FREE
HYBACHI
LEMAR

Impregnable is the inner mind of Hybachi LeMar, MAY HE TRIUMPH – 5 laps no brakes

Hybachi LeMar speaks from SCI Huntingdon:

(contributing to the Midwest Censorship Update 2025 zine)

In The Palestinian Prisoner’s Movement: A History, it’s written that “the primacy of the liberation of prisoners as a collective goal of the Palestinian resistance is also emergent from the unity of imprisonment as a place of militant development, training, and socialization”.

It teaches of the universality of imprisonment as a weapon of warfare, and occupation, and that whenever there is occupation, there is rebellion, and that even the most brutal forms of imprisonment can themselves become schools of revolt.

In “Black Anarchism and the Black Radical Tradition”, Atticus Bagby-Williams and Nsambu Za Suekama articulates that “black anarchist politics reside within a cultural oral tradition”. Letters from jail and from exiled revolutionaries and self-published literature in the form of zines, primarily because many initial black anarchist intellectuals emerge from prison struggles.

Brother Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin points out that these materials are weapons against fascism, illiteracy, self-hatred, and lack of self-esteem. Printing and sharing these ideas revolutionary enough to subvert these interlocking oppressions are an essential means of our psychological self-defense.

Defense against kick-backs, coverups; of mice that eat through ramen noodle packets, of chipped-walls, peeling ceilings, roaches, no cell windows or air conditioning; slave labor, periodic denials of suicides. We’re in a violation of freedom of press: it takes maneuvering  under radar, under the censors, ideological – [this is a call from Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution Huntingdon. This call is subject to recording and monitoring]

Not a single lifer I spoke with where I’m confined was aware of the 2016 nor 2011 country-wide prison strike: a political form of protest – largely due to targeted newspapers denied to them by mailroom officials.

What helped me get through while in the hole? Self-discipline, meditation, and the application of knowledge. A healthy vibe of: do pushups and study. Do sit ups and study. Do dips off the side of the toilet and recall what I’ve learned while pacing the cell.

Robin D.G. Kelly acknowledged the way Robert F. Williams insisted that “all young black activists undergo personal and moral transformation”. It was a familiar lesson embodied in the lives of Malcolm X and later George Jackson, the idea that one possesses the revolutionary will to transform one’s self.

Government attacks on newspapers and books have played a particularly violent role in South Africa during apartheid. For example, as early as the 1950s, it was behind the repression of union papers like Morning Star; and in the 80s, on books like “Biko”, on the South African Bantu revolutionary who was banned from being communicated with while in public as well as his teachings before his torture and execution.

The power of print can also be felt in Rojava. Before 2011, when North and East Syria was pregnant with revolution, we saw several similar circumstances: labor pains, miscarriages of justice, society saturated with corruption and nepotism; surveillance and censorship everywhere. These very conditions, however, spawn a species of thinkers who evolved, who brood over books, whose diet consists of ideas, who find themselves stirring, mutating, in the reservoir of the repressed social imagination.

Before his assassination August 21, 1971, general and field marshal in the Black Panther Party George Jackson spoke of his revolutionary awakening, of his transformation. While in San Quentin he wrote “I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels and Mao; and they redeemed me.”

And from an isolated cell on İmralı Island, Abdullah Ocalan – the now-renowned revolutionary of the Kurdish freedom movement – became exposed to the social ecology writings of anarchist Murray Bookchin. He cross-bred Bookchin’s ideas with his own principles of self-determination, which assisted dynamically in hatching the Rojava revolution.

Ocalan analyzed how our ecological crisis is a symptom of human hierarchy and domination. And with this diagnosis, directly inspired the democratic autonomous administration of North and East Syria DAANES with a radically feminist revolutionary prescription of direct democracy against the state.

The force of censorship has failed to repress the resurrecting powers of Black consciousness our martyr Steve Bantu Biko gave rise to; nor did it stop General George’s message in blood from making it clear to the American government that if it continues to kill us, then there will be funerals on both sides.

