Jalil Muntaqim - Escaping the Prism... Fade to Black: Poetry and Essays

Poetry Like Bread: The Necessity of Poetic Wholeness

by Walidah Imarisha

My poetry is not fairy tales

or lullabies or sing-a-longs,

Naw it is a rebuke of the

ostrich syndrome a swift kick

in the ass to make you stand up

straight and take responsibility

for your failures, demanding you

live life fully and love completely

Jalil Muntaqim, My Poetry

Political prisoner Jalil Muntaqims writing doesnt live in ivory towers, wrapped in elitism and dripping privilege. Jalil Muntaqims writing breaks the pedestal meant for it, sharpening the shards for survival.

Weaving together essay, analysis and poetry into one, his collection Escaping the Prism recognizes none of us is beyond critique and responsibility not even art. His work fulfills the edict by Salvadoran revolutionary poet Roque Dalton that poetry, like bread [be] for everyone.

A former Black Panther member, a consummate and continued freedom fighter, Jalil has spent more than two-thirds of his life in prison. Infused in his poetry is a sense of urgency as present as the need to free him; the clarity rings out, not shrouded in secrecy, but loud as a bomb. It echoes with the punishment he has suffered, the decades of his life stolen. It rings with his continued commitment to organizing even through iron bars and barbed wire, using any and all tools available to him.

Poetry has become part of his arsenal of justice, and Jalils work embodies the words of Martinique-born Afro-Caribbean revolutionary Frantz Fanon: I want my voice to be harsh, I dont want it to be beautiful. I dont want it to be pure I want it to be torn through and through

In his poem, My Poetry, Jalil closes by saying My poetry is my life, and it is absolutely life you will find in these pages. Gritty, complex, raw life. Life that was meant to be extinguished, stomped out by the entire weight of an oppressive system. But like Tupacs rose that grew in concrete, Jalils work and words, his humanity, his life, slips through bars.

This collection is not just about rebuke, but a commitment to living fully and loving completely. To exploring all aspects of humanity, all pieces that make up liberation. Many of the poems look at sex, at sensuousness, at humans joining flesh and sometimes hearts. Escaping the Prism flips seamlessly between poems about sexual pleasure, and political essays on incarceration, in such a way that the reader understands implicitly they are intimately connected. That this is human. His poems around desire, lust and longing also allow the reader to explore the complexities, convolutions and sometimes contradictions of masculinity, compressed by decades in a cell.

As Ward Churchill writes in his essay in this book, Jalils writing is absolutely born out of love. Some of the pieces, like For Zakia, are so imbued with conscious vulnerability, it makes the heart ache, this poem, written for a daughter who was in the womb when he was arrested, a daughter he has only known through bars.

Jalils writing, his case, his life, shows both the continuity of repression, but also the continuity of resistance. As part of their attempt to disrupt this continuity of resistance, governmental forces hoped to use prisons to smash a lineage of struggle that for Black people reaches unbroken back to the first attempted African enslavement.

Escaping the Prism defies the attempts of the state to silence political prisoners, to disconnect them from those on the ground working to create change. In the context of the international Black Lives Matter movement, this roar for justice led by Black youth, Jalils poetic voice, and the voices of all our political prisoners, are vitally necessary to continue the continuity of Black resistance.

Walidah Imarisha
May 2015

My Poetry

My poetry is sharpened knives

clipping thorns off roses

My poetry builds bridges over

lava flows to step in spring

streams

My poetry replaces hate with

understanding and puts sugar

in kisses

My poetry ravishes and plunders

the greedy to feed the needy

My poetry puts the hue in humanity

to consternation of racists

and xenophobes

My poetry puts the stink in

shit and makes you love the

stench

My poetry is the bastard son

of the hookers that satisfy your

husbands and boyfriends, and

some of your girlfriends

You know it is all about love

My poetry is not fairy tales

or lullabies or sing-a-longs,

Naw it is a rebuke of the

ostrich syndrome a swift kick

in the ass to make you stand up

straight and take responsibility

for your failures, demanding you

live life fully and love completely

Even when I procrastinate to write

my poetry

My poetry puts the puzzle in an

enigma, like a Rubiks Cube, you

have to twist your mind to discover

a solution

My poetry put the Pan in Doras

box, and swallowed the key to

keep it locked

My poetry has a chip on its

shoulder bigger than the heads

on Mount Rushmore

My poetry is the calm before the

storm, and the silence in the dark

My poetry is the hypnotists trance

and the enlightenment of an epiphany

My poetry only asks for your

ear to open your mind so

your heart will hear my

poetry tantalizing your

soul

My poetry is my life