Whether you trust her as a narrator or believe her story exactly as she tells it (and I think there’s plenty of reason to believe almost all of her story, and trust most of her story as narrator), it’s hard to come away from this book or any write-up of Assata Shakur’s life and not feel like she was absolutely railroaded by the US government. Sometimes people in liberal-ish circles have a real hard time dealing with ambivalent or worse contradictory feelings about the US. For me, I think we’re more or less stuck with it, and I have enough privilege to make a reasonable go of it, and don’t want to stand in the way of any progress that we need to make as a country (within some constraints I won’t get into). I have never had any illusions about police behavior, and the fact that not every single police officer I have ever met has treated me as horribly as the ones who treated me the worst (and again, I’ve gotten off pretty lightly) has done nothing to make me trust any of them. So when you begin this memoir with Assata Shakur being shot, arrested, beaten, had said within her earshot that they should wait until she’s dead to move her, chained to a hospital bed, not allowed to speak to her lawyer (and then only for five minutes), being charged in the hospital, being arraigned in the hospital, and then being interrogated by police without her lawyer present, well, it shouldn’t actually matter much if you believe she is guilty or not. And that’s all before you hear her side of the story, which is convincing. And if you’re not convinced, then you get the on-record version of a second trial where she has been accused of robbing a bank. Her photos are doctored, she’s accused of losing weight in prison on purpose to not look like the accused bank-robber, and she’s made to wear a wig and glasses in court, and they still can’t convict her.
So for me, I don’t need to worry too much about the ultimate truth of innocence or guilt because the lengths that they go to to destroy are exponentially beyond what would be reasonable. Plus, I DO believe her.
So that’s about half of the memoir. The other half of the memoir intersperses scenes of Assata Shakur’s awakening to her suppressed state as a Black woman in the US. She’s deeply critical of the state apparatus, of Conservatives, of Liberals, of White socialists/Leftists, of certain elements of the Black Liberation Army and Black Panthers, and of plenty of other things. I think some of her analysis of US history is not wrong necessarily, but overly opaque at times, and I can’t get behind her fawning adoration of Castro’s Cuba, even if her reasons for feeling this way are more than justified.
