Assata Shakur - Eyes of the Rainbow (1997)

Assata Shakur: The first person that I learned gave me the inner strength that I needed to overcome, or to be able to think about overcoming, the tremendous odds that were against me was my grandmother. She came from Wilmington, North Carolina, to see me, to see me at Yardville Prison. I was in that prison. I was put in a maximum security unit, in a cell with 2 guards in front of the cell, 24 hours a day. And I was in a cell with 2 guards in front of the cell, 24 hours a day. 3 albums a day, and the cell between 2 gun towers that could train their guns directly on the cell. I was told that I was in the Yardville unit for women, even though I was the only woman, and they tried to keep me there for the rest of my life. Um, my grandmother came to visit me there, to tell me a dream. And she came with all of my family, and everybody was happy. And I'm like, you know, what's happening with y'all? You're in this mood. She had a dream, she had a dream. And I was like, okay, okay. And so, my grandmother's dream was that she was Dressing me, that she was in an old house that she lived in when she lived in New York still, um, and she was putting clothes on me. I said, is that the dream? She said, that's the dream. And I said, well, was I little or big? She said, no, you were big. So I said, oh my God, the only time people dress anybody when they're grown is when they're dead. And so she said, no, no, no, I know what you're thinking.

Speaker 2: No, no, no.

Assata Shakur: What this dream means is that you are going to leave this prison. I don't know when, but it's going to be much less time than you've already spent here. And, you know, I didn't understand the dream, to be honest. It didn't make any sense to me. What does this have— wearing clothes have to do with getting out of prison? But my grandmother has always had dreams, and her dreams have always Come true.

Speaker 3: I don't know how my mother walked her troubled down. I don't know how my father stood his ground. I don't know how my people survived slavery. I do remember, that's why I believe. I don't know why the rivers go the flow of their veins. I don't know why the snow falls and covers the ground. I don't know why the hurricane sweeps through the land every now and then. Standing in a rainstorm, I wonder why. I don't know why the sun comes up and sets down.

Speaker 4: Many people say that injustice and hunger are walking freely all over the universe, and that nature is seeking a response.

Speaker 2: Oh, ya dey, baribate kese.

Speaker 4: The moon and the sun once asked the earth, where are the women warriors? The earth responded, they've been scattered all over the world, but they can always be identified by the beauty in their eyes. Which reflects the dignity and greatness of the rainbow. Nevertheless, continued the Earth, they suffer greatly, often much more than what is commonly endured by a human being.

Speaker 5: Why?

Speaker 4: Then the Moon and the Sun responded energetically, we have to look for them. We have to bring them together, because it is only women warriors who know how to survive in the midst of so much suffering, struggling, struggling, struggling.

Assata Shakur: I come from a tradition of women Maroons, Cimarrons, who Didn't just try to escape from oppression, but were totally mind, body, spirit committed to resisting and committed to winning. Whether it was Nanny in Jamaica who fought against the enslavers, whether it was Harriet Tubman who helped to free more than 700 slaves. I think I come from a very strong history, and I simply wanted to live on this planet and to continue that tradition and to I try in my little way to make my ancestors proud. I want to live in a country where freedom means something.

Speaker 6: Well, when I came to Cuba, I really didn't know what to expect. You know, I had these, like, crazy images, because even though I was— I considered myself a socialist, I considered myself someone who Really identify with the Cuban Revolution. I had been raised on a diet of anti-communism. And so I came here and I, you know, I was like expecting, first of all, everybody to look like Fidel. I thought everybody was going to wear green fatigues and stuff. It was just like a crazy thing. And I thought people would be talking like, the revolution— you know what I mean? I just had these crazy stereotypes. And then when I came, it was just—

Speaker 2: It was a shock.

Speaker 6: It was like, wow, a whole new world. The first thing that hit me was, you know, just how beautiful the nature is here. You know, whether it's the sea, whether it's the plants, this is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen in my life. Everything is so lush, so green, so ripe. And, you know, just the climate made me immediately feel at home. I'm from the Bahamas. I was very much impressed by the healthcare system, by the education system, by the sports teams, by all of the many things that the revolution has been able to accomplish. What has impressed me most has been how people live, just how people relate to each other.

Speaker 4: I mean—

Assata Shakur: I'm a teacher.

