shot, captured, and tortured as a political prisoner who plans her escape into political exile as a “maroon.” Democracy-seeking Salbi emigrates from a dictatorial state to become a sovereign citizen in the West. Democracy-fleeing Shakur in metamorphosis is in constant violent transitions, from that of a “slave” insurrectionist labeled, tortured, convicted, and imprisoned as a “common criminal” into a political prisoner-fugitive who survives a lethal, governmental war that killed or disappeared other Black radicals.[5] The anonymous counterparts to these women’s public lives are the more typical “Captive Maternals”— those most vulnerable to violence, war, poverty, police, and captivity; those whose very existence enables the possessive empire that claims and dispossesses them.
Global dominance in economics, military, and cultural commodities allows the United States’ imperial reach, despite the “blowback” of its devastating, unwinnable wars (alongside the genocidal violence the United States unleashed abroad, its interventionist warfare has resulted, in 2016, in twenty veteran suicides a day, trillions of dollars in military debt, and projected decades of warfare in the Middle East). However, the United States’ longest war is with its domestic target: enslaved or captive Black women, a war that dates back to the Commonwealth of Virginia’s 1658 attempts to (re)enslave Elizabeth Key, one of the first Captive Maternals to have her battles enter public record.
Captive Maternals can be either biological females or those feminized into caretaking and consumption. To better understand the meaning of Captive Maternals requires context. Western theory or Womb Theory provides the historical context that married democracy with slavery; one unintended offspring was the Black Matrix.[6] Captive Maternals and the Black Matrix are unfamiliar terms that point to the limits of theory that rationalizes the avoidance of interstices or gaps in the world through the consumption of maternal lives and bodies.[7] In transitioning a colony through a republic into a representative democracy with imperial might, the emergent United States grew a womb, it took on the generative properties of the maternals it held captive. Western democracy, based in American Exceptionalism, merged Enlightenment ideologies with Western theories to birth a new nation (a nascent empire) that fed on Black frames. Centuries later, Black Captive Maternals remain disproportionately disciplined, denigrated, and consumed for the greater democracy. Although Black males are most publicly policed, imprisoned, and executed by state violence and vigilantism, and remembering to call out the names or images of their female counterparts is an important additive in a Black death roll call and mobilization, this lens is shaped by paternal power, imagery, and desires. For Captive Maternals, the chit-chat of the little cuts and rat-like gnawing is the norm; they face verbal slander and intimidation, physical violence, domestic violence, rape and sexual assault, and contempt, policing in schools, jobs, society, and prisons, from every sector. Still, it is not their victimization that marks them; it is their productivity and its consumption. Throughout history, Captive Maternals provided the reproductive and productive labor to stabilize culture and wealth. The Viking mercantile raiders survived and thrived because of slavery: agricultural work and reproductive work by the feminized or female enabled raiders to seek glory through pillage and rape. Even Thor required a Captive Maternal (although he would likely have denied the fact).
The trauma and theft that produced Western democracy dependent upon slavery also created an unintentional shadow twin within Western theory or Womb Theory: the Black Matrix. The Black Matrix is a fulcrum that exists along a political spectrum that stretches like a plank. The plank-like spectrum upon the fulcrum is shaped by triad formations in racial rape/consumption, resistance, and repression in a renewable cycle of fight, flight, and fixation. The Black Matrix as fulcrum functions when the captive leverages her power against captor and captivity. The weight of oppression rests along the spectrum upon a fulcrum. Atop the spectrum plank are the protagonists. Think of an old-school seesaw on the playground. The fulcrum is the pyramid upon which the spectrum rests. The political actors are seated in various distances on that spectrum plank. The weight of those seated, and perhaps their “erratic” proclivity to jumping off the plank, determines who is elevated to the highest position and who scrunches their knees up with their bottom on the ground. Alexander Kojeve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel[8] argues that the slave has powers that surpass the master; that the latter, in fact, is dependent upon the former. Here I argue that leverage, rather than “feminism” or “intersectionality” or “progressivism” might be a useful term for recognizing power and predation.
