Escaping the Prism… Fade to Black: Poetry and Essays

Jalil Muntaqim is a former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. For over forty years, Jalil has been a political prisoner, and one of the New York Three (NY3), in retaliation for his political activism. Escaping the Prism … Fade to Black is a collection of Jalil s poetry and essays, written from behind the bars of Attica prison. Combining the personal and the political, these texts afford readers with a rare opportunity to get to know a man who has spent most of his life over forty years behind bars for his involvement in the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. Jalil s poetry deals with a range of themes spirituality, history, and the struggle for justice; depression, humor, and sexual desire; the pain and loneliness of imprisonment, the ongoing racist oppression of New Afrikan people in the United States, and the need to find meaning in one s life. At the same time, his political essays show him to be as eager as [...]ever to intervene in and grapple with the events of today, always with an eye to concretely improving the lives of the oppressed. Escaping the Prism … Fade to Black also includes an extensive examination of the U.S. government s war against the Black Liberation Army in general, and Jalil and the New York Three in particular, by renowned scholar-activist Ward Churchill. In this highly detailed essay, "The Other Kind: On the Integrity, Consistency, and Humanity of Jalil Abdul Muntaqim," Churchill traces this story from the FBI s murderous COINTELPRO repression of the Black Panther Party, through the NEWKILL operation which led to the NY3 s incarceration, to the more recent Phoenix Taskforce which orchestrated the re-prosecution of Jalil and other veteran Black activists, in the case of the San Francisco 8. With illustrations by revolutionary prisoner-artists Zolo Agona Azania and Kevin Rashid Johnson, as well as various outside artist-activists.