Cleaver's Redemption

Sources: Soul on Ice and Soul on Fire, plus multiple writings and interviews from Eldridge Cleaver, The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon.

I'm going to do it. My thesis, I mean. It's hard to pin down my fascination with violence to any crucial young event, and I always operate under the suspicion that I've blocked things out (I think I'm kidding, but how can you be sure?). Maybe it starts with small things, like my few brushes with school violence (the hitting, not the shooting kind), by utter distaste for blood (I wouldn't eat ketchup for years following a particularly grisly nature program about the Africa savanna), or my years-long fascination with world wars. I don't even know how I feel about violence now, except to say that I loath it and look to it in principle. I'm a conflicted young man.
I say all this to put into context the ethereal nature of my academic interest. The very fact that violence pervades human society means that I've bounced around at warp speed from inner-city drug narratives to cowboy/Indian binaries to depictions of anarchy in Russian film. I know. A thesis, especially as my university envisions it, will not fit all those planks. I had to decide on ONE thing. Torture.
This past summer, I read Soul on Ice for the first time. I was both disgusted and intrigued (a combination which never recedes for long) by Eldridge Cleaver. He seemed to both eschew violence and live for it. More precisely, his notions of just violence evolve as his essays and letters go on, leaving me wanting more after I finished. So, where does one go to keep the information ball rolling? Wikipedia, of course! That entry search, while informative, didn't quite satisfy me (it was sort of like an episode of Lost, raising more questions than it answered), but the lack of readily available sources turned me off for a time. Rereading Soul on Ice for a class this semester gave me the chance to open things up. I was disappointed by Soul on Fire, troubled by Cleaver's speeches, and turned on to other writings of his contemporaries and former comrades, like Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. I'm just starting, but I think I've found my literary period.
Two worries as I begin this journey, and then I'll clue you in to my preliminary claim. First, I find it hard to not get caught up in the headiness of revolutionary ideas. Anyone who knows me tends to laugh at my self-styled political edge, but what will happen to me after days in the library immersed in radical Marxism, anarchism, and left-wing terrorism. Probably nothing :)
My other worry involves my discipline. When I tell folks I'm studying English, I imagine they're picturing To Kill a Mockingbird and Romeo and Juliet, not the Black Panther Party newspaper and born-again Christian autobiographies. I don't really have any anchors here, so I worry (probably too much) about ricocheting off into interdisciplinary vacuum land. I'll risk it.
Basically, my ideas about Cleaver involve his position within the larger revolutionary scene. First, his threatened mobilization of the white youth connects pretty smoothly with Fanon's ideas on mobilization of the country districts within a colonial country. Second, for the Black Panther Party to succeed within the structure of American politics, they couldn't be the most radical voice. Cleaver, by splitting with the Panthers, was sacrificed for the "greater good," though that good never could materialize (angry fist shakes at J. Edgar). To sum up: no Berkely, Peace and Freedom candidacy, exile, and alienation, no breakfast programs for Oakland kids and no canonization of Newton and Seale. I know, this gets a little fuzzy as I go on, and it probably has to do with how far I get away from texts, but I'll hammer it down. I'm just glad I have a topic.