PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness (2003) ISSN: 1094-2254 “Bourgeois Cancer vs. Revolutionary Love: A Taste of Power Revisited”

Greg Thomas

A TASTE OF POWER: A BLACK WOMAN’S STORY, Elaine Brown. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney and Auckland: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1992. ISBN: 0-385-47107-6. 452 pp.

Now, while Nobel’s Toni Morrison writes famously on the opening lines of her novels, I’m not sure that hers can compare with the first words of Elaine Brown in A Taste of Power: “‘I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, Comrade?’” (Brown 1992, 3). We’re told that eight years went into the composition of this book, a seriously well-written one on a “[B]lack woman-child in America” (ix). We hear Brown chant, “We are rough! We are tough! We are the girls who don’t take no stuff!,” in her early years on York Street, Philadelphia. We follow her on out to southern California, then Oakland, to hear her chant “Power to the People!,” in due course.

We get more than your average autobiography or “movement memoir” about life in the Black Panther Party. Brown tells the tale of her promotion to its “Central Committee,” how this promotion coincides with their recognition, as anti-colonial internationalists, of “China’s correct recognition of the proper status of women as equal to that of men” (304), and her eventual rise to BPP “Chairman” and de facto “Minister of Defense” during Huey P. Newton’s three-year exile in Cuba.

Though her personal relationship with Newton has preoccupied many, especially yet not exclusively academic feminists, Brown’s profound opposition to sexual convention as a Panther is often, somehow, strangely ignored.

Ironically, Newton barely enters Brown’s narrative before her story is half-told. She will twice state she loved him because he was, in his own words, “not a man…not a woman…just a plain-born child” (243, 445). Love is in no way reduced to “romance” here. Its entanglement with romance is nonetheless exposed and subject to passionate critique. “Becoming Huey’s Queen” titles a chapter in which Brown confronts an ideology of erotic ownership, the idea of being “someone’s man” or “someone’s woman,” and confirms her party’s ideological rejection of gender. The desire to “belong” to someone in socio-sexual terms is called “the bourgeois cancer” (260), a sickness that infects Black bodies thanks to white culture’s bourgeois socialization. A Taste of Power documents an individual yet collective struggle against this cancer, therefore, that would have a female Panther renounce her “instincts to be a free being…all over a band of gold” (377). While others may continue to identify as “women,” or “men,” Brown maintains: “I, on the other hand, was a politico, a partner, a comrade, notably with ‘pussy,’ which was sometimes relevant” (381). Even this “genital” distinction is not noted for “reproduction” but pleasure, a pleasure to be had among politicos/partners/comrades who resist ruling-class sex ontologies. While gender can be used strategically, against itself, as “another weapon of the revolution” (137), it cannot be naturalized with its basic race-and-class norms. Brown narrates her genuine struggle to see with “new eyes” (381), newly liberated “eyes” in Malcolm X/Malik Shabazz terms; and she never loses sight of these facts.

A Taste of Power actually begins by reflecting on “the madness…just inherited” (15), as Brown assumes BPP leadership with Panthers under FBI attack. It also closes with reflections on madness (449), which Toni Cade Bambara saw at the core of “masculinity” and “femininity” in The Black Woman’s “On the Issue of Roles” (Bambara 1970). For Brown, there was “love…inside the madness” she inherited (355). This was a “temporary” madness (Brown 1992, 437) that revolution would certainly cure. Tragically, though, she must concede in the end: “The Black Panther Party had given me a definition… Now the barricades the party had erected against oppression seemed to be eroding” (443). When the party ceases to be revolutionary or revolutionist, under relentless pressure of racist state persecution, its anti-sexist/anti-gender ideals seem to crumble. The “madness of masculinity and femininity” can take over (Bambara 1970, 102), after tough efforts to put audacious theory into practice. The “words ‘Panther’ and “comrade” take on “gender connotations” previously denounced (445), despite Newton’s post-exile statements promoting sexual equality in party leadership (441). Black revolution is scarcely the culprit, as academic critics regularly assume. Counter-revolution is in the form of COINTELPRO which finally subverts, among other things, BPP resistance to conventional sex politics.

Brown’s riff on this colonial class cancer is based in Oakland’s “national headquarters.” It does not entail guerilla underground accounts where Assata Shakur, for example, could signify as Black Liberation Army’s “Soul” or “High Priestess,” “Sister Love” and even “St. Joanne” (à la Joan of Arc) in white media imaginations (Shakur 1987; Williams 1993). Still, when Brown critiques certain Black Power brokers for “sexist masculinity” and middle-class opportunism, her critique is made in the name of revolution; when she insists that her “party was so far to the left of the civil rights and black nationalist men, nothing in their philosophies was dreamt of in ours” (363), latter-day liberals and social democrats are no less indicted; and when she laments politico capitulation to non-revolutionary postures, she worries “history might come to define the party for its worst, not its best” (447).

This has certainly come to pass, for some or many. Brown would later counter an anti-BPP book review written by Alice Walker, who perversely mined A Taste of Power to generalize Panther “sexism” and “homophobia” (Walker 1993, A23). Brown crafts a brilliant exposé of homophobia and gender-conservatism in Walker’s own New York Times editorial (Brown 1993, A23). Kathleen Cleaver could herself have this mentality in mind, interestingly, when she balks at constant questions about “women’s role in the Black Panther Party”: “The assumption held that being part of a revolutionary movement was in conflict with what the questioner had been socialized to believe was appropriate conduct for a woman” (Cleaver 2000, 124).

Brown, whose working-class profile is rare among such “radical female icons,” challenges bourgeois “sex cancers” which current critics, “masculist” and “feminist,” uncritically embrace. She and her Panther partners “glorify [their] best” and “criticize [their] worst,” to be sure, “even knowing all the whys and wherefores,” toward an anti- colonial future. Indeed, Brown asks of comrades and “slaves”: “Can we not unite in revolutionary love? Can we come to understanding and embrace before we are no more? We Africans lost in America, still trying to decide on our name when we still don’t have a place to be” (Brown 1993, A23).

Read in this vein, A Taste of Power is duly appreciated in “post-COINTELPRO” days, days in which counter-revolution lives on, and days that require Brown’s latest stick of dynamite, The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America (2002).

References

Bambara, Toni Cade (Ed.). 1970. The Black Woman: An Anthology. New York: Mentor Books.

Brown, Elaine. 1993. “Attack Racism, Not Black Men.” New York Times (May 5): A23.

-----------. 2002. The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America. Boston: Beacon Press.

Cleaver, Kathleen Neal. 2000. “Women, Power, and Revolution.” Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy. Eds. Kathleen Neal Cleaver and George Katsiaficas. New York and London: Routledge: pp. 123-27.

Shakur, Assata. 1987. Assata: An Autobiography. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books.

Walker, Alice. 1993. “They Ran on Empty.” New York Times (May 5): A23.

Williams, Evelyn. 1993. Inadmissible Evidence: The Story of the African-American Trial Lawyer Who Defended the Black Liberation Army. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.

© 2003 Africa Resource Center, Inc.