FREE
HYBACHI
LEMAR

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!

“Revolutionary Greetings.

My name is Hybachi LeMar and I’m a member of the Black Autonomy Federation Chicago Local Organizing Committee. I’m sending this message to support the release of scholar activist dedicated community organizer and friend Casey Goonan.

When I was houseless, he let me eat and sleep in his home. Each morning we asked each other, “What’s your positive affirmation for the day?” We take a meaningful moment before sharing a positive truth, both of us knowing it’s significance in our lives when we internalize it as an instrument of our liberation. More often than not, for the years I’ve known Casey, he’s neglecting his own needs to prioritize those of others, has led me to ask him instinctively, if he’s taken his meds yet. And I’ve lost count how many times he thanked me for reminding him before asking if I remembered to take mine too.

With barely anything in his pocket, I watched him fill a perfect stranger’s diabetic medication prescription. He’s loved, and I don’t mean by me, but by street walkers and other commoners throughout Chicago.

He’s organized fundraisers in one particular area of the city on several occasions. We’d pass out $20 bills he prefilled in envelopes, for every single houseless person on the street, or asking for change. From one corner to the next, up one gentrified block and up another, not letting him know the contents, or lingering around for thanks; often with the clenched fist of unity and a solidarity smile.
It was heartwarming to hand out gloves, masks, hygiene supplies like cases of hand sanitizer, chips, and other community needs for free, under the el train one blistering winter amidst the pandemic from a makeshift warming center he’d open each weekend. A smile on people’s faces glow from appreciation, from those of us who know him, to the newcomers asking ‘And this is for free?’ when glancing at the fold-out tables, not far from the turnstile.
“Mm-hmm! Yep! Help yourself,” Casey responds, wishing them a good day and to take care, which is substantial to folks rendered socio-economically invisible in the city.
Free, the root word in freedom, has been top priority as an agenda item for Casey from dusk til dawn every day of every year that I’ve known him.
He likes to remind everyone how special we are in this world, by showing how easy and necessary it is to care for each other, and to help a world that could certainly use it, offering a space and a table of togetherness, and free education.
As a publisher, he provides an invaluable resource for writers. With freedom inspired by billions of us, it speaks not only to our conscious, but to our collective benefit to know we’re substantially freer in this world with him inside it. We, particularly poor folk throughout the city, appreciate him.

The socio-economically engineered gentrification spiraling genocide by poverty in Chicago’s northside has been as politically protracted as an alienated southside housing he helped me leaflet. His spirit of spending his last to buy insulin for the diabetic outside the electric doors at Walgreens is the same one alive in the Holy Land 5 that sends medicine and food supplies to orphans in Palestine.

Casey Goonan is a walking model of our aspired-after ideals as Human Beings. A genuine listener, whose aura is evident in the integrity of compassion. His ideals against genocide are shared by me and each of us around the globe who envision a world released from it’s grip.

Free Casey Goonan! Free Jack Mazurek! Free the Cop City 61! Drop the charges against the Merrimack 4 and the Mountain Valley pipeline defenders! Free the Holy Land Foundation 5! Free Leonard Peltier! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Free Cletus C Rivera! Free them all!

In solidarity with the Columbia University Hinds Hall demonstrators and the CUNY 22.

Love and soli,

Listen to a recording of Hybachi LeMar from Jacksonville Correctional Institution:

In the East African language of Swahili, the word for self-determination is Kujichagulia. It means “to define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined, named, created for, and spoken for by others.” (Mfundishi Jhutyms Ka N Heru El-Salim)

In West Africa, the Yoruba tradition of Ifa, teaches the significance of choosing our Ori – our head. And with this choice, with this conscious decision in defining who exactly we are, determines our destiny.

Among the might Bantu of South Africa was taught that we share in Ubwenge, which is the power to use the faculty of our will, to influence our spirit, to bring about what doesn’t exist and what does exist into existence. And with this bringing, we direct the course of events.

Why is this important? For several reasons. For one: every manifested thing has a name; and it’s by the name that everything manifested is recognized. In a world where so many people suffer from being emotionally bullied, struggling with dealing with identity crises, go through life misunderstood, misrepresented. We find that we can empower ourselves, and affect reality as we know it, as self-definers.

We find also that we can choose what kind of head-frame to occupy, to possess, to embody: and we can exercise the power of being the wagoner of our own ways of thinking. With Ubwenge, the power to use our will to affect our spirit, we become the controller of our consciousness; the pilot of our own plane.