In the final analysis, the censorship of ideas is a form of psychological warfare. The state might ban our books, they may dispose of our bodies, but they fail to annihilate our ideas.

Our beloved compa Casey says “forward ever; forever forward.” It’s practically scientific: the more the repressive hands of state forces struggle to hold us back, only catapults us further into the expanding arms of the revolution.

Listen to Hybachi LeMar speaking from SCI Huntingdon:

When I was six or seven, my mom tried to start feeding me oatmeal before school. I tried to let her know “Ma, I don’t like oatmeal that much”. After insisting, I gave in; asking that she’d let me eat it in my room while doing my homework at my desk before heading out. Each morning, I’d come down with my empty bowl and homework done: she’d smile, while taking my bowl, letting me know how proud she was of me before kissing my cheek, letting me know to have a good day at school. I was in the 3rd grade. One day, about two weeks later, I got home from school, opened the door, and there she was standing; as if waiting for me. I looked up, she said “Boy, I went to clean your room, when I opened the lid to your desk, it was overflowing with oatmeal!”

I don’t know if I ever got the chance to let her know that I understand the struggle of a single mom making sure I was always full and had something to eat, even if it was oatmeal at times. I was elated when she mixed it with pieces of bread for flavor. She always knows how to make the most out of anything, and with love; and I appreciate her.

She used to carry me on her back in a papoose, and clip my nails. She’d go over my homework with me, making sure I got my math right, and helped me sound out my words. I learned patience from her early on, when she’d take me to her job when she was a home healthcare worker. I loved the attention she always showed: from letting her boyfriends know that I came first, to humming and singing the theme song to the Muppets show. (Hybachi sings). Ah, boy.

This birthday, I’m saying Mom: thanks. Thanks for caring for me and for loving me. Thanks for flavoring my oatmeal, and for the delicious okra rice and hamburger hookups with the adobo. Thanks for washing my clothes by hand in the tub each week, and for ironing them each morning; for making sure I brushed my teeth and washed my face. Thanks for taking time to watch movies with me on the couch on Saturday nights, and for having my back at parole hearings. I love you mom, I got your back too. I’m proud of you and love you always.

Your son always, Thunna – aka Hybachi LeMar.

Hybachi LeMar speaks from SCI Huntingdon:

Muata Ashby wrote that “The mind is capable of taking any direction it is given, provided the mind is disciplined and controlled.”

An aphorism in The Anarchybalion teaches that “The revolutionary is a free thinker able to walk out of one door in the mind and into another.”

In a world where the struggle for survival is not only a material goal but a mental priority, it’s of fundamental importance that we consistently exercise self discipline in our social lives as well as in our minds.

We make our beds each morning; it infuses us with the feeling that we have it together. We look in the mirror and tell ourselves a positive affirmation like “I”m a revolutionary”, or, “I’m a thinker”.

Those of us who are handy capable maintain presence of mind despite our dilemmas and find ourselves standing taller, standing stronger: in fact, more mentally intact than the most ice-hearted oppressors throughout the world who let their spirits be broken.

When you carry yourself like this, you can’t help but to glow. It reflects your maturity level and revolutionary development, despite how inhumane or reactionary the odds.

You operate with an elevated sense of self-esteem when you take, even if only for a moment, control over your life and project this inner power to change the world.

Remember that unlocking our inner powers requires dedication and patience. Never forget the power of your spoken word can bring a revolutionary shift in perspective.

You can use your tongue to touch someone to free them from an emotional prison. To paint an image into your and to another person’s mind, as a responsible art.

You’re free inside when you define yourself as you see fit, as Title-holder of who you are. As Erriel Kofi Addae expressed, “Being a self-definer is a liberating act of ceasing to allow those that oppress to define the oppressed.”

