Last week, in response to Assata Shakur’s passing, I shared a syllabus providing folx with resources to understand her life more deeply. I’ve liked it again at the end of this one, in case you missed it. In that piece, I mentioned that it took me three years to finish Assata: An Autobiography. I started the book at sixteen, and then put it down after the first chapter.

The depth of Assata’s pain, relayed in her own words was too much for my young mind to hold. I only returned years later when I had the breath to sit with what her story asked of me.

Some books don’t want to be devoured quickly. They would prefer to make a home in the psyche and join you for dinner twice a week for the rest of your life.

I want to linger on that thought. That sometimes the best way to really learn something is slowly.

And I want to linger on the works I cited in that essay. Because honestly, what good is a syllabus if we don’t actually read the shit in it? If we don’t live in the texts, and carry them in our bodies, and let the words teach us how to move differently in the world?1

This is how you read slowly.

Open Assata and before even letting the first chapter land like a stone in your chest, read her opening poem. It is an affirmation that carries everything yet promises nothing easy:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAFFIRMATION - Assata Shakur

I believe in living.
I believe in the spectrum
of Beta days and Gamma people.
I believe in sunshine.
In windmills and waterfalls,
tricycles and rocking chairs.
And I believe that seeds grow into sprouts.
And sprouts grow into trees.
I believe in the magic of the hands.
And in the wisdom of the eyes.
I believe in rain and tears.
And in the blood of infinity.

I believe in life.
And I have seen the death parade
march through the torso of the earth,
sculpting mud bodies in its path.
I have seen the destruction of the daylight,
and seen bloodthirsty maggots
prayed to and saluted.

I have seen the kind become the blind
and the blind become the bind
in one easy lesson.
I have walked on cut glass.
I have eaten crow and blunder bread
and breathed the stench of indifference.

I have been locked by the lawless.
Handcuffed by the haters.
Gagged by the greedy.
And, if I know anything at all,
it’s that a wall is just a wall
and nothing more at all.
It can be broken down.
I believe in living.
I believe in birth.
I believe in the sweat of love
and in the fire of truth.

And I believe that a lost ship,
steered by tired, seasick sailors,
can still be guided home
to port.

Which line in Assata’s affirmation lands hardest for you?

Read it slowly. Let the lines settle in your chest. Let the rhythm of belief and witness press against you. The poem moves from sunlight and sprouts to mud bodies and bloodthirsty maggots, from the everyday to the unimaginable, and back again.

Don’t move past it. Close the book. Breathe. Feel the tensions, memories, and aches it awakens. Reach for a companion text—a letter, an essay, or a chapter of Black Against Empire. Read for ten minutes. Listen for resonance, not argument. Write one sentence connecting the two. That sentence is your teaching. Let it live in your hands, in your gut, and in the way you fold your shoulders when you remember what the world asks you to endure.

After the reading, after you’ve let the poem and the companion texts seep into your psyche, take your teaching into conversation. Talk to someone who was there, or someone who studies this history, or someone who has felt the weight of systems Assata names. Ask questions. Offer your reflections. Notice where your understanding falters, and where it stretches. Let these interactions be another layer of slow reading; another method of understanding.

Then, return to the texts with what you’ve gathered. See how the body of experience you’ve curated through listening, questioning, and witnessing sits against the words. How does your lived engagement deepen the lines you marked? How does it destabilize what you thought you knew? Record it. Reflect on it. Let the learning circulate through your body, your speech, your movement in the world. Soulwork considers all knowledge embodied knowledge. Meaning:

If you don’t feel some shit, you don’t know shit.

If a passage destabilizes you, let it. Get a friend to hold you or a notebook to receive you or a slow cup of tea to bring you back to life again.

Return to Assata again and again. Let her sentences relocate your bones. Let the ancillary readings teach you how to stay with the feeling long enough to be changed by it.

Knowledge only matters if it becomes practice. Slow reading is how practice moves from page to body to world.

Maybe that is the point of a syllabus named for a life. Not to finish, but to keep inviting us back until we learn the shape of listening.

Love y’all. Mean it. If you love me back, buy me a book!
-B

I keep wondering what it might look like to study these texts together. Kinda like a class, but also kinda like a living room conversation. I’m considering hosting a small discussion circle or experiment in collective study. Whether you’ve read every text or none at all, there’s a way to be in conversation with this syllabus.

Next Read

If you missed the original essay which is acting as our syllabus this month, follow the link below:

her life was a syllabus

Assata Shakur has transitioned, but she has not disappeared. Death does not erase women like her. It cannot. Her name is already in the marrow of the women, the activists, the organizers an…

The Soul Work NewsletterBethany Nicole