Speaker 6: I come from a society that is literally at war with itself. I didn't even know how to react to people when I came here. People would just come off the street and start talking to me, and I would immediately get paranoid.

Assata Shakur: What do they want?

Speaker 6: What, you know, it was very difficult for me to realize, you know, somebody would say, you know, what time is it?

Assata Shakur: Or where did you buy that?

Speaker 6: Because Cubans will come up to you and just talk to you, you know, whether you were in a store or in line. And that was something very different, that human contact.

Speaker 4: I'm from जो रोजा किसे ही तुम खाओ, जो रोजा किसे ही तुम खाओ। Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Assata Shakur: I was born in 1947 in New York City. I lived with my mother and my aunt and my grandparents. In a house in Queens, New York, in Jamaica, Queens. And I stayed there until I was about 3 or something. And I went with my grandparents to live in Wilmington, North Carolina. My grandparents decided to go back to Wilmington because Wilmington Was their home, and because also they wanted to open up a small business. They had saved all their money hoping to go back to Wilmington, and they did go back, and they opened up a small business on the beach by the sea. They opened the business because at that time Wilmington was completely segregated. Well, the South was just totally segregated. It was apartheid. What that meant was that there were Black schools. For example, I went to an all-Black school, the Gregory School. There were the Black library. The Black library. You know, we grew up with that kind of reality of not voluntarily living like that, not voluntarily accepting apartheid, but understanding that the price of stepping out and/or standing up alone could possibly be death. From slavery, the idea of a political prisoner started. We were political prisoners brought here from Africa. We were political prisoners in the— in order to keep colonialism fat, in order to keep the plantation owners that profited from our sweating labors, we were kidnapped and brought here. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. As prisoners, and our status hasn't changed, whether it's on the streets. We're prisoners of the ghettos. In Harlem, we're prisoners in small tenements. We're prisoners of urine smell in hallways. And I mean—

Speaker 4: I'm sorry.

Assata Shakur: I've always been a prisoner. I was— I've never been free in my life. I don't, I don't know what freedom means. Sitting in this place on this plantation, you know, you think back to what those slaves had to deal with and that probably the only beauty that they saw was the human beauty between them and The beauty of the sky, and of the trees, and of the grass. And I think that probably helped them to survive, to stay alive, to stay alive internally, spiritually. Growing up, you know, by the sea and seeing the beauty of this planet. So, I just, it was hard not to really have a profound respect for this planet, for nature. My grandmother, she could not stand people throwing paper on the floor. I mean, she could not take that. That was a crime for her, because what, and then, you know, she would say, look at these grown people, you know, what's wrong with their hands?

Speaker 6: They can't hold the paper until they find a trash can, you know.

Speaker 2: Right.

Assata Shakur: I think that it— how we live in this earth is very much tied to how we think about nature. And so I think that it's important for African people and all people of— who appreciate living, to make sure that our children and our grandchildren have a planet that is livable. And that means to make very serious changes in the order of the priorities and the politics that exist today.

Speaker 2: Mariboye, mariboy. Maribosa, mariboye, mariboy. Maribosa, mariboye, mariboy. Maribosa, mariboye, mariboy. Maribosa, mariboye, mariboy. Maribosa, mariboye, mariboy. Maribosa, mariboye, maribo. Maribosa, mariboye, maribo. Maribosa, mariboye, maribo.

Assata Shakur: Being African is not a matter of race. It's a matter of a history. of a culture, of a struggle, of a people. And the important thing is to be able to remember that, not to be disassociated from that, not to be torn from that, to carry that on into the future, and to carry that on in changing the future.

Speaker 4: Thank you.

Speaker 6: One of the most shocking things when I came to Cuba was just how African Cuba is. I mean, I get, you know, I didn't realize that there were this whole huge number of African people on this island. I had no idea because the projection is very different, how you are taught to think about Cuba in the U.S. media. I'm from Ghana. So I was really shocked. And then I began to, um, be exposed to the culture, and the culture's so rich, whether it's in dance, whether it's music. It's so African. There's the rhythm, there's the drums, you know. I began to be aware of just how much they had robbed us in the United States.

Speaker 5: Yes.

Speaker 6: Because the slavery, the kind of slavery that existed here was terrible and equally as terrible in the United States, but people were able to keep their religions, their gods, their heart pieces, language. They were able to maintain dances, rituals. That were directly from Africa. And for the first time in my life, I became acquainted with the Orishas, with Yemaya, Shango, Obatala. And I felt like, wow, I was reclaiming just another piece that we were stolen from.

