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| self-portrait from Penguin website |
“The
pictures I’m choosing to draw in these boxes is revolution”: Interview with Ben
Passmore
By
Katherine Kelp-Stebbins
Conducted
10/1/2025
Katherine
Kelp-Stebbins: Does it feel like your life has
changed significantly in the past month or so with the release of Black Armsto Hold You Up?
Ben
Passmore: In terms of how busy I am? Making comics is infinitely
harder than doing events, so in that way, it doesn't feel incredibly busy. In
most cases, I'm showing up, and the topic is me, so there's not usually a whole
bunch of preparation. It's busy. My partner would certainly agree with you.
She's been reminding me that things are very, very busy as I add additional
things to my plate. But it feels good. I used to self-publish for years, and I
was used to contacting reviewers and trying to get interviewed on podcasts, organizing
tours, and doing the shows. So, in that way, this feels much easier, because
Ciara, [my publicist] over at Pantheon, ultimately organizes a lot of things.
And even if I set something up, she's getting the specifics down. So, things
seem not that bad to me, but maybe that's because I am a workaholic. It's a
crazy that's less crazy than I'm used to.
KKS:
In 2020, the auction for Black Arms to Hold You Up was big news. What
was the pitch that you brought to that auction? Were there things that changed
along the way, and were there ways that being with Pantheon shaped the book?
BP:
I appreciate you saying it's big news. I didn't have a real sense of how much
anyone cared. It was big news for me, in my life. About 14 publishers bid on
the book, and I ultimately went with Pantheon for all the reasons that I think
anyone that reads comics knows.
When
I pitched the book, there was a pitch deck, but it was essentially a title and
a relatively broad concept. The original idea was a straight history graphic
novel, something that would almost look like a Ben Passmore version of a Gord
Hill graphic novel. Originally, I wanted to have a lot of interviews, something
between Gord Hill and Joe Sacco.
Pantheon
had certain requests that made sense based off of what seemed popular that I
had done, which at that time was Your Black Friend and all the things
that I'd done for The Nib, in which I was a presenter of the material; I'm
lecturing in temporal spaces, chaos is happening. So that style of narration
was a request, and I felt like I needed to honor that after they paid me more
money than people usually pay cartoonists.
But
the issue was that a nine-page comic on The Nib is different than a 200-page
graphic novel. And there's obvious narrative requirements. The most obvious
thing was I am not an armed black revolutionary, at least not in the way that
Assata Shakur is, now was (she's obviously transitioned recently). The struggle
was to justify my presence.
The
easy thing to do would have been to just do what I had done before for The Nib
and be a smartass for 200 pages. But honestly, I was tired of doing that. It
felt like it was feeding this parasocial relationship with me outside of the
books that I had become really uncomfortable with in my career as a political
cartoonist. You never want to be in a situation where people are associating
you with founding these ideas that you are taking from somewhere else.
Upon
reflection, thinking about how the culture of liberation movements in general or
the political culture of the country had changed after Ferguson and Baltimore,
we were seeing the rising up again of Black liberation, culture, energy--we
were in the streets. Something that I think really cut the legs out of a lot of
the mobility of liberation was people who were comfortable taking credit for
revolutionary ideas in exchange for a lot of money and a lot of power, and that
was easy to do. People are very trusting, particularly in these periods when
people who maybe didn't think of themselves as political subjects or political
agents are now thrust into protest movements, and they're looking for answers.
A lot of these people are really young, and they turn to someone who is very
charismatic and seems to know everything, but probably only knows like an Assata
speech and has read maybe one book by Imari Obadele, or more likely has just
watched some Kwame Ture speeches. And they're like, okay, we'll go with that.
I
wanted to move away from anything that would sort of fake that. So the solution
I came up with was to locate myself within the gathering of this knowledge,
which was this history. And the community itself has raised me, has helped me
locate my identity in the world and given me a lot of tools over and over
again, starting as a 16-year-old who was institutionalized; the community really
took the place of my father.