When the Black Matrix rends or ruptures captivity, the lofty topple; this is because those aloft have been called out, humiliated, vanquished in some form, whether through large or small rebellion. That rupture is an inescapably bloody, unattractive affair. This is true not just because the balance of the high and low has been disturbed but because the retaliatory violence to punish that disturbance is inevitable. Hence, most public activism stays on script, within conventional politics or on-continuum politics, where activism sanctioned or approved by governance or funders dominates. Meanwhile, off-continuum politics that resist governance and nonprofits to follow the “rabble,” rebellion through boycott, protest, or even riot becomes an act of the uncivil.[9] The Black Matrix is found in both on- and off-continuum politics. Thus the “political revolution” so prominent in campaign rhetoric in 2016 is not inherently aligned with Captive Maternals.
Captive Maternals work in and for governance, corporations, prisons, police, and the military. Their diversity — from CEOs and university presidents to Attorney Generals and janitors and the incarcerated — indicates ideological difference, economic need, and political desire within a democracy. The concept of the “Captive Maternal” is not fungible. There are distinctions between Salbi and Shakur because of the importance of their respective work for justice and against war. Venerated and employable by governance and nonprofits, Salbi is sovereign in a democracy that installed the dictator Saddam Hussein that terrorized her birth nation, levied deadly sanctions against Hussein that led to the deaths of half a million children, deposed him through an invasion under the false pretext of weapons of mass destruction, an invasion that caused mass destruction. The Ted Talk platform open to Salbi (or even Edward Snowden by bot) cannot be offered to Assata Shakur because the Black Matrix is the expression within which US democracy is a plank in the spectrum. In order for Shakur’s narrative to emerge in its own right, not as a perversion or pathological mutation of victimization or violence, one cannot ignore Shakur’s structural relationship to propping up Western democracy, first as caretaker (Panther breakfast program supplementing for social services denied to the urban poor) and later as demonized criminal. Material conditions, refugee or immigrant status only slightly determine one’s status as captive. The resolve and ability to resist captivity through the use of a fulcrum, even if leverage engenders disarray, is a form of politics, disparaged and punished by conventional politics. (The elder’s admonition by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that there was a “special place in hell” for young women who preferred to vote for the more radical “Bernie” rather than for “Hillary” in the 2016 democratic primaries comes to mind.) When that fulcrum originates in the Black Matrix, one is talking about a politics tethered to master/slave terror.
Western theory or Womb Theory creates the template that makes predation of the Captive Maternal invisible, through consumptive relationships that provide the free theorist or citizen with plausible deniability. Today, Womb Theory accommodates critiques of feminism, antiracism, and heterosexism to some degree. Womb Theory co-opted genesis for democracy, idealized as the highest form of human self-governance. For centuries, patriarchal, enslaving Womb Theory normalized — as natural, universal, and befitting the diminished capacities of the captive — trauma and theft of labor and time, which legitimized the existence of Captive Maternals as inevitable, inconsequential, and invisible. Citizen and ruler benefit from reproductive labor to accrue leisure and space for theory, war, and power. Oral and written biographies[10] and treatises of captive females embattled against violence offer important perspectives.[11] As forms of theorizing,[12] such works allow Western theory to be viewed as the anti–soulmate of freedom.
*excerpted from “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time, Theft and the Captive Maternal”, Carceral Notebooks, Vol.12, 2016.
[1] Zainab Salbi, “How Do People Live and Cope in the Midst of Violent Conflict?” TED Radio Hour, NPR, February 11, 2016.
[2] From the perspective of the Black Liberation Army, its most prominent member was Assata Shakur. This was a reaction to lethal repression from the police and FBI Cointelpro. See Coordinating Committee: Black Liberation Army, “Message to the Black Movement: A Political Statement from the Black Underground,” (1976), 12, http://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/messageblackmovement.pdf.
[3] Seymour M. Hersh, “US Secretly Gave Aid to Iraq Early in Its War against Iran,” New York Times, January 26, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/26/world/us-secretly-gave-aid-to-iraq-early-in-its-waragainst-iran.html.
[4] Salbi, “How Do People Live and Cope in the Midst of Violent Conflict?”
