Excerpt — Paul B. Preciado’s Afterword to “Hello Cruel World, 2nd Edition” by Kate Bornstein

José Martí organized and unified the movement for Cuban independence and died on the battlefield. His dedication to the goal of Cuban freedom made his name a synonym for liberty throughout Latin America.

This José Martí anthology brings together his bilingual poetry, political essays, cultural writing, and letters, into one definitive volume. Readers will discover a literary genius and an insightful political commentator on the troubled relationship between the United States and Latin America.

As Cuban revolutionary leader Carlos Rafael Rodríguez once wrote, "Martí was the guide of his time but also stands as the anticipator of ours." 

INTRODUCTION
BY IVAN SCHULMAN

José Martí (1853–95) was a revolutionary writer in every sense of the word. Born of Spanish parents in colonial Cuba, he witnessed the oppressive measures imposed on the island by the Spanish colonial administration. Early in his life he made the decision to fight for the liberation of his country and similarly oppressed Antillean peoples. But Martí was not merely a political revolutionary: he was a revolutionary in literature who gave expression to the emerging ideas and emotions of a modernizing world in a language and style that perplexed and fascinated many of his contemporaries. Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (1859– 95), for example, wrote of the Cuban that at times he could not follow his ideas, “because his ideas have sturdy wings, strong lungs, and rise inordinately… [in his] magical style we lose ourselves from time to time, like Reynaldo in the garden of Armida…”

Martí’s conscious resolve to devote himself to revolutionary political and literary ideals became clear shortly after the first Cuban war against Spain (1868). During this period he participated in the publication of clandestine newspapers and circulars, including El Diablo Cojuelo (The Crippled Devil), and later, La Patria Libre (Free Homeland). In the latter, in 1869, he published a dramatic poem, “Abdala,” in which the main character sacrifices his life to defend his country against its oppressors. For a while the colonial regime took no action against Martí; but in 1869, when he and a friend, Fermín Valdés Domínguez, signed a letter questioning the political behavior of one of their classmates, Martí was accused of treason against the Spanish colonial regime. He was tried and condemned to six years’ hard labor in the quarries of San Lázaro in Havana.

The San Lázaro experience is recorded in a political essay “Political Prison in Cuba,” published in 1871, that is both moving and revealing: moving, because it records an adolescent’s reaction to the harsh, sometimes nightmarish conditions of a forced labor camp; revealing, because it foreshadows the expressive force of a mature writer. “Political Prison in Cuba” is directed to the Spanish authorities; it is a plea for humanity and reform in the administration of the island. It is also a milestone in the evolution of the prose in a period of metamorphic change called Modernismo in Latin American literature and culture. “Political Prison in Cuba” was followed by a companion piece entitled “The Spanish Republic and the Cuban Revolution,” written in Spain in 1873, where the young Martí was exiled after his sentence was commuted.

Martí’s Spanish exile marks the initiation of a lengthy period of peregrination: Spain, Mexico, Venezuela, and, finally the United States, a productive period during which he wrote, spoke to Cuban and Hispanic revolutionary and cultural societies, and organized the invasion of colonial Cuba in 1895.

Spain is where Martí received his formal education: at the universities of Zaragoza and Madrid he earned degrees in philosophy and law. Late in 1874 he left Spain for Mexico, with a brief stay in France. After Europe, Martí found Mexico to be a hospitable environment. He participated widely in the country’s cultural life, wrote for the Revista Universal, helped found the Sociedad Alarcón, debated the merits of spiritualism and materialism in a national forum, wrote a play entitled Amor con amor se paga (Love is Repaid with Love), which premiered in 1875. It was in Mexico where Martí met Carmen Zayas Bazán, who was to become his wife and, subsequently, the symbol of a painful, frustrated domestic life. The rise of the dictator Porfirio Díaz signaled the end of Martí’s Mexican residence and the renewal of his wanderings in search of a place where he could work with personal freedom. He returned briefly to Cuba, responding to the pull of family and a desire to resettle in his homeland.

Guatemala was Martí’s next resting place. His stay there also proved to be brief. He was appointed to the faculty of the Escuela Central de Guatemala where he taught French, English, German and Italian literature as well as the History of Philosophy. For a while life seemed prosperous and serene; he married Carmen Zayas Bazán, contributed to Guatemala’s developing cultural life, and wrote of his gratitude to that country in a slender volume entitled “Guatemala” (1878). A shift in political factions made life there untenable for him. Once again Havana drew him; but while working in the Havana law offices of Miguel Viondi, his revolutionary activities resulted in his second deportation to Spain in 1879.

Instead of staying there, he left almost immediately for France, and then to the United States. While in New York, he met Charles A. Dana who invited him to write for the New York Sun; but New York was not to become Martí’s home until after he attempted life in Venezuela. In 1881 he went to Caracas with the hope of finding refuge and solace in “Our America,” as he called the Hispanic countries of the New World. Things went well in Venezuela, but again, for an extremely short period. Nevertheless, in that time he succeeded in founding an important Modernist magazine, the Revista Venezolana. In its second issue of July 15, 1881, he defended his magazine’s style, and in the course of this defense, developed one of Modernism’s early manifestos:

Some of the “simple” pieces that appeared in our last issue have been tagged and polished exquisite. What follows is not a defense, but a clarification. Private speech is one thing; passionate, public discourse, another. Bitter polemics speak one language; quite another, serene biography… Thus, the same man will speak in a different language when he turns his searching eyes to past epochs, and, when with the anguish and ire of a soldier in battle, he wields a new arm in the angry struggle of the present age… The sky of Egypt ought not be painted with London fogs, nor the youthful verdure of our valleys with the pale green of Arcadia, or the mournful green of Erin. A sentence has its adornments, like a dress, and some dress in wool, some in silk, and some become angry because their dress is wool and are displeased to see another’s is silk. Since when has it become a defect to write in polished form?… It is essential that notice be taken of the following truth about style: writers should paint just as the painter does. There is no reason for one to use different colors from the other.

When Martí left Venezuela for New York, he renewed his writing for the Sun. New York was to be Martí’s permanent home until he returned to Cuba, just prior to his untimely death fighting for Cuba’s liberation on May 19, 1895. In New York, which both attracted and repelled Martí, he wrote his best prose and poetry. Amidst the din and clatter of an industrializing society, plagued by labor strikes, anarchist terrorist attacks, and racial and religious conflicts, Martí peered into the fortune of a capitalist society, and from this vantage point drew conclusions he described in his prose pieces about life in the United States written for Latin America’s major newspaper, La Nación (Buenos Aires). His association during 1883 with this newspaper was followed by invitations from others, among them La República (Honduras), La Opinión Pública (Uruguay), and El Partido Liberal (Mexico).

To earn enough for survival, this extraordinary writer became a versatile professional: a translator for Appleton, a clerk for Lyon and Company, a consul for Uruguay (1887) and Argentina (1890). Writing and political organization took up the rest of his energy and time. Martí immersed himself in the careful planning of the Cuban revolutionary process. He organized patriotic clubs not merely in the New York area, but all along the Eastern seaboard, especially in Florida among the tobacco workers of Tampa and Key West. Addressing these working class groups he displayed a passion and fervor that transfixed his audiences. Unfortunately, many of these speeches have been lost. A few that have survived, such as “Los pinos nuevos” (“The New Pines”) show the hand of a writer of learning, passion, and rhythmic prose, and of an accomplished political tactician who skillfully swayed his audience.

With the generals of the revolutionary forces, Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, Martí organized and monitored the émigré groups. In 1884 he had a falling out with the generals, especially Gómez; but later he worked with them again to raise the funds and provide the organization and arms for the 1895 invasion of Cuba. Martí’s was a Herculean task, superior to his dwindling physical strength, vitiated years before by lesions and diseases contracted in the quarries of San Lázaro. Yet such was his determination to see the liberation of his homeland that will and desire sustained a calendar of activities which would have sent more robust souls to an early grave.

Patriotism and martyrdom in the cause of Cuba and Puerto Rico consumed his being. Writing and his faith in the revolution kept him alive. To be sure, there were frequent moments of despair. His experiences with human cruelty were such that at one point he wrote: “It is with horror that one looks within many intelligent and attractive men. One leaves in fright, as from a lion’s den.” This modern Machiavellian analyst wrote: “Men like to be guided by those who abound in their own shortcomings.” Cognizant of human foibles, but committed to social redemption, he noted: “Man is ugly, but humanity is beautiful.” Martí’s was an 18th century faith in the perfectability of humankind, in social progress and in the feasibility of socioeconomic reform. Like the thinkers of the Enlightenment, he needed to be persuaded of the inevitability of violent change, which he espoused only when all other viable channels were exhausted.

Martí found temporary release from anguish in poetic creation. Poetry had a double interface for him: “To create beautiful poetry one has only to turn one’s eyes outward: to Nature; and inward: to the soul.” Nature was an enchantress, who consoled, fortified and soothed. By contrast, internal suffering purified inspirations and provided release from the oppressive realities of everyday existence. Pain, said Martí, “matures poetry… Man needs to suffer. When he lacks real pain, he creates it. Pain purifies and prepares.” Convinced that suffering engenders art, the poet poured his personal anguish into his verses.

Martí wrote three major books of poetry: Ismaelillo (1882), Versos sencillos (Simple Verses, 1891), and Versos libres (Free Verse, 1913). A fourth volume, entitled Flores del destierro (Flowers of Exile, 1933), somewhat loosely organized by Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda, and some other poems have been traditionally included in other volumes. Ismaelillo and Simple Verses were published in New York during the poet’s lifetime; he read the proof for both works. Free Verse was first published posthumously, transcribed inaccurately from complex manuscripts and corrected by the present writer.

All of the volumes have one element in common: one which Karl Vossler described as the characteristic of all poets of intense fantasy: a capacity for liberating themselves from the norms of the linguistic community; by passing under or over words, such poets create works by means of notes, melodies, rhythms, images, gestures and dances. This is the case with Martí and that of other Modernist poets of his generation: they were subjective creators, attentive to internal flux. In this connection, Fina García Marruz finds syllabic groupings of suffering in Free Verse, and Cintio Vitier senses the voice of a poet of light and movements, who creates a baroque, obscure, foaming, volcanic, abrupt and strange world. Martí’s is a highly original verse, in which there is both innovation and tradition, a paradoxical admixture common to the poets of the Age of Modernity, intent upon recasting the past to express an unstable present.