Speaker 5: Yagumagare re amaga.

Assata Shakur: Edo si ba ba ka re re. Edo si ba ba ka re re.

Speaker 5: Ame a ka re re. A la tari ye ye.

Speaker 2: Edo si ba ba ka re re.

Speaker 5: Morokoro ko mo temero. Mo tena ke mo mo temaka. Morokoro ko mo temero. Moderna gemu mo demata. Ota ni mamadara. Jero ni mamarora. Lawe de lorun terikin. Terikin lorun apeleya. Sakakem mesa o koroba. Baba enaye mata ke yana yo.

Speaker 2: Goro goro gomode mero. Gomode enaye gomode mata. Goro goro gomode mero. Gomode enaye gomode mata.

Assata Shakur: The Black Panther Party came under the guns of the FBI, as did all of the Black liberation movement. It didn't matter what positions you took. It mattered that people related to those positions, that people understood what you were saying, that people supported you. And I think that when J. Edgar Hoover and those who controlled the United States government understood how many young people looked to the party for leadership, how many young people were inspired by the Black Panther Party, how many young people supported the activities of the Black Panther Party, and it was, you know, people, just ordinary street people, who, people, working people, mothers, grandmothers, who would come to the office and bring clothes, come to the office and make donations. So the, the government just perceived us as a threat because they understood that we were serious, they understood we were telling the truth, and they understood also that we were becoming a much more sophisticated opposition. We were not just the piece of pie opposition, but that we wanted a real structural change in the United States. And so we took very clear positions. We opposed the United States government intervention in Vietnam. We opposed the blockade against Cuba and all of the other U.S. policies that were hostile to the Cuban Revolution. We opposed the United States' policies of supporting apartheid in South Africa. We opposed all of the U.S. government's imperialist policies against all progressive people's struggles. By the 1960s, the late end of the 1960s, the Black liberation movement We became the main target of the counterintelligence program. And what they did was to try to neutralize all of our leaders, to prevent young people from coming together and uniting. And so what they did is try to pit organization against organization. They tried to pit leaders in the same organizations against each other. In New York, where I was, what they did was they arrested in, I think it was 1968, 1967, 1968, I'm not very clear on the date, or don't remember it at this moment. They arrested on charges of conspiracy 21 of our most effective, active list of our most effective leaders. As a movement, we have to concentrate a lot of our energies on trying to liberate our imprisoned comrades. And even though they were given bail, the bail was $100,000 apiece. And only a few of them we were able to bail out. I think that we cannot look at the Black Panther Party in the past. We cannot look at the Black liberation movement as something in the past. African people are still not free, and there are still many, many political prisoners in the United States. It is time for us To demand total, immediate amnesty for all political prisoners and prisoners of war. If we do not take ourselves seriously, if we do not take our movement seriously, then we will have to hang our heads in front of our ancestors.

Speaker 5: Baba ojosin, aye lo da o molote.

Speaker 2: Ojosin, aye lo da o molote.

Speaker 5: Baba ojosin, omake.

Speaker 2: Ocho días y lota o molote.

Speaker 5: Daba ocho días o mayelota o miau la miaute.

Speaker 2: Ocho días y lota o molote.

Speaker 5: Dame ley y loro de mata corona.

Speaker 2: Dame ley y loro de mata corona.

Speaker 5: Dame ley y loro de mata corona.

Assata Shakur: Where I was kept. For, um, in a room, isolated, um, for something like 4 or 5 days. Uh, I was beaten, tortured. Um, it was, uh, a hellish experience. Uh, no one was permitted to see me. Uh, my aunt, who is all Also, my lawyer, Evelyn Williams, had to get a court order for her and my mother and my sister to come and see me. I was in prison altogether 6 and a half years. I spent 2 and— more than 2 and a half years in solitary confinement. Much of that was in men's prison. In other words, I was the only woman. Even though they say that there are no political prisoners in the United States, I was kept in solitary confinement, kept in men's prisons because of my political beliefs. So you figure that one out. What was prison? It was hell. It was a new kind of plantation.

