SermonsChristian Republic

My newest beta reader is a COINTELPRO prisoner

UPDATE:  We learned on the morning of June 25, 2014 that Jalil was turned down for parole yet again.  He wrote to me and my husband that there had been one sympathetic person on the parole board, but she must have failed to convince one of the other two people.   I feel so sad, because I know from letters he wrote to me and my husband that he had allowed himself to hope.

 

In previous blog posts I wrote about a visit to Attica prison and my conversation with Jalil Muntaqim, a member of the Black Panther Party who70949 was swept up in the COINTELPRO prosecutions/persecutions of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI in the 1970s and has been incarcerated since 1973.

During our visit in April, we were talking about our writing and my husband brought up, a little to my chagrin, my novel, The Price We Paid, and suggested that Jalil’s opinion on it was worth having.

Now, the thing is, my main character, Islam Goldberg-Jones is a political prisoner incarcerated for three decades for a crime he did not commit. Even though the fascist Christian Republic government has fallen by the end of the novel, he remains in jail because the federal judiciary remains filled with Christian Republic appointees. I actually had in mind COINTELPRO prisoner Leonard Peltier when I subjected Iz to life in prison. (I had this fantasy that if the novel were published I would follow up with a novella or short story that frees Iz on the condition that Obama pardon Peltier—but it looks unlikely at this point that the book will be published while Obama is still in office.)

So, I never thought I’d have the chance to have an actual COINTELPRO prisoner read the novel and offer suggestions—and he was someone I did not know well to boot, always a bonus in a beta reader. (People most willing to read your manuscripts are usually people who like you, and they will try to be objective, but they will also always cut you a little slack.)

Within a few days of his receiving my manuscript, I had Jalil’s first letter. It was exactly the sort of critique that any writer hopes to receive from a reader, one that shows the reader has read the manuscript carefully, noticed gaps in logic, and sees ways that it can be improved. He followed it with two more letters containing some afterthoughts—again, gratifying to the writer, because it shows the novel has stuck with the reader.

The flaw he pointed out that I most want to remedy was the omission of how the African slave trade, 400 years of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow etc would have fed into the rise of the Christian Republic theocracy—even though the people participating in the government, including people of color, might not understand this history.

Additionally, he wrote

As you may recall, I mentioned there was an absence of the African diaspora experience and how it shaped the U.S. existence. What I failed to mention as a method for you to include this dynamic is the reality of how the slave trade miscegenation created a New Afrikan. The Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, Mandigo, Mandika, etc. etc. were chained, shackled and brought to the country, denied the right to practice their indigenous religions (Yoruba, Islam, Animism, etc.) were told to Christianize their names, not permitted to read or write, until they were integrated into the Christian religion, soon being allowed to read the Bible and Christian literature, etc. until they were able to have Black Christian churches and other forms of worship. This method of creating a New Afrikan, including Native American and European DNA in the Afrikan bloodline, wrapped in the Christian belief system was an important plan/procedure to domicile these Africans, which lead to the U.S. becoming an international economic power.

So this has given me the idea to go back to the Ralph section, when he is meeting the young people from all the various youth groups in the DC area to plan public witnesses that are veiled critiques of the government, and having one of them be a New Afrikan youth group, who view Christianity as a slave religion. I was thinking that Jerry, Ralph’s boyfriend, could become fascinated by the New Afrikan kids and interested in that history. Hank, on the other hand, devout African Methodist Episcopal Zion member that he is, would frown on this talk, and that could increase the sense of alienation that Ralph begins to feel towards Hank, who has been a mentor and father figure to him.

Last summer, I wrote about the pleasure of revising future Canadian history in the manuscript after my colleague Jim Loney read it.  I will feel some of the same pleasure incorporating Jalil’s suggestions, especially since Iz and most of the people in my novel’s resistance movement are people of color.

So I was even more apologetic than I would have been ordinarily that it took me so long to respond to Jalil’s letters. I noted that I was feeling a little overwhelmed by my CPT work, and had been unable to do writing that really fed me for more than a month (more about this in a future post.) He wrote back that it was good to take time away from CPT work to deal with my needs and mentioned that his comrade in the struggle, Safiya Bukhari had died too young because she had not taken care of herself. (It feels weird to receive comfort and encouragement from someone who is locked up in Attica while I am living a suburban lifestyle in Rochester, NY.) I googled Bukhari and really wish she was still around. She sounds awesome. And she was a year older than I am when she died.

In a couple weeks, Jalil will be face a parole hearing for the eighth time. It is my great hope that justice will prevail and he will be able to leave prison and sit down to the family dinner his mother wants so much. If not, I am going to adjust my fantasy. If I manage to sell this book I will suggest, as part of the marketing, that I will follow up with a short story or novella about Iz leaving jail, on the condition that all of the COINTELPRO prisoners receive a pardon.

Dreams are free, right?

Revising Future Canadian History

When I set up the geography for my dystopic future novel, The Price We Paid, (formerly Shea) I knew that I wanted to have several Autonomous Indigenous Regions (AIRs) between the United States and Canada which would serve as a place that dissidents, Muslims and other people fleeing the fascist Christian Republic could find refuge. I think I probably got the idea from the film Frozen River (one that I think anyone who makes more than $50,000 a year should see).

