Tougher Than Time
By Corey Devon Arthur
Garrett Felber rips the rage from amongst the roar and turns it into a refined revolution. In his work A Continuous Struggle, The Revolutionary Life Of Martin Sostre, he pens a rebel's life revolting in real time. This book review superimposes Martin's past over my present. Felber's sentences stitch together an ongoing situation that symbolizes a symbiotic signature between comrades, time, and structures.
"Sostre saw all spaces within an oppressive society as possible sites of resistance", Writes Felber. Unbeknownst to me I was destined to be a revolutionary descendant of Martin's dialectical resistance stratagem. My battleground is the state pen, where I use my paintings and pen to push back and punch up. Beside being a prisoner of 30 years, I'm a published writer and my paintings are painful. Scholar and Author Garrett Felber crafted a masterpiece in motion.
A Continuous Struggle made me aware that the connectivity between Martin Sostre and I, inside the carceral state, was no coincidence. Structures of oppression carve out and try to crush men like us. Not Martin Sostre; He was sturdy wherever he stood. Martin best described his goal when he said, " Something concrete to show people instead of just rhetoric." His wife Lizabeth insisted that Martin would "never want his life to be documented as a biography." Since Martin was ex-military and a man of war, he would want his life's work to be weaponized in words and proven by actions.
Martin Sostre was born in 1923 and raised in Spanish Harlem. He came up on the streets of a scarred society. Later, he became a soldier and got court martialed for slaying a man. After being discharged from the army, he was set up and sentenced to serve time in New York.
Despite being a wounded animal, Martin became an organizer on both sides of the wall. He learned best by reading books, and brokered the same knowledge to others by the multiple bookstores he owned throughout the course of his life. He taught himself and his community how to heal. Back in the mid 1990s when I first came into the New York prison system, Black and Hispanic boys and men used to viciously make each other bleed. Unfortunately, this still happens.
Recently I floated Felber's book to some gang members I mentor through the Study and Struggle group. I pointed out how Martin was a Black Puerto Rican who, "believed were allies in their struggle against their common oppressor." I also showed them what Felber wrote about the origins of their respective gangs. "In Chicago Black Panthers , the Puerto Rican Young Lords Organization, and poor white migrants from Appalachia known as the Young Patriots." Martin coached these groups to clique up, and cranked it on the capitalist cruelty crushing their communities.
This burden that Martin burned into my brothers and I challenged us to recognize ourselves in others behavior and to understand the root of our interconnectedness, according to Ann Russo in her work, Feminist Accountability. Some of us brokered for peace; A few didn't budge. Touching the scars on my face, I wonder would we always have to bleed before we could bond? While I couldn't be certain of that, I was sure I would strike back at the true enemy within.
My struggles against the sexual violence of the strip frisk inside the carceral state was paralleled and premeditated by Martin Sostre. In 2002 I resisted being strip frisked and was violently beaten by prison guards like Martin was 50 years before me.
Soon after it happened to me, one of my prison mentors, KO Smitty, infamously known for knocking out prison guards who tried to make him strip, sent me a kite. I opened it. "Fight until it's finished. KO," it read. KO was also a comrade of Martin's. The triangulation caused the following trifecta. What my eyes couldn't see, and my ears didn't hear, but my soul heard was Martin Soste screaming to me through time. "RESISTANCE FOR FOREVER!"
These were Martin's actual words before they were shaped down by the space between us. "They may succeed in beating me to death but they shall never succeed in forcing me to relinquish what in the final analysis are the final citadels of my personality, human dignity and self respect." Felber informs us in his writing.
It would take nearly 20 years of being similarly groomed as Martin was in prison before I got some payback. He made his struggle about strategic survival to save others as well, including me. "Struggle emerged from certain principles, certain tactics that can be used over and over again. Felber reports Martin once wrote.
Felber explains one strategy Martin used. "One tangible way that Sostre used the oppressive legal arm of the state as a revolutionary weapon against itself" Sostre became a paralegal to push it on prison officials and won.
In 2020 eighteen years after the police sexually assaulted me, I played politics and got elected as the Inmate Liaison Chairman at Fishkill Correctional Facility. The entire prison system was sick. Although, due to Covid 19. Like Martin did in his day, I organized and took action. Thereby, reversing the highest death rate caused by Covid in any New York State Prison.
During the aftermath, I fired on the big bosses. I wrote and published an article about the sexually violent practice of the strip frisk and other foul prison policies. Next, I dug in deeper, forging forward as feminist. I created a collection of paintings honoring the women who gave me a shot to shoot at the prison system, although softly. I titled it, She Told Me To Save The Flower.
"Sostre owed his release from prison to such labor, much of it performed by women." Felber writes. The same is true for me, except the women in my life rescued me and offered redemption to exact my revenge. I went looking for smoke, flicked, and never looked back.
A little less than a decade after Martin's death the job was done in my sector of the war zone. "A revolutionary never dies because his ideas live through his comrades." Felber wrote, quoting political prisoner Albert Nun Washington. As of October 2024, New York Code Rules And Regulations Section 7460 states that prisoners now have the option to be body-scanned instead of being stripped. I slumped the carceral state. Now I was out to shame them.
During his struggle for freedom, a film was made about Martin's illegal arrest. It was titled, Frame-Up! Fragments of this same film are featured in a documentary I recently directed advocating against the strip frisk. I showed the world what prisons do to people; And I did it from behind the enemy lines of the carceral state.
Some revolutionaries decide to bleed and die for our liberation. Martin struggled to survive. Here's why. "My getting out is living proof of what is possible - not abstract, but a concrete example - of what a resolute struggle will do." He said. This is how Garrett Felber’s words and my actions make the difference between the two extremes. According to Martin Sostre either/or isn't the way. For our struggle to succeed we need lots of both; His book and the blood in my eye.
Corey Devon Arthur is an incarcerated writer and artist who is part of Empowerment Avenue and Look 2 Justice collectives. He is also a Mississippi Five Art fellow, with his work published in multiple venues, including the Marshall Project, Inquest, Study and Struggle, Spectrum Journal, The Drift, Writing Class Radio, and Apogee.
“Knowledge is Power” Image Credit: Corey Devon Arthur