The Books that Have Most Influenced Me

Students, friends and comrades have asked me which books were the most influential in my coming of age. These are the most brazen anti-imperialist testimonies I had the honor to read beginning when I was 11 or 12. My mother deserves the credit for showing me that books and self-knowledge would help me survive in enemy terrain.   

Malcolm X’s autobiography: Malcolm was extremely disciplined and unrelenting in his spiritual and intellectual journey through the minefields of white supremacy. As a community, national and emerging international leader he was among the most well-organized and eloquent. This book shaped me as I battled an alienating junior HS, High School and teenage experience. Few books have the capacity to inspire young people to be self-taught and to fight back as this one. 

The Uses of Haiti: Dr. Paul Farmer very succinctly shows the cause behind so much hunger and misery in Ayiti; US imperialism. The book presents a great case for why reparations are due, even if the good doctor does not explicitly state this. Prisoners of Colonialism by Ronald Fernandez played the same role in elucidating the inspiring chapters of the Puerto Rican liberation struggle. Eva Alvarado’s Don’t Be Afraid Gringo and Domitila Chungara de Barrios’ Dejame Hablar are also great testimonies of anti-imperialist struggle in Honduras and Bolivia, respectively. Catherine Sunshine’s The Caribbean: Survival, Struggle and Sovereignty reads smoothly, offering insights into different liberation struggles, and could even function as a textbook. Early on in my ideological and intellectual development, these books helped me step outside of the parameters set by white supremacy and U.S. social patriotism to see the world from the view of the most damned.

Bandit Country: This is my favorite book on the Irish liberation struggle. Toby Harnden shows how ordinary, everyday people will fight against all odds and summon the greatest creativity and fearlessness to rid themselves of their swashbuckling occupiers. The book focuses on South Armagh, the Southernmost part of the occupied 6 counties of Ireland. South Armagh was the most dangerous place in the world for British soldiers on patrol. Street signs read: “Snipers at work” giving fair warning to any occupying Brit. 

Assata: I read this book very young. Assata Shakur’s words and life experiences leave no doubt about the criminal, racist nature of this system and country.  All the books by Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, George Jackson, and Eldridge Cleaver drew me closer to the Black Liberation struggle and defined my unrelenting hatred for the white supremacist ruling class in this country.

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. A true internationalist and anti-colonialist.  A Martinican who gave everything for the definitive liberation of Algeria from the grip of French colonialism. His chapter “Concerning Violence” cuts at the power relations that pit ghetto-dweller against ghetto-dweller in an endless orgy of violence. He leaves no doubt that only the colonized’s violent overturning of colonial society and property relations can bring true liberation.

Jude the Obscure This Thomas Hardy’s novel holds a special place in my heart because my mother and I read it together during difficult moments. Jude’s character is all too human. I related to his inner-struggles. Other classics by Chalres Dickens, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and so many others. The Hunchback of Notre Dame also excellent. East of Eden also captured my imagination.  

Isaac Deutscher’s Trilogy on the life of Leon Trotsky, The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Outcast and his Political Biography of Joseph Stalin: This is some of the most important and objective history writing.  Deutscher’s writing offers the political context in which to understand the decisions these leaders made.  It shows the class forces at work and takes us beyond the bourgeois history-writing of heroes and villains.

The Russian Revolution. Leon Trotsky. A brilliant, super-entertaining blow by blow, first-hand account of how it all went down in Petrograd. A book and writer like no other.

What is to Be Done?, The State and Revolution and The Communist Manifesto.  How can I not include them? They more than any other documents or books lay out strategies for working and oppressed people to seize power.

Dr. Anne and David Jubb’s Life Foods Cook Book.  The guiding science behind Life Foods, the fountain of youth that Juan Ponce de Cabron could never discover.  There is no dis-ease we cannot heal.  There are only people we cannot heal because they are closed to the power of Life Foods.

Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America.  Both authors employ dialectical materialism to understand the connection between the West’s accumulation of wealth and the third world or exploited world’s descent into poverty.  Some of the most crisp writing you will find.  Essential for anyone trying to understand the underlying structures responsible for hunger, AIDS, migration, genocide and all of the social problems that affect the oppressed nations today.  

El Gigante Dormido. The Life of Amin Abel by Fidel Santana, my mentor in El MPD in the Dominican Republic. It marked my entrance into reading seriously in another language and trying to emulate the larger than life figures that led the resistance to the 1965 US invasion of the Dominican Republic and then continued the struggle for a free, socialist D.R. Amin, Maximilian Gomez, Amaury etc… were the mentors of my mentors.

The Big Book: Alcoholics Anonymous. Sharp wisdom on being a less selfish, self-seeking human being. A classic for anyone exploring spiritual growth, regardless of what addictions they may struggle with. 

I have to also add Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton. David Hilliard’s This Side of Glory should also be read after reading the other Panther bios. 

What books most shaped you?