Mourning for Marilyn Buck, Part II
Mourning for activist, poet, and political prisoner Marilyn Buck, shown
at three stages of her life.
The blue afterwards:
Mourning for Marilyn, Part IIBy Felix Shafer
/
The Rag Blog
/ January 13, 2011
Part two of three[On December 13, Marilyn Buck, U.S. anti-imperialist
political prisoner, acclaimed poet, former Austinite, and former
original Ragstaffer, would have been 63 years of age. Scheduled for
parole last August after nearly 30 years in federal prisons, Marilyn
planned to live and work in New York. She looked forward to trying her
hand at photography again, taking salsa lessons, and simply being able
to walk in the park and visit freely with friends.Instead, after 20 days
of freedom, Marilyn died of a virulent cancer.In the first part of this
essay, Felix Shafer wrote about the pain of losing his friend and
artistic collaborator, Marilyn Buck, to cancer, and his determination to
mourn her in some way appropriate to her life, accepting and
experiencing grief as fully as great friendship demands.
He evoked the heady, seemingly revolutionary days of the late 1960s, and
Marilyn’s simultaneous coming of age with a generation that wanted to
change the world for the better and instead found itself criminalized in
the councils of government and power. Buck’s experiences, and her
fundamental identification with people over profits, led her
increasingly to seek effective ways to oppose injustice, and,
inevitably, brought her under official scrutiny.But the 1960s proved to
be a pre-revolutionary decade, and, along with others who refused to
read the repressive writing on the wall, Marilyn Buck became an
“internal exile”: a political prisoner of the State.-- Mariann Wizard /
The Rag Blog]keywords: revolutionary. enemy of the state. Alive !After
the terms revolution, liberation, resistance, freedom were thoroughly
drained of signifying power by the predatory, vampire-like cartels in
advertising and Hollywood, they could be banished to the merely
unfashionable passé. It's not solely a question of who "speaks" like
this anymore but where in our society are these goals even considered to
have meaning?Today, enemy of the state probably sounds more like a dark
shiny movie title or an album download than something serious and
politically contentful. Its most likely association is to enemy
combatant -- people whom U.S. state power locks up and can torture in
lawless offshore dead zones like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. After
9-11 they stripped a huge layer of constitutional protection off.Yet
throughout history, empires and their regimes have singled out for
attack and removal all who stood up for the disempowered to challenge
the obscene "order of things." It remains a point of historical fact
that Marilyn Buck was an enemy of empire and an enemy of the state. The
national security state (laws, courts, prisons, police, FBI, military
intelligence, and other armed/security bodies) has long treated her, and
the other political prisoners, as people to be buried alive.To get a
sense of this it's instructive to look at a very abbreviated account of
what the government charged and convicted her of:1In 1973 Marilyn was
convicted in San Francisco of two counts of buying two boxes of legal
ammunition while using a false ID.At that time, her sentence of 10 years
in federal prison was the longest -- by far -- for this offense in U.S.
history. Many people believe that this disproportionate sentence came
because the government was well aware of her close support for the
freedom struggle of black people in this country, particularly the Black
Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. During the early 1970's,
the Black Panthers were under military, political, and media attack by
the FBI's COINTELPRO, as of course was Marilyn.Marilyn was particularly
hated because she was a young radical white woman from the South who
crossed the line against racial privilege and white supremacy. She was
unwilling to stand on the sidelines while good people were being hunted
down and destroyed by our government. She was explicitly seen as a race
traitor, a "n----r lover" by the FBI/police, and the state moved to make
an example of her to frighten others, especially radicalized white
women, from following this path.It was during this time that the FBI
began to characterize Marilyn as the "sole white member of the Black
Liberation Army (BLA)." And, in typical J. Edgar Hoover character
assassination style, the bureau began saying that she had a "Joan of Arc
complex."Inside the Alderson, West Virginia, federal prison, Marilyn met
the great Puerto Rican political prisoner and national (s)hero Lolita
Lebron -- who along with her comrades would be pardoned in 1979 by
President Carter after they'd served 25 years. (1)Marilyn integrated
herself into the community of women prisoners who did their best to
support each other. She worked at staying attuned to outside events,
from Watergate to the persistence of radical movements and the U.S.
withdrawal in defeat from Vietnam. After serving four years of her
sentence, Marilyn received a furlough in 1977 and did not return to
prison. Between 1977 and 1985 we must assume that she lived and worked
underground.2Recaptured in 1985, at the height of the Reagan era,
Marilyn underwent a total of four trials, including two prosecutions for
conspiracy, based on charges from the clandestine years. As a member of
the "Resistance Conspiracy" case she, along with Linda Evans, Laura
Whitehorn, Susan Rosenberg, Tim Blunk, and Alan Berkman, were accused of
taking actions toinfluence, change and protest policies and practices of
the United States Government concerning various international and
domestic matters through the use of violent and illegal means.Among the
alleged actions (in which no one was injured) were bombings of: the U.S.
