Marronage and Re-Creation in Assata

CLA JOURNAL 155 Marronage and Re-Creation in Assata Dominick D. Rolle My name is Assata Shakur, and I am a 20th century escaped slave.” On October 5, 1998, Assata Shakur, who was born JoAnne Chesimard, declared these words in an open letter which she presented to Pope John Paul II during his historic visit to Cuba.1 This black female revolutionary currently lives there, in exile, once under the protection of Fidel Castro after the Cuban government granted her political asylum in 1984 following her daring escape from an American prison. In 1987, Lawrence Hill & Co. published the author’s lyrical and poignant autobiography, titled Assata, five years following her escape in 1979 from the maximum-security wing of the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey. While Shakur’s first name—Assata—literally means “she who struggles,” she presents her harrowing escape from the clutches of incarceration as one who possesses the spirit of a slave revolt.2 The Black Liberation Army (BLA) task force orchestrated her daring flight from the confines of the prison’s walls. In this context, she portrays herself as a runaway slave—a maroon. She escapes the captivity of a prison, which she refers to as a plantation, after serving six years out of a life sentence.3 She was convicted on March 25, 1977 of the slaying of a white police officer, Werner Foerster. On May 2, 1973, she and two other members of the BLA, Zayd Shakur and Sundiata Acoli, garnered national media attention after they were brutally apprehended by New Jersey State Troopers on a turnpike. In the aftermath of this incident, Shakur was seriously wounded and Zayd Shakur and Werner Foerster both died. The details of this event and the subsequent legal trial suggest reasonable doubt concerning Shakur’s physical ability to cause Foerster’s death; because her arm was seriously injured during this incident, and her wounds were consistent with being assaulted with her hands raised while in the car—before Foerster’s death.4 Describing her dreadful apprehension she recalls: “I felt myself being dragged by the feet across the pavement. My chest was on fire. My blouse was purple with 1  Pope John Paul II visited Cuba from January 21-25, 1998. It was the first time a Pope had ever visited this island nation. Please see Assata Shakur’s letter on her official website: Assata Shakur Speaks! www.assatashakur.org. 2  “Assata” is a name derived from West Africa and from the Yoruba language. See Williams, Evelyn. Inadmissible Evidence. Lawrence Hill Books, 1993. pp. 77. 3  Shakur expresses this in Eyes of the Rainbow (00:14:56-00:15:33). 4  See Williams, Evelyn. Inadmissible Evidence. Lawrence Hill Books, 1993. pp 77-120. “ 156 CLA JOURNAL Dominick D. Rolle blood. I was convinced that my arm had been shot off and was hanging inside my shirt by a few strips of flesh. I could not feel it.”5 During an interview conducted by an anonymous interviewer, Shakur describes her brutal assault in even more striking detail: “I was half dead—hospital authorities had brought in a priest to give me last rites—but the police would not stop torturing me.”6 Similar to the omnipresence of death which pervades the genre of the slave narrative, Shakur’s narrative reiterates her brushes with a possibly violent demise at the hands of the police who “torture” her. This description of her apprehension and interrogation as “torture” frames the New Jersey State troopers’ vicious assault as not only extrajudicial but also protected by law and social customs when they punish her to avenge the loss of their fellow officer. Their heinousness ushers a barrage of unfair legal maneuvers that helped to ensure that Shakur could not receive a fair trial.7 Furthermore, under New Jersey law her mere presence at the crime scene as a supposed accomplice amounted to sufficient cause to convict her.8 In the months following her apprehension, she was indicted on several charges including armed robbery, murder, attempted murder and kidnapping.9 Shakur’s affirmation of her status as a tortured, modern-day slave brings into focus the intricate ways in which American law...