Memorial for a Comrade

Memorial for a Comrade.

By the time September 2021 had come along we’d all been working together for about a year solid on political education. The ‘we’ being our grades 5 and 6 classroom comrades and our comrades from the Protégé Panther Project for Self-Defense and comrades in solidarity with us. Collectively, we’d built up a lot of critical knowledge that allowed us to begin to develop in ourselves a collective revolutionary consciousness. We learnt about the connections between local and global struggles for justice and what a revolutionary response from the People to that injustice meant and what it means to be a ‘People’ in the first place. We began to understand what the ‘system’ was, what oppression was, what it looked like, how it spoke, and about the ways it puts us down as oppressed peoples and tries to keep us down and so we began to understand what anticolonial comrades like the great revolutionary Frantz Fanon talks about when he tells us about the connections between the violence thats been forced down on us by the system and the violence we’re forced to do to each other. We were becoming transformed. We were living what Huey had said a long time ago about how unity comes out of consciousness. We were seeing it happen. We felt it. We witnessed it. We witnessed how revolutionary unity transforms our individual and collective consciousness and how it changes the language that we use, the way we relate to each other and to the world and the way we see ourselves as a collective and as a community and so we understood the power in respecting and treating each other as ‘comrades’. And then, in that first month of the 2021 school year for a moment it all fell apart. It fell apart when the life of a close and beloved comrade to many of our grade 5 and 6 comrades was taken. Our comrade’s comrade was a dedicated community worker from the community itself and the community loved him. The school loved him. Our comrades loved him. His office in the school was next door to our comrade’s classroom. We remember our comrade teacher in the classroom putting his hand up against the classroom wall, tears swelling and saying to us, “he was right here. He was just on the other side of this wall. That’s how close he was”. His life was taken on a weekend.

The city’s only 24 hour news channel (BS24, bringing you BS twenty four hours a day seven days a week) broke the news. They broke the news in the same racist anti-Black way that they always do which is to equate crime with race and to criminalize, devalue and dehumanize Black life and Black death for entertainment, for profit, and for political gain and power. Race is the channel’s bread and butter. But because BS24 is spread out across the city just like butter on bread on a daily basis on TV screens in homes, on café walls, in doctor’s and hospital waiting rooms in college and university cafeterias, in shops and shopping malls, on the subway system, at the dentist when you’re having your teeth pulled and just left on in homes as background noise, its destructive influence is everywhere, like a warfare it saturates and bombards the minds of the public with its racism, like the way it constantly plays the same anti-Black racist stories over and over again on a loop twenty four hours a day seven days a week. Like the way these racist stories where ‘GUN VIOLENCE’ thats written across the screen in red and black bold letters stirring up fear and panic and hate is connected only to Black bodies whether victim or suspect, and where almost every single time, those who are not Black but more so those who are White and are victims or suspects or perpetrators of violence and crime involving guns are never ever given the label of “GUN VIOLENCE” and their communities are never asked to apologize or portrayed as violent or bad or faced with having microphones pushed in their grieving faces to answer racist questions like ‘did he listen to rap’ and they’re never ever talked about in panic as a problem in the city that needs to be controlled by police and prisons.

Unable to grieve and traumatized even more by the media’s racist ‘gun violence’ coverage of our comrade’s comrade and with no love coming from the city that weekend our grades 5 and 6 comrades returned to school and their classroom on the Monday morning in a state of collective trauma. They came shattered. Their pain expressed in tears, in silence, in numbness in screaming, and in anger, not a collective revolutionary anger that was aimed at oppression but an anger aimed inwards. Our comrades imploded. Fell apart. All struggling trying to express what couldn’t be understood. “I was talking to him and playing basketball with him on Friday, and then we parted and he said see you Monday and I said yeah see you Monday and now he’s gone. How can he not be here?” What does it mean to love someone, to know someone deeply, like you see them every day, like they’re a constant in your world and then they’re gone. What does that mean? What does living mean? What does death mean? What does loss mean?

What was colonial education’s response? How did colonial education as a system defend our comrades? It didn’t. In what it did and didn’t do the system said to our comrades “we don’t give a damn about you”. It told our comrades, “we don’t give a damn about you” when the week before it had talked about how it was honoring “Orange Shirt Day” in memory of the thousands of Indigenous children who had been killed and abused in a systematic act of genocidal oppression in Canada’s residential schools. It had gone on all the BS24s and talked about how it was committed to the words written on the front of those orange shirts that it was wearing and being worn or left hanging in public by people all across the country that said, “EVERY CHILD MATTERS”. But when it really mattered, when their colonial dance was over and the show was done and the news cameras were gone, and when our Indigenous, Black, Brown, racialized and working class grade 5 and 6 comrades four days later were pleading in their grief for love and care and support, it was nowhere. Our comrades heard its absence and its neglect. They heard its silence, they heard the violent contradiction between what was said and what was done. They heard it in their hearts and in their bones. They heard the hypocrisy of it all and it deepened their pain, it threw salt into their wounds, it stamped on their KOS (knowledge of self). It turned their KOS inside out. So how did we defend our comrades against this warfare? We defended our comrades with Panther KOS and Panther healing

We remembered in our bones and in our blood what Assata (Shakur) had said a long time ago about how we got to recognize that as oppressed Peoples we’ve all been subjected to “extreme oppression, extreme racism, extreme sexism and to all kinds of degrading and humiliating and hostile situations and we have to be affected by that, that’s real, if you slap me I feel it, if you insult me on a daily basis I feel it”. We remembered how Assata had said that the struggle and defense against colonialism’s warfare is not just about opposing and tearing down all the structures of oppression that are out there, nah, it’s about healing too. Assata knew that colonialism and its violence rips our world apart, it rips our bodies apart, it rips our relationships apart, it causes us to become disconnected from everything that we are connected to and to everything that makes us whole, loved, human and centered. Knowing all that is knowing Panther KOS and Panther healing.