Capitol building to protest the illegal invasion of Grenada; three
military installations in the D.C. area to protest U.S. backing of the
Central American death squads; the apartheid-era South African
consulate; the Israeli Aircraft Industries building; and the Patrolman's
Benevolent Association (to protest police murders of people of
color).While underground, Marilyn was also charged with conspiracy in
the successful 1979 liberation of political prisoner Assata Shakur (2)
and the 1981 expropriation of a Brinks armored car in which two police
officers and a security guard were killed. The government contended that
the conspiracy brought together black and white North American radicals,
under black leadership.To my knowledge, this was the first time since
the pre-Civil War era of John Brown that blacks and whites stood accused
of joining together to conduct guerrilla activities. In this case,
Marilyn was convicted of conspiracy; however, neither she nor her
co-defendant Dr.Mutulu Shakur (stepfather of slain musician and actor
Tupac Shakur) was convicted of any murders. Dr. Shakur was an original
member of the Republic of New Afrika and a founder of the Lincoln Detox
center in New York, which pioneered the use of acupuncture to help break
drug addiction in the black and brown communities.I feel a certain
defensive avoidance about commenting, in shorthand, on this era's
underground movements of the left, which, after all, came to their
historical end many years ago. This is an essay of mourning and homage
to Marilyn Buck who lived this struggle for many years; it's not an
assessment of politics and strategy. Her clandestine years are held in
protective secrecy by those who shared them. For her to have kept a
journal would have been to put collective security in unacceptable
jeopardy.Nonetheless, at minimum, it seems to me, we ought to recognize
more about these contributions than a basic recitation of her charges
and convictions. But the post 9-11 "war on terror" has had a chilling
effect on such conversations, despite the fact that these organizations
had absolutely zero in common with Al- Q'aeda or similar terror
killers.During Marilyn's powerful memorial celebration in Oakland,
California, on November 7, 2010, it was revealing to hear members of the
Black Panther Party tell how her underground skills helped them survive
the onslaught of COINTELPRO. Marilyn's tribute in New York was held a
week later at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Center (formerly the
Audubon Ballroom) in Harlem. As nearly 500 people jammed the room where
Malcolm was assassinated, a moving message was read from political
prisoner/POW and freedom fighter Sekou Odinga -- who was also convicted
for the liberation of Assata:She was someone who would give you her last
without any thought about her own welfare. I remember one time when she
shared her last few dollars with a comrade of ours, and later I was in
her kitchen and opened her refrigerator to find nothing in it and almost
no food in the house. I told her she had to let comrades know when she
was in need, and stop giving when she didn't have it to give. But she
never stopped because that's just who she was.There have been very few
actions to liberate PP/POW's and Marilyn was involved with more than
one. The roles she played were critical in not only liberation of POWs,
but also in making sure they remained free, never thinking about the
great threat and danger to herself.For the most part, what remains of
the left today dismisses these efforts as worthless adventurism or
ignores them altogether. While there's much of real value and importance
in some of these critiques, the fact that empire rests on its capacity
to inflict unlimited violence with impunity is rarely mentioned as
something to organize against.Isn't it frankly obscene that ex-President
Bush and high officials -- obvious war criminals -- who illegally
invaded Iraq under a web of lies, causing hundreds of thousands of
deaths, can walk free and add to their fortunes? Or that the top CIA
executives who destroyed more than 90 hours of videotape (an illegal act
in itself) showing their torture of suspects in contravention of
International Law, won't be prosecuted by the Justice Department.Isn't
it beyond acceptable that central components of the permanent
government, the CIA and Pentagon, stand exposed before the entire world
as conducting an illegal, organized program of torture against
prisoners, deemed "enemy combatants," yet for which no one is brought to
trial? Marilyn thought so. In her last year and a half she began writing
a novella, partially set in Guantanamo, about torture and
imprisonment.The many-sided crisis of global capitalism, run-away
environmental damage, and the decline of the U.S. empire, makes it
likely that we are entering a new age of rivalry and upheaval. Not only
is the U.S. deeply at war(s) in the Muslim and Arab world, conducting or
backing counterinsurgency campaigns in many more regions, but the rise
of both Blackwater style mercenaries and a mass gun-glorifying,
fascistically-inclined Tea Party movement means that real violent
momentum is on the right.On an immediate note, as I write this in late
2010, the news comes in that Johannes Mehserle, the white terroristic
cop, whose murder of Oscar Grant, an unarmed prone and handcuffed
African-American, at an Oakland BART Station on New Years 2009 was
captured on video, has been sentenced to only two years in jail.