Of Martí’s three principal poetic works, Ismaelillo is a free, luminous volume, written largely in Caracas, and published in New York. Its imagery is so singular that the poet felt compelled to comment on its oneiric quality in a letter to Diego Jugo Ramírez on May 23, 1882:

I’ve seen those wings, those jackals, those empty goblets, those armies. My mind was the stage, and on it all those visions were actors. My work, Jugo, consisted of copying. There isn’t one single mental line there. And, how should I be responsible for the images which come to me without calling them? I have done nothing more than put my visions into verse.

The volume is dedicated to the poet’s absent son. The poet occupies the center of a visionary space in which the perils of modern life assault the poet/narrator. “Alarmed by everything, I take refuge in you,” he writes to his son in the brief introduction. The absent son is ever-present in verses whose levels of reality and dreams reach beyond the limits of 19th century positivism and reason. “I dream with open eyes,” reads the first line of “Sueño despierto” (“I Dream Awake”). The visionary quality is sometimes surrealistic: “And on the backs/ Of giant birds/ Endless kisses/ Awaken.” Though a process of inversion, a metamorphosis is effected by filial love; the father conjures up the vision of the son, and in this vision is reborn through the son: “I am the son of my son!/He remakes me!” This identification of father and son orchestrates and unifies the metaphoric eruptions of a volume, which, at bottom, is a musical concert centering around three motifs, filled with chaotic, tender and troubled leaps to a loosely associated poetic space. Ismaelillo’s motifs are the poet, the son, the world; the leaps are executed in the form of voyages in which traditional time and space concepts are unhinged so that the poet-son can move freely outside the limitations of a traditional Logos. In “Musa traviesa” (“Mischievous Muse”) he writes: “Often, a rider/ In momentous dreams,/ I ride long hours,/ Through the air./ I pierce rosy clouds/ I fathom deep seas,/ And in the eternal bowels/ I travel.”

In these travels the poet/son/seer comes upon battles, visions of martyrdom, caves, dances, erotic scenes, heights of idealism and depths of materialism; it is a confusing world the narrator captures: reflecting the frightening realities of modern life. We witness torments, confused scenes, temptations, moments of disarray, and spirited battle. It is a spectacle of “splendid transformations” that boils, creaks, bites and assaults the agonists of modern life. In keeping with these decentered, fragmented visions, the son is Ismael, Jacob, the object of pleasure, love, tenderness, the heart, the soul of the father and, finally, not merely his reflection but his very being. Thus, this volume, more than the lyric prayer book Rubén Darío found it to be, more than the “Art of Being a Father” which he saw in it, is rather a voyage that incarnates a modern mythic sense of experience and existence.

Equally personal, and equally anguished are the poems of Free Verse. Darío said of them that they were free verse, produced by a free man. Martí called them “my irritated Free Verses,” “my rough hendecasyllables, borne of great fears, or of great hopes, or of an unbridled love of liberty, or of a painful love of liberty…” In his preface, Martí insisted, once again, as in his Ismaelillo, upon the visionary quality of his verses, visions that he “copied” and for whose strangeness, singularity and passion he alone was accountable. These are verses written, “not in academic ink, but rather in my own blood,” an image used by the poet to refer to their personal quality as well as the aura of sacrifice and martyrdom that pervades so many of the poems. Their key words are love, liberty, unconquered, passionate, natural, vigorous. To this linguistic base, José Olivio Jiménez adds another that centers around the terms circumstance, nature, transcendence, and three concepts: love, suffering, duty. The originality of these poems consists in their anguish. It is a poetry of existence in which the poet/narrator confronts the imperative to transmit an authentic, sincere, necessary reality. “What matters in poetry,” he wrote, “is to feel, regardless of whether it resembles what others have felt; and what is felt anew, is new.”

Images of nature, often traditional in origin, appear in this volume as in others by the Cuban, but it is man, not nature, that occupies the center of his poetic discourse. It is a poetry that speaks of daily cares, experiences, existences; it radiates in circular patterns, reaching toward the upper spheres, that is, toward a quality of transcendence noted by Jiménez, and which in spatial form points to the fundamentally realistic; it is based upon specific, concrete circumstances: those of his life, and of the emotions of his existence. Unamuno called Martí’s words “acts”; but when the Cuban poet harnessed his words to his thoughts he created novel structures which even today surprise us by dint of their modernity.

The visionary quality of his first volume persists in Free Verse; present also are the dualities of experience, the antithetical images that constitute Martí’s assumption of the contradictions of modern life and the aspirations of perfection and idealistic placement of his visionary poetics. The dualities sometimes represent a world truncated, or the poet’s simple vision of life: “I have lived: I have died.” The poet in his anguish wishes to sacrifice himself to his fellow man, for that is his mission in life. At times, he feels useless, unable to realize the martyrdom that will release him from his terrestrial struggle and allow him, finally, to seek an undefined solace in a vaguely expressed afterlife.

Less anguished, at least at first glance, are the poems of Simple Verses. Their apparent serenity is linked to their traditional, popular metrics, and to the poet’s insistence upon more direct and unencumbered forms of expression in comparison with the “volcanic eruptions” of the previous volumes. In this volume there is an emphasis upon the harmony of life and philosophy, or at least upon a system of transformation from crass, material forms to noble, ideal objects. And this search for and belief in idealism and harmony lends the volume a placid quality which has disquieting moments, for the Simple Verses are poems born of pain and anguish: “My friends know how these verses were born in my heart. It was in that winter of anguish, in which out of ignorance, or due to fanatical faith, or fear, or courtesy, the Spanish American republics met in Washington, in the shadow of the dreaded eagle,” wrote Martí in the introduction. Martí represented Uruguay at the International Monetary Conference in Washington, D.C., called by the United States to standardize currency in Latin America. Martí led the opposition of the Latin American countries to the plans of the United States to impose a silver standard.

Elsewhere, the poet explained that “To suffer is a duty. With what does one write well in prose or verse, but with blood?” The poet’s anguish is personalized. The verses speak of his individual view of the world, as the poet/seer turns his eyes upon the universe internalized, and describes its external and internal structures. The poet has assumed the universe, and from a symbiotic stance he offers new insights into its meaning. Martí’s experience is broad: it includes the divine spirit, the terrestrial clamor of voices, envy, hate, human ugliness, materialism, idealism, the metamorphosis of reality. The nature of writing poetry is also present here as in previous volumes. But, unlike these, experience is expressed from the viewpoint of a compendium, seen, to be sure, from the interior world (“I know,” “I’ve seen,” “I hear,” “I am,”) of the creator in search of harmony:

All is beautiful and constant,

All is melody and reason,

And all, like a diamond,

Is dark before light.

In Simple Verses one finds the most frequently cited Martí verses: IX is devoted to “La niña de Guatemala” (“The Girl From Guatemala”), and X to “La bailarina española” (“The Spanish Dancer”). Other sections may be less musical and more anguished, but all point to the future in modern poetry. In VIII and XI the poet carries on a dialogue with his doubles: a page/skeleton; a dead friend. In the end, in XLVI a conversation is established between the poet and his verse in which he declares, “Verse, as one our fates are sealed:/We are damned or saved together!”

Both Martí and his poetry have survived; but not merely Martí the poet. Martí is one of Spanish America’s most original prose writers. “Verses,” he said, “can be improvised, but not prose; prose style comes with maturity.” His early prose works, mentioned above, were followed by a voluminous opus of imaginative, rhythmic, chromatic pieces that found their way into the cultural and literary life of his period through a network of contemporary artists and the columns of the most prestigious newspapers of both North and South America. It is perhaps as a cronista, a chronicler of contemporary events — political, social and literary — that Martí is best known. He read accounts of current events voraciously. Such was his imagination that he was capable of creating visions of them as they occurred, even when he was not a witness to them.

His 1889 account of the opening of the Oklahoma frontier, for example, appears to have been written by a journalist astride a horse, who observed the excitement and violence of the events. His moving account of the 1886 earthquake in Charleston, South Carolina, contained the shrill cries and the emotional despair, the fervent, frightened prayers of the residents, as if the chronicler himself had experienced the tragedy. Martí wrote with vision, compassion, uncanny perception and a highly developed concept of innovative style on subjects as diverse as European monarchs, American anarchists, New York elevated railways, urban tenements, violent crimes, St. Valentine’s Day, Buffalo Bill, the Cody Brothers, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American technology, and agricultural and floral exhibitions. On all of these, and others too numerous to mention, Martí informed his Latin American readers. He was especially careful to show them the advantages as well as the dangers of life in a modernizing, capitalist society such as the United States, hoping to interest his fellow men in technical innovations while avoiding the social, racial, and political strife he observed in New York. For his American readers of the New York Sun he wrote mainly of life in Europe, signing with a pseudonym, M. de S.

Another of Martí’s major undertakings while in New York was La Edad de Oro: Publicación mensual de recreo e instrucción dedicada a los niños de América (The Golden Age: A Monthly Magazine of Instruction Dedicated to the Children of Spanish America). He contributed his own writing to the magazine as well as selecting artists for translations. La Edad de Oro became a milestone in Spanish children’s literature.

Freedom from Spanish rule for his native Cuba, the liberation of Puerto Rico, and economic and political independence for the Antilles and Latin America were constantly on Martí’s mind. In essays, speeches and poems, this liberating discourse — a hallmark of Modernism — is a recurring mark. Though he suffered physically and emotionally at the hands of the Spanish colonial authorities in Cuba, Martí never expressed a sense of animosity toward Spain. Instead, he espoused a doctrine of love and brotherhood; he hoped that the war with Spain, if unavoidable, would be brief and swift. In his writings on Cuba he argued for political unity, economic modernization (without the pitfalls of US capitalism), respect for human rights, and a broad, democratic, participatory social compact. When it was clear there was no other road but revolution to achieve Cuba’s freedom from colonial rule, he organized a political party among exiled Cubans residing in the United States — the Cuban Revolutionary Party — and almost single-handedly planned the 1895 invasion of Cuba. As a political strategist his sights were set on achieving independence for his native island, hence, like so many other Latin American essayists, his political writings are fundamentally instrumental or programmatic. His grasp of contemporary and future social and economic institutions was stunning, so much so that critics such as Cintio Vitier perceive in his essays on Cuba a futurity that guided not merely Martí’s generation, but generations of writers and thinkers since. Martí wrote no single, organic political treatise on Cuba. However, he left a rich legacy of conceptualizations — perceptive and “necessary” — in separate, substantive essays such as “Con todos y para el bien de todos” (“With All and For the Good of All”), “El Partido Revolucionario Cubano” (“The Cuban Political Party”), or “El manifiesto de Montecristi” (“The Montecristi Manifesto”).

