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.”