Counting the 140 days he already did before making bail, he is expected
to serve in the neighborhood of just six months. In contrast, the
African-American football star, Michael Vick, got four years for the
violent crime of organizing brutal dogfights. This isn't a post-racial
society. Once more the obvious: it's open season on black and brown
people.Although I'm not aware of any formal written self-evaluation of
her underground political strategy, I do know that Marilyn engaged in
ongoing reflection and complex dialogues with trusted comrades about
this. When possible she tried to convey lessons to today's new movements
facing infiltration, grand juries, and conspiracy trials as a result of
their militancy. Marilyn didn't romanticize the underground struggle and
counseled activists strongly against militarist and adventurist
approaches. She changed as times changed AND she stuck to her
principles.Marilyn Buck at Dublin FCI, 1994. Photo by Mariann G. Wizard
/ The Rag Blog.keywords: Midlife- art and cutting throughBy the end of
the 1980's, while many of Marilyn's contemporaries were going through
midlife crises, occasioned by our fortieth birthdays, she faced the
ugly, cramped, totalitarian, arbitrary, cruel, violent, life-sucking,
and repetitive regime of prison life. After all the court trials, she
would be sentenced to 80 years.What she had hoped was the bright glow of
a revolutionary dawn would turn out to be the brief, fiery sunset of the
passing era which had launched her.Marilyn Buck was becoming a member of
that extraordinary global minority: people who are imprisoned by the
state for their political actions and beliefs. She sustained and was, in
turn, sustained by this community of comrades and their strong webs of
outside supporters and friends.In the Bay Area her diverse circle grew
wide, warm, and deep. The group Friends of Marilyn Buck was formed over
a decade ago and is going strong today. Members of her family
reconnected with her. While her physical range was totally restricted,
the world came to her through amazing visitors from many continents and
people's movements.She loved and mentored the children of activists,
some of whom grew up visiting her. She helped raise her godchildren,
Salim, Tanya, and Gemma. Day in day out, Marilyn participated with,
learned from, mentored, and hung out, suffered, and stood with women --
social prisoners and politicals -- in every prison where she lived for
the past quarter century. And she is being mourned behind those walls by
people who knew her and those who knew of her.(3)When she was captured
and imprisoned in 1985, I was a member of the Prairie Fire Organizing
Committee and spent time in Washington, DC, working as a paralegal on
the Resistance Conspiracy case. Around this time, I began to bring my
three year old daughter Gemma on social visits with Marilyn. Over the
next 25 years, the tender alchemy of love between them grew into a
strong family relation of their own.I imagine that many people spoke
with Marilyn about what, along with political solidarity, might help
sustain her over the long haul. Prisons are soul-murdering places and it
is a testament to human creativity and spirit that many, many prisoners
refuse to give in.From early on we shared poetry and she sent me this
poem, beloved by political prisoners the world over. Written in 1949,
it's by the Turkish revolutionary poet Nazim Hikmet. In its
entirety:Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in PrisonIf instead of
being hanged by the neck
you're thrown inside
for not giving up hope
in the world, your country, your people,
if you do ten or fifteen years
apart from the time you have left,
you won't say,
"Better I had swung from the end of a rope
like a flag" --
You'll put your foot down and live.
It may not be a pleasure exactly,
but it's your solemn duty
to live one more day
to spite the enemy.
Part of you may live alone inside,
like a tone at the bottom of a well.
But the other part
must be so caught up
in the flurry of the world
that you shiver there inside
when outside, at forty days' distance, a leaf moves.
To wait for letters inside,
to sing sad songs,
or to lie awake all night staring at the ceiling
is sweet but dangerous.
Look at your face from shave to shave,
forget your age,
watch out for lice
and for spring nights,
and always remember
to eat every last piece of bread--
also, don't forget to laugh heartily.
And who knows,
the woman you love may stop loving you.
Don't say it's no big thing:
it's like the snapping of a green branch
to the man inside.
To think of roses and gardens inside is bad,
to think of seas and mountains is good.
