A Wall Is Just a Wall
“A wall is just a wall, and it can be broken down.” — Assata Shakur
Assata Shakur, who passed away just over a week ago at the age of 78, was a revolutionary thinker, writer, and member of the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panther Party. Accused of killing a police officer and denied the prospect of a fair trial, she fled the United States in the early 1980s and lived out the rest of her life in Cuba — as a free woman.
Assata saw herself in the lineage of the maroons — fugitive Africans who escaped enslavement and built new worlds beyond empire’s reach. She identified as African, not because of geography, but because of ancestry and refusal: a refusal to accept the terms of captivity and an insistence on liberation as a birthright. That claim resonates deeply for many of us in the diaspora, whose histories span continents and centuries but whose very bodies still bear the mark of Africa.
The Biggest Lie: Secularism
One of the most dangerous lies the West ever told is the idea of secularism — the notion that there is any part of life outside the realm of the divine. For most of human history, art, politics, and daily life were inseparable from spiritual purpose. Art was made in praise of God, in awe of creation, or as offerings to what people held sacred.
The Enlightenment project — and later, psychoanalytic and Zionist ideologies — attempted to sever us from that truth. By reducing the spiritual to superstition and explaining away consciousness and emotion as merely psychological, they disconnected people from God and from themselves. But everything — even psychology — is spiritual. There is no outside to the sacred.
Gaza, Genocide, and the Power of Refusal
We live now amid genocide, where Zionist settler colonialism seeks not only to dominate land but to desecrate it — to erase its sanctity and to make violence feel inevitable. Their project depends on convincing us that we are powerless, that right and wrong are negotiable, that human life is disposable.
Yet even as governments stand by and systems of power prove themselves hollow, ordinary people act. The recent Gaza Freedom Flotilla — 500 people on 44 ships, many barely seaworthy — broke through the siege. They carried aid, but more importantly, they carried a message: this blockade is man-made. It is not permanent. And it will fall.
Just a Wall — Inside and Out
I explored this concept in my exhibition Close to Home through a pair of French doors dividing “inside” from “outside.” Visitors could see through them, walk around them, even pass through them. The work challenged the illusion of separation — that what’s inside is safe and what’s outside is chaotic.
But in truth, there is no fixed line. What happens inside shapes the world beyond, and what happens outside reshapes the space within. The doors were both barrier and passage, wall and invitation. They asked viewers to remember that every wall is porous — and every boundary is subject to refusal.
The Imaginary Nature of Barriers
Every so-called reality of the modern world was once thought impossible — from human flight to global communication. Walls fall because people refuse to believe they are permanent. Even the boundary between this life and the next is but a moment.
Assata lived as a free woman because she claimed her freedom — not because it was granted. Her life is a testament to what becomes possible when we stop mistaking walls for fate.
If you’d like to bring this conversation into your classroom, exhibition space, or community, reach out. I collaborate with universities, cultural institutions, and community organizations through speaking engagements, exhibitions, and short-term residencies — spaces where we can think and act together toward a freer future.
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