I
still need a narrator; I'm covering 100+ years of history. That means I'm going
to have to jump around, because 200 pages is a lot of pages, but it's
absolutely not enough space for how much material I wanted to cover, and I
didn't want to give readers something they could essentially find on Wikipedia.
That felt insufficient. I'm not an academic, but I wanted to add to the
conversation in some kind of way. So my solution was to introduce my father, or
a facsimile of my father, into the book and have us go through a history. Hopefully
by the end of the book it becomes very clear that this is not definitive at
all. But it gives you a sense of what it’s like to have an elder like this give
you a very essential history, but one that's filled with contradiction, and
truth gets very, very fuzzy very, very quickly. And the job is to take it in
with respect, but be critical and, as best you can, find out what is true, and
to see this history amongst others like queer history, and to recognize how it's
very important for power to invisibilize the history of people fighting
oppressors.
For
much of the stuff I was researching, you are relying on people writing about
their own life or people who are not academics. Very famously, the book Who Shot
Malcolm X is written by someone who's not an academic at all. And that's an
essential piece of work, and there's a lot of things like that. And there are
academics: Akinyele Umoja is one of the most important writers in this
space.
So
that's how the book changed. It went from a straight history to something that
was a bit different. Where the book wears its untrustworthiness on its sleeve,
and I hope that you still understand that some of this is pearls, and I'm
trying to challenge the reader to start here and locate more details in other
places, which is why I have the reading list in the back to help people get
started.
KKS:
In terms of drafting and scripting, was Ronnie [your facsimile father] the
framework from the beginning? Did you know you were going to end with Micah
[Xavier Johnson], or did that come out as you were writing it? How much did you
know in advance?
BP:
I knew who I was going to focus on. And I had an idea of what sort of figures or
moments around them I wanted to help frame them. The only big difference is
that originally, instead of Sanyika Shakur, the Crip-turned-revolutionary, I
was going to write about the time Tupac Shakur shot two undercover cops as they
were assaulting a black man in a parking lot in Atlanta. I think that would
have been cool, but in some ways I chose not to because I was worried about it being
a Tupac book. In the way that when I originally conceived of my book Sports Is
Hell, the football player who was haunting the book was going to be Colin
Kaepernick. But it was just going to be the Colin Kaepernick book then. And I
really wanted to interview Sanyika, but he died of an overdose in a tent, unfortunately.
So,
I knew what I was going to write about, but in terms of framing it, like the
connective tissue, that changed quite a bit. Originally, I was going to be like
an MC: you would join me in like a bookstore, I'd open up a book, and we'd go off
to learn. And I think that would have been fine, but I think some part of me
wanted to make a book that worked outside of it being a political book. I
wanted there to be real emotional stakes, in part because I wasn't so confident
that I could make those moments inside the chapters themselves. There's a lot
of information that I really wanted to get down, and I thought some sections
are going to seem a little dry, or like we can't sit on certain moments in a
way that I want to. So let's have this overarching relationship between me and
my dad, so that even if a Brazilian publisher bought this book--and there’s an edition
down there, where’s there's the largest diaspora population, a lot of black
people there, but I don't know them like that. And I don't know what they'll
get out of the book--they'll understand, hopefully,
this dynamic with my father, and maybe that will help them understand the
stakes of why all this information is important for me.
KKS:
Do you script before drawing? And were there ever times where you reworked
certain sections, especially the game show moment at the end?
BP:
Do I script before drawing? The answer is yes. For a book this size, I have to
do a lot of writing, way, way before I draw. Most of the writing that I did
early on was just going from all sorts of notes from various readings and some
of the interviews that I did to a condensing down, trying to pick out moments I
want to write about and fleshing those out. (In some ways I’m proudest of the Robert Charles story, because I
really wanted to make the couple hours of that gunfight feel like a narrative
that built up.)
