Sanyika Shakur

The follow up to his best-selling memoir Monster, Sanyika Shakur's T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E. is a vicious, heart-wrenching and true-to-life novel about an LA gang member that masterfully captures the violence and depravity of gang life. Shakur's protagonist is Lapeace, the leader of the Eight Tray Crips gang in South Central Los Angeles. In a deadly gunfight with Anyhow, a Blood and Lapeace's rival since childhood, eight innocent civilians are killed. Anyhow is captured. Lapeace becomes a fugitive and he must hide out in the home of his girlfriend, Tashima, a hip-hop mogul as a pair of crooked LA detectives, John Sweeney and Jesse Mendoza, attempt to track him down.This novel was written from the confines of Shakur's jail cell, and the authenticity of its street scenes&#8212the relentlessness of violence, the do-or-die attitude of each side of the gang war, the sheer joy in the killing&#8212is a testament to the hell that has been a majority of Shakur's life. With T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E., Shakur delivers a powerful and gripping story about the terror of gang life and one man's attempt to free himself.

I propose to open my mind as wide as possible to allow my readers the first ever glimpse at South Central from my side of the gun, street, fence and wall.After pumping eight blasts from a sawed-off shotgun at a group of rival gang members, twelve-year-old Kody Scott was initiated into the L.A. gang the Crips. He quickly matured into one of the most formidable Crip combat soldiers, earning the name 'Monster' for committing acts of brutality and violence that repulsed even his fellow gang members. When the inevitable jail term confined him to a maximum-security cell, a complete political and personal transformation followed: from Monster to Sanyika Shakur, Black nationalist, member of the New Afrikan Independence Movement and crusader against the causes of gangsterism. In a document that has been compared to The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, Shakur makes palpable the despair and decay of America's inner cities and gives eloquent voice to one aspect of the Black experience today.

"It was over 20 years ago that the book Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member exploded on the scene and gave us all a front row seat to explore the genocidal brutality of the neo-colonial world of gangbanging. A world that exists at the expense of New Afrikan communities and New Afrikan youth in particular, through our social savage way of attempting to gain power through AK's, bats and beat downs ... it was in the belly of the beast (prison) that 'Monster' underwent a revolutionary transformation, dissecting and re-building himself from the inside out, slaying the colonial thug 'Monster' and emerging through a re-birth as 'Sanyika Shakur, ' a New Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalist." -- from the Foreword by Yusef "Bunchy" ShakurThis collection of writings by Sanyika Shakur, formerly known as Monster Kody Scott, includes several essays written from within the infamous Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in the period around the historic 2011 California prisoners' hunger strike, as well as two interviews conducted just before and after his release in Black August 2012.Shakur rejects the easy answers and false solutions of the neocolonial age - integration and racism, the colonial-criminal mentality and subservience to imperialism - as the "oppo-sames" that they are. Firmly rooted in the New Afrikan Communist tradition, he skillfully uses the tools of dialectical materialism to lay bare the deeper connections between racism, sexism, and homophobia and how these mental diseases relate to the ongoing capitalist (neo-)colonial catastrophe we remain trapped within.Defending the legacy of New Afrikans' historic struggle for Land, Independence, and Socialism, Shakur spells out a uniquely liberatory Revolutionary Nationalist vision. Annihilating the "amerikan" mental fog that has new generations continuing to self-defeat rather than coming together against the real enemy, Stand Up, Struggle Forward serves as a battle cry against all forms of oppression.Stand Up, Struggle Forward also contains a valuable account of political repression in the California prison system, including several of the intelligence memoranda they were used to condemn Shakur to years of solitary confinement in Pelican Bay. These internal prison documents clearly show that this prolonged solitary confinement was a direct result of Shakur's continuing promotion of New Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalist politics. As such, they provide a clear example of the way in which solitary confinement continues to be used as a tool of political repression against thousands of prisoners in California today.

Written in solitary confinement, Kody Scott's memoir of sixteen years as a gangbanger in Los Angeles was a searing best-seller and became a classic, published in ten languages, with more than 300,000 copies in print in the United States alone. After pumping eight blasts from a sawed-off shotgun at a group of rival gang members, twelve-year-old Kody Scott was initiated into the L.A. gang the Crips. He quickly matured into one of the most formidable Crip combat soldiers, earning the name -Monster- for committing acts of brutality and violence that repulsed even his fellow gang members. When the inevitable jail term confined him to a maximum-security cell, a complete political and personal transformation followed: from Monster to Sanyika Shakur, black nationalist, member of the New Afrikan Independence Movement, and crusader against the causes of gangsterism. In a document that has been compared to The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, Shakur makes palpable the despair and decay of America's inner cities and gives eloquent voice to one aspect of the black ghetto experience today.