Read and write without rest,
and I also advise weaving
and making mirrors.I mean, it's not that you can't pass
ten or fifteen years inside
and more --
you can,
as long as the jewel
on the left side of your chest doesn't lose it's luster!Marilyn Buck
read poetry and wrote hundreds of poems in her lifetime. She's beloved
by poets both within and beyond the borders of this country.keywords:
transformation is her talent for livingThe high tide movements in this
country and worldwide, which so moved Marilyn to transform herself, had
definitively ebbed. Not only had the political maps changed but also the
rate of change accelerated. She kept abreast by reading voraciously,
talking with visitors, and conducting a far ranging correspondence.While
by no means a traditional Soviet-style leftist, she watched the Berlin
Wall fall in 1989 and then the consequences of the Soviet Union's
collapse. The Reagan-Daddy Bush era death squads and
counterrevolutionary wars, from Central America to Angola, had bathed
regions in blood to blunt popular revolutionary initiatives and, with
the Chinese government and party's embrace of greed, the "socialist
alternative" all but disappeared. Revolutionary forces laid down their
arms. Marilyn loved Cuba and followed events on this brave, unrepentant
island closely. The bombs of the first Iraq war rained down.Even from
behind the wire there were bright moments. On February 11, 1990, Nelson
Mandela walked out of a South African prison and shortly thereafter was
resoundingly elected president of his country. I remember visiting
Marilyn in 1990 at the Marianna, Florida, maximum-security prison with
my young daughters, Ona and Gemma, and cheering his release.(4) As we
slowly walked from the visiting room that day, they said, as they had
many times before and would into the future, "We want her to come home
with us."By 1993, she was transferred to FCI Dublin in Pleasanton,
California -- in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area -- where she would
live until the last months of her life. Over the years in Dublin she was
incarcerated with many political prisoners.(5) As the 21st century got
under her skin, Marilyn grew increasingly into a woman of many voices,
passions, and fundamental, lifelong commitments. She somehow bore bitter
setbacks and crushing disappointments to the limit, with
deliberation.Tendencies towards dogmatism and rigidity softened and
this, I believe, made her stronger. She had the capacity to actively
turn from spells of frank despair -- which could go on for a period of
time -- towards renewal, creative experimentation, and her practical
stance of being of use to others. This capacity to make a small and
decisive inner turn away from the soul-murdering, isolating regime of
prison towards a freedom of mutuality and care was, I believe, one of
her great talents..At her New York memorial tribute former political
prisoner Linda Evans spoke about Marilyn's AIDS educational work among
women inside. She also told us about how Marilyn organized a benefit in
the prison chapel to raise funds for black churches in the South which
were being burned to the ground. This was her practice many times
over.Linked to this was her breadth of interest and penetration of
thought. She read widely in natural sciences and literature. People who
visited and corresponded with her know how engaged she was in thinking
through the decline of revolutionary ideologies and movements over the
past quarter-century and how well she knew answers for the future would
not come easy.Fluent in Spanish, she followed with great enthusiasm the
new heterogeneous radicalism that has emerged in Latin America --
Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay -- over the past
decade or so. When I sent her some photos taken by a friend who
documented the FMLN electoral victory in March 2009, she wrote back
expressing her joy. In recent times as part of her ongoing effort to
grasp how the world was changing beyond prison walls, she studied
political economy with a group of women on the outside who were close
supporters.Earlier, somewhere around the late 1990's, I helped Marilyn
reenter college. Returning to school in midlife had been good for me and
I hoped it could assist her growth in unforeseeable and surprising ways.
She enrolled in New College of California where she went on to earn a
Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and her Master of Fine Arts Degree in
Poetics with an emphasis on translation.One of her teachers, Tom Parsons
-- who coordinated her distance learning process, which involved sending
tapes of classes to her so she could hear and do course work -- told me
she was the most gifted student he'd seen. Two of her other teachers --
the poet David Meltzer and Latin American literature professor Graciela
Trevisan -- spoke at her Bay Memorial Celebration and have played
important roles in the publication of her work.Marilyn’s interest in
women and feminism, poetics, literature, science, psychology, and
cultural studies began to flourish, allowing new bridges to unfold
across the last 10 years of her life. Those of us fortunate enough to
visit and correspond with her found ourselves growing along with her in
surprising ways. Marilyn, locked down in the totally controlled
penitentiary space was, paradoxically, our breath of fresh air.More to
come[Felix Shafer became an anti-imperialist/human rights activist while
in high school during the late 1960's and has worked around prisons and
political prisoners for over 30 years. He is a psychotherapist in San
Francisco and can be reached at felixir999@gmail.com.]
Footnotes:(1)Lolita Lebron, Andres Figueroa Cordero, Irvin Flores and
Rafael Cancel Miranda assaulted the U.S. Congress in 1954 to bring
attention to the colonial plight and harsh repression of Puerto Rico.
Along with Oscar Collazo, imprisoned for an earlier attack on the
residence of president Truman in 1950, they were released after serving
more than 25 years in prison. Lolita Lebron died at 90 years of age on
August 1, 2010 -- two days before Marilyn.(2)Assata Shakur was freed
from prison by an armed clandestine action in which no one was harmed.
Granted political refugee status, she lives in Cuba. Her autobiography,
Assata, is available for people who want to learn about her life in the
time prior to her liberation from prison. The website assatashakur.org
contains valuable information. On the day before she died, Marilyn
received a tender, personal audio message from Assata deeply thanking
her for her life and contributions.(3)In the soon-to-be published (March
1, 2011) book, An American Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own
Country, Susan Rosenberg, Marilyn's co-defendant, writes about daily
life in the remarkable communities created by women in prison.(4)Marilyn
was imprisoned in Marianna FL with North American anti-imperialist
political prisoners Laura Whitehorn, Susan Rosenberg, and Silvia
Baraldini.(5)Some of the women political prisoners she did time with in
Dublin: Ida Luz Rodríguez and Alicia Rodríguez, Carmen Valentín, Dylcia
Pagán, Ida Robinson McCray, Linda Evans, Laura Whitehorn, Donna
Willmott, and women from the Ploughshares and environmental
movements.The Rag BlogOnly a few posts now show on a page, due to
Blogger pagination changes beyond our control.Please click on 'Older
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http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/felix-shafer-mourning-for-marilyn-buck_26.html
Via InstaFetch
Mourning for activist, poet, and political prisoner Marilyn Buck, shown
at three stages of her life.