A
big part of the craft of comics is your deadlines, which is not something they
talk about at school, but it becomes part of the medium. It's
how you're managing time. And you end up making a lot of decisions based off of
the lack of it. So there are certainly moments where I will script something,
realize I don't have enough time to do that, and
then find a resolution that does the same thing. Or I might script things, and
start to thumbnail, and realize I don't have time to draw this crowd scene.
There's
a transition period that's unstated in the book; it's sort of like the long hot
summer. It's the transition from the Robert F. Williams chapter, which ends
with folks rioting in some of the northern cities, and that brings us into the
Republic of New Afrika [RNA] chapter. That section originally included huge
crowd scenes of people running around, and I realized that I have to cut a lot
of this because I don't have enough time to draw these crowds of people.
There's
a lot of things like that. This being the most ambitious book I've ever done,
it made me figure out, similar to what I've learned in martial arts, that as a
40-plus year-old man there's moments where you have to use a whole burst of
energy, and you only have so much energy, so you got to make it worth it. Those
are the moments in which I would go back to scripting after doing thumbnails
and reconsider how I was going to draw it.
KKS:
Are you working digital from the start, or are you doing parts of it first on
Bristol board with pencil and then scanning? What is that workflow in terms of
the actual drawing?
BP:
The only physical drawing I did was thumbnails and all of the character design.
That was all on paper. After that, everything is digital. I immediately take a
picture with my iPad of the thumbnails, and then it all ends up being digital,
which is terrible for any selling of originals. I hate working like that, but
it's the fastest. And the book took about five years to do. If I did it on
Bristol board like I'd like to, it would have taken ten.
KKS:
It's such a complex book, and one of the things that makes it especially
involved is that you don't have neat transitions. There's times where, as a
reader, you’re pressed to question, “Am I to understand that this is a story
that I'm reading directly in relation to the one that came before?” Especially how
“The Republic of New Afrika” section goes into “This Is Assata” in a way where
those are intimately intertwined. The chapters do more weaving than stop and start.
I'd love to hear how you conceptualized those sorts of like shifts from section
to section.
BP:
I came to understand that all of this stuff was really intricately connected,
and I picked subjects that I both thought were very important and underrepresented,
and also ones that weave together. Some things I didn't know, like, I didn't
know that Assata got her first New Afrikan name at an RNA event. I had no idea
until I read her book. I wanted people to understand that these different
movements are integrally connected, and that people flowed into other things
like the Panthers, and I don't talk about the Panthers really at all. They're
sort of there in the Assata section, but I purposely don't really focus on
them. But there are many significant Panthers that became RNA members despite Huey
[Newton] not being into their vision of nationalism. I wanted to show that a
lot of things are happening at the same time.
I
also wanted people to have a feeling of presence. There's this way that people
think about this kind of black liberation history: it's over there; it's in the
past. And similarly, that there were singular mythical figures who were wholly
unique, and they're the only people that could do what they do. I wanted people
to understand that there's a whole ecosystem that people come out of, and it's
interconnected. And its interconnectedness is part of why people are able to do
what they're able to do.
If
you talk to Panthers, they talk about how they were in the moment. This was the
culture; this is what was around them. And they just hopped on it, and they had
a persona drive. In some cases, like Robert F. Williams, his writings and
writings about him point to his grandfather, his grandmother, and them being
sort of uniquely rebellious against white supremacy. His grandmother handed him
his first gun, that was his grandfather's that he used to defend his family
from white racists. That felt really important to me. And the Micah stuff is in
there. And we're not necessarily thinking of this thing as all the way back
there.
KKS:
I was surprised at seeing RNA popping up throughout in places where I wasn't
necessarily expecting it, and all these other callbacks to signal that we're
not actually leaving that. Like that's still part of all these other movements
and all these other ideologies.