Speaker 6: I feel like, I feel like a maroon woman. I feel like an escaped slave because what I saw in the United States in those prisons was slavery. It was Black people with chains in cells. It was just poor people, you know, I mean, just stepped on and I'll never forget what I saw. I'll never forget what I've lived through. I'll never forget what my people have lived through. Iya lo, di haraye imu. Atse toro wenche miyo wenche u. Awomanda iya lo chamama nayo.

Assata Shakur: We started to, I don't know. To feel tender toward each other. We started to feel an attraction, to feel like human beings again, I guess is the word for it. And the subject of sex came up, and we thought about it, and we talked about it. And it was really heavy. It was a heavy It was a really heavy thing because, you know, I didn't know how to feel, because so much that was around us was like slavery, you know. I mean, it was like very clear they were out to wipe us out, and it was real. It wasn't any fantasy, wasn't any joke. They were out to take our heads. And, you know, I, I felt like a slave.

Speaker 6: Mm-hmm.

Assata Shakur: I must have felt just like a slave. And we said, well, how could we even think about bringing a child into this world? But then what other world is there to bring a child in? I mean, the world is a terrible place. And, you know, I thought about my, my mother, my grandmother, my great-great-great-grandmothers, and what they must have thought about as slaves.

Speaker 2: I'm sorry.

Assata Shakur: Um, bringing life into this world. And, you know, we just decided that we were gonna live. You know, we were gonna live, we were gonna struggle, uh, and we're not gonna kill our own hopes. We're not gonna kill our own life. We're not gonna kill our right to live.

Speaker 6: And so we just decided to be human beings, to be people.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Assata Shakur: In spite of all the people that were trying to squash us down and all the forces that were trying to dehumanize us, we decided to be human. The day before it was time to escape, I called my grandmother, and I couldn't call her, you know, and say, I'm getting ready to escape. And so she She said, I want to tell you something. Are you listening to me? Yes, Grandmother. I don't want you to get used to that place. Don't get accustomed to that place. Do you hear me? Yes, Grandmother. Are you sure you hear me? Yes, Grandmother. I do not want you getting used to that place. Do you hear me? Yes, Grandmother. And so I, when I hung up the phone, it was like a sign.

Speaker 6: It was like, you know, You know, my grandmother knew.

Assata Shakur: It was like everything was ready to go, and everything went, and everything went fine.

Speaker 2: I'm so happy.

Assata Shakur: I think that the only way that we're going to realize freedom, justice, equality, decent living for people is if there's a complete change, a complete change. Everything has, has That's got to be turned around, and that, that's the revolution, a complete change. Separation has been very hard on my family. I'm sure in other eras, I don't know, you know, after slavery, people went around looking for their family, looking for the mark. That they put on their children. So I'm sure there's a lot about my family's separation and the pain that— I don't know whether it's in the coast of Africa or the coast of—

Speaker 6: The Caribbean.

Assata Shakur: Some island in the Caribbean or in the United States. Separation is a real part of being African. In the Americas, being slaves or ex-slaves. In my own case, prison has meant separation. Exile has meant separation. And, well, I'm gonna be real right now, because I can't be any other way.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Assata Shakur: Today, my mother died. And I didn't know if I could do this, but since I didn't have anything else to do, and I figured this was the best homage I could pay to my mother, is to try to carry on her tradition, what she passed down to me, what my grandmother passed down to her, and what their foremothers passed down to them. I hope that I can live up to my mother's example, and I hope I can live up to my ancestors' expectation of me, because I really believe that I have a duty to all those have— who have come Thank you. To all those who lie at the bottom of the ocean, to all those who lost their lives, whether it's in the cane fields or the cotton fields or, you know, hanging off some tree, to continue this struggle and to continue to love and to continue to Believe in to continue to try to be human, to be giving, to be loving.

Speaker 2: Women warriors fight while others celebrate.

Speaker 4: It is only they who see the dreadful colors of suffering. It is only they who perceive where the intense splendor of victory is to be found. Because warrior women are the eyes of the rain, the eyes of the river, the eyes of the war.

Speaker 2: Ma bene, ma bene.

Assata Shakur: My name is Assata Olu Bala Shakur. Assata means she who struggles. Olugbala means for the people. And Shakur means the thankful. It is a name that I took to carry on the name of Zayd Malik Shakur, in honor of his family and in honor of the forces of beauty and good on this earth, which I'm very grateful for. That is my name.