The blue afterwards:
Mourning for Marilyn, Part IIBy Felix Shafer
/
The Rag Blog
/ January 13, 2011
Part two of three[On December 13, Marilyn Buck, U.S. anti-imperialist
political prisoner, acclaimed poet, former Austinite, and former
original Ragstaffer, would have been 63 years of age. Scheduled for
parole last August after nearly 30 years in federal prisons, Marilyn
planned to live and work in New York. She looked forward to trying her
hand at photography again, taking salsa lessons, and simply being able
to walk in the park and visit freely with friends.Instead, after 20 days
of freedom, Marilyn died of a virulent cancer.In the first part of this
essay, Felix Shafer wrote about the pain of losing his friend and
artistic collaborator, Marilyn Buck, to cancer, and his determination to
mourn her in some way appropriate to her life, accepting and
experiencing grief as fully as great friendship demands.
He evoked the heady, seemingly revolutionary days of the late 1960s, and
Marilyn’s simultaneous coming of age with a generation that wanted to
change the world for the better and instead found itself criminalized in
the councils of government and power. Buck’s experiences, and her
fundamental identification with people over profits, led her
increasingly to seek effective ways to oppose injustice, and,
inevitably, brought her under official scrutiny.But the 1960s proved to
be a pre-revolutionary decade, and, along with others who refused to
read the repressive writing on the wall, Marilyn Buck became an
“internal exile”: a political prisoner of the State.-- Mariann Wizard /
The Rag Blog]keywords: revolutionary. enemy of the state. Alive !After
the terms revolution, liberation, resistance, freedom were thoroughly
drained of signifying power by the predatory, vampire-like cartels in
advertising and Hollywood, they could be banished to the merely
unfashionable passé. It's not solely a question of who "speaks" like
this anymore but where in our society are these goals even considered to
have meaning?Today, enemy of the state probably sounds more like a dark
shiny movie title or an album download than something serious and
politically contentful. Its most likely association is to enemy
combatant -- people whom U.S. state power locks up and can torture in
lawless offshore dead zones like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. After
9-11 they stripped a huge layer of constitutional protection off.Yet
throughout history, empires and their regimes have singled out for
attack and removal all who stood up for the disempowered to challenge
the obscene "order of things." It remains a point of historical fact
that Marilyn Buck was an enemy of empire and an enemy of the state. The
national security state (laws, courts, prisons, police, FBI, military
intelligence, and other armed/security bodies) has long treated her, and
the other political prisoners, as people to be buried alive.To get a
sense of this it's instructive to look at a very abbreviated account of
what the government charged and convicted her of:1In 1973 Marilyn was
convicted in San Francisco of two counts of buying two boxes of legal
ammunition while using a false ID.At that time, her sentence of 10 years
in federal prison was the longest -- by far -- for this offense in U.S.
history. Many people believe that this disproportionate sentence came
because the government was well aware of her close support for the
freedom struggle of black people in this country, particularly the Black
Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. During the early 1970's,
the Black Panthers were under military, political, and media attack by
the FBI's COINTELPRO, as of course was Marilyn.Marilyn was particularly
hated because she was a young radical white woman from the South who
crossed the line against racial privilege and white supremacy. She was
unwilling to stand on the sidelines while good people were being hunted
down and destroyed by our government. She was explicitly seen as a race
traitor, a "n----r lover" by the FBI/police, and the state moved to make
an example of her to frighten others, especially radicalized white
women, from following this path.It was during this time that the FBI
began to characterize Marilyn as the "sole white member of the Black
Liberation Army (BLA)." And, in typical J. Edgar Hoover character
assassination style, the bureau began saying that she had a "Joan of Arc
complex."Inside the Alderson, West Virginia, federal prison, Marilyn met
the great Puerto Rican political prisoner and national (s)hero Lolita
Lebron -- who along with her comrades would be pardoned in 1979 by
President Carter after they'd served 25 years. (1)Marilyn integrated
herself into the community of women prisoners who did their best to
support each other. She worked at staying attuned to outside events,
from Watergate to the persistence of radical movements and the U.S.
withdrawal in defeat from Vietnam. After serving four years of her
sentence, Marilyn received a furlough in 1977 and did not return to
prison. Between 1977 and 1985 we must assume that she lived and worked
underground.2Recaptured in 1985, at the height of the Reagan era,
Marilyn underwent a total of four trials, including two prosecutions for
conspiracy, based on charges from the clandestine years. As a member of
the "Resistance Conspiracy" case she, along with Linda Evans, Laura
Whitehorn, Susan Rosenberg, Tim Blunk, and Alan Berkman, were accused of
taking actions toinfluence, change and protest policies and practices of
the United States Government concerning various international and
domestic matters through the use of violent and illegal means.Among the
alleged actions (in which no one was injured) were bombings of: the U.S.