BP:
I'm biased because when you meet a Panther, you're starstruck. You know what I
mean? And there are many; they're living. They're not living in mansions,
right? They live in cities. You're going to run into them. They look like any
one of my neighbors, and then you find out, “Oh! it's Ashanti Alston!” But in
my mind, there is a greatest generation, and it's that generation. We
got so much from them, and they stayed busy for so long; they gave so much
energy and knowledge. I really appreciated Sanyika Shakur as someone who came
from that gangland generation, but who was so deeply changed by that prior
generation. It's not depicted in the book at all, but when he was in prison, he
connected with Sundiata Acoli. And the BLA had transitioned from a guerrilla
movement to largely a prison support movement, and they had a press. Sanyika
connected with certain members like Safiya Bukhari and Jalil Muntaqim, the BLA
soldiers who founded the Jericho movement (which is still around and dedicated
to political prisoners across the board, not just black ones). He connects with
those people, and he gets a bunch of writings and that becomes part of him
understanding, “F--- gangbanging. This is what people like me should be doing.”
Even in his writings you can hear some of that deference. As an anarchist, I
find deference to be a complicated concept, but you do really appreciate that to
a person there is something really, really special, and they did do so much.
KKS:
Is the section with Ronnie interviewing Sanyika an actual interview?
BP:
No, there's no actual interviews in the book. But in that section of the book,
I'm caught in a fire, and it's like, “Where is Ben?” Because I’m sort of the
reader’s safe place. And in the prior chapter with MOVE, we lose Ronnie, right?
I was hoping that people would think of it how I think about MOVE in that
period where the Panthers are crushed, where we've lost the prior generation to
guide us, and it left people open to a lot of manipulation. (MOVE is, in my
opinion, an example of that.) But then in Sanyika's section, we're still kind
of lost. So with the interviews, I wanted people to not be sure exactly who is
talking to him at first. I also thought it would be nice to have those little
interviews because Sanyika Shakur is a terrifying person--he murdered a bunch
of people. There's a lot of conflicting opinions about how accurate his book Monster
is in terms of like how many people he killed. But he has stories about cutting
an enemy's arms off and bringing one to a house party. You have to square that
with--if you watch any interviews of him, or if you read his book, Struggle
Forward--he's very funny. He's a very likable person. And he did a lot of
organizing in his community. He needed both his street reputation and his
charisma to organize in his community. I wanted people to feel that: Up close
he's just a normal person, despite the fact he is a murderer, you know what I
mean? He started killing really young.
KKS:
In terms of style, especially with Assata, you have at least four distinct
styles for that section. Are there specific things that you were trying to
emulate or trying to evoke with each of those styles?
BP:
The longest section when she's a little girl and she's tricking the john, I
based that style off of Ho Che Anderson, whose book King was really
important to me for this book. He's an amazing artist, but I had many dark,
dark days where I didn't know what I was doing. And I would look at King
and it was helpful for me to consider some ideas and representation. There are
a couple of artists I looked at.
The
main idea was—and this goes for the whole book, but for Assata specifically--so
much of how we think of her is informed by narratives around her. She will say
herself that the FBI created this image of her as the bank-robbing gorilla, the
heart of the Panther Party. But also BLA members will say, she's like the heart
of the BLA. And there's decades that we don't know. She didn't write another
book. There's a couple of interviews and a couple of documentaries, but even
those are not like her book. They're a lot more focused on her relationship
with her mother and her elders. I thought that in trying to communicate what
it's like to learn about Assata, it's through several layers of interpretation.
I thought it would be good to have sections of her chapter be presented by
these different people, like Imari Obadele. I was a little unfair with my
representation of him in the book. But he wrote “War in America.” His section
is like hyper rah rah, the Assata that particularly
the BLA generation would think of her as. The first Assata, who Mae Mallory is
presenting when she's like a little girl, is how she thinks of herself. Because
Assata talked about her youth over and over again after she went to Cuba. So, I
wanted to give people a range.
KKS:
If you could pick someone who is in the book but doesn't really have their own
section or a movement that you learned about that doesn't get a lot of play,
what would you want to keep writing about or keep drawing if you had more time?
