Marlon Peterson - Bird Uncaged: An Abolitionists Freedom Song

Marlon Peterson lyrically and powerfully narrates his own experience with the injustices of American prisons, from the cruelty of incarceration to the cages of masculinity. Bird Uncaged is a freedom dream, and important reading for anyone thinking deeply about our carceral systems.

Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Awardwinning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist

Marlon Petersons memoir tells the intimate story of how the twin forces of patriarchy and white supremacy have combined to build a life of cages for generations of Black men in America. Marlons worka narrative of men who have suffered under, been complicit in, and then attempted to upend their involvement in patriarchal systemsis just the kind of book we need to build toward a liberated future for all Black people in America.

Kimberl Crenshaw, author of On Intersectionality

Petersons words are necessary balm. And we need them now more than ever. What a gift he has given us in his debut book.

Darnell Moore, author of No Ashes in the Fire

Marlon Petersons gift is one of immense heart. He has been tested throughout his lifehe has had his freedom taken away from him in the most real sense. That has provided Marlon with the kind of perspective often missing from conversations of justice and violence and transformation and healing.

Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Stakes Is High

Peterson has done what is rarely done in American literature: created a classic memoir that shows contemporary readers how to rewrite our lives and future readers how to reread the possibilities of abolition. This is a stunning memoir that pulls off everything it attempts and somehow it made me want to ask more of myself as a writer, human, and abolitionist.

Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

Bird Uncaged is a story of trauma and survivala lesson in what it means to confront all of the ugliness of the past and dare journey to forgiveness and something more. Peterson is resolute in these lines, because he has seen enough to know that the healing and the hope is in the journey. The journey found in these pages isnt just a coming-of-age story, but rather is a crucially important [story] confronting the ways a man has hurt and been hurt, and come to believe honesty might be a pathway away from shame and more suffering.

Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Felon

Bird Uncaged is an exquisitely excruciating exercise in emotional excavation that is at once a profoundly personal story as well as a sweeping indictment of this countrys systems and norms and practices. Bravo, Marlon. I am grateful for your intrepidity, voice, and humanity.

Sophia Chang, author of The Baddest Bitch in the Room

In Bird Uncaged, Marlon Peterson offers compelling insights from his remarkable life story. It is a tale for our times: how a young man of promise ends up finding meaning and direction despite numerous challenges and obstacles, not least of which is a lengthy stint in prison. Bracingly powerful and painfully honest, Bird Uncaged is a call for change that should be read by anyone with an interest in justice in the United States.

Greg Berman, executive director of the Center for Court Innovation

Marlon Petersons Bird Uncaged: An Abolitionists Freedom Song is a viscerally honest, bracingly insightful, exquisitely lyrical memoir that is impossible to put down and even more impossible to ever forget having read. It is raw testimony. It bears witness to modern-day slavery. And it is a full-on education about what America is and what it foolishly imagines itself to be. The book should be required reading in schools from one end of the USA to another.

Dr. Baz Dreisinger, author of Incarceration Nations

Bird Uncaged is heart-wrenching without being sentimental. Its beautiful without ever being flowery. Its one voice without ever being just one thing. Its all honest without ever pretending to be complete. I hope you love it. It deserves to be a thing you love.

Danielle Sered, author of Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

for the hurt people, and the people who hurt people: sit down in this circle

Rumi, A Community of the Spirit

To Dr. Angelou, because your legacy is every life you touch.

I dont believe in cages of any kind. Let me tell you why.

Dear Marlo,

The first thing you should know is that you were a beautiful, brilliant, bubbly Black boy. Your big black lips were just the right size. No need to hide them by folding them inwards. No need to hide your presence.

You were talkative, and that was okay. It was your way of sharing your light. No need to hide your voice by playing small. Your smile your smile was contagious. No need to hide it by masking it with screwfaces. Your ability to carry on big people conversations as an eight-year-old was a gift. No need to hide your maturity. It was one of the ways you learned about the world, even if you did raise your parents phone bill to over $1,000 dollars by calling 1-900 numbers to play Jeopardy!

You were a nerd. No need to hide your intelligence.

You should know that your 1980s Crown Heights, Brooklyn, neighborhood needed young Black boys like you to shine and inspire.

Too many of you hid, in cages of your own creation, but mostly in cages created for you. Often the two were indistinguishable.

My mother, Elsa, is a hardworking woman who loves her children. She was once a little Black girl in Trinidad who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. She lived during a time when tightly coiled hair on a girl was considered nigger naps, something to be ashamed of and hide away. So my mom hid her hair under berets to avoid feeling that she was ugly because of her hair. My mom also witnessed both her biological father and her stepfather plagued by alcoholism, and her mom get beaten regularly by the latter. She told me and my pops about the abuse a handful of years ago. She kept that information hidden for over sixty years from two of the closest men in her life. Despite that part of her childhood, Mommy was the gem of her mothers eyes, and spoiled.