I Am Maroon by Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, cowritten by Kanya D’Almeida, is a memoir that follows Shoatz’s journey from a child in Philadelphia to Black liberation leader and political prisoner. Born in 1943, Shoatz was a dedicated community activist, founding member of the Black Unity Council, former member of the Black Panther Party, and soldier in the Black Liberation Army.

In 1970, Shoatz was involved in an attack at the Philadelphia Fairmount Park guard station that resulted in the death of one cop and the serious injury of another. He went underground but was eventually captured in 1972 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He escaped from prison twice, once in 1977 and again in 1980, which earned him the nickname “Maroon.” He was then held in solitary confinement for twenty-two years before being released back into the general prison population in 2014 thanks to an international campaign calling for the end to this unconstitutional punishment. 

Shoatz’s theory of change included educating those he was incarcerated with about political movements, particularly Third World liberation struggles in Africa, Palestine, and Vietnam, as well as resistance movements in Western nations like Ireland. From his experiences with the Black Liberation Movement and the Black Panther Party, he developed a philosophy he called “The Hydra Shall Prevail,” under which he advocated against hierarchical movement building. He argued that organizing should instead take the shape of a Hydra and not rely on one party or leader. 

In reading about Shoatz’s life and beliefs in I Am Maroon, I was drawn to the fact that D’Almeida—a Sri Lankan journalist who reported for a decade on global economic apartheid, reproductive justice, and prison abolition—cowrote Shoatz’s memoir. How did these two people come together from their immensely different positions in life to produce this book? What insights about Black and Asian solidarities can be gleaned from their collaboration? And what does it look like to bring a feminist lens to Shoatz’s life, given his intensely patriarchal attitudes and behaviors towards the women around him early on in his life?

When Shoatz met D’Almeida in 2013 at the State Correctional Institution at Mahanoy, he said, “This is a historic moment right? This is the day a Black Panther meets a Black Tiger”—a tongue-in-cheek offering of solidarity to lay the foundation of their relationship. D’Almedia does not identify as a Black Tiger and building a deeper understanding with Shoatz and their views on liberation took place slowly over the course of twelve years. As D’Almeida says, “Sometimes the search for solidarity can be a narrowing experience: the impulse to connect and to empathize is strong and beautiful but in truth it’s not a process that can be rushed.”

Shoatz was released from prison for fifty-two days before he died in 2021 of cancer and institutional neglect. Through his book and his collaboration with D’Almeida, he leaves behind a legacy of solidarity as patience, solidarity as commitment. 

Julie Ae Kim (JAK)

What drew you to this project and how did you become the biographer of Russell Shoatz?

Kanya D’Almeida (KD)

I was introduced to Russell Maroon Shoatz by Fred Ho, a jazz musician in New York City who initially solicited me to write a screenplay about Maroon’s life of incarceration, his dual escapes, and his decades in solitary confinement in Pennsylvania state prisons. Fred believed that a powerful film about Maroon’s long search for freedom both outside and within the prison system would be an effective tool in mobilizing a massive, international campaign to win his release from twenty-two years in the hole. 

I was utterly captivated by Maroon’s story and while I had serious doubts about my ability to produce a screenplay without ever having read or written one, I found myself agreeing to the assignment. I began a correspondence with Maroon that lasted over a decade, but I can’t say that I ever really became his “biographer.” We collaborated very closely, abandoning and resuming the project many times along the way. I struggled to overcome my reservations about speaking for him—or as him—in the course of working on the book, which I initially approached as an editor. 

Later, as I became more involved in the campaign to free him from solitary confinement, I was often called upon to be a spokesperson for both his life and his political views. It wasn’t until I said my goodbyes to Maroon, in 2018, and returned to Sri Lanka to have a child, that I finally understood I was neither his editor nor his spokesperson but in fact his cowriter. Maroon and I had undergone a painstaking process to find and create shared language that could serve as a bridge between our differences: our respective upbringings, the histories of our people, and our political visions for the world. When I no longer had a direct line of communication to him, I was forced to draw from this pool of language. It was only then that I began to write alongside him, so to speak. 

JAK

“Black Panther meets a Black Tiger.” I found that such a poignant moment in the introduction when you first meet Russell and talk about how the two of you were connected through the “histories of our people.” How did solidarity function during the process of this book? 

KD

It was not a straightforward collaboration at all. During my first visit with Maroon, he talked at length about Sri Lanka’s civil war, particularly his research and study of the LTTE (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who fought a thirty-year war against the government for a separate state). They were ultimately defeated in a grisly military offensive in 2009 but prior to that, Maroon and his comrades had undertaken a detailed investigation of the tactics that enabled the LTTE to repeatedly confront, and at times even overwhelm, a state army. He expressed a deep sense of respect for their military prowess, which alarmed and dismayed me because I had by that point in my life—having lived through decades of war, even though I was relatively untouched by it—come to view violence and bloodshed as an utterly wasteful enterprise. We shared a strong theoretical base when it came to questions of Third World liberation movements and self-determination of oppressed peoples. But this base quickly crumbled as we layered it on top of lived experience—his and mine—which was necessary to do in order to tell the true story of Maroon’s life, including his childhood, his intimate relationships, his most raw emotions and recollections. 