Less known, and less studied, are Martí’s letters. His epistolary art fascinated Unamuno and continues to attract devoted readers. Next to his poetry, the medium in which Martí expressed his most intimate thoughts are his letters, especially those to his closest friends and confidants. The letters to his friend Manuel A. Mercado, to María Mantilla, to his mother, are filled with the tenderness and anguish of Free Verse. In his letters Martí dared to bare his soul and allowed the solitude and suffering of a mission-driven artist and revolutionary to surface. The prose of these epistolary pieces is baroque at times, at others, limpid; sometimes convoluted, sometimes succinct; at others telegraphic. He once complained: “Words I cannot.” The reader at such moments is placed in the role of having to add, interpret, complete.

One other prose genre merits special comment: the novel — Martí wrote a single narrative without great enthusiasm as a favor to a friend. She had accepted to write the work for a New York magazine but could not. Under the pseudonym of Adelaida Ral, the Cuban agreed to compose a novel in her place in seven days; its format followed the prescriptions laid down by the editor: lots of love, a death, many young girls, no sinful passions, and nothing that might offend fathers of families or priests. And, it had to have a Spanish American setting. The narrative was not Martí’s favorite genre because, as he put it, one had to feign the existence of people, scenes and dialogues.

In this narrative, in his other prose pieces, his poetry, letters, and in his journals, Martí understood that man stood at the crossroads of an entirely new world order, the Age of Modernity. He understood its metamorphic qualities, he often felt anguished about their influence over man, the socioeconomic progress of Latin America, and the liberation of Cuba and Puerto Rico, always uppermost in his mind. He saw and understood the falling away of traditional institutions — religious, social and economic — and the accompanying cultural and ideological void. This visionary writer was thus able to write as early as 1882: “There are no permanent works, because those which are the product of reframing and recasting are by their very essence mutable and restless; there are no constant roads; the new altars, great and open as the woods, are barely visible.” Though they were invisible to most people, Martí was able to see and foresee, to write and speak the signs of both his age and the future, scanning the past and linking its universal values to an unstable chaotic present.

—Ivan A. Schulman

Guardianas is a bilingual collection of testimonies from midwives in El Salvador who delivered babies during the twelve-year-long civil war and who, today, fight to protect their ancestral role in the midst of ongoing repression.

This edition includes thirty color photographs and five black-and-white illustrations.

Out of necessity, women in El Salvador began attending births during the twelve-year-long civil war, when pregnant people in rural areas and guerrilla camps could not access medical care. From their mothers and older midwives, these women learned partería—traditional midwifery that was once the norm in El Salvador and has since been prohibited. After the official end to the war, the parteras became central fixtures in the “repopulation” of their country, building new communities, often without electricity or running water or hospitals. In 1994, out of this organizing, the Association of Parteras Rosa Andrade (APRA) was born. Today, the founding members of APRA, along with a younger generation training with them, continue to fight for the reproductive rights of thousands of people living in the municipalities of Suchitoto, Cuscatlán.

Collected in 2019 by Salvadoran American birth worker Noemí Delgado, Guardianas weaves together testimonies from twenty members of APRA to tell a collective story of:

- the experiences of midwives, mothers, guerrilla fighters and “gente de masa” during the armed conflict that took approximately 75,000 lives; 

- the role of the midwife during the period of repopulation after the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords, when thousands of displaced Salvadorans were finally allowed back into their homeland;

- the brutal obstetric violence that people giving birth in hospitals routinely face, and how this mistreatment compares to care provided by a midwife; 

- the extreme repression Salvadoran midwives have faced since 2011, when the health ministry prohibited home births;

- the ancestral nature of partería, an earth-based art practice that is passed down between generations, and derives from an extensive body of knowledge about safe and empowering births.

This anthology is both a safeguarding of the caretaking traditions of partería as well as a broader invitation to consider the role of birth work in organizing against war, imperialism, and corporate power. Here, the beauty of the testimonies—and the care with which they were compiled—ultimately come together to upend our ideas of what a medical ethnography can be and what an oral history can do.

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INTRODUCTION

During an assembly of the Association of Midwives Rosa Andrade (APRA) of Suchitoto, El Salvador, in September 2021, one of the members, Natividad Escobar de Henriquez, got a call for help from another community midwife. While the midwife had been caring for her daughter who was giving birth at home, a government health promoter had arrived and threatened to call the police if they didn’t take her to the hospital to give birth.

“Put the health worker on the phone,” Natividad said to the other midwife.

“You have to let this woman decide where to give birth, and if she wants to give birth with her mom, who’s a midwife, she’s within her rights to do so,” she informed the government health promoter.

With the blessing of her fellow APRA members, Natividad left the meeting to help the midwife defend against the threats of the health promoter. I had the honor of accompanying her and we were both present for a beautiful birth where the woman giving birth could completely trust in her own body and in the wisdom of nature, supported by her mother and her community.

In this case, the health promoter backed off when faced with the fierce bravery of the midwives. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, midwives who had not attended births for many years as a result of government intimidation returned to midwifing for women in their rural communities. Just as the armed conflict had revealed three decades earlier, the pandemic underscored the fact that midwives always offer a fundamental human service. With hospitals overwhelmed, turned into spaces of disease and infection once again, the midwives of APRA drew on their thirty years of organizing to continue to work together to provide health services to their communities without institutional support.

This group of women tell histories of violent repression and survival, but more than anything they tell stories of love for life. Through a practice of transcendental solidarity, APRA has managed to give care to thousands of women, adolescents, and babies who have been excluded from the cruel economic system that still dominates El Salvador. The members of APRA have attended births in the middle of the Civil War, without the proper supplies, while fleeing airstrikes and other extremely difficult aggressions. They were there when women giving birth had nowhere to go: in the guerrilla camps, in the refugee camps of Honduras and Nicaragua, and in their own communities when they returned to El Salvador. Under these conditions, many of them began working as midwives in response to the great needs of the people in their communities. Their fight to defend life from violence has continued since those times.

I learned of APRA’s work for the first time in 2018. I was providing education around contraception and lactation to pregnant teenagers and mothers at the health center in La Libertad, El Salvador, while on break from my university in the United States. I saw that the prenatal care that young people were receiving in the health center was incomplete and at times disrespectful. When I asked the nurses about midwives, they told me, “midwives don’t exist anymore” and “that’s a thing of the past.” Aware that midwives are often invisibilized at the global level, I began to investigate what had happened to them in El Salvador. I quickly learned that all of the people over twenty in my father’s town had been born at home with a midwife. A friend who was living in Suchitoto introduced me to two of the midwives in APRA and I immediately felt inspired by their powerful presence. After graduating from university, I returned to El Salvador to work with the association. When I asked the women how I could support their work, they said that they wanted to make a book documenting their history.

I lived with the members of APRA for ten months, joining them on their prenatal visits, at their monthly assemblies, at their social events and soccer games, while I gathered the testimonies for this book. When I think about those women my very cells fill with love. They have treated me like a daughter and living alongside them has transformed the deepest parts of me. I have even continued attending births as a community doula since returning to California.

This collection of testimonies was born of interviews completed in August of 2019 with all of the founding members of APRA and several of the new generation of midwives. By sharing details from their personal histories, the midwives of APRA tell their collective histories. The format of this collection pays homage to their collective model—a structure for protecting their communities and each other as an organized front. Organizing with APRA is an important aspect of each midwife’s identity as one part of a struggle much bigger than herself.

The association has its roots in the armed conflict that took place in El Salvador from 1979 to 1992. The majority of the midwives of APRA began, or rather continued, the work of attending births in the middle of a war fought between a US-backed dictatorship on one side and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a popular guerrilla movement, on the other. The majority of the midwives were involved in the guerrilla political movement and began attending births in the guerrilla camps or among the gente de masa, civilian groups that mobilized alongside the guerrillas.

The Salvadoran Civil War was a continuation of the violence and repression that began with the arrival of the Spanish in El Salvador in 1524: the first chapter in the ongoing colonizing of Indigenous peoples, including the Náhuat-Pipil, the Lenca, the Maya Ch’orti’, the Maya Pocomam, and the Cacaopera. Four centuries later, virtually all of the land and wealth in El Salvador belonged to fourteen families, descendents of the colonizers. The Fourteen Families controlled coffee production, which was the country’s main export. In 1932, the Armed Forces suppressed a revolutionary movement, murdering over thirty-thousand campesinos and workers—the majority Indigenous—who were fighting for a more just political and economic system. The government began killing people for simply appearing Indigenous or speaking their mother tongue. They also assassinated key leaders such as Farabundo Martí, who was one of the founders of the communist party in Central America and later became an icon for the revolutionary party in the 1980s. After the massacre of civilians in 1932, the coffee oligarchy handed control of the country over to a military regime that immediately robbed the campesinos of the right to organize. The country remained under the control of military dictatorships for the following decades. When the war began, at the end of the 1970s, 2 percent of the population owned 60 percent of the country’s cultivable land.

The midwives explain that the popular guerrilla movement mobilized because the people would no longer endure injustice. In 1979, there was a coup d’etat backed by the United States with the objective of avoiding a leftist revolution. The military continued torturing, abducting, and killing any civil and religious leaders who were considered critics of the regime. In 1980, archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero was assassinated by the government the day after a mass in which he called upon the military to end the repression. That same year, five left-wing parties joined forces to form the FMLN. In her interview, María Dolores Hernández de Rivera recounts how the guerrillas called it “a fight for the poor.” For many of the midwives of APRA there was no option but to join the guerrillas: they joined because the army and the death squads were persecuting them for being campesinos and for being from certain communities that were politically organized, including Suchitoto. The guerrilla was their only protection.

The midwives were politically formed within the guerrilla movement, which was inspired by Marxism and Liberation Theology. They continue bearing a collective and anti-capitalist spirit. They do not charge women for their services and sustain themselves with solidarity and social organizing. Their fight is still a fight for the poor. All of the founding members of APRA are survivors of this war, which took the lives of approximately eighty-thousand people—the great majority at the hands of the Salvadoran government, which received the equivalent of a million dollars of military assistance a day from the United States. Every single founding midwife lost loved ones during the war—husbands, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, cousins. In the midst of this violence, they protected the lives of women giving birth and their babies. They attended births under the most difficult imaginable conditions that the Salvadoran people have lived through.

During the armed conflict, 25 percent of the population of El Salvador was forcibly displaced. Some of the midwives of APRA attended births while fleeing violence, or in refugee camps in Honduras (where twenty-thousand people sought safety) and Nicaragua, where access to health services was extremely limited. The refugee camps were surrounded by soldiers and people were not allowed to leave without permission from the United Nations (UN). On top of that, there were very few doctors to care for thousands of people. The midwives continued to be a fundamental resource for the health of an entire people who had been forced to flee.