What this essentially means is that the power is yours on what to think, how to feel, what to direct your focus on. To detach yourself from any emotions that may have been holding you down. And you arrive from the dusk an emissary of the dawn; possessed with an inseparable sense of self. You return to bed at night a warrior of your own inner well being.

We are sad to announce that, although Hybachi LeMar was scheduled to be released on parole from IDOC Jacksonville Correctional Center on October 4, 2024, he was instead picked up by Pennsylvania authorities on a warrant for an alleged parole violation. He was transported overnight from Illinois to Pennsylvania and is now incarcerated at SCI Smithfield.

Update Message from Hybachi LeMar:

Solidarity Greetings.

The following are the events surrounding my October 2024 transfer from Jacksonville, Illinois.

On October 4th, I was exported by U.S. Security Transportation Services van from Jacksonville Correctional Center, first to Connersville, Indiana, where I slept in a hallway of its county jail overnight, en route to Pennsylvania. I arrived the next evening at SCI Smithfield.

And while the other two passengers who were picked up from different parts of the country were given their customary browns, clothing exchange, I was put in a cell in order to place all the clothes I had on into a box. No socks. No shirt. No underwear.

I was handed a smock—a thick, blue, velcro, padded observation garment with no sleeves, too hot to wear, ostensibly under the pretext that the nerve medication prescribed at the previous institution had to be taken and re-prescribed. And with me having to be monitored in such a way in case I would undergo any detox symptoms.

Doing jumping jacks; recalling knowledge I memorized from an almanac that Midwest Books to Prisoners mailed me in Cook County Jail; and planning what to do to assist uplifting communities once I’m released, were resourceful in centering my mind and keeping it balanced on a solid foundation of constructive thoughts, the two days I spent in that particular cell.

Due to my history of clairvoyance and clairaudience, which has been misnomered as schizophrenia, I was moved upstairs on the psychiatric wing for “closer observation” to see how I do.

In spite of it all, I remain cool and collected, and hope you are too.

Before closing this message, it’s important to always remember, whether you find yourself alone in your room, or naked inside of a cell: as we drift 67,000 miles per hour around the sun, no one can take away the fact that you can center your mind on a thought along the way.

The thought you choose is yours to make, yours to keep, one to be appreciated with genuine understanding. And it’s a gift, a primordial power that no one can take away.

Sending you solidarity, love, and strength.

Sincerely Yours,

Hybachi LeMar

You can continue to write Hybachi using this form or by sending a single sided letter to this forwarding address:

Hybachi LeMar calls in from Jacksonville Correctional Center to participate in the “Zines As Resistance” virtual panel at Chicago Zine Fest:

Hybachi LeMar speaks from Jacksonville Correctional Center:

From my Chicago squat, few things kindle the curiosity of our incendiary potential than underground zines, etched from behind the barricades of intercontinental resistance! Sometimes I keep a favorite in my jacket to read in an alley. Sometimes I sleep with them by my pillow, and I admit, it helps me feel like I’m not alone.

In the Black ghetto, we see it all: the ins and outs, left and right; eyes that lack an outlook, and the look-outs around the way. An alcoholic getting his pocket picked on the train by someone less privileged.

“Doors now opening.” Dinnnng Donnnng

The 4th floor curtain that closes the moment your intuition tells you to look upward and to the right… The hustler shifting his toothpick in his mouth with his tongue watching your every move. The experience of alienation, like you don’t want to live any more… The spell of hopelessness momentarily broken by fingers snapping in a dice game.

I never finished high school and pirated most of my education from libraries, self-help books from used bookstores, and Each One Teach One zines. The non-verbal communication that becomes second-nature to many of us with nothing to lose is really a reflection of the emptiness we embody: where the newscast appears emotionally deaf while reporting a string of shootings & murders over the weekend before moving onto the weather. The flash of sirens turn everything blue and red when it’s dark. High grade weed wafting from a car window helps people get by, and somewhere there’s a six year old who can see through you.

Depending on whether or not your energy’s good, the black cat under the alley dumpster you suddenly make eye-to-eye contact with could be your walkie part way through the night.