It took years for me to ask the right questions and even longer for him to answer them: questions of dignity, self-respect, courage, honor, loyalty, and humanity. For Maroon, these sentiments were not born of mental constructs, but of a life spent on the streets as a gang member, in formation with his people in the Black Liberation Movement, always as a soldier willingly conscripted. For me, they were informed by loss: stories of family who had been killed, who had been exiled, who had been torn apart by political violence. I had never been on the front lines of anything. He had never been witness to what savagery prevails between two evenly matched foes. We had to chip away at one another’s illiteracy for many years before we could proceed in a spirit of real solidarity.

JAK

The ways that solidarity and cross-racial building in praxis shows up in this book struck me. In particular, Fred Ho’s friendship with Russell Shoatz and commitment to freeing him, in addition to your commitment to this project, made me think about our column’s mission on creating space for Black and Asian feminist solidarities. What are your thoughts on Black and Asian solidarity? Were there other examples of this that you noticed during your process?

KD

These are old solidarities, so there is a sturdy base for them. Sri Lanka once housed the coordinating bureau of the Afro-Asian Writers Association, which was a vehicle for nonaligned postcolonial literary expression during the Cold War. 

But my collaboration with Maroon taught me that sometimes the search for solidarity can be a narrowing experience: the impulse to connect and to empathize is strong and beautiful but in truth it’s not a process that can be rushed. As a journalist covering social movements, I often believed I was in solidarity with dozens of struggles around the world, without ever really having the time or space to fully understand all their complexities. I was so eager to find common ground with Maroon that I was initially willing to accept some of his explanations out of a desire to avoid conflicting conversations or because I didn’t want to appear disrespectful—explanations about armed struggle, for instance, or domestic violence. Fortunately for me, the book demanded a slowing down. A full gestation of certain truths. And ultimately the emergence of a story that reflected changes in both of us, certain kinds of self-realization which I now believe are crucial for real solidarity.

JAK

As the book chronologically goes through Russell Shoatz’s life, we can trace his growing political consciousness and how he also shares and attempts to build it with those he is incarcerated with. Can you share any insights on cultivating political consciousness that came through writing this book and about your own path?

KD

I think it has to be lived. The reason Maroon was successful in cultivating political consciousness among the people around him—particularly on the inside on death row, in solitary confinement, and later, specifically among men who were sentenced to life imprisonment—was because he had lived his principles. Initially this was fraternal loyalty as a gang member, then Black power as a Black Panther, and still more latterly his jail breaks, which earned him the name Maroon. Freedom was a principle he practiced—he had always been trying, and would always be trying, to get free. 

As for myself, it was pregnancy and childbirth that gave me the life experience needed to finally conclude our work on this book. It taught me about time and patience, and what it means to give life to something, or bring something to life. How to find and trust instinct, how to survive violence (in my case this was obstetric violence). It was the experience of my son’s birth, and the knowledge that came with it, that allowed me to cowrite this book with Maroon with strength and equality. Because I do believe that the act of birthing in this world forces us to confront every superstructure out there, from the capitalist patriarchy on which the medical industrial complex rests, to the legacies of slavery and incarceration that continue to strip us all of our bodily autonomy. 

JAK 

As a feminist, you mention that you struggled with wondering if you should write about the women that were a part of Russell Shoatz’s life. The book also ends with a reflection from him that patriarchy is “that most ancient system of coercion and control that is still dominant in the world today.” Were there any more conversations on feminism and sexism that came up with Russell or while you were navigating the writing of this book?

KD

We both learned a lot, I think, in our conversations on these subjects. For me it was a very conflicted decision to stay with Maroon’s story, rather than pivoting towards the women who approached me about telling their life stories instead. And there were many ways it could have gone. For example, I stated earlier that I was never really Maroon’s biographer. If I had been, I might have been tempted to follow every lead into every version of his life. I might have become lost in that labyrinth. Instead what I committed to was trying to find answers with Maroon about the questions that came up for me in conversation with the women around him, and also questions of my own. There were times I found his answers vague and unsatisfactory (domestic violence as a plague “of the times” or machismo as “the way things were”), but gradually, over years, he began to write to me at length from a place of great vulnerability—letters that were almost confessional in their tone. I held onto these very dearly because they offered me an entirely new map to follow—not the straight path of narrative, blame, defensiveness, or justification but a more meandering path, the path of retrospect, reflection, and even deep regret. 

JAK

As a creative writer as well as a journalist, how was writing this biography different from other writing you have done? You mention the arduous journey of writing this book. What kept you going?

KD

When I agreed to this project, I don’t think I grasped exactly what I was saying yes to. I didn’t know it would take twelve years of my life to see it through to publication. What kept me going was the same thing that prompted me to enter this fray to begin with: the memory of my uncle, who was assassinated in 1990 during an insurgency in which tens of thousands of Sri Lankan civilians were killed or disappeared. Following his murder, his mother, my grandaunt, led a movement of mothers across the country who wanted justice and accountability for the deaths and disappearances of their kin. That is a part of my family’s legacy that is perpetually present in my being at all times—it is the part of me that takes a long view of history, and that has a clear view of what is always at stake. 

I will say too that my father has been a tremendous source of support in this. He introduced us to the Panthers, showed us the iconography of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising black-gloved fists on the podium at the 1968 Olympics, quoted the words of H. Rap Brown, and taught us why Muhammad Ali refused to serve in Vietnam. He felt that the struggle for Black Liberation was relevant for us in Sri Lanka then, and that Maroon’s life and legacy is relevant for us in Sri Lanka now.