At the beginning of the nineties, as the war came to a close with the signing of the Peace Accords, thousands of displaced people returned to repopulate the municipality of Suchitoto in the department of Cuscatlán; there, they built new communities with the scarce resources available. In that time, the only hospital in Suchitoto was inaccessible to the people who lived in rural communities, and midwives were the only aid available for births and other medical emergencies. Public health infrastructure was very precarious. Between 1993 and 1998, 42 percent of births in the country took place outside of a hospital; in some places that had been repopulated by former guerrilla combatants and refugees, such as the Cuscatlán department, closer to 70 percent of births took place at home.

Between 1993 and 1994, forty-five women organized to receive a formal training in midwifery through a program established by two nurse-midwives from the International Medical Relief Fund. In 1994, APRA was born, and ever since, the midwives of Suchitoto have been organized. They continue to meet the first Wednesday of every month to share experiences and make a count of the number of people served by the organization. They also sell pupusas to people in the community to raise funds to buy birth control pills and other materials needed in their communities.

The ancestral role of the midwives is a unique one that includes many kinds of community attention. Being members of the same communities that they serve engenders a deep trust in the midwives by the people; this is not always the case with government health promoters. It’s this trust that allows the midwives to offer diverse kinds of care that transcend a single sphere of health: the midwives of APRA offer talks about sexual and reproductive health; they distribute contraceptive methods in the communities; and they also care for people’s emotional health when someone is sick or injured. Attending births is just one piece of their work.

This model of traditional community midwifery has been transmitted from generation to generation. Many of the members of APRA have learned care practices to aid birth and how to use medicinal plants from their own mothers as well as from elder midwives in their communities, even learning from the same midwives who delivered them a generation before. The wisdom that midwives safeguard has survived centuries of colonialism, a colonialism that continues to devalue Indigenous knowledges above all those practiced by women.

Birth has always been a microcosm of our relationship with nature; it’s not a coincidence that the growing medicalization of childbirth has coincided with the neglect of Mother Nature. Midwifery is an art form that seeks to protect our connection with nature and impart the knowledge that our ancestors have passed down.

Midwives have been subject to extreme repression in the last decade. Around 2011, workers from the Ministry of Health began a campaign of intimidation directed toward midwives in their own communities, telling them they did not have the right to attend births—and that, if something went wrong with a birth, they would get sent to prison. That same year, the Salvadoran Ministry of Health published a policy decreeing that all births must take place in a hospital as part of their “Strategic Birth Plan.” In her testimony, Patricia Hernández shares how the director of the Ministry of Health at the time told the association directly that if it were up to her, “midwives wouldn’t exist on this planet.”

This attempt to eradicate community midwives was a response on the part of the Ministry of Health to the United Nations’ “Millennium Development Goals,” instituted in the year 2000, one of which was to reduce maternal mortality by 2015. This goal was in part measured by a specific target of the number of births attended by “skilled health personnel.” For many countries, El Salvador among them, complying with the Millennium Development Goals became one of the conditions required to receive international aid from countries like the United States. In 2010, the UN published a report about the progress of these goals. Just after this report came out, midwives all over the country, including those in APRA, began to receive threats from Ministry of Health workers.

So what happens when dominant powers define and finance “development” in other countries? In The White Man’s Burden, American economist William Easterly classifies the people in charge of establishing objectives like the Millenium Development Goals as “planners” rather than “searchers.” “Planners” set enormous, even utopian, goals for communities that they are not part of. This top-down hierarchical model means that the so-called solutions to problems like high rates of maternal mortality are not based on the needs and desires of the actual people living in the communities. Moreover, these planners measure their results entirely in numbers, and toss out the importance of people’s real, lived experiences.

Instead of investing resources and training in midwives to support their community work, the type of work that has reduced maternal mortality in other countries, the then Salvadoran government excluded midwives entirely from the formal public health system. The repression of midwives represents a threat to the health of many women and babies who live far from a hospital or who don’t trust health institutions.

According to the Ministry of Health, in 2012 five of six of the most common causes of death for women between the ages of twenty and fifty-nine in El Salvador were related to pregnancy and birth complications; the majority of these deaths were preventable. Midwives live in rural communities, ready for any emergency. It should be added that women put their trust in midwives, and tell them if they have any doubt or if something feels off. Community midwives prevent maternal and neonatal deaths thanks to the early detection of obstetric emergencies.

Birth is not by definition an emergency, and in general does not require any intervention; without a doubt, the Westernized health system treats all births as medical emergencies that need to be controlled. Just as the midwives know how to identify the signs of danger and will accompany women to the hospital when they present with emergencies that cannot be treated at home, they also know to treat birth as a natural process that requires patience and intuition. The fundamental difference between the ways that a midwife and a doctor conceptualize birth sheds light on the distinction between delivering at a hospital and giving birth at home with the support of a midwife.

The ritual of giving birth in a hospital under the complete control of a doctor has become a part of the cultural fabric in the last few decades, one that reproduces colonial relationships and results in physical and emotional wounds for many people. These wounds are the result of obstetric violence, a legal term Venezuela powerfully defined as “the appropriation of women’s bodies and reproductive systems by health officials, which expresses itself in dehumanizing hierarchical treatment, and in the abuse of medicalizing and pathologizing natural processes, leading to a consequent loss of autonomy and the ability to freely make decisions about their bodies and sexuality, ultimately negatively impacting quality of life for women.” Unnecessary or forced C-sections are one of the most easily statistically documented kinds of obstetric violence. UNICEF reports that C-sections represent 32 percent of all births in El Salvador, three times the level recommended by the World Health Organization. When the rate of C-sections exceeds 10 percent, there is no evidence that infant mortality goes down.

Unnecessary C-sections are not the only act of obstetric violence, and are probably not even the most common form. Obstetric violence includes violations of the right to receive information and make decisions, as well as the right to protect intimacy and dignity. Episiotomies, where doctors make an incision in the back wall of the vaginal opening, are violent and unnecessary procedures that historically were common in hospitals in El Salvador. In many cases, this procedure has been done without the consent of the woman giving birth. In 2019, in their study entitled a “National Survey on Sexual Violence Against Women,” the Salvadoran General Directorate of Statistics and the Census found that 71 percent of people who gave birth in the hospital were victims of obstetric violence.

The current first lady of El Salvador, Gabriela de Bukele, has taken an interest in the issue of birth, and in 2021 the Legislative Assembly approved her Nacer con Cariño (Born with Love) law, which promotes “birth with kindness and respect, with kind and sensitive care for newborns.” This law established some important rights for women giving birth, including the right to be accompanied by someone for support during birth and the prevention of health personnel from performing any intervention without receiving the informed consent of the person giving birth. It also included plans to train and certify more health workers focused on perinatal care, but it neglected to consider the role of traditional midwives.

Recognition for the work of midwives seeks not only to bring justice to the women who have dedicated their lives to caring for their communities but also to safeguard birth as an event that can bring us closer to our ancestral roots. The physical body can be a medium for spiritual healing and cultural transformation. Experiences where we become portals of power and transcendental love, such as community births, help us recover what we have lost to colonial history. The suppression of traditional midwives results in a tragic loss for families, for communities, and for the people.

The midwives of APRA fight for a future where the autonomy and intuition of each person giving birth is respected, and where new generations can learn and benefit from this irreplaceable tradition. These women teach us that birth should be a territory of nature and of our own communities, not of the State.

—NOEMÍ DELGADO
San Diego, California
2024

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NOEMÍ DELGADO is a doula, body worker, and childbirth educator. Born in San Diego, she began her birthwork journey while living and working with midwives in her family’s homeland of El Salvador, where she received training in traditional birth and postpartum care from members of the Asociación de Parteras Rosa Andrade. In 2019, she was awarded a Public Health Fullbright Fellowship to continue this work. She is cofounder of Cuidando A Las Que Nos Cuidan, a collective generating ongoing support for APRA, and is director of Matronas: The Struggle to Protect Birth in El Salvador (2021), which was an Official Selection at the San Diego Latino Film Festival and the Oakland Short Film Festival and won Best Cinematography at Documentary Short Film Festival. Delgado is dedicated to uplifting ancestral wisdom and challenging the systems that attempt to erase it; Guardianas and Matronas are a part of that effort.
 

CELEBRATE WOMEN'S HISTORY
30% OFF HIGHLIGHTS FROM OUR CATALOG

Women's History Month can trace its beginnings back to the first International Working Women's Day in 1909. Before it's revival by feminist activists in the 1970's — and the UN's subsequent ratification in 1977 — International Women's Day's first appeared in 1908, when 15,000 women working in the New York City garment industry went on strike to demand better working conditions. The following year, the Socialist Party of America declared the first International Working Women's Day. 

To celebrate these radical roots, we're delighted to share the following works of literary fiction, memoir, political non-fiction, and other writings that we recommend for Women's History Month, and for the rest of the year, too.

 

From the award-winning French-Moroccan novelist Abdellah Taïa comes a story in praise of a woman, a fighter, a survivor. Shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2022.

Known internationally for his beautiful treatment of North Africa’s otherwise marginalized characters — prostitutes and thieves, trans and gay people in a world where being LGBTQ+ can be a dangerous act — Taïa’s latest novel to be translated in English shares the story of his mother, a Moroccan countrywoman who he calls Malika.

Three moments in the life of Malika, from 1954 to 1999: from French colonization to the death of King Hassan II. It is her voice we hear in Abdellah Taïa’s stunning new novel, translated by Emma Ramadan, who won the PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Taia’s last novel, A Country for Dying.

Malika’s first husband was sent by the French to fight in Indochina.

In the 1960s, in Rabat, she does everything possible to prevent her daughter Khadija from becoming a maid in a rich French woman’s villa.

The day before the death of Hassan II, a young homosexual thief, Jaâfar, enters her home and wants to kill her.

Malika recounts with rage her strategies to escape the injustices of History. To survive. To have a little space of her own.

Malika is Taïa’s mother: M'Barka Allali Taïa (1930-2010). This book is dedicated to her.

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EXCERPT FROM LIVING IN YOUR LIGHT BY ABDELLAH TAÏA
TRANSLATED BY EMMA RAMADAN

All the love of this earth.

All the love that there is on this earth will not be enough for me, will not help me to bear what happens to me after you, Allal.

You went so far away, to a world I know nothing about. And you will not return.

There is nothing ahead of me now but memory, absence, love without you.