Capitol building to protest the illegal invasion of Grenada; three
military installations in the D.C. area to protest U.S. backing of the
Central American death squads; the apartheid-era South African
consulate; the Israeli Aircraft Industries building; and the Patrolman's
Benevolent Association (to protest police murders of people of
color).While underground, Marilyn was also charged with conspiracy in
the successful 1979 liberation of political prisoner Assata Shakur (2)
and the 1981 expropriation of a Brinks armored car in which two police
officers and a security guard were killed. The government contended that
the conspiracy brought together black and white North American radicals,
under black leadership.To my knowledge, this was the first time since
the pre-Civil War era of John Brown that blacks and whites stood accused
of joining together to conduct guerrilla activities. In this case,
Marilyn was convicted of conspiracy; however, neither she nor her
co-defendant Dr.Mutulu Shakur (stepfather of slain musician and actor
Tupac Shakur) was convicted of any murders. Dr. Shakur was an original
member of the Republic of New Afrika and a founder of the Lincoln Detox
center in New York, which pioneered the use of acupuncture to help break
drug addiction in the black and brown communities.I feel a certain
defensive avoidance about commenting, in shorthand, on this era's
underground movements of the left, which, after all, came to their
historical end many years ago. This is an essay of mourning and homage
to Marilyn Buck who lived this struggle for many years; it's not an
assessment of politics and strategy. Her clandestine years are held in
protective secrecy by those who shared them. For her to have kept a
journal would have been to put collective security in unacceptable
jeopardy.Nonetheless, at minimum, it seems to me, we ought to recognize
more about these contributions than a basic recitation of her charges
and convictions. But the post 9-11 "war on terror" has had a chilling
effect on such conversations, despite the fact that these organizations
had absolutely zero in common with Al- Q'aeda or similar terror
killers.During Marilyn's powerful memorial celebration in Oakland,
California, on November 7, 2010, it was revealing to hear members of the
Black Panther Party tell how her underground skills helped them survive
the onslaught of COINTELPRO. Marilyn's tribute in New York was held a
week later at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Center (formerly the
Audubon Ballroom) in Harlem. As nearly 500 people jammed the room where
Malcolm was assassinated, a moving message was read from political
prisoner/POW and freedom fighter Sekou Odinga -- who was also convicted
for the liberation of Assata:She was someone who would give you her last
without any thought about her own welfare. I remember one time when she
shared her last few dollars with a comrade of ours, and later I was in
her kitchen and opened her refrigerator to find nothing in it and almost
no food in the house. I told her she had to let comrades know when she
was in need, and stop giving when she didn't have it to give. But she
never stopped because that's just who she was.There have been very few
actions to liberate PP/POW's and Marilyn was involved with more than
one. The roles she played were critical in not only liberation of POWs,
but also in making sure they remained free, never thinking about the
great threat and danger to herself.For the most part, what remains of
the left today dismisses these efforts as worthless adventurism or
ignores them altogether. While there's much of real value and importance
in some of these critiques, the fact that empire rests on its capacity
to inflict unlimited violence with impunity is rarely mentioned as
something to organize against.Isn't it frankly obscene that ex-President
Bush and high officials -- obvious war criminals -- who illegally
invaded Iraq under a web of lies, causing hundreds of thousands of
deaths, can walk free and add to their fortunes? Or that the top CIA
executives who destroyed more than 90 hours of videotape (an illegal act
in itself) showing their torture of suspects in contravention of
International Law, won't be prosecuted by the Justice Department.Isn't
it beyond acceptable that central components of the permanent
government, the CIA and Pentagon, stand exposed before the entire world
as conducting an illegal, organized program of torture against
prisoners, deemed "enemy combatants," yet for which no one is brought to
trial? Marilyn thought so. In her last year and a half she began writing
a novella, partially set in Guantanamo, about torture and
imprisonment.The many-sided crisis of global capitalism, run-away
environmental damage, and the decline of the U.S. empire, makes it
likely that we are entering a new age of rivalry and upheaval. Not only
is the U.S. deeply at war(s) in the Muslim and Arab world, conducting or
backing counterinsurgency campaigns in many more regions, but the rise
of both Blackwater style mercenaries and a mass gun-glorifying,
fascistically-inclined Tea Party movement means that real violent
momentum is on the right.On an immediate note, as I write this in late
2010, the news comes in that Johannes Mehserle, the white terroristic
cop, whose murder of Oscar Grant, an unarmed prone and handcuffed
African-American, at an Oakland BART Station on New Years 2009 was
captured on video, has been sentenced to only two years in jail.
