Click Sign in through your institution.Shibboleth / Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.Ĭhoose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways: Get help with access Institutional accessĪccess to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. This article positions mourning as central to Jackson’s texts, concentrating on his strategies for representing loss and grief (and their political relevance) in Soledad Brother and in the political treatise Blood in My Eye (1972), which was completed days before his death in prison at the age of twenty-nine. These circumstances shape Jackson’s understanding of loss, and his parsing of emotions related to death-specifically grief-is conditioned by the terms of imprisonment. Life is ultimately unsustainable under conditions of confinement, and resistance gives meaning to his eventual death.
Specifically, he battles the prison system and, by extension, a racist US culture that disproportionately incarcerates black men. He divines his fate elsewhere in the text, too, always with this same wish-to strike a blow against the forces that will eventually kill him.
Jackson follows it by writing, “I don’t mind dying but I’d like to have the opportunity to fight back” ( Soledad 103). Pouring out of him, without line breaks, the poem becomes a lyric meditation on the conditions of social (and even physical) death in the carceral space. Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!Īt one point in Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970), political activist George Jackson laments his continued imprisonment and then quotes the entirety of Claude McKay’s famous sonnet, “If We Must Die” (1919). Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
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