You watched me for months and months when I went to the souk with my father. You weren’t afraid of him and you let your eyes speak, follow me, enter me, and decide for me what would follow, happen. Be with you. Be yours. Be your wife. Your eyes didn’t say that I was beautiful nor that you were in love with me. No, none of that. Your eyes played, danced, and invited me to do the same. Dance with you in public, in the souk. That was what you wanted, what excited you. To see how I would react, what I would show of myself. My reaction to your stares when my father was right there, beside me. Together we carry a basket of vegetables, he and I. We are perfectly respectable. Was my father unaware? I don’t think so. He plays innocent, my father. But he’s tender. Tender and submissive to his second wife. It’s only in this souk, once per week, that I can have him all to myself. It’s only here that he dares show me any affection and buys me donuts coated with sugar.

You had planned your strategy, Allal. You went for it, you spoke. Not to me, no. To my father who, for some time, had been trying to get rid of me. Me, Malika, his daughter. He couldn’t take it anymore, watching his second wife humiliate me every day and saying nothing about it.

He said nothing, my father. He was enchanted by her, bewitched. He’d lost his head a long time ago. He let himself be guided, directed. I was his weak point. The daughter of his first marriage.

She grew up, little Malika. Seventeen years old. She’s a woman now. Entirely a woman. She must be given to someone. Find her a man. There are plenty in this vast bled where everyone keeps tabs on everyone else.

Let me help you carry the second basket, my uncle. That’s how you approached us, Allal.

It’s too heavy for you and your daughter, my uncle.

Okay, my son. May God show you the path to paradise, my son.

You were walking on the other side. My father was between us. You acted like manly men, you spoke of crops, of the sky that had been generous with rain that year, and of the French who still didn’t want to leave Morocco. You spoke of the facts of life that I didn’t yet know about. And suddenly, my father stopped and said:

You’re the son of Saleh, aren’t you?

How had he guessed? I never would have known.

I am the youngest son of Saleh, yes. I am Allal, my uncle.

Allal. That’s right. Little Allal. How you’ve grown! You don’t remember him, Malika? Look. It’s Allal. Give him your hand and greet him. Allal is like a cousin to you. Give him your hand. Don’t be shy. Allal is from the same place as us, from the same extended family as us. Same blood and same flesh. Look at him. I am here with you, Malika. Look at Allal. He has become a man. Bigger than me. Look.

Later, I understood that my father knew all about my little game. He had seen everything. My little dances for you, Allal. Your eyes permanently fixed on me. Your eyes devouring me.

It was my father, Baba, who insisted on bringing me with him to the souk, and he was the one who wanted to buy me donuts each time from the old woman set up next to a little open-air café. Your café, Allal.

You were there. In that café. You were always there.

I am standing near the old woman’s stall. I am alone. Baba told me he would be back in about ten minutes. I eat the donuts very slowly. I take my time. I let you look at me all you want. My body. My character. My history. I am strong. That is what you will love about me. A strong woman who engulfs you entirely. Not a woman just for a night. No. I am a woman for something serious, you see that, a woman to accompany you and help you as you face off against zman, time, which passes and ends up ruining us all. I am Malika. I am in very good health. I am not lazy. I see things through. I have good teeth. My hair is very black. My thighs are solid. My chest will continue to grow, don’t worry. My stomach is large. And my Berber tattoo between the eyes means one thing: I am loyal. Loyal and cunning, to be frank. But I imagine that doesn’t scare you, my cunning. You continue to watch me, you don’t judge me. I please you. I please you, I know it. Look, Allal. Look. I’ve finished eating the second donut. I start on the third. I want you to see that I have a healthy appetite. I eat. I eat. I love food, all kinds of food. I am a woman who is not ashamed to eat. Malika. Malika, Allal. It’s for you. Come. Come. When will you come?

You walk with us, Allal. Down our path. You help us, me and Baba. You carry the second basket. And you speak. You have a lot to say. I barely listen. I let myself be soothed by the sound of your voice. I enter into that voice and its world. My father is delighted. He has understood that you are a man who is not afraid. A man full of words that ring true and good stories to share. A man who reveals himself all at once, who is open, who says: Here is my heart.

Hope exists. With your body, Allal, in your heart, Allal, I will find another path. Finally flee my stepmother and her maliciousness. Thwart destiny. Grab hold of hope, have proof of it.

I will live.

Baba suddenly asks you that question, direct, too direct: What do you have in life, my son Allal?

You answer honestly. You don’t even stop to think.

I have nothing but my open-air café, my uncle. I bring it with me from souk to souk, from mausoleum to mausoleum. It’s not much, I know. It’s no guarantee of a beautiful future, I know. But I live well, even very well during the summer, with this café. I’ve managed to save up a bit of money. I live with my parents. In their house. And I have two brothers who are younger than me. I am twenty-seven years old, my uncle. It is time for me to get married. I have cousins younger than me who already have children. I want to get married.

I daydream. I look at your feet, Allal. Your feet in leather sandals. They are dirty, your feet. Strong and dirty. I want to take them in my hands, those feet, right there, on the spot. Wash them slowly, gently, very gently. And then massage them with olive oil. I know how. I practice on my father’s feet when he comes home at night from working in the field. Isn’t that right, Baba? Tell Allal that I know how to massage feet. Tell him. Tell him. This detail is very important. Men’s feet. Allal’s feet. I will always begin with your feet, Allal. And then everything will be easy. Love. Love.

The dream of love.

We’ve arrived at our house. We’re in front of the door. You place the basket on the ground. My father invites you in for a cup of mint tea. You say that you have to return to the souk to pack up your café. Baba insists:

At least a glass of water, Allal. You accept.

Bring him a glass of water, my daughter Malika.

It’s only you and me now. Baba has gone to bring the baskets inside the house. He’ll be back any minute now.

You drink the water. You’re very thirsty. I watch you drink the entire glass in one gulp. Your eyes are closed. Your head is tilted back. I see your strong neck. I see everything, everything, from close up. Heat rises in me. The dark black hairs of your short beard. Your nose, long and thin. Your lips, the color of the land here: red ocher. Your ears, huge and strange. Your head is almost shaved, like a thief ’s. You never let your hair grow, I believe. Why not?

I want to reach out my hand and caress your head.

You are a man. You are handsome. I find you handsome. I tell you this, in my heart: You are so handsome, Allal.

Did you hear me?

You are handsome. You are not rich but you are handsome.

I breathe in the smell of your body, Allal. The body of a man beaten by the sun for years and years, browned by the sun, almost black from the sun. A body that’s sweating, dripping. It is hot. It is cold. It is burning.

Allal, you come toward me. Open your legs, you say. Open them. Open, Malika.

I open them. Immediately. For you. I have been waiting for so long. I am seventeen years old. It is time. To give myself to you, Allal. Take you inside me, mix together our scents and our sweat. Our paths.

And our dreams.

You have finished drinking the water, Allal. You make no improper or uncalled-for gesture. You’re in front of Baba’s house. I emerge from my dream beside your body. I lower my eyes. You hand me the glass. Your hand touches my hand. It lasts three or four seconds. Your heat, Allal. The heat on the surface of your skin. It enters me and courses through all of me, from my head to my toes. You say goodbye.

Bsslama, Malika. Bsslama, Allal.

You leave. Right away. I watch you leave. You walk. You walk quickly. You are so light. You are skinny. You are fragile. You are a little bird. I am stronger than you.

You turned left. You disappeared from my sight. But you are still here, in the air. I see you. Your trace. Your memory. Your gentle virility.

Baba returns.

Come in, Malika. Come in, my little girl. Allal is a fine man.

It’s in God’s hands now.

You came back to see us a month later to ask for my hand. Both of your parents were with you. And your best friend too: Merzougue. He’s my brother, more than my brother, I heard you say to my father when you introduced him. Merzougue. Some- times, a friend is much better than a brother, you’re right, Allal.

Merzougue was seated next to you, glued to you. When I entered the living room of our house to serve everyone mint tea, Merzougue said:

She’s lucky, your daughter.

Baba didn’t ask for much money as a dowry. Almost nothing.

But to your parents, Allal, he spoke from the heart:

Malika will be your daughter. I give her to you. I am not selling her. I am entrusting her to you. I am not forcing Malika to do anything. She is your daughter. Life will smile on her with you and your son Allal. Life will finally reward her. I am counting on you.

Hearing these words, my stepmother stood up and left the living room. She wanted to show her disapproval of Baba’s words and what he was implying. I went to check whether or not the couscous was ready.

Baba continued his speech.

My daughter Malika lost her mother at a very young age. I couldn’t raise her on my own. In this life, a man cannot weather the storm without a wife. I married again. I had no choice.

Your father then began speaking.

You daughter Malika will be our daughter. Do not worry. And our son Allal is your son. God will guide us on this path as good Muslims with pure hearts. But . . . but . . .

But what?

The dowry is a bit too substantial for our son. How much money can you give for my daughter?

This isn’t about money. Trust is the most important thing. How much?

That’s for you to decide. Our son is a good son. A man. He is not afraid of work. He is—

How much?

Half of what you asked.

Baba turned toward me. He took my hand in his.

Malika, my daughter, you have heard what has just been said. Are you okay with all of this? I am not forcing you to do anything. Do you want to marry Allal under these conditions? You won’t tell me later that I sold you for nothing? Allal is here, in front of you. His parents are here, in front of you. You have heard everything they said. Their proposition. Money isn’t every- thing in life, but . . . but sometimes you have to know . . .

I am okay with it, Baba. I want to marry Allal. I accept what his parents propose.

You have all heard it. My daughter Malika agrees. She is your daughter now. She is yours. She is yours, my son Allal. We will celebrate the wedding in a month. Now let’s read Surah Al-Fatiha, since we are all in agreement.

Listening to these words, I looked at you, Allal. You didn’t look at me at that moment, Allal.

You turned toward your friend Merzougue and you gave each other a very warm embrace. Two friends. Two brothers.

And I understood, seeing you entwined like that for a long time, too long, that there was a secret between you. A very special bond.

Baba was even forced to intervene. He said to you:

That’s enough now, Allal my son. Let go of Merzougue and give Malika a kiss on the head.

You kissed me timidly in front of everyone. Merzougue smiled wide and warmly encouraged you.

You returned to Merzougue. You looked at each other. You were excited. You embraced again. You were entwined again. In front of us all. You were not ashamed.

What am I supposed to do, I thought, faced with such a spectacle? Who is marrying whom here?

I understand and I don’t understand. I see and I don’t see. The world of men from the bled. Solidarity between men of the bled. The gestures of men. Men spend the majority of their time together. Man to man. And what happens happens. They touch each other. While they wait. Nothing new. It’s natural. Allal and Merzougue, it’s natural. One shouldn’t ask too many questions.