The first few steps – you look back. It looks the other way. You keep walking. You smile – noticing it’s not far behind, trotting to keep up.

It takes the edge off.

From my South Side squat, where resistance is fundamental to my survival, zines like “Zabalaza” and “Tokologo” – a newsletter from the Tokologo Afrikan Anarchist Collective – add perspective to the reality that I’m far from alone, neither in the everyday struggle that comes with being black in the ghetto, nor in the revolutionary ideals that I’ve adopted & study from the edge of my mattress beside my piece.

From this side of the Atlantic, I reflect on deep-rooted affinities by candlelight with pan-African appreciation to Mompe and Mtetwa. The legacy of segregation Black folk endured here in amerika and the apartheid in South Africa are not far removed from the gentrification and post-apartheid capitalist governments we’re simultaneously resisting against!

Lekhetho Mtetwa, expressing in a 2014 issue of Tokologo that “The System of Voting For Leaders is Killing Us,” is relevant to us struggling for survival in the amerikan ghettos today. His rationale that “we know … that real majority rule doesn’t exist,” and that “it is clear the Constitution is used to blind us into believing we have real democracy;” is as precise as Anarchist ancestor Lucy Parson’s instruction to “never be deceived that the rich will let you vote away their wealth”.

Our Struggle is global. Nowhere is this shown better than in zines – our intercontinental and intercommunal underground press.

As recently as 2008, Pitso Mompe analyzed in his call to “Stop Evictions, Stop the State, Defend the Working Class and Poor” the findings from the International Alliance of Inhabitants, which reported that “between 30 and 50 million people in 70 countries worldwide live(d) under constant threat of being forcibly evicted.”

Mtetwa wrote that “we need to bear in mind that our brothers and sisters fought the previous apartheid government due to its brutality towards our people. And even today we are still fighting the government, and in the same way they fought the previous one.”

W.E.B. DeBois wrote of reading’s power of giving “leisure for reflection and self-examination”, it’s legacy of liberating youth with “dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, and self-respect”; and in this intimate encounter – in this process of self-discovery, consider their mission, and that “if living doesn’t give value, wisdom, and meaning to life, then there is no sense of living at all”.

T. W. Thibedi – a South African militant, virtually unknown outside the Continent & a contemporary of DuBois, is noted in Zabalaza’s section “Black Stars of Anarchism” as writing to the “Workers of the Bantu races”: “(T)he sun has arisen: the day is breaking, for a long time you were asleep”.

Around the world, we’re rising with the eye-opening reminder that the gains of the capitalist class makes at the expense of the dispossessed are accumulated in the absence of our autonomy.

In the words of Bongani Maponyane: “We want a world based on freedom, liberation, anti-authoritarianism and anti-statism. A world free from all forms of domination; capitalism and the state.”

Hybachi LeMar speaks from Jacksonville Correctional Center:

What it means to be different in a world where you’re not seen as the same as everyone else? To relate with the feeling of not fitting in; like a beast in search of meaning in a field of flowers and bloom, To feel closed in… and it’s empty, like a seashell inside. To be the only quiet one in the class, and to wonder, why am I here?
To read the posthumously writings of truth-seekers distance themselves in the alleyway of deep thought, and mysteriously disappeared through.
It’s relevant in giving serious thought to the destruction of western civilization, all the while knowing how high chances are that sharing these thoughts cling to whoever listen to circle their finger around their ear, especially if you elaborate how every ghetto groomed in civilized insanity will find redemption in the rights of the uncivilized insane, is to intimately understand the feeling of a moth lost in the most celebrated seasons of butterflies, is to wonder if there’s a place in this world to fit in, why you’re not like everyone else, and to seek wisdom to alleviate yourself from the loneliness in parting ways.
But in parting ways with others, we get closer to finding ourself. To be different, to be unique; not being like the others means you’re exceptional, and remarkably rare. It’s the moth that devotes itself to the nature of light, that’s fortunate to find something worthy onto the sacrifice of its wings. If being civilized is to mean anything, be it to situate yourself against the domestic colonialism that’s been so savagely pitted against you.
There are pages, beyond the veil of night, for future generations to make wonder along the same alleys in search for similar truths, once discovered, become yours to treasure. It is as Pythagorus directed, declining from the public ways, walk in unfrequented paths. When your mouth is closed, no one can see inside of your head. The emptiness in the seashell contains the sounding of the depths from which it was drawn. Everything on Earth is in a state of turning inwards in the direction of finding peace. The beauty of the flower can be found in the development of the beast.

