The Window 2 My Soul: My Transformation from a Zone 8 Thug to a Father & Freedom Fighter, A Political Memoir
If your summer reading includes only one book, I recommend Yusef Shakur'sThe Window 2 My Soul: My Transformation from a Zone 8 Thug to a Father and a Freedom Fighter. As I talked with Yusef Shakur, I thought of the huge changes that have taken place in the Black community since Richard Wright sNative Son(1940), Ralph Ellison sInvisible Man(1952) and Claude Brown'sManchild in the Promised Land(1965). In the mid-20th century these books alerted Americans to the rage against racism that was smoldering in Black ghettoes and, as Black youth were being made expendable by Hi-Tech, had begun to explode in the urban rebellions of the 1960s.Window 2 My Soulis the 21st century story of a new generation of Outsiders, born since the 60s. This street force, Jimmy Boggs wrote, compels every member of the Black community, on pain of extinction, to face up to the failure of all institutions in modern America: the economic system, the schools, the welfare system, the hospitals, the police, the political system, i.e. the entire American way of life and to develop a perspective for the total revolutionizing of America.Window 2 My Soulis not literature like Native Son and Invisible Man. Yusef Shakur has coined new words like "s**t-uation" and "overstand" to open our eyes to the world of single mothers and absent fathers into which he was born. His mother was 15. He was named Joseph Lee Ruffin after his mother s father. His own father, Richard Lee Carter, 17, had left for the Navy. To provide food, clothing and shelter for him and his sister (by another man), JoJo's mother sold her body to men who used her as a punching bag. She became an alcoholic but never stopped caring for him. Growing up on the mean streets of Detroit, where factory jobs had disappeared and crack was king, JoJo's education came from the thugs and predators in Zone 8 (Detroit 48208). So it was natural for him to believe that preying on one another and meeting violence with violence was the way to survive. He was only able to rebuild himself from the inside out (p.82) after he was incarcerated (for a crime he did not but could have committed) and was schooled in prison by his father, who had been incarcerated when JoJo was 10 and had overcome self-hate by becoming a Muslim.Window 2 My Soulis the story of an Outsider rebuilding, redefining, re-spiriting himself. It may not be read as widely as Native Son, Invisible Man and Manchild. But I recommend it to anyone seeking to overstand our s**t-uation. Whether you grew up in a 'hood, a suburb, a gated community or an Ivy League campus, it will help you discover how you can begin to free yourself and our country from the dog-eat-dog, hyper-individualistic, hyper-materialistic, Darwinian, survivalist, violent capitalist culture, which is destroying our humanity and all life on our planet. Yusef's journey, like Malcolm's, has been one of Transformation and Resurrection. Malcolm, also a thoughtful reader, was murdered before he was 40, leaving it to us to keep transforming our selves, as he was doing to the very end, e.g. going to Selma to tell MLK he wanted to work with him. Yusef Shakur is 36, still with us, still evolving. --The Michigan Citizen, Grace Lee Boggs