BP:
I wish that I had written really anything about Muhammad Ahmad and RAM [the
Revolutionary Action Movement]. Muhammad Ahmad and RAM did the Kwame Ture arc
where they went to the South to be a part of the freedom struggle, realized
that actually a lot of Southern resistance culture is based in armed
self-defense, and really had a come-to-Jesus moment about the limitations of
non-violence.
RAM
itself was sort of a mix of underground and above-ground and was really
informed by these youth uprisings, these riots, which other organizations were
shaming. Muhammad Ahmad recognized that this was important energy and an
important phenomenon. They did a lot of things that, in my opinion, informed
the Panthers a couple of years later. They did karate workshops. They did
political education. They had chapters in different cities. And they had a
close relationship with Malcolm [X]. Malcolm was their unofficial foreign
diplomat. Muhammed Ahmad went to Cuba and was part of talking to Robert F.
Williams about being the president of the Republican of Afrika. He's a Forrest
Gump figure for that time, but wholly clandestine for the most part. He has a
really good book called We Will Return in the Whirlwind, but I don't
hear about him from anybody. He's a Philly native. He lives here, but he's not
trying to talk about his past at all to most people. I wish I wrote about him.
I
also learned a lot about reconstruction-era resistance when reading things for
this book. And I would love to do a book about resistance during
reconstruction. Akinyele Umoja writes about it quite a bit, and some other
people do. But I didn't appreciate how much insurrectionary history could be
found during reconstruction, which, in retrospect, makes sense.
KKS:
That's really where you start; that's where you place the fulcrum for what
you're exploring throughout in the question of armed resistance. I’d like to
ask about how you end the book by picking up and throwing a book rather than
taking up the gun. Do you see those as being two diverging paths, or do you see
those as being unified in some important way?
BP:
There’s obvious, non-profound choices that go into making a conclusion. In the
beginning, I'm arguing with my dad and say, you may as well just throw these
books; they're so useless. Of course, I have to end the book with me throwing
them at cops. Also, I can't draw myself shooting cops. I want to work in this
country. Although these days, just making a book will probably get me as bad a
sentence. We'll see.
I
don't think of them as divergent at all. Guns have a place of prominence in
this book. Shooters specifically do. But I think that the main focus is about
revolution. These are revolutionaries in the sense that they're engaged in
struggle, actual struggle, not the things that professional activists call
struggle. They're engaged in the war of liberation. And to me, of course, guns
are part of that because that's the war. You know, if it was bows and arrows,
this book would feature a lot of bows and arrows, But in all cases, like
knowledge that they don't want us to have, these conversations that happen in
text and person to person from generation to generation, these are, in my view,
incredibly important to maintaining this war of liberation. In that way, I
think I'm just playing my part. Researching for this book and just being in the
world, being in the streets when uprisings happen, you appreciate what you can
do and what you can't do, where your strengths are. I went into the book
thinking that what I did was pretty unimportant as a cartoonist, and I came out
the other side being like, “Well, a lot of people told me that it was.” And I
can see in my past books were really, really important for me becoming who I
am, and also engaging in struggle, you know, in an actual struggle.
KKS:
Do you feel like while researching and writing this book there were revelations
you had that you wouldn't have had otherwise about who you are and what you do?
BP:
Yeah. It is difficult because it's me, but it's not me. The book starts off in
2020 and I'm disaffected and uninterested and uninformed, which is not what I
was like in 2020 in reality. And my father in the book is not my father, not in
many different ways. Mostly what I hoped a reader would get other than just being
invested in this character, I was hoping that they could see themselves in me,
you know what I mean? And maybe hopefully relate to the experience of the
relationship with my father in the book, my relationship with material concepts
that are talked about.
