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Jackson . . • (Continued from Page 7)
intelligence into art. And I wonder: does
the exception actually reveal the rule?;
doesn’t the daring metaphor tell us where
we’re at a generation before the tame
prose of the retrospective? Jackson
clearly knows about conditioning. He
attended Catholic mission school for a
decade in Chicago, he heard his father’s
this-is-the-best-of-all-possibleworlds
speech time after time, he saw a black
people stripped of their cultural heritage.
And he knows that only polemic, incisive
and impassioned, can pierce and burn
through layer upon layer of indoctrination.
Polemic does not exist in a vacuum: the
truth of Jackson’s argument is dialectical.
Yet opposition is not liberation. The
role of adversary is predicated upon the
existence of the opponent. Ideally,
resistance will grow into liberation. The
liberated consciousness will exist
autonomously as well as in opposition to
the oppressor. I often feel that Jackson’s
energy, by being so exclusively invested in
resistance and denunciation, is ironically
defined by that which it resists and
denounces. Jackson says he does not want
a slice of the capitalist pie: baked in
Dachau ovens, it is “putrescent.” But will
there be a new pie? Any pie?
The major disappointment of Solrdad
Brother for me is its failure to present a
vision. Jackson mouths generalities from
Communist texts (“From each according
to his abilities, to each according to his
needs”) and raves about China and alludes
to “the automated welfare state” (why
this naive faith in the machine?). But his
preoccupation is destroying the monster—
to the exclusion of envisioning the mon
ster’s replacement. He seems unaware
that victory and vision are fundamentally
related.
I agree with Jackson that the process
of revolution is itself a new world. And I
do not ask him for a blueprint. But I do
hope for an image, a gesture towards the
future, perhaps the enactment of a new
style of living and relating in Jackson's
prose. Jackson is clear: the new world will
not be racist and capitalist. Yet what will it
be? Unfortunately, Jackson’s only image
of the new man is the romanticized
guerrilla, Che and VC and jungle cat,
macho and machine gun—the prisoner’s
composite fantasy.
Perhaps Jackson’s vision is
fragmentary. But I’m uneasy with my
quibbling. Jackson writes to Joan, a
member of the Soledad Defense Com
mittee:
My father has tried for years to get
me interested in writing fiction stuff.
I’ve tried to explain that I was too
busy living—and you know where
I've been these years—. . .
The comment is revealing: Jackson does
not have the desire, leisure, or leftover
energy for writing fiction. And vision is the
fiction of new possibilities. What is real,
immediate, all-consuming, for Jackson is
the sting of oppression and the thirst for
freedom; the bars about him, the steel and
concrete, the barbed wire, the guard
towers, the automatic rifles, are Jackson’s
existential predicament. His strength is
his undiluted single-mindedness. Jackson
faces up to his painful predicament
without anyone. Neither forgetfullneas
nor revery—nor fiction—are adequate,
conceivable, responses for a man of his
nature. Jackson can not, he will not, make
believe the bars are non-existent. TTiey are
there, and their existence registers.
Seen in this light, the fragmentariness
of Jackson’s vision of a new world appears
to be inseparable from the wholeness of
the Jackson myth. In creating himself, in
transforming his hatred and confusion into
knowing resistance, Jackson also creates
a larger-than-life image, an image of high
theater: the black prisoner denouncing his
imprisonment with righteous indignation
and refusing any capitulation to his jailor.
The purity and scale of Jackson’s
resistance are its mythic powers, it
stranscendence the source of its hold on
the imagination.
If you don’t doit,
it won’t get
done.
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