Like all Panthers, Assata had read comrade Frantz Fanon’s book “The Wretched of the Earth” so she knew that colonialism leaves nothing and no-one intact. She knew that in its path of destruction it leaves behind a disconnected self. The kind of healing then that Assata was talking about wasn’t the oppressor’s colonial healing that path-olo-gizes usmeaning that it treats us like we got a disease or an illness that needs to be fixed or corrected or cured with colonialism’s drugs or punished with arrest or imprisonment if the drugs don’t work as if we the oppressed are the cause of our own trauma and pain and not the violence of the colonial system that hurts us, slaps us and insults us on a daily basis. Nah, Assata was talking about a revolutionary healing. Assata was talking about the kind of healing that takes back our connectedness to everything that we have been dis-connected from by the oppressor and the oppressor’s violence, cruelty, assaults and woundings. Assata was talking about a healing medicine that makes us whole and centered, that heals our whole body and our relationships to ourselves and between ourselves and to all living things. That’s Panther KOS

Panther KOS knows that what’s at stake is life and death. It knows that if the oppressed cannot heal in a revolutionary way then its gonna be hard for them to grow a revolutionary consciousness and if they cant grow a revolutionary consciousness they’re never gonna become revolutionaries and if they don’t become revolutionaries for and in the future the People can never be free. If the People can never be free they will die. The planet will die. We all die. Why? Because, if there are no revolutionaries in and for the future nothing will change. Oppression will not cease. It will not ease. It can only get worse. Panther KOS knows too that if we’re gonna be free we got to become new peoples, we got to become new beings, we got to create a new world. It knows that revolutionary healing, revolutionary self-defense, and revolutionary fight-back against oppression cannot use the language and the ways of doing of the oppressor. It cannot use the oppressor’s mental pictures and explanations (whats called ‘concept’) about the world. It cannot use the oppressor’s definitions, words, language, ways of being, ways of thinking, ways of talking, ways of knowing, ways of feeling and ways of doing. It cannot accept what the oppressor says is possible and what is not. It cannot accept the fear that the oppressor tries to impose on us. It cannot accept what the oppressor says ‘healing’ is, or what justice is, or what life is, or what love is, what hope is, or what death is, or what loss is, or what grief and grieving is, or who or what is sacred and who or what is not. It cannot. It must not and so it don’t and we don’t.

Armed with Panther KOS we intervened and reclaimed the sacredness of our comrade’s comrade. We demanded that his sacredness be heard, honoured and made visible on our comrade’s terms, on our terms as oppressed peoples. We acknowledged and honoured our collective loss and our collective pain. As comrades we burned sacred herbs like sage that brought balance back to our minds, our bodies and our collective souls. We witnessed the singing of honour songs and jingle dress dance that honoured the memory of our comrade and honoured the sacredness of us all. We heard, felt and witnessed our collective heartbeats beating in time with our comrade’s sacred drum and on each beat we could hear and feel our own heartbeats and our whole bodies re-connecting back to the heartbeat of the land and to the water and to the Earth and to everything that we are related to.

We came to a consciousness as a collective that if our bodies are in the land and the water and the Earth and if the land and the water and the Earth is in our bodies then our comrade’s comrade is with us. He is present. He’s in our classroom, he’s down the hall, on the street, in the air that we breathe. He is everywhere. Our grief and grieving became a revolutionary grief and grieving and in our revolutionary grief and grieving the more conscious of all of these connections we became the more unified we became and the more unified we became the more we got for real what Fred (Hampton) was saying back in the day when he said “you can kill the revolutionary but you cant kill the revolution”, coz our comrade’s comrade wasn’t just with us, he was in us, he was in all of us. His love was in us. In everything that we did, in the love and respect we showed each other, in the way that we now carried ourselves with power and pride, in the way that we defended each other as a collective, as a Fam against oppression. That was him. He was in us, making us bigger, making us more power-FULL, making us more liberated, just like Fred said it would. That’s the revolution, that knowledge, that power, that fire, passed on from body to body, from People to Peoples, that’s what they can’t kill. EVER. Our revolutionary healing brought with it a revolutionary love for our collective self that was stronger than before. We put our heads down on our pillows that night, believing that we had the power-FULL-NESS to transform our world.

We went to sleep that night believing that we were revolutionaries. We went to sleep that night filled with the joy and happiness that comes to you when you are at peace and when you are centered in your whole-self and when your hearts and souls are full in the fire of knowing that if (as Huey said) I is we and we is I then everything is possible. And when we WOKE, and went back to school the next day our bodies burned with that revolutionary hope that comrade Elaine Brown the leader of the Black Panther Party back in the day talked about when she told us straight to our face how “it is inevitable that the pendulum will swing our way” and how there aint no-one or no thing nowhere that can stop us, that can put us down or keep is down if we stand together and defend each other as a collective, as a Fam, as a People.

The K-OS