Allal has a friend and a supporter: Merzougue. I shouldn’t take that away from him. I am not the only person in Allal’s life and heart.

I am not jealous of Merzougue. Do you hear me, Allal? Even when I saw you together with my own eyes on the terrace of the house, on top of each other, naked, naked, I did not become jealous. It was night. Summer. It was too hot. That’s all. I wasn’t shocked. I wasn’t devastated. I know what life is like. The facts of life.

Merzougue was here long before me.

Merzougue is not a dangerous man. When he looks at me, his eyes don’t change. His eyes are always full of tenderness.

Merzougue is all that’s left to me now that you’re gone, Allal. When I see him, I see you. I make him food. I invite him over. He comes. He eats like you, has the same mannerisms as you. He eats for you, in memory of you. I don’t cry.

Merzougue predicted what was going to happen in Indochina. He did everything to stop you from going there, so far away, so far away, to fight for the French, to fight against people you didn’t even know, to kill people who had done nothing to you. You wouldn’t hear any of it.

I’ll bring back money, a lot of money. And life will be good for the three of us. You, Malika. You, Merzougue. And me, with you. We’ll move out of my parents’ house. We’ll be free from my parents. We’ll buy land that we’ll cultivate. And we’ll have lots of children. Many, many children. We’ll be comfortable, you’ll see. I’ll wage their war and I’ll take their money. That’s my mission.

How naive you were, Allal. And how I regret not having fol- lowed my intuition: to do everything I could to stop you from walking into your own death. Death in a land that doesn’t exist for us, a country that isn’t real to us.

We listened to you, Allal. You dreamt and constructed a prosperous future for us, in front of us. You convinced us. No, that’s not true. You ate our brains. We let you leave.

Where is Allal?

Allal is in Indochina.

Any news from Allal?

Allal died in Indochina.

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In 1973, ABDELLAH TAÏA was born in the public library of Rabat in Morocco, where his father was the janitor and where his family lived until he was two years old. Acclaimed as both a novelist and filmmaker, he writes in French and has published eight books now widely translated, including Le jour de roi, which was awarded the prestigious French Prix de Flore in 2010. An adaptation of his novel L'Armée du salut was his first feature film, released in 2014, screened at major festivals around the world, and hailed by the New York Times as giving "the Arab world its first on-screen gay protagonist." Abdellah Taïa made history in 2006 by coming out in his country, where homosexuality is illegal. His commitment to the defense of homosexuals in Muslim countries has made him one of the most prominent Arab writers of his generation—both "a literary transgressor and cultural paragon," according to Interview magazine. Taia has lived in Paris since 1998.

EMMA RAMADAN is an educator and literary translator of all genres from French, with a focus on undersung women novelists, experimental literature, and writers from the Arab world. She is the recipient of the 2021 PEN Translation Prize, the 2018 Albertine Prize, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a PEN/Heim grant, and a Fulbright. Her translations include Sphinx, Not One Day, and In Concrete by Anne Garréta; A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa; Zabor, or the Psalms by Kamel Daoud; co-translations with Olivia Baes of The Easy Life and Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras; and Panics by Barbara Molinard. Her translations of Lamia Ziadé ’s Mon port de Beyrouth and Ma très grande mélancolie arabe are forthcoming from Pluto Press.

When we talk about Black History Month, we talk about the rich, diverse histories of Black political and cultural life in the US and abroad. Black History Month should serve as a launch point for a full year of investigation into the story of Black America and Black histories worldwide, a reminder that the work of Black liberation and anti-racist movement building requires more than just 29 days. Celebrate Black History Month every month.

Black History Month Reading Lists

SUMŪD: A New Palestinian Reader is an anthology that celebrates the power of culture in Palestinian resistance, with selections of memoir, short stories, essays, book reviews, personal narrative, poetry, and art from the Markaz Review.

The Arabic word sumūd is often loosely translated as “steadfastness” or “standing fast.” It is, above all, a Palestinian cultural value of everyday perseverance in the face of Israeli occupation. Sumūd is both a personal and collective commitment; people determine their own lives, despite the environment of constant oppressions imposed upon them. 

In times of devastation, poetry, literature, and art are the mediums through which oppressed peoples reveal cherished aspects of their existences and remain defiant in the fight for self-determination. Sumūd: A New Palestinian Reader honors the Palestinian spirit and its power in the face of dispossession and war. When governments around the world enable the genocide of a people and the dilapidation of a sacred homeland, the Palestinian people stand fast and resist. The fifty-eight contributions in this collection remind readers that just as love perseveres, so do the Palestinians, and their struggles and triumphs.

This anthology spans the 20th and 21st centuries of Palestinian cultural history, and highlights writing from 2021–2024. The essays, stories, poetry, art and personal narrative collected in Sumūd: A New Palestinian Reader is a rich riposte to those who would denigrate Palestinians’ aspirations for a homeland. It also serves as a timely reminder of culture’s power and importance during occupation and war.

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PLEDGING ALLEGIANCE
NOOR HINDI

I am tired of language. I don’t want to make metaphors. About olive trees. About wearing a keffiyeh. About About About. The dream has not ended. My grandma is back in Jordan. She loves her passport. What does it mean to love? A country? A book? A people? To say “I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty,” while thinking about Palestine. While holding the key to your father’s first home. While While While. The news keeps screaming. The headlines chew at our eyes. A bald eagle burdens its wings with suitcases, then drops them in another land.

*

The language isn’t enough.

Here—an image of homeland. The word colonization, a photo of a fruit so bloodied. I hold a beam of light to a wall, make shadows of Palestine I try to catch. Olive tree, Israeli soldier, a metaphor of Palestine as a woman.

In a workshop, a white classmate says some of us celebrate diversity. Someone wants to talk about hummus and falafel (pronounces them both wrong, then asks me for the labor of forgiveness).

I’m supposed to be feeding them whatever is the opposite of guilt.

I want to move beyond. Where?

There are bodies. And then there are fewer bodies. This is the formula.

Ask me about a two-state solution. About caring for a world that does not love you back. About holding a knife and tearing into a map. But oh—

There’s the cliché again. But the deaths. But the deaths. But the deaths. Have they, too, become a cliché? A transgender Palestinian teen is stabbed. Israa Ghrayeb is dead. Gazan families continue to face an electricity crisis.

And still—I didn’t even know any of this was happening. // Thank you for educating me. // Do you like living in America? // But what about those terrorists? // When you say Palestine, do you actually mean Pakistan? What comes after awareness? And then what? There’s a bird. No, it’s a drone. My tax dollars pay for the bombs that kill my people.

*

I’m locked out of my home. No, I can’t recognize my home. I grabbed the wrong keys. The house has been painted a different color. There is music inside but I don’t understand the words. There is smoke inside, but nothing is burning.

All I do is wait. I peer in from the windows. The house is inhabited by ghosts. They recognize my face but not my tongue. I try to find where it hurts.

*

The ghosts laugh. Their laughs end with a sharp pang of grief; it sounds like a fist, or a hand around my throat. I reach for them, begging to be let in. When I ring the bell, no one answers. I draw letters on the outside of the door.

---

WE WILL NEVER LEAVE
HANEEN NAZZAL

 

Haneen Nazzal, We Will Never Leave, 2021. Digital illustration, 36 x 51 cm.

Courtesy of the artist.

We Will Never Leave was inspired by graffiti on the walls of Sheikh Jarrah, in occupied East Jerusalem. The poster was used in a cam- paign to save Palestinian homes that was launched by families in the area who were—and still are—facing ethnic cleansing by the Israeli authorities. Top right, the address on the poster reads: “13 Sheikh Jarrah Arab Palestinian neighborhood.”

---

MY HOUSE
MAYA ABU AL-HAYYAT

TRANSLATED FROM THE ARABIC BY FADY JOUDAH

None of the many houses I lived in
concern me. After the third house
I lost interest, but lately my organs and body parts
have been complaining of unexplainable ailments.
My arms extend higher than a tree.
My acromegaly. And when I run
it’s at inconsistent speeds.
The important thing is to pass those walking
closest to me, leave them behind
before they leave me.
A Tunisian doctor
told my dad “It’s a psychiatric condition.”
I had liked her and considered her a house
before she spoke that sentence
which caused a lot of bruises
and brought down the house.
I read several texts I took for houses
and stayed in them a while: “Liquid Mirrors”
was a crazy abode in which I forgot
my first love. There were magazines, too:
Al-Karmal, Poets, and Aqwass,
then I studied engineering,
specialized in earthquakes
to build houses whose foundations
resist climates and the unpredicted.
My children dug up a trench for me
and said, “Here, rest a bit, Mom.”
But trenches leave marks on skin
as if on a field, and the birds
gathered and pecked my seeds
after the field had drowned in stagnant water.
In a text, I can build a house
with windows and balconies
that overlook galaxies and stars,
paint it with the writings of Amjad Nasser
who said that for the sake of a solid house
one should distinguish
between imagination and knowledge
even if the house is built on illusion.
I will raise my house on the backs of horses
that will carry it to the fields,
there my legs will pause.

---

SHORELESS SEA #11
TAYSEER BARAKAT

Tayseer Barakat grew up by the sea, in Gaza. His series Shoreless Sea is a meditation on the large numbers of Arabs becoming refugees and crossing the perilous Mediterranean while the world watches on, indifferent to their tragedy. The artist acknowledges how the monotone tones of his paintings “reflect the hardships of our time and our present life. I think the pressure on us makes us use dark colors.”

Tayseer Barakat, Shoreless Sea #11, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 70 cm. 
Courtesy Zawyeh Gallery.

---

WATCHTOWERS
TAYSIR BATNIJI

Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of Europe’s postindustrial water towers reminded Taysir Batniji of “the Israeli watchtowers that have invaded Palestinian territory.” Born in Gaza, Batniji was not allowed to enter the West Bank. So a delegated, uncredited photographer, at great danger to himself, took the images for the Watchtower series “in the manner” of the German photographers. Some of the images, blurred and in poor light, were impossible to aestheticize because of the military context. They symbolize for Batniji “a typography” of oppression. 

Taysir Batniji, Watchtowers, 2008, installation view. 
Series of twenty-six black-and-white photographs, inkjet prints on Fine Art Pearl paper, 50 x 40 cm (each). Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery (Hamburg/Beirut). 

A reading list for a new era.

ALL THAT YOU TOUCH YOU CHANGE
BY TOSHI REAGON

Octavia E. Butler’s Parable novels—Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents—have become bibles for grassroots revolutionaries. They’ve become temples and gathering stones. Many folks have Earthseed or God Is Change as their religion on social media sites. The post-Parable generations of Black Sci-fi, Afrofuturistic Comic Book Nerd Kids, students, professors, and artists have taken pos- session of the mainstream idea of who gets to imagine and create a future on Earth and in the stars. Octavia Butler’s never-ending yet full of endings universe laid a foundation and held up that soulful spot upon which revolutionaries can stand.