Counting the 140 days he already did before making bail, he is expected
to serve in the neighborhood of just six months. In contrast, the
African-American football star, Michael Vick, got four years for the
violent crime of organizing brutal dogfights. This isn't a post-racial
society. Once more the obvious: it's open season on black and brown
people.Although I'm not aware of any formal written self-evaluation of
her underground political strategy, I do know that Marilyn engaged in
ongoing reflection and complex dialogues with trusted comrades about
this. When possible she tried to convey lessons to today's new movements
facing infiltration, grand juries, and conspiracy trials as a result of
their militancy. Marilyn didn't romanticize the underground struggle and
counseled activists strongly against militarist and adventurist
approaches. She changed as times changed AND she stuck to her
principles.Marilyn Buck at Dublin FCI, 1994. Photo by Mariann G. Wizard
/ The Rag Blog.keywords: Midlife- art and cutting throughBy the end of
the 1980's, while many of Marilyn's contemporaries were going through
midlife crises, occasioned by our fortieth birthdays, she faced the
ugly, cramped, totalitarian, arbitrary, cruel, violent, life-sucking,
and repetitive regime of prison life. After all the court trials, she
would be sentenced to 80 years.What she had hoped was the bright glow of
a revolutionary dawn would turn out to be the brief, fiery sunset of the
passing era which had launched her.Marilyn Buck was becoming a member of
that extraordinary global minority: people who are imprisoned by the
state for their political actions and beliefs. She sustained and was, in
turn, sustained by this community of comrades and their strong webs of
outside supporters and friends.In the Bay Area her diverse circle grew
wide, warm, and deep. The group Friends of Marilyn Buck was formed over
a decade ago and is going strong today. Members of her family
reconnected with her. While her physical range was totally restricted,
the world came to her through amazing visitors from many continents and
people's movements.She loved and mentored the children of activists,
some of whom grew up visiting her. She helped raise her godchildren,
Salim, Tanya, and Gemma. Day in day out, Marilyn participated with,
learned from, mentored, and hung out, suffered, and stood with women --
social prisoners and politicals -- in every prison where she lived for
the past quarter century. And she is being mourned behind those walls by
people who knew her and those who knew of her.(3)When she was captured
and imprisoned in 1985, I was a member of the Prairie Fire Organizing
Committee and spent time in Washington, DC, working as a paralegal on
the Resistance Conspiracy case. Around this time, I began to bring my
three year old daughter Gemma on social visits with Marilyn. Over the
next 25 years, the tender alchemy of love between them grew into a
strong family relation of their own.I imagine that many people spoke
with Marilyn about what, along with political solidarity, might help
sustain her over the long haul. Prisons are soul-murdering places and it
is a testament to human creativity and spirit that many, many prisoners
refuse to give in.From early on we shared poetry and she sent me this
poem, beloved by political prisoners the world over. Written in 1949,
it's by the Turkish revolutionary poet Nazim Hikmet. In its
entirety:Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in PrisonIf instead of
being hanged by the neck
you're thrown inside
for not giving up hope
in the world, your country, your people,
if you do ten or fifteen years
apart from the time you have left,
you won't say,
"Better I had swung from the end of a rope
like a flag" --
You'll put your foot down and live.
It may not be a pleasure exactly,
but it's your solemn duty
to live one more day
to spite the enemy.
Part of you may live alone inside,
like a tone at the bottom of a well.
But the other part
must be so caught up
in the flurry of the world
that you shiver there inside
when outside, at forty days' distance, a leaf moves.
To wait for letters inside,
to sing sad songs,
or to lie awake all night staring at the ceiling
is sweet but dangerous.
Look at your face from shave to shave,
forget your age,
watch out for lice
and for spring nights,
and always remember
to eat every last piece of bread--
also, don't forget to laugh heartily.
And who knows,
the woman you love may stop loving you.
Don't say it's no big thing:
it's like the snapping of a green branch
to the man inside.
To think of roses and gardens inside is bad,
to think of seas and mountains is good.
Read and write without rest,
and I also advise weaving
and making mirrors.I mean, it's not that you can't pass
ten or fifteen years inside
and more --
you can,
as long as the jewel
on the left side of your chest doesn't lose it's luster!Marilyn Buck
read poetry and wrote hundreds of poems in her lifetime. She's beloved
by poets both within and beyond the borders of this country.keywords:
transformation is her talent for livingThe high tide movements in this
country and worldwide, which so moved Marilyn to transform herself, had
definitively ebbed. Not only had the political maps changed but also the
rate of change accelerated. She kept abreast by reading voraciously,
talking with visitors, and conducting a far ranging correspondence.While
by no means a traditional Soviet-style leftist, she watched the Berlin
Wall fall in 1989 and then the consequences of the Soviet Union's
collapse. The Reagan-Daddy Bush era death squads and
counterrevolutionary wars, from Central America to Angola, had bathed
regions in blood to blunt popular revolutionary initiatives and, with
the Chinese government and party's embrace of greed, the "socialist
alternative" all but disappeared. Revolutionary forces laid down their
arms. Marilyn loved Cuba and followed events on this brave, unrepentant
island closely. The bombs of the first Iraq war rained down.Even from
behind the wire there were bright moments. On February 11, 1990, Nelson
Mandela walked out of a South African prison and shortly thereafter was
resoundingly elected president of his country. I remember visiting
Marilyn in 1990 at the Marianna, Florida, maximum-security prison with
