The Autobiography Of Assata

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Therefore, through the altering of language, Assata finds a way to engage in political activism by working towards the de-construction of naturalized notions of territoriality that have long affected the African American community. With her autobiography, Assata works through a variety of sentiments that can be deemed as collective to the African American community, the main one being rage. In relation to the scene with the black nurse, Mary Phillips claims that the literature provided to Assata fed her revolutionary spirit while impassioning “her strong sense of agency despite hospitalization and containment” (42). Writing this autobiography, then, is a way of continuing to feed the revolutionary spirit while also serving two main purposes: …show more content…

Assata’s childhood was filled with contradictions. Despite affirming that her family instilled in her “a sense of personal dignity” (Assata 19), she notes that, for them, “pride and dignity were hooked up to things like position and money” (20). In this way, her “awareness of class differences in the Black community came at an early age” (20-21). Her grandparents associated being good enough with having the same things white people had. Although she was raised to believe she was good enough, this was not the message that the environment constantly communicated to her. She attended segregated schools and grew up amidst an unconscious rhetoric of self-hatred fostered by beauty stereotypes that included skin bleaching, hair straightening, and the rejection of numerous body parts: thick lips, wide nose, kinky hair. All of these distorted beauty expectations disrupted her identity as a black girl. If she was expected to behave as whites did, why didn’t she have the same things as they? she wondered. This caused a great amount of resentment toward her mother, for example, for not having “freshly baked cookies” (37) upon her arrival from school —like white kids in commercials did—, and resentment towards having to do chores, which white kids did not have to do. The anger continues to build up and appears to reach its childhood peak when she tells the story of a white boy she attacked in the sixth grade because he accused her of stealing his pen. Assata states: “I was usually very quiet and well behaved. [The professors] acted like i had jumped on that boy for nothing, and they couldn’t understand why i was so angry. As a matter of fact, even i didn’t understand. Then” (42). This episode exemplifies the outbursts of rage that daily encounters with racism can lead to. Her incapacity to articulate the reasons for the anger show her inability to assimilate the condition of

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