Escaping the Prism… Fade to Black: Poetry and Essays

297 Pages·2015·3.077 MB·English

by  Jalil Muntaqim

Table of Contents
Poetry Like Bread: e Necessity of Poetic Wholeness
PART I
My Poetry
AMERICA IS A PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Ya Hear Me?!
e Hunger
e Profane, Arcane & Mundane
Who Am I?
Why?
For Zakia
DIVEST FROM THE PIC TO END MASS INCARCERATION
e Haunt
With All My Heart
WHEN FOOD BECOMES A WEAPON
Tag!!!
Long Distance Swimmer
Back to Blackness
Pieces
THE HANDSHAKE
A Long Kiss Goodnight
Clipped Wings
I Seek Truths
e Reality of Love
THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT — PRISON SLAVERY AND
MASS INCARCERATION
Speaking Spirits
Sunflare
Chocoholic
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Smart Aleek
TARGETED KILLINGS
What Color Is Your Blues?
Flippin’ the Script to a Revolutionary Tip
A Climactic Interlude
e Crazed
In ose Times
GOVERNMENT SANCTIONED KILLINGS
Chairman Fred & Captain Mark
Talking To Depression
WHO’S BIG BROTHER???
I Cry Genocides
What Is Your Question?
Katrina!!!
Hip-Hop Wrong!
New Afrikan Anthem of a Ruph Ryder
IMPOTENT (DECOLONIZE THE PIC)
PAIN
No Liberty
L.I.F.E.
Kingdom Come
Brotherhood
BLOW-BACK?!
Out-Post
e Bush Family
e Program
HANDS UP—DON’T SHOOT
Full Moon
Hollar Back
Terrestrial Rebel
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WHEN POLICE DIE!
e Enchanter
Marshmallows In A Storm
Elephants vs. Tigers
I-Clone
SEIZE
A MOTHER’S LOSS (FOR THE MOTHERS WHO LOST A
CHILD FROM AN UNJUSTIFIED POLICE SHOOTING)
Winter Wax
“I Am Jalil… In e Court Of Oz”
PART II
e Other Kind: On the Integrity, Consistency, and Humanity of Jalil
Abdul Muntaqim
About Jalil Muntaqim
APPENDIX: NEWKILL DOCUMENTS
DEDICATION
more kindle books from kersplebedeb
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Escaping the Prism … Fade to Black:
Poetry and Essays by Jalil Muntaqim
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Escaping the Prism … Fade to Black: Poetry and Essays by Jalil Muntaqim
ISBN 978-1-894946-81-0
Kindle edition published in 2015 by Kersplebedeb
Copyright Jalil Muntaqim
is edition copyright Kersplebedeb
Please note that artwork by Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, Zolo Agona Azania, Bec Young, Pete
Railand, Nicolas Lampert, Rocky Dobey, and We Are the Crisis, which appeared in the
print version of this title, has been omitted from the digital version.
To order copies of the book, contact:
Kersplebedeb
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Canada
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Also available from:
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Since 1998 Kersplebedeb has been an important source of radical literature and agit prop
materials.
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e project has a non-exclusive focus on anti-patriarchal and anti-imperialist politics,
framed within an anticapitalist perspective. A special priority is given to writings regarding
armed struggle in the metropole, and the continuing struggles of political prisoners and
prisoners of war.
All books and pamphlets published by Kersplebedeb are available from AK Press, Amazon,
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Poetry Like Bread: e Necessity of Poetic Wholeness
by Walidah Imarisha
My poetry is not fairy tales
or lullabies or sing-a-longs,
Naw — it is a rebuke of the
ostrich syndrome — a swift kick
in the ass to make you stand up
straight and take responsibility
for your failures, demanding you
live life fully and love completely …
—Jalil Muntaqim, “My Poetry”
Political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim’s writing doesn’t live in ivory towers,
wrapped in elitism and dripping privilege. Jalil Muntaqim’s writing breaks
the pedestal meant for it, sharpening the shards for survival.
Weaving together essay, analysis and poetry into one, his collection
Escaping the Prism recognizes none of us is beyond critique and
responsibility — not even art. His work fulfills the edict by Salvadoran
revolutionary poet Roque Dalton that “poetry, like bread [be] for
everyone.”
A former Black Panther member, a consummate and continued freedom
fighter, Jalil has spent more than two-thirds of his life in prison. Infused in
his poetry is a sense of urgency as present as the need to free him; the clarity
rings out, not shrouded in secrecy, but loud as a bomb. It echoes with the
punishment he has suffered, the decades of his life stolen. It rings with his
continued commitment to organizing even through iron bars and barbed
wire, using any and all tools available to him.
Poetry has become part of his arsenal of justice, and Jalil’s work
embodies the words of Martinique-born Afro-Caribbean revolutionary
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Frantz Fanon: “I want my voice to be harsh, I don’t want it to be beautiful.
I don’t want it to be pure … I want it to be torn through and through …”
In his poem, “My Poetry,” Jalil closes by saying “My poetry … is my
life,” and it is absolutely life you will find in these pages. Gritty, complex,
raw life. Life that was meant to be extinguished, stomped out by the entire
weight of an oppressive system. But like Tupac’s rose that grew in concrete,
Jalil’s work and words, his humanity, his life, slips through bars.
is collection is not just about rebuke, but a commitment to living
fully and loving completely. To exploring all aspects of humanity, all pieces
that make up liberation. Many of the poems look at sex, at sensuousness, at
humans joining flesh and sometimes hearts. Escaping the Prism flips
seamlessly between poems about sexual pleasure, and political essays on
incarceration, in such a way that the reader understands implicitly they are
intimately connected. at this is human. His poems around desire, lust
and longing also allow the reader to explore the complexities, convolutions
and sometimes contradictions of masculinity, compressed by decades in a
cell.
As Ward Churchill writes in his essay in this book, Jalil’s writing is
absolutely born out of love. Some of the pieces, like “For Zakia,” are so
imbued with conscious vulnerability, it makes the heart ache, this poem,
written for a daughter who was in the womb when he was arrested, a
daughter he has only known through bars.
Jalil’s writing, his case, his life, shows both the continuity of repression,
but also the continuity of resistance. As part of their attempt to disrupt this
continuity of resistance, governmental forces hoped to use prisons to smash
a lineage of struggle that for Black people reaches unbroken back to the first
attempted African enslavement.
Escaping the Prism defies the attempts of the state to silence political
prisoners, to disconnect them from those on the ground working to create
change. In the context of the international Black Lives Matter movement,
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this roar for justice led by Black youth, Jalil’s poetic voice, and the voices of
all our political prisoners, are vitally necessary to continue the continuity of
Black resistance.
Walidah Imarisha
May 2015
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