my young daughters, Ona and Gemma, and cheering his release.(4) As we
slowly walked from the visiting room that day, they said, as they had
many times before and would into the future, "We want her to come home
with us."By 1993, she was transferred to FCI Dublin in Pleasanton,
California -- in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area -- where she would
live until the last months of her life. Over the years in Dublin she was
incarcerated with many political prisoners.(5) As the 21st century got
under her skin, Marilyn grew increasingly into a woman of many voices,
passions, and fundamental, lifelong commitments. She somehow bore bitter
setbacks and crushing disappointments to the limit, with
deliberation.Tendencies towards dogmatism and rigidity softened and
this, I believe, made her stronger. She had the capacity to actively
turn from spells of frank despair -- which could go on for a period of
time -- towards renewal, creative experimentation, and her practical
stance of being of use to others. This capacity to make a small and
decisive inner turn away from the soul-murdering, isolating regime of
prison towards a freedom of mutuality and care was, I believe, one of
her great talents..At her New York memorial tribute former political
prisoner Linda Evans spoke about Marilyn's AIDS educational work among
women inside. She also told us about how Marilyn organized a benefit in
the prison chapel to raise funds for black churches in the South which
were being burned to the ground. This was her practice many times
over.Linked to this was her breadth of interest and penetration of
thought. She read widely in natural sciences and literature. People who
visited and corresponded with her know how engaged she was in thinking
through the decline of revolutionary ideologies and movements over the
past quarter-century and how well she knew answers for the future would
not come easy.Fluent in Spanish, she followed with great enthusiasm the
new heterogeneous radicalism that has emerged in Latin America --
Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay -- over the past
decade or so. When I sent her some photos taken by a friend who
documented the FMLN electoral victory in March 2009, she wrote back
expressing her joy. In recent times as part of her ongoing effort to
grasp how the world was changing beyond prison walls, she studied
political economy with a group of women on the outside who were close
supporters.Earlier, somewhere around the late 1990's, I helped Marilyn
reenter college. Returning to school in midlife had been good for me and
I hoped it could assist her growth in unforeseeable and surprising ways.
She enrolled in New College of California where she went on to earn a
Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and her Master of Fine Arts Degree in
Poetics with an emphasis on translation.One of her teachers, Tom Parsons
-- who coordinated her distance learning process, which involved sending
tapes of classes to her so she could hear and do course work -- told me
she was the most gifted student he'd seen. Two of her other teachers --
the poet David Meltzer and Latin American literature professor Graciela
Trevisan -- spoke at her Bay Memorial Celebration and have played
important roles in the publication of her work.Marilyn’s interest in
women and feminism, poetics, literature, science, psychology, and
cultural studies began to flourish, allowing new bridges to unfold
across the last 10 years of her life. Those of us fortunate enough to
visit and correspond with her found ourselves growing along with her in
surprising ways. Marilyn, locked down in the totally controlled
penitentiary space was, paradoxically, our breath of fresh air.More to
come[Felix Shafer became an anti-imperialist/human rights activist while
in high school during the late 1960's and has worked around prisons and
political prisoners for over 30 years. He is a psychotherapist in San
Francisco and can be reached at felixir999@gmail.com.]
Footnotes:(1)Lolita Lebron, Andres Figueroa Cordero, Irvin Flores and
Rafael Cancel Miranda assaulted the U.S. Congress in 1954 to bring
attention to the colonial plight and harsh repression of Puerto Rico.
Along with Oscar Collazo, imprisoned for an earlier attack on the
residence of president Truman in 1950, they were released after serving
more than 25 years in prison. Lolita Lebron died at 90 years of age on
August 1, 2010 -- two days before Marilyn.(2)Assata Shakur was freed
from prison by an armed clandestine action in which no one was harmed.
Granted political refugee status, she lives in Cuba. Her autobiography,
Assata, is available for people who want to learn about her life in the
time prior to her liberation from prison. The website assatashakur.org
contains valuable information. On the day before she died, Marilyn
received a tender, personal audio message from Assata deeply thanking
her for her life and contributions.(3)In the soon-to-be published (March
1, 2011) book, An American Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own
Country, Susan Rosenberg, Marilyn's co-defendant, writes about daily
life in the remarkable communities created by women in prison.(4)Marilyn
was imprisoned in Marianna FL with North American anti-imperialist
political prisoners Laura Whitehorn, Susan Rosenberg, and Silvia
Baraldini.(5)Some of the women political prisoners she did time with in
Dublin: Ida Luz Rodríguez and Alicia Rodríguez, Carmen Valentín, Dylcia
Pagán, Ida Robinson McCray, Linda Evans, Laura Whitehorn, Donna
Willmott, and women from the Ploughshares and environmental
movements.The Rag BlogOnly a few posts now show on a page, due to
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1 comment:
As a white psychiatrist who assisted two Black Panthers in creating a Seattle African American Museum, I can sure identify with the ton of bricks that falls on you when you cross that racial line.
In my recent memoir THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE (www.stuartbramhall.com), I describe what started as relentless prank calls and quickly progressed to stalking, break-ins and people trying to run me down with their cars.
I currently live in exile in New Zealand.
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