Frozen River with Melissa Leo

Frozen River with Melissa Leo

Frozen River takes place on the Mohawk Reserve at Akwesasne and tells the story of desperate people: A Mohawk woman who smuggles immigrants from Canada into the U.S. and who is shunned by her family for doing so and a mother of two whose husband has gambled away the downpayment for a prefab house. She joins the Mohawk woman to recoup the money. . .
Anyway Akwesasne straddles the Canadian and U.S. border, so when the river is frozen, people can cross from one side to the other without going through U.S. and Canadian customs.

So I thought for my novel, that would be really useful; I could see the Mohawks and other First Nations that have communities on both sides of the border—Anishinaabe, Dakota, Blackfoot, etc. —being amenable to receiving persecuted people from the Christian Republic, but I wasn’t sure if the history of how their autonomy came about would stand up under scrutiny. I thought maybe Canada could have a Mohawk Prime Minister in the 2050s who helped facilitate the creation of the zones and that the United States, in its weakened status, might not have the power to object when large chunks of its territory were carved out, because the Latin American Union and China would support the AIRS.

One of my Christian Peacemaker Team colleagues, Peter Haresnape, who works on our Aboriginal Justice team and is thus familiar with the intransigence of Canadian Federal and provincial governments when it comes to the rights of the First Nations told me he thought that that non-Indigenous Canadians wouldn’t allow this change to happen out of a simple sense of morality. So based on his suggestions, I came up with the following footnote:*

In 2052, with indigenous nations wielding more influence in the Canadian government, Prime Minister Kaniatariio, announced that Canada supported the autonomy of the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) Nation, whose territory at Akwesasne straddled the U.S./Canadian Border, and would defend it militarily if need be. China and the Latin American Union (LAU) immediately joined a defense pact with Canada, saying they would view an incursion by U.S. troops into the territory as a hostile act against their own nations. The LAU joining this pact was somewhat ironic, given that Colombia and Peru had almost exterminated their own indigenous populations by this time. Within the next decade, three more Autonomous Indigenous Regions were established between the U.S. and Canadian border at Red Lake, Dakota, and Niitsítapi, incorporating large swathes of U.S. territory.

The granting of autonomy was not entirely altruistic on Canada’s part. The Autonomous Regions became tax havens for wealthy Canadians, and the northernmost tribes whose lands contained significant mineral deposits agreed to cede their lands to the Canadian government and move to the Autonomous Regions.

The First Nations allowed descendants of European settlers still living in the regions to remain on their lands, but not to pass the properties on to their children. Since Estadounidenses were allotted considerably greater political freedoms in the Indigenous territories than they were in the U.S., most chose to remain on their lands. The few settler Canadians living in the Canadian Indigenous regions accepted financial compensation and emigrated to Canadian provinces.

Jim with his book and a couple admirers

Jim with his book and a couple admirers

I asked my friend and CPT colleague Jim Loney to read my manuscript, because I wanted his perspective on whether I had portrayed my gay teenager, Ralph, realistically. Jim (who is the author of Captivity: 118 Days in Iraq and the Struggle for a World Without War, which tells of the time he was held hostage in Baghdad November 2005-March 2006) told me that he had problems with my Canadiana. He said the Northern Nations would never cede their lands willingly (which was something I had wondered about, too.) He also said he just didn’t see white Canadians morally evolving to the point where they would elect a Mohawk Prime Minister by 2052 or be amenable to Autonomous Indigenous Regions.

He further said that my set-up for the Canadian Civil War was based on a false notion of the Parti Québécois. They are secessionist, yes, he said, but they are also progressive, and therefore unlikely to seize Indigenous lands or bomb Indigenous education centers. What I wanted was a Parti called Pure Laine (Pure Wool), which refers to people of a pure French-Canadian heritage. As we talked further, we realized that this political party and its militia groups would be just the sort of people that the Christian Republic would support with funding and weapons so they could foment a coup in Quebec and stop the trafficking of people and supplies through Akwesasne.

And then we realized we could backtrack a bit to the Mohawk Prime Minister. What if a much beloved populist Anglo Prime Minister were assassinated in the late 2040s-early 2050s by a member of Pure Laine (possibly with the backing of the Christian Republic?) What if one of his political passions had been reparations to Indigenous peoples in Canada, and after he died people elected Prime Minister Dudley Kaniatariio as a way of honoring that legacy? Kaniatariio, as a savvy politician, could then lay the groundwork for the AIRS.

That scenario, Jim said, might work.

One of the things I generally like about writing for Christian Peacemaker Teams is its communal nature. Someone (if I’m involved, usually me) knocks out a first draft, and then other people suggest new information and perspectives that are incorporated into the piece. My character Ralph became who he was at the suggestion of one of my beta readers. I feel both excited and relieved that my future Canadian history makes more sense now because of Jim’s input.

*************************
Note: The Price We Paid was featured this week in the Worlds of the Imagination blog, as part of the 77 challenge, (7 lines starting at the 7th line from the top of page 7 or 77) Thanks fellow She Writes member Olga Godim http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6471587 Olga_Godim for picking me!

*I’m currently eliminating all the footnotes either by incorporating them into the text or just losing them. Not everyone is as enamoured of fake academia as I am, according to my beta readers.