[5] Senate Hearings on CIA/FBI illegal or extralegal warfare and malfeasance against the Black Panther Party and radical activists is public record. Most though are unfamiliar with the Department of Homeland Security and FBI maintaining surveillance files on Black Lives Matter. With Jeh Johnson, former counsel for the Department of Defense, as the Secretary of Homeland Security and Barack Obama as president, the government sought influence or control over black political leadership in resistance to racist violence. Black Lives Matter activists also publicly critiqued FBI requests that Apple create software to compromise security on its devices following the December 2, 2015, San Bernardino mass killings by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfin Malik. The Intercept maintains that the FBI
Joint Terrorism Task Force has also monitored Black Lives Matter. See: The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (The Church Committee), 1976, http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/investigations/ChurchCommittee.htm;
George Joseph, “Feds Regularly Monitored Black Lives Matter since Ferguson,” The Intercept, July 24, 2015, https://theintercept.com/2015/07/24/documents-showdepartment-homeland-security-monitoring-black-lives-matter-since-ferguson/; and, Beats, Rhymes & Relief, Letter to Judge Sheri Pym, March 3, 2016, “http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/Beats_Rhymes_Relief_Center_for_Media_Justice_The_Gathering_for_Justice_Justice_League_NYC_Opal_Tometi_and_Shaun_King.pdf.
[6] In “Afrarealism and the Black Matrix,” I describe the Black Matrix as a maroon philosopher who defined the boundaries of Western democracy through her flight to its borders where she established marronage (both in the act of departure and reconstitution in exile). The flight is from democracy’s growth of white citizenship through black female or feminized captivity. The Black Matrix becomes, then, the space of utility and coherence in response to predatory relations, excessive exploitation, and terror in productivity. As a fulcrum traveling along a spectrum of power and domination, it emerges from within triad formations of racial rape/consumption, resistance, and repression. Distinctions between racial “theft” (police homicides of black people as codified in the “Stolen Lives” project) and racial “genocide” (US training of Brazilian forces that diversify into paramilitaries and dictatorship) in domestic and foreign policy require more study. See Joy James, “Afrarealism and the Black Matrix: Maroon Philosophy at Democracy’s Borders,” The Black Scholar 43.4 (Winter 2013): 124–31; “Confronting the triads of black life/death,” AAS21 Forum, October 24, 2015, https://medium.com/focus-series/confronting-the-triads-of-black-life-death-bf0ed82a4d6e#.8sp6mkr26.
[7] Intersectionality is a more widely known or popularized framework.Linked to critical race/feminist theory and legal scholar Kimberly Crenshaw, intersectionality has worked to counter simplistic constructs of “women,” “blacks,” “poor,” and “queers” as isolated identities. It became a talking point in the Clinton 2016 democratic presidential primary campaign against Bernie Sanders and was used to highlight Clinton as the superior candidate, whose inherently more “progressive” politics were tied to her feminism. “Intersectionality” is presented as a theory; however, in its fungible nature without reference to any specific ideology or specificity of agency (rather than victimization), it seems to be used by some to conflate the powerful with those less structurally empowered. See Clare Foran, “Hillary Clinton’s Intersectional Politics,” The Atlantic, March 9, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/hillary-clinton-intersectionality/472872/.
[8] Alexander Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Alan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980).
[9] On-continuum politics, with its distrust of leadership rooted in unauthorized activism, seeks access to power through philanthropic and bureaucratic governance, while off-continuum politics demands that governance cede power and control to the populace, which at times includes the rabble, the boycott, and sometimes the riot. A brief contrast of on-continuum and off-continuum politics in prison abolitionism appears in Joy James, “7 Lessons in 1 Abolitionist Notebook,” Abolition Journal, June 25, 2015,
http://abolitionjournal.org/joy-james-7-lessons-in-1-abolitionist-notebook/.
[10] Although possibly censored for icon respectability, the most well-known biographies or autobiographies of black radical women in twentiethcentury politics and movements include Shirley Chisholm, Unbought and Unbossed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Angela Y. Davis, Angela Y. Davis: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1985); and Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (London: Zed Books, 1987).
[11] The 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement is a manifesto that dissects predatory violence from multiple sectors. See https://wgs10016.commons.gc.cuny.edu/combahee-river-collective-black-feminist-statement/.
[12] For a discussion of black feminist theory’s use of the term “theorizing,” see Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique 6 (Spring 1987): 51–63.
No comments:
Post a Comment