It was very hard for me to read Parable of the Sower. My mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon, introduced Octavia Butler’s work to me in the late ’80s. I read Dawn first. Then Kindred. Then Wild Seed. And on and on until, one year around Christmas, I saw a new book on the shelves at the bookstore—Parable of the Sower. I bought two. One for me, and one for Mom. I wrapped Mom’s book and put it under the tree. When we opened our gifts, we had each given the other Parable of the Sower and purchased another copy for ourselves. Mom read hers right away. I read two pages and closed mine, thinking, Nope. Not now. I was not yet ready to face it.

In 1997 Mom and I taught a semester at Princeton University for Toni Morrison’s Atelier. We taught songs from the African American song tradition. Because we had to teach a text alongside the music, Mom suggested Parable of the Sower.

This was when I first read the book. This was when we learned we could sing this book, leading us on our journey to create Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower: The Opera.

Octavia Butler gets us back home again in Parable of the Sower.

After reading it I couldn’t imagine the need for anything else. A book that was so hard for me to read past the first page. It was a story that swallowed me up and told me it was true even though it was placed in the fiction section of the bookstore. True even though it took place in the future, a future thirty years away from the time I first read it. It moved my feet across a highway where feet are not supposed to travel. It took me along. It landed me home.

But I did need the something else that is Parable of the Talents.

Parable of the Talents is the part we don’t want to face. That denial trigger hits and hits and we act like we don’t know what to do, or how to do. All of sudden our skill and mastery duck deep inside us and we whisper, No. Not again. We are unable to count on or stand on our strength and knowledge.

Parable of the Talents says, “Stay here and watch the future look back at you.”

In looking at what narrative to tell for the opera, my mind kept traveling to this Parable. Here in the teen years of the twenty-first century, not so far away from the year 2024, when Parable of the Sower starts, we are, right now, at the beginning of Parable of the Talents. We are at the opening of that unimaginable, horrible era of human destruction—of each other, of the world—stated so clearly on the pages of both of these books that long after her death Octavia Butler is being praised as a predictor of our current events.

Octavia Butler the time traveler, the wall bender, the space explorer and community maker, the race builder. Sometimes she can be too literal for me, like the town oracle you go to sit in front of when you’re extra desperate. The town oracle who never lies, whose eyes won’t twinkle and let you see something else or let you think that maybe you heard wrong.

No, you heard right.

Parable of the Talents is delicious plain human speak. It is what you are actually working with. It is another map for anyone looking for where they are. It is unfolded in your lap and you can see yourself on it. You see the roads you have traveled and the ones you have yet to travel. You see the space where there was no road and you climbed over, under, and through wilderness. You see your good company and your alone places. You see your deserts and your too-much-rain places. You see the years roll on no matter what. You see your won- dering how far have you gone.

As you look, you trace scars on your own body where someone cut you, or you tripped running, or the earth burned or shuddered open and things fell on top of you while you covered others. You learn the geography on the map, practice memorizing routes. You forget where you buried things in the past and that’s okay—if you have an imagination.

If you believe in something beyond yourself.

If you know that you are a part of a changing universal narrative and that there is home on the journey, and rest for the weary.

If you are available to stand inside the ever-turning possibilities of breathing.

But if you are not, you might find yourself in a oneness of fear and hatred, only wanting and serving one thing. You might think you own the elements themselves and all other living creatures must bend to serve your narrow-minded vision of domination. You might look at the map and, as slave masters did centuries ago, think it is a plaything for your pleasure only. You will never learn.

Embrace diversity
Unite—
Or be robbed, ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed.
—EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Through these powerful interviews with scholars, organizers, and activists leading the movement to end policing and prison, award-winning journalist Sonali Kolhatkar presents a visionary outlook for a future rooted in liberation, freedom, and justice. 

Abolitionist thinkers have been envisioning police-free communities for decades, but only in the aftershock of the racial justice uprisings of 2020 have their radical ideas entered into mainstream discourse. In her book Talking About Abolition, Kolhatkar presents an inspiring collection of her conversations with scholars, movement figures, and activists who are leading the movement to end policing and prisons. From articulating the best counter-arguments to pervasive “copaganda,” to exposing the moral bankruptcy of reformism, each conversation connects the dots between past and present while imagining a collective future rooted in liberation, freedom, and justice.

---

INTRODUCTION

The instinct to dial 911 in an emergency is embedded in the American psyche. However, Cat Brooks, an abolitionist organizer and community radio host, counters this. She notes, “Wide swaths of the Black and Brown community don’t call the police because we know that when we dial that number, it is very rarely help that actually comes. What comes is an institution, or agents of an institution, who are trained to suppress, control, and subjugate, as opposed to help.”

Studies consistently prove Brooks’s assertion to be true, including a 2023 survey by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), which found that the majority of Black Americans are afraid of relying on police to help them in a crisis.[3] Meanwhile, the majority of white Americans are comfortable doing so. Gallup found that, from 2021 to 2023, confidence in policing among white Americans has hovered around seventy-five percent, despite the mass demonstrations against racist policing in 2020, in which many white Americans participated. [4]

The racial disparity over attitudes toward policing isn’t the result of a bizarre built-in bias against authority among Black folks. The entire US system of criminal justice—from police patrolling and surveillance to the legal system of courts run by prosecutors and judges, culminating in incarceration—is sharply tilted against Black people. Black people don’t trust the police because they face the existential threat of death or imprisonment during every interaction with a cop. Such conditions beg the question: has racial segregation truly ended?

In her powerful 2010 bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander makes the case that no, it did not end. “Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind” such as slavery and segregation, writes Alexander in her book. [5]

In 2016, filmmaker Ava DuVernay expanded on Alexander’s work with her Oscar-nominated documentary 13th, which draws a direct line from the end of slavery to the modern-day criminal justice system, making a powerful case that policing and incarceration are merely extensions of the original racist institutions in the United States.

There have been many compelling treatises in recent years written by US scholars proving the moral bankruptcy of racist policing. “[N]o aspect of national life—from the economy to education to electoral politics—has been untouched by the scale and scope of racialized policing and punishment,” writes Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, in his 2019 book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, for example. [6]

Muhammad’s book is part of a growing canon of work upending the notion that the American justice system is impartial. It’s no wonder then that George Floyd’s brutal murder at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis sparked a raging inferno of anger among Americans of every racial background. According to one study, an estimated 15 to 26 million people marched in 8,700 racial justice protests that took place across the country between May 25 and July 31, 2020. [7]

However, merely calling attention to the racism embedded deeply within systems of policing is clearly not enough. Indeed, every year since Floyd’s murder, police have progressively killed more people, with 1,347 people’s lives snuffed out at the hands of law enforcement in 2023. That’s more than 112 people killed per month, and ninety-six more than the previous year. Moreover, Black people are nearly 3 times more likely to be killed by police than white people. [8] Unless there is a serious intervention, we can expect the level of violence to continue to rise.

Similarly, it’s not enough to simply denounce the perverse number of people who remain incarcerated. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, over the past half century the number of people held in state and federal prisons increased by an unimaginable 700 percent, with Black people being much more likely to remain trapped behind bars. [9]

When I think about the profound damage the carceral system inflicts on people, families, and communities, I cannot help but think of my friend, Darrell “Dortell” Williams, who has been imprisoned in California for more than thirty years. Although we’ve been friends for about two decades, we’ve never met in person. To me—a non-Black American who has not had to suffer the pain of seeing a family member incarcerated—his indefinite incarceration is symbolic of everything that is wrong with our current justice system.

“Prisons are a failed experiment that has no social, societal, or penological validation,” writes Dortell in a letter to me from Chuckawalla Valley State Prison. For him, “the roots of crime” are “marginalization, poverty, and defunded zip codes,” and “prisons themselves perpetuate these same ills.” In using the word “defunded” to describe how vulnerable communities have been stripped of resources, Dortell references a solution to the violence of the system in which he remains trapped.

Alongside the protesters’ message of “Black Lives Matter” in 2020, was the more esoteric “Defund the Police.” Those latter three words hinted not only at the need to overhaul the American system of policing and prisons, but also at a reimagining of something entirely different as a means of enacting public safety.

Abolition Is an Evolving Idea

Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, became the epicenter of the modern-day abolition movement in 2020. “We are actually building on decades of work from other organizers who have been doing abolition work and trying to move us towards a world in which abolition is possible,” [10] said Miski Noor, a leading organizer and activist with the Minneapolis-based Black Visions Collective. Noor cites the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Andrea Ritchie as laying the groundwork for contemporary abolitionist organizing.

Indeed, there is a rich trove of abolitionist analyses available for those seeking to end policing as we know it. Angela Davis’s 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete? was a foundational publication that powerfully made the case for ending the American system of incarceration. “[L]arger prison populations led not to safer communities, but, rather, to even larger prison populations,” writes Davis. [11]

In the late 1990s, Davis and Gilmore, together with scholar-activist Dylan Rodriguez, co-founded an abolitionist organization called Critical Resistance with an explicit focus on eradicating prisons, the carceral end point of policing. At around the same time, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) became embroiled in a scandal of epic proportions that made national headlines.

Starting in the 2000s, I interviewed Gilmore, Rodriguez, and other prison abolitionists on my daily drive-time radio program, airing on a community station based in Los Angeles called KPFK Pacifica Radio. During that period, I also covered street actions in downtown LA. I witnessed Angelinos protest the ugly corruption at the heart of the LAPD, particularly its Rampart Division. Hundreds of police officers were implicated in abusive and corrupt practices, which led to untold numbers of wrongful convictions.

Despite evidence of systemic failures, imagining a world without prisons—let alone police—was considered far more radical at that time than it is today. However, thanks to the last few decades of dogged work from largely Black activists and academics such as Gilmore and Noor, abolition has become a far more acceptable idea.

In 2019, the New York Times printed an extensive profile of Gilmore as a prison abolitionist. [12] In 2021, The New Yorker published Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s powerful piece titled “The Emerging Movement for Police and Prison Abolition.” [13] And in 2022, Harper’s Bazaar conducted an in-depth interview with Angela Davis and Gina Dent about their book, Abolition. Femnism. Now. [14]

It seems abolition is an idea whose time has come. This book is intended to connect the abolitionist work done in the 2000s and 2010s to the resurgence of interest in abolitionism since the 2020 uprising for racial justice. The wheels of abolition are already in motion. Many of those leading the change tell their stories here.