This being said- there’s a few important things for you to remember:

You’re not the mistakes you learn from in life, you’re the Life that learn from mistakes.
You’re not the lessons that you learn from in life, you’re the Life that learns from your lessons.
Our ability to use the instruments of knowledge plays a pivotal role in finding a sense of direction throughout the course of our lives.
Before you leave this world just as suddenly as you arrived in it – discover your mission and Rise!

Take your Destiny in your hands!

Listen to Hybachi LeMar speaking from Jacksonville Correctional Institution:

Reflections From the Wretched of the Earth
(A Response to Study Materials Sent from True Leap Press)

James Yaki reflected on how “revolutionary thinking begins with a series of illuminations. It is a result of both long preparation and a profoundly new – a profoundly original beginning. But every profound change is at the same time a sharp break with the past.”

Who better can relate to a need for a break than the dispossessed, whose sense of powerlessness is due to the course of their lives being in the hands of those that exploit them; who react when their buttons are pushed, who have nothing to lose; who’d think of more reasons to die than to live for; who’d rather say Good-Nite to this world than waking instead inside it.

“What would it matter anyway, if I left the world? Who’d even care to think of it tomorrow if I leave it tonight? I don’t want to ache inside it anymore”. These are the feelings of the repressed, who look faithlessly to the future after a lifetime of doors being slammed in their faces!

In the opening of radical books they read in private the teachings of marginalized intellectuals cast in their mold… They hold a memorial in the hearts for the martyrs… for Malcolm, for Lolita, for Tortuguita. They pour libations for Lumumba. In their solitude study, they find sanctuary: some develop step by step from a city staircase; others, on their lunch break in the cafeteria corner. It fills them with the sense of self when traveling by train; from solitary confinement, with conscientious consideration by candlelight in the abandoned building they squat.

Suddenly, with a semiautomatic beside an underground zine, they don’t feel so alone anymore, when they read in Lorenzo: “Although we recognize the importance of paramilitary violence, and even guerilla attacks, we do not depend on war to achieve liberation alone; for our struggle cannot be won by force alone. No, the people must be armed beforehand with understanding and agreement of our objectives, as well as trust and love of the revolution.”

They know Fanon is speaking for them when they read “these vagrants, these second class citizens … these children who seem not to belong to anyone, the hopeless cases, all those who fluctuate between madness and suicide”. It touches them. It touches a part no public school teacher has been able to reach. A part of themselves no government paid guidance counselor could ever grasp. In this intimate moment of clarity, they become illuminated in the awareness that their pencils were moved to kindle the fire in the consciousness of the miseducated and lost.

“These jobless, these species of subhumans,” Fanon referred to, feel the flame of affinity being fanned in the innermost parts of their being. “They redeem themselves in their own eyes and before history.” They’re awakened by the epiphany that “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill it or betray it.”

In our study session, we shifted “Wretched” diagonally between us, as X guided his reading finger and paused at the word ‘proletariat.’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘It means broken worker. The working class, whether we have a job or not. It’s referring to us, the part of society who makes our living working ourselves to death and are lashed to the dollar throughout the world’. We continued: “The lumpenproletariat constitutes a serious threat to the security of the town, and signifies the irreversible rot and the gangrene eating into the hearts of colonial domination. So the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, and the petty criminals, when approached, give the liberation struggle all they have got, devoting themselves to the cause like valiant workers.”

We followed where Fanon was coming from when he spelled out how “Whereas the colonist or the police officer can beat the colonized subject day in and day out, insult him and shove him to his knees: it’s not uncommon to see the colonized subject draw his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive look from another colonized subject.” To progress, it’s imperative that the ghetto streets and lockdown units reflect on how “the oppressor, who never misses an opportunity to let the blacks tear at each other’s throats, is only too willing to exploit those characteristic flaws of the lumpenproletariat’s ignorance and lack of political consciousness. Comprehending this puts us at a tactical advantage in achieving our aims.

The reason we rise when we feel the system’s knee on our neck is because “Deep down the colonized subject acknowledges no authority. He is dominated but not domesticated. He is made to feel inferior but is by no means convinced of his inferiority.”

We don’t study like this for certificates, we study for our survival. To build a new psychology in the shell of the old. To arm ourselves with knowledge before institutions attempt to ideologically disarm us by taking our books. We’re drawn to develop our character – to experience the presence of mind that comes with the genuine sense of understanding. And in the process of putting revolutionary ideals into practice, we see it’s nature itself that rewards us around the world, who radically develop in the light of the teachings, who transforms, when with patient consideration, reflects on the relevance of our existence.