Remember the Fallen
by Judy Clark
Judy Clark was a comrade of Kuwasi Balagoon's, arrested for
participating in the same Brink's holdup of 1981.
This text was first published in the radical feminist newspaper Bottomfish
Blues in 1987.
Kuwasi. Now he's gone.
And
its
like his last loving joke on me, his last gentle bursting of my
egotistic
bubble. Because i was all ready for a long, lingering heroic battle
against
disease and death. Ultimately lost, but great tragic courage and
sharing.
And he did it his way. Fast. Kuwasi was never cut out to be a tragic
hero.
Or any kind of hero. He hated it and fought it. And subverted many
people's
attempts to mould him into one or create a myth with which to bury his
real
self. Which was simple human.
Simply
lustful of life and life's sensuous pleasures – food, people, wine and
laughter.
Lustful too, for battle against the enemy.
He
hated
hypocracy and I am writing this because i want to combat our own need
for
hypocracy, for myth. Let's not make him bigger than life – but simply
human.
Let's
not distort his ideology, but claim him as the anarchist he was, who
allied
with New Afrikan nationalists because it was the best way he saw to
fight
for the human rights and liberation of his people and all people.
Let's
not bury those parts of him - his kinkiness, iconoclasm, individualism,
because like it or not, they are part of what fed his courage, his
idealism
and willingness to make his life the revolution.
For
Kuwasi,
fighting for Freedom and living free were one and the same thing.
Maybe
Kuwasi died so quickly because he got to that point, looked around at
the
party that was planned for him and it sure wasn't one of those wine and
music and a million people rockers he loved and he escaped before he
could
be trapped off.
Some
people might wish .that Kuwasi died a more properly “revolutionary”
death,
in combat against the enemy or at least from a more respectable disease
than AIDS. But AIDS is a scourge of the people, oppressed people.
Its endemic because those who suffer its wrath are mainly the
dispossessed,
the hated, the marginalized. So the system has refused to address it
and
has punished its victims. Many of our communities have disowned our own
in
the face of it.
In
this
prison, (Bedford) women with AIDS are isolated into a filthy ward mixed
among other sick women whose germs will kill them. They are punished
double,
disowned, humiliated, feared and hated. i am glad that Kuwasi did not
have
to suffer that indignity, even though i greedily wanted him to live
longer,
because i was not ready to lose him.
Did
Kuwasi
get AIDS from his transvestite lover, who he persisted to love and
insisted
entrusting despite pressures and conflicts from the rest of us? i would
like to say "from those others" in the revolutionary movements who
hardly
celebrated that part of his life. But having called for an honest
accounting
i have to look at my own bourgeois moralism, hypocracy and self-hating
anti-gayness.
But
Kuwasi
was persistent and consistent in his own way. Kuwasi could love women
and
men fully, freely, lustfully and most of all with such generosity of
spirit
that it never felt exploitative.
He
didn't
live by the rules. Not society's or Christianity's or Islam's or
feminism's
or the New Afrikan Independence Movement's.
But
he
did have principles and integrity and honesty.
He'd
fight like hell for his positions - but if you convinced him he'd
change,
and he realized that one's actions had to be consistent with one's
principles.
We
used
to fight furiously about his love of pornography, i can still recall my
fury at his exchanging short ice with one of the prison guards! Yet i
felt
more comfortable, intimate and freer with Kuwasi than almost any man
i'’ve
known. Comfortable enough to hug and kiss and massage and play through
our
legal meetings in the county jails. And .when he once said that for him
making
love could mean anything, could mean playing footsies, as long as it
was
fun and with love, as he sat there, gleefully massaging my bare foot in
his
lap, i .believed him and was delighted and thrilled.
i
am
fighting the allure of putting my own stamp on Kuwasi, as though it
would
be any more accurate than any others.
Only
Kuwasi can define Kuwasi.
i
hope
people collect his poems and his theoretical writings, because that
will
be the truest reflection.
All
i
can do is speak for myself. That's one of the things Kuwasi taught me.
We
are
each ourselves and can only vouch for our own partial truths and when
we
ennoble that into dogmas, or try to enforce or assume collective
assumptions
through social pressure, we delude ourselves and will pay for it in the
end.
Kuwasi
believed that and clung to his own ideology and dreams as dogmatically
and subjectively as the rest of us.
Which
is to say, he was contradictory.
Like
the rest of us. Human!!!