Hybachi LeMar speaks from Jacksonville Correctional Center:

Zines are more than thoughts from the left, and ways to connect; they’re also repositories of culture and revolution resistance from our sector, the class of the have-nots.

One of my favorite underground zines is on the life of Maria Nikiforova a.k.a. Marusya. She was an anarchist from the Ukraine who was virtually expunged from the Soviet histories during the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Born in poverty, she left home at 16: she emerged a terrorist in defense of the people and spent most of the years of her life underground.

Born in 1885 in Alexandrovsk, a city experiencing rapid industrial growth at the time with a large and militant working-class population. She made ends meet by babysitting, working as a sales clerk, and then from washing bottles at a vodka distillery at the turn of the 19th century.

She began doing factory work, and it was around this time she joined a local group of anarchist-communist revolutionaries who actively advanced the “philosophy of class struggle, an end to capitalism, and all forms of oppression”, as brother Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin aptly defines it. Based largely on the theories of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, anarchist communism advocates for community and worker councils being in control of the means of production and distribution instead of the private owners who profit off the sweat of working-class labor. It’s not to be confused with communism based on state ownership of the economy, control of production and distribution, or on party dictatorship. It has no support or connection with Lenin or Stalin or Trotsky. Essentially speaking, it’s a revolutionary tendency where communities benefit fully from the working-class production instead of bosses or any other exploiter.

While the ideas of anarcho-communisn developed in the 1870s Russia, it began spreading and reaching the Ukraine in 1903, becoming so dynamic a force that there were as many as 90 anarcho-communist groups organized there between 1905 and 1907. During this time in 1906, around the world in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, a list of principles were being signed for a new Jewish-Anarchist paper Broyṭ Un Frayheyṭ (“Bread and Freedom”), which included:

1. Immediately awaken the degraded and depressed to struggle against all that degrades and oppresses humanity;
2. Encourage and develop the anarchist and revolutionary movement among all people and nations;
3. Educate and lighten the labor movement everywhere especially in America;
4. Maintain and further develop the militancy and fighting spirit in which our young comrades brought from cold Russia and their contempt for the dismissive indifference of the bourgeois and the slavish patience of the workers.

The members of the anarchy-communists in Ukraine being even stronger and more organized than in Russia provides a glimpse in just how far advanced Maria Nikiforova aka Marusya was in the cause.

Whereas political tyrants were targets of earlier Russian terrorists, Maria belonged to a group that engaged in “motiveless terror”, which advocated the necessities of attacking agents of economic oppression based solely on the class position they occupy.

The pent-up frustrations of the Russian empire’s lower classes subjected to an existence run by a monarch who is an honorary member of the Union of the Russian People, an organization roughly equivalent to the Ku Klux Klan, permeated the atmosphere.

After a series of bombing attacks, including on an agricultural plant that killed a chief cashier and guard, she was arrested when the bomb she tried to blow herself up with to avoid capture failed to explode. She was sentenced to death, but then she was underage; not yet 21. She was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor Siberia after her transfer from the Peter and Paul Fortress.

Not long after she escaped, reaching as far as Japan, finding refuge by anarchists in New York and Chicago, she published articles under various aliases in the Russian language press.