In
terms of how I was changed outside of the book or in the course of making it, in
many ways, I'm a wholly different person. I was deeply changed, not even just
by the research. I prioritized being in community with people I was either
researching or their families, or other people that are really, really invested
in this movement. The RNA was broken apart, but there's many organizations that
formed out of it. And I have close relationships with people in those groups.
And a lot of these people are doing things that I wouldn’t have respected or
understood prior to getting into this book. My day-to-day, my whole life is fundamentally
different than it was when I started the book five years ago.
KKS:
Do you imagine that you will do more work in this continuum? Or do you feel
like this was kind of the culmination of that work and of that process?
BP:
I would need to have something new to say about it. There's exceptions to that:
I've talked with Russell Maroon Shoatz's kids about doing a book based off of
the book he wrote, I Am Maroon. So if a family was interested in me
adapting something like that, or if there was someone who hasn't written
anything at all, like Joe-Joe Bowen (who would never want to do that, but, you
know, as an example), I certainly would do that.
Being
a cartoonist, I think that there are just other genres I would like to work in.
You know, there's other kinds of stories I'd like to tell. This book was
incredibly exhausting and almost ruining to do. It almost destroyed me. So, the
idea of doing something at the scale is terrifying to think about. It also made
me appreciate the kind of skill and stamina an academic has to have to do this.
Definitely in the middle of the book, I was like, I'm not an academic. I'm
doing my best...but like, I'm not. And I don't want people to walk away thinking
that I work at that level. And the scale of all the different people I was
trying to write about, the timeframe was too much. It was definitely a first
book mistake to commit to doing this. And I realized that way too late.
Anything
I did in the future would be much more manageable and much more focused and
hopefully wouldn't age me so much. We'll see. I started out doing weird sci-fi
comics and then at a certain point, people decided I was really good at this
kind of stuff. I will always do work
around this, but whether or not people think that it can make them money for me
to do it is, unfortunately, not really up to me. 2020 was such a particular
time. The enthusiasm for what was ultimately an idea by so many publishers is a
wholly singular scenario. I would certainly like to do more things like this,
but that might look like me self-publishing something that's 15 pages and maybe
not a major publisher publishing something that's 200 pages.
KKS:
It's clear how much research went into this book. The book is also outspoken
about the need to “free our stories from white supremacy. Given the way that
white supremacy forecloses so much Black history, how did you approach the idea
of accuracy and wanting to be true to the people and the movements you're
talking about, while at the same time acknowledging that there's often no way
to do that or to do it with justice?
BP:
It's interesting, thinking about people's different expectations of a book like
this. We, for understandable reasons, want a book about history to be accurate
and to be, to some degree, provable. But I am finding that people who are inside
of the world that the book is writing about, they're mostly focused on respect.
Their stories have been exploited and diminished forever.
When
it's Assata or Sanyika, someone like that writing about their own lives, people
just assume that they're telling the truth, right? There's no question. There's
no, "Did you get a source for this?” And some of that has to do with the
differences between how our communities think of elders. The fact that they can
live to be elders already like this is much more of a hurdle than the
majority population.
I
found myself trying to consider: who am I writing for? Since I did the comic Your
Black Friend, which I wrote without necessarily thinking about who I was
writing for--the title itself was a bit of a joke that was just taken totally
sincerely—I've thought about this a lot. Over the years, when I was working for
The Nib, I made a decision to stop writing for non-Black audiences. I
know that they're in the room. I know that they're reading. The higher
percentage of readers, maybe less so now, but certainly when I started, was
going to be non-Black people reading. But I felt like I was limiting myself. I
would get caught explaining things that in my world are very obvious. And that
would keep me from having deeper conversations.
So,
when I wrote this book, I wrote it for Black people, Black people who are more
or less invested in this movement, for lack of a better word. Some of them
might even be MAGA voters, but, because of the contradictions of being Black in
America, you can be a MAGA voter, you can be anti-immigrant, and still quote
Malcolm X. I think that those people will find this book disrespectful, even if
they think that it's well researched, because the book does take the Black
leadership class to task in various ways. That is an inside conversation. This
is not an outside conversation. The book is filled with a lot of inside
conversations that are going to happen outside. And I think people are going to
dislike that. I did a presentation to a reparations salon, and that was the
overwhelming feedback that I got. They liked the material, but they felt like
it was disrespectful.