Enforcing and Preserving Racial Capitalism

“The United States is unlike any other place on the planet,” Gilmore said to me in a 2011 interview, “and the states that have the worst prison systems are also the ones that have the biggest gaps between rich and poor.” She added, “We as Americans have got to get serious about thinking of the ways that people are abandoned—we have immigrants locked up, people of color locked up, mentally ill people locked up, people with addictions locked up—and reconsider how it is that we should be in this world.” [15]

She deepened this analysis in a conversation we had in 2023, on which Chapter Two of this book is based. “Abolition,” says Gilmore, “lets us look at how people are struggling and understand the organized abandonment that characterizes so much of everyday life under capitalism.”

Our criminal justice system is deeply intertwined with our economic system. It’s no coincidence that the same society that embraces racist policing and imprisonment is also one where people of color, and Black people in particular, remain deeply disadvantaged compared to white people. [16] The system born from white supremacist ideals that enriched white enslavers and their progeny has largely maintained its socio-economic hierarchy in the modern world. And therefore, as Andrea Ritchie says in Chapter One, “What police are charged with doing is maintaining the existing social order.” They are the “muscle of racial capitalism.”

For decades, politicians have responded to the violence of policing by assuming it was a flaw that needed fixing, a few “bad apples” that needed expunging. But, as abolitionist attorney Noelle Hanrahan says in Chapter Four, “the system is designed to function exactly as it was planned. It is not broken. It is doing a service for the ruling class, the capitalist class, those who want to manage people who are demanding food, work, and bread, and humanity.”

Those who believe the police could be a force for good have backed many tiny (and expensive) tweaks to law enforcement. They respond to its inherent abusiveness with stricter protocols for physical interactions, body cameras, or diversity training. Such tweaks have not only preserved policing but relegitimized it again and again. “There is a kind of stubborn persistence, a stubborn loyalty to those things as forms of power that actually provide social work,” says Dylan Rodriguez in Chapter Three. He calls out the “almost religious loyalty” to policing as an “anti-Black and colonial power, as that which gives order to the world.” City budgets tell the story of such loyalties in cold hard numbers, as lawmakers direct jaw-dropping portions of tax revenue into their local police departments. This leaves public goods— including libraries, afterschool programs, job training, public transportation, and the like—to fight over the crumbs.

For example, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, the portion of the city budget spent on policing is twenty-six percent in Baltimore, Maryland; thirty-four percent in Wilmington, Delaware; thirty-seven percent in Chicago, Illinois; thirty-six percent in Houston, Texas; forty-one percent in Phoenix, Arizona; and a whopping sixty-four percent in Billings, Montana. [17] In attempting to reform police—which has turned out to be an exercise in futility—city and state officials have poured yet more public resources into systems designed to maintain racial injustice from their inception.

It’s not just police departments that are sucking up our precious tax dollars. Courts, jails, and prisons also extract resources at the expense of public safety and well-being. Ivette Alé-Ferlito, cofounder of the abolitionist organization La Defensa, calls courts “a line of production for incarceration” in Chapter Eight. They add that “the budgets for the judiciary have been climbing for the last twenty years, and the increases in judicial spending are reflected in the expansion of our criminal legal system and mass incarceration.”

This vastly expensive and patently anti-Black system of oppression preserves economic hierarchies along racial lines and has stubbornly persisted at the center of American civilization. It is, at its core, deeply uncivilized. So, what do we do about it?

Defund the Police = Invest/Divest = Care Not Cops = Care First, Jails Last

It is incumbent on governments to equalize wealth distribution. But the very resources that could do so via things like housing assistance, job training, small business subsidies and grants, and free college are diverted into funding the armed enforcers of inequality. Given this, the call to “Defund the Police” makes profound sense. However, liberal politicians and corporate media pundits, while embracing “Black Lives Matter” in 2020, rejected the idea behind the accompanying slogan of “Defund the Police,” [18] and maintained the big lie that there is no alternative to police, prisons, and the entire criminal justice system.

What if they—what if we—instead poured resources into those institutions that have actually been proven to promote public safety and well-being? Moving money out of policing, courts, and prisons and into public services is a straightforward idea, which the slogan “Defund the Police” attempts to capture. The same idea has been expressed in various other, perhaps less provocative, formations, such as “Invest/Divest,” “Care, Not Cops,” and “Care First, Jails Last.”

Regardless of the phrasing, the sentiment is the same: let’s invest resources into the things that keep us safe rather than policing. Such thinking has informed discussions around budgetary processes in various cities where abolitionists have been active. In Chapter Nine, longtime Black Lives Matter activist and California State University, Los Angeles professor Melina Abdullah lays out how cities can be pushed to enact participatory budgeting processes so that city residents can decide how to spend their tax dollars. By surveying those who are made aware of the extent of city police budgets, she finds that “people, regardless of political persuasion, tend to lean towards defunding the police.” She acknowledges that “simply having a participatory budgeting process is not abolition,” but “it pulls people in, so they begin to ask questions about why do we spend money here and not there?”

Abolition may feel too big and too complicated to achieve. In Chapter Five, Reina Sultan, who helped build the website 8toabolition.com in the summer of 2020 when interest in such ideas spiked, writes “It’s hard to imagine change when you’ve only known this way of living.” But it’s not really that complicated. Sultan articulates a handful of clear steps to achieving abolition, starting with “Defund the Police,” and ending with “Invest in Care, Not Cops.” The steps are a distillation of ideas articulated and put into practice in various ways and at various times by abolitionist activists and public intellectuals.

The idea of investing in community care over policing is popular, and why not? The M4BL survey conducted in 2023 found that “86% of Black people support creating a new agency of first responders who specialize in de-escalating violence and providing mental-health support and other social services that would take over these responsibilities from police.”[19] Well-funded social structures supporting public health and education; quality employment; living wages; and access to fair housing, clean air, and fresh, healthy food could diminish, if not entirely erase, the need for a criminal justice system.

Such projects are already underway in many US cities. As Eunisses Hernandez, the young abolitionist organizer who became an LA city councilmember, says in Chapter 7, “We have had a lot of success in moving money out of the carceral system into community, in moving money that was destined for jail construction into access to housing and care."

Hernandez coauthored Measure J, a citywide ballot measure passed in November 2020 which directs a chunk of LA’s budget into nonpolice public safety programs. The LA Times Editorial board called Measure J “the nation’s most lasting and consequential criminal justice reform strategy to arise from the social movements of 2020.” [20]

Black Futures and the Promise of a Multiracial Democracy

Cat Brooks says, “A world without police doesn’t mean a world without accountability. It means that what we’re doing right now actually doesn’t create safety for anyone.” Abolishing slavery and segregation were not enough to end the scourge of virulent racism infecting the heart and soul of the United States. If policing and prisons are merely extensions of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, then the original project of slavery’s abolition is incomplete.

The necessary next phase of abolition, then, is to eradicate policing, prisons, and the courts, while simultaneously building up structures that actually promote community safety and creating a future where a multiracial democracy can thrive. We can think of this as a grand unifying theory of abolition.

Turning that theory into practice is not an impractical prospect at all. Black women are at the forefront of realizing abolitionist ideals. Alongside Indigenous Americans, Black women in the US have faced the worst forms of violence and marginalization, historically and in the present day. [21] They have also led the most inspiring struggles for freedom and originated the most powerful and radical analyses of what is necessary for collective liberation. It is the reason why I, as a non-Black person of color, have taken my lead from Black women visionaries and why the majority of the interview subjects in this book are Black women.

In Chapter Twelve, Alicia Garza, one of three Black women who popularized the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” says “When we think about laws and policies that impact our lives, most of the time our communities are not involved in the development of those processes, but we certainly are impacted by them.” To that end, Garza, who founded the Black Futures Lab says, “We want to change that equation. We think that Black communities deserve to be the people who are making the rules, and changing the rules, that are shaping our lives every single day.”

This book, although by no means comprehensive, is a compilation of the ideas and views of twelve movement leaders, rule changers, and culture shapers who envision a future where both the unequal socio-economic order and the enforcers of that inequality are obsolete.

On the other side of abolition lies a beautiful world where quality education and libraries, food and housing, physical and mental healthcare, satisfying work, and good pay, are not just theoretical rights, but are available to all. It is a world where we can all thrive, especially those among us who have been historically excluded from the largesse of American wealth.

It’s never too early to begin visualizing and actualizing that future. Many are doing just that. In Chapter eleven, acclaimed food justice organizer and farmer Leah Penniman links abolitionist ideals of rebuilding new worlds to land, food, and farming, saying that “the food system is essentially incarcerated in corporate racial capitalism” and that the severing of Black and Brown people’s ties to the land goes hand in hand with policing and mass incarceration. Conversely, freeing land from corporate control, says Penniman, is central to freeing people from prisons and policing.

And finally, in Chapter Twelve, feminist abolitionist Gina Dent reminds us that “the carceral system is naturalized for us,” and that “we are taught over and over again that we need to rely on it.” Consequently, “that’s the only thing we can imagine.” Dent calls for a wholesale cultural transformation of the individualist mindsets and behaviors that drive incarceration, down to our personal interactions with one another.

This book is intended to weave the many disparate threads of abolitionist theory and practice into a coherent tapestry that can guide us into the future, applying a necessary sense of urgency. After all, the lives and dignity of our fellow human beings—like my friend Dortell Williams—are at stake. Some have survived the horrors of police abuse and incarceration. Far too many remain caged, suffering daily dehumanization. Many live in fear. Far too many have died already. Many more will be killed.

We have the power and the responsibility to transform this system.

“[I]t should be remembered that the ancestors of many of today’s most ardent liberals could not have imagined life without slavery, life without lynching, or life without segregation,” says Angela Davis in Are Prisons Obsolete. [22] The same historical throughline that connects chattel slavery to the contemporary system of policing and mass incarceration extends to abolition. Those who imagined a slavery-free future lifted the nation up to the path to freedom. Modern-day abolitionists are walking that same path in order to finish the task their ancestors began.

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SONALI KOLHATKAR is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the racial justice editor at YES! Magazine and the host of YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali, a weekly television and radio program that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica Radio stations and affiliates around the United States. Sonali is a senior correspondent of the Economy For All Project at the Independent Media Institute and the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice. She has won numerous awards, including Best TV Anchor and Best National Political Commentary from the LA Press Club, and has been nominated for Best Radio Anchor four years in a row.

Sonali earned her MS in Astronomy from the University of Hawaii, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. She resides with her husband and two sons in Pasadena, California.

A collection of books about prisons, abolition, and the ongoing fight for a liberated world.