Around 1912, she settled in Paris, after being wounded in an anarchist bank robbery in Barcelona, being treated clandestinely in a clinic in France. She liked painting and sculpture, and attended school for art; met other artists and poets, hung out at cafes upon her arrival in France in 1913. She married Witold Brzostek, a Polish anarchist, before rear riving in Russia in 1917 where she threw herself into the Revolution in Petrograd. There, Marusya went to the famous Kronstadt Rebellion giving speeches on Anchor Square with crowds numbering between 8,000 and 10,000 sailors. The provisional government nearing collapse was due partly with thousands of Kronstadt sailors to unite with the fighters in Petrograd. And when the government began hunting them down, hunting down the Bolsheviks and anarchists, she made her way back to Alexandrovsk in July 1917, eight years after her escape as an outlaw.

Chudnov, a former Makhnovist, physically described Marusya as “32-35, medium height, with an emaciated, prematurely-aged face in which there was something of a eunuch or hermaphrodite. Her hair was cropped short in a circle.” After meeting her in 1919, Kiselev, the Bolshevik agitator, described Marisa as “around 30 years old. Thin with an emaciated face, she produced the impression of an old maid type. Narrow nose. Sunken cheeks. She wore a blouse and skirt and a small revolver hung from her belt”. Malcolm Archibold wrote that “generally physical descriptions fall into two camps; one emphasizing attractiveness, the other repulsiveness”.

Marusya was well loved. As a militant anarchist organizer, she robbed from the rich, gave to the poor, and cared for her class. Once, after being traded from prison for a Soviet chairman who was kidnapped by worker delegates, Marusya was carried over the head of her compas. She showed the legendary Mr. Makhno around to the workers group, and escaped death on several occasions.

Her final trial was held September 16, 1919, in what represented a field court marshal, where she defiantly swore at the court after being sentenced; breaking down only when saying goodbye to her husband before they were shot.

Marusya gave impassioned speeches calling for workers to struggle against the government, and for a free society. She made it clear on several occasions that the anarchists are not promoting anything to anyone. The anarchists only want people to be conscious of their owns situation, and to seize freedom for themselves.

It was with a revolutionary spirit that repeated: “the workers and peasants must as quickly as possible seize everything that was created by them over many centuries and use it for their own interest” that led to the overthrow of the government in the Ukrainian anarchist revolution.

As Malcolm Archibald captures inside of this sensational underground zine, at a 1913 Russian anarch-communist conference in London, where Maria Nikiforova signed in as Marusya, one of the main concerns was the lack of anarchist education and agitational tracks.

It’s estimated that 700,000 people commit suicide every year. Imagine if these oppressed hundreds of thousands discovered they’re able to find redemption in the revolution against depression. I myself understand what it feels like, with many others, becoming radicalized with exposure to revolutionary knowledge, who find it worthier what brief moment we have in this world to help liberate those who unnecessarily suffer under our collective oppressions.

How could they blame us? How could they blame us after a life of so much oppression and being our people suffer? Who could blame us for resolving, with a gulp of sincerity in our throats, to devoting our lives to uplifting the people and be willing to lay down our lives for the oppressed?

Hybachi calls in to deliver this statement outside of MCC Chicago at Running Down The Walls 2024:

Thanks everyone for coming out!
I want you all to take a moment to picture a dream that you have, a goal that you can see in your mind.
It could be free healthcare, free housing for the folks sleeping under a viaduct.
Maybe you can hear yourself effectively speak without fear, or society’s prisons within as well as without, become obsolete.
Now think of the barrier standing between you and that dream. It could be a barrier of submitting to authority with blind obedience all of your life. It could be a wall of fear.
Imagine how satisfying the crunch of those walls turned into rubble would feel under your shoes as you run them down.
You’re a gift. To rid yourself and the world from oppression is priceless: let nothing stop you from breaking whatever barriers stand in the way.
From your anarchist compaz confined at Jacksonville Correctional Center, to you, and the abolitionists around the world tonight: Unite, Incite, and Run Down the Walls!