There's
a moment in the book when there are different people pointing out the
limitations of the narrative that you've read so far. There's all these things that
are being left out and why. And you're finding out that my dad, has limitations:
these misogynies, this queerphobia, these unaddressed queerphobias made his
view smaller. For me, I was late to a lot of gender content. It was something
that I needed to learn about that I learned through friends, through comrades,
and then reading. In that way, despite the fact that I researched quite a lot
for this book, because I did want things to be as true as possible, but also
knowing it's a comic book not a history book, there's only so much I can put in
there. And there's a lot of blanks I have to fill in, right? Because there's so
much we can't really know for sure about so many things that I write about. I
wanted to be able to stand up in a room and defend choices that I made and
point to books that I read or people that I talked to, but also I don't
actually want people to assume that everything is true in the book or to assume
that they can necessarily know that things are true. That's just the reality of
being a colonized population who's trying to remember.
It's
interesting seeing the third-positionist fascism that's taken over the country
because it has superficially taken on so many of the critiques that the left
wing has had. And one of those is the critique of academia, the sciences. And
it's true that these institutions have created a noose to make sure that a lot
of things that my community talk about get scrutinized, like, "Are you
sure that that's what happened? Where's the proof?”, making sure that only
certain voices are validated.
It's
one of those things that I was really battling in my head when tackling the
book, both because I have a critique of this idea of the truth when everything
is so subjective. In the case of Sanyika Shakur, most of what he writes about
being a Crip, no one is around for it. Everyone else that was there is dead.
KKS:
How do you introduce the idea that there are things that will necessarily be
left out, but that doesn't mean that they didn't happen or that they're not
true?
BP:
Or that they can't change you...for the better. I think that's the big thing. If
you talk to a former BLA person, someone who's still alive, or Joe-Joe Bowen,
who was not in the BLA. He spent most of his adult life in prison being a part
of these really fantastic prison rebellions. If you talk to them, they don't
want to talk about any of the details of their struggles. Because in their
minds, they're still at war. What you have around a lot of these people is just
rumor. It's street knowledge stuff. And what you do know is that this person
was a soldier in a war of liberation that you feel like you're the beneficiary
of. So what do you do? Because you don't know anything for sure. You can choose
to be inspired by just the presence of this person and decide how you want to
live your life because we all have to. And if you're sitting there waiting to
know absolutely what's true, you're going to be waiting forever. I don't think
that's preferable. But I think that's the reality right now. Hopefully the
conclusion that the character of me is demonstrating at the end: the books he's
tossing these are weapons because they inspire action. We know that the
white supremacists are afraid of that, it's terrifying for them. And that's all
we can know.
Maybe
somewhere down the road, the Republic of New Afrika Department of Education can
narrow all of these things down when the nation is made. But right now, all we
have is rumor. All we have is street knowledge. We have some accounts of
elders. And we're being attacked. So we’ve got to do something.
Sometimes
I feel like it’s irresponsible for me to publish a book with that mindset. But
also, it's a comic book. And we have real academics like yourself to write the
more concrete material. I just thought about when CLR James was writing in The
Black Jacobins: “I didn't try to cover everything. I just want you to know
it's there.” At this point in our country, the best thing I can do is put things
out there and say look, this is here, look at it. You have to go to the source
if you want deeper knowledge about it, but I draw pictures in boxes, and the
pictures I'm choosing to draw in these boxes is revolution. Let this be a
starting point.
Kate
Kelp-Stebbins is an Associate Professor and Director of Comics Studies,
Department of English, University of Oregon.
A version of this interview will appear in print in IJOCA 27-2
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