Bridging Parallel Worlds

A Spy in the Struggle by Aya de León
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Aya de León, Creative Writing teacher in UC Berkeley’s African-American Studies Department, weaves a rough-and-ready novel around the consciousness-raising issues of what “defunding the police,” “disaster capitalism” and climate crisis justice have in common. 

Through the “coming of age” of her main character, Yolanda Vance, de León explores how a person who thought they knew, can learn “the Real history” of race, gender, privilege, power and pollution in America at ground level. 

Yolanda grew up in Georgia, got scholarships to prep school and a women’s college that looks a lot like Mills and takes a job infiltrating a grassroots climate change organization. By going undercover with activists opposed to an East Bay government contractor, she finds herself on the wrong side of the law as well as her gut feelings, childhood intuitions, eroticism, moral values, legal expertise and heart. 

The two separate “silos” of Yolanda’s federal police work and the “Red, Black and Green” (RBG) teens and activists she’s been sent to surveille jostle for dominance with her consciousness, upbringing and “education” to bend and penetrate her tough and naïve surface masquerades. She starts transforming her vision of what she was told were her employer’s “regrettable” (murderous) 1960s “tactics” into the reality of cover-ups, disappearances due to immigrant status, greed, fact and data manipulations and denial all around her. 

At rock bottom, de León uses her “experience in the anti-nuclear movement as a teen in the 80s… the Livermore Action Group in South Berkeley,” in the Black community in Roxbury, Massachusetts and “with the climate initiative of the Movement for Black Lives” as excellent detail material for her fast-moving action; diverse, lively characters and outstanding flair for dialogue that moves Spy along smartly.

 As fiction, she doesn’t name names here or dwell on current events, but the lines are pretty clearly drawn from East Bay life where we all know who gets “cheap land, a freeway, a place to dump their toxic waste and don’t have to pay a cent in taxes…(I)t’s not enough (for BIPOC) to have a handful of custodian jobs ---“ “…our people were the ones dying, while the employees … who live in cozy white suburbs worked from home” when COVID hit. Ouch! Hey, Sistah, tell it like it is!

Like my political “deflowering” hearing about and witnessing the police riots of 1968 in Chicago and at University of Wisconsin anti-war sit-ins; Yolanda doesn’t want to believe it’s really happening, that corruption really goes down that deep or spreads out that far. Or that her own actions, like Meridel LeSueur yelled at do-gooder dummy me in 1980, were going to “splinter the movement! That’s counter-insurgency,” a knee-jerk habit of infighting all-too-common in liberal and radical left orgs letting competition and egoism open the doors to distrust, confusion and provocateurs.

 
As I straggled into the Orlando, Florida airport motel three days before a visit to Mom for Thanksgiving; a wiry white man with crisp, short grey hair; a sneering, angry look and a yellow-on-black “DEFUND BERKELEY” T-shirt was being dragged out of the breakfast area by his exhausted-looking younger wife or daughter. I rolled my eyes and went about my business, but the image stuck in my mind:
 

“DEFUND BERKELEY?” “What the hell does that mean?” on the one hand (besides “Please get in a fight with me!”), and “Good luck with that!” on the other. (Would that include “defunding” Livermore Labs and Cal? I think not.) 

Soon after that, a massive storm of tornadoes flattened whole towns in Western Kentucky, hitting already impoverished, jobless and homeless people especially hard; and last week 600+ homes were destroyed and tens of thousands evacuated in Colorado wildfires with winds up to 100 miles an hour. As Marvin Gaye called out to us in his 1971 hit release, “What’s Going On?” “We’ve got to find a way, to find some loving here today…Don’t punish me with brutality, talk to me…What’s going on?”

On the first anniversary of the U. S. Capitol insurrection and riot, disaster and disunity signal major human misunderstandings about each other and the world around us on which we tenuously depend. The difference between the huge police, National Guard and White House responses to the peaceful Black Lives Matter and Wall of Many protests and the former President’s absence of planning, ugly encouragement and then despicable apathy and lies during and after the January 6th insurrection.
 

The 99% INCLUDES people duped into thinking an election was stolen, so that we fight EACH OTHER while the Boards of Directors and real estate barons laugh all the way to the bank.
 

Marcus, the head of the RBG teen and neighborhood center, says about a white attorney working for them, “He clearly had no idea what kind of violence the government has done in our community.” Neither does a guy in a DEFUND BERKELEY T-shirt. What violence has been done to “THEM,” too.

When Mr. Floyd called, “Mama, I’m through!” he was calling to ALL OF US in the human family to get smart, listen to each other’s truths and help each other and the Earth SURVIVE. 

Listen to the youth!
We demand the truth!

It is our duty to fight for (th)our freedom
It is our duty to win
We must love and support one another
We have nothing to lose but (th)our chains


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