Once a Peabody Award-winning radio reporter, Mumia Abu-Jamal is now in a Pennsylvania prison awaiting his state-sanctioned execution. In 1982 he was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner after a trail many have criticized as profoundly biased. LIVE FROM DEATH ROW is collection of his prison writings- an impassioned yet unflinching account of the brutalities and humiliations of prison life...
John Edgar Wideman introduces a clear and precise vision into the mind of Mumia Abu-Jamal that any reasonable being ought to solely agree with...
He doesn't split his world down the middle to conform to the divided world prison enforces. He expresses the necessity of connection, relinquishing to no person or group the power to define him. His destiny, his manhood, is not attached to some desperate, one-way urge to cross over to a region controlled or possessed by others. What he is, who he can become, results from his daily struggle to construct an identity wherever his circumstances place him...
The power of his voice is rooted in his defiance of those determined to silence him.
The voices are always there, if we discipline ourselves to pick them out. Listen to them, to ourselves, to the best we've managed to WRITE and SAY and DANCE and PAINT and SING.
Africans [in America] culture, in spite of the weight, the assaults if has endured, may contain a key to our nation's survival, a key not found simply in the goal of material prosperity, but in the force of spirit, will, communal interdependence.
Mumia Abu-Jamal's voice can help us tear down walls-prison walls, the walls we hide behind to deny and refuse the burden of our history.
Mumia points out that Thurgood Marshall, the first person of African descent appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, admitted, just hours after his resignation from the Court, that "I'm still not free."
In another essay, Mumia calls our attention to Nelson Mandela. Released after twenty-seven years in South Africa's jails as a hero, leader, and liberator of his people, universally acknowledged to be the most powerful man in his country, its best hope for peace, possibly its next president-still didn't possess the right to vote.
Mumia Abu-Jamal's writing insists on these kinds of gut checks, reality checks. He reminds us that to move clearly in the present, we must understand the burden of our past.
The following insert is for all brothers and sisters that have been strangled at the hands of prison systems...
For all of our youth that has been subjected to improper solutions for apparent problems...
For the families that have to endure the pain of losing a loved one to THE GAME...
Actin' like life's a ball game
March 1994
...The man, whom I'll call Rabbani, was tall, husky fifteen-year-old when he was arrested in southeastern Pennsylvania for armed robbery. The prosecutor moved that he be judicially certified as an adult, and the Court agreed. Tried as an adult, Rabbani was convicted of all charges and sentences to fifteen to thirty years in prison, for an alleged robbery with a CO2 air pistol...
For those critical years in the life of a male, from age fifteen to thirty, which mark the transition from boy to man, Rabbani was entombed in a juridical, psychic, temporal box branded with the false promise "corrections". Like tens of thousands of his generation, his time in hell equipped him with no skills of value to either himself or his community. He has been "corrected" in precisely the same way that hundreds of thousands of others have been, that is to say, warehoused in a vat that sears the very soul.
He has never held a woman as a mate or lover; he has never held a newborn in his palm, its heart athump with new life; he hasn't seen the sun rise, nor the moon glow, in almost fifteen years- for robbery, "armed" with a pellet gun, at fifteen years old.
When I hear easy, catchy, mindless slogans like "three strikes, you're out," I think of men like Rabbani who had one strike (if not one foul) and are, for all intents and purposes, already outside of any game worth playing.
The following insert is a Father's attempt and success (in my eyes) to show his daughter the LOVE he has for his people and HER while restricted, confide, and denied of LOVE and JUSTICE for himself...
The visit
November 1994
...Tiny, with a Minnie Mouse voice, this daughter of my spirit had finally made the long trek westward, into the bowels of this man-made hell, situated in the south-central Pennsylvania boondocks. She, like my other children, was just a baby when I was cast into hell, and because of her youth and sensitivity, she hadn't been brought along on family visits until now...
"Break it! Break it!" she screamed. Her mother, recovering from her shock, bundled up Hamida in her arms, as sobs rocked them both. My eyes filled to the brim. My nose clogged.
Her unspoken words echoed in my consciousness: "Why can't I hug him? Why can't we kiss? Why can't I sit in his lap? Why can't we touch? Why not?" I turned to recover. I put on a silly face, turned back, called her to me, and talked silly to her. "Girl, how can you breathe with all them boogies in your nose?"...
I reminded her of how she used to hug our cat until she almost strangled the poor animal, and Hamida's denials were developed into laughter... before long our visit came to an end.
Her smiled restored, she uttered a parting poem that we used to say over the phone: " I love you, I miss you, and when I see you, I'm gonna kiss you!"
Over five years have passed since that visit, but I remember it like it was an hour ago... They haunt me.
This book brings conflicting energy, immediate attention and piercing images to the way we have/are treated within bars, steels and court orders.
ReplyDeleteLIVE FROM DEATH ROW... Mumia Abu-Jamal
A Toxic Shock... "The earth is but one great ball. The borders, the barriers, the cages, the cells, the prisons of our lives, all originate in the false imagination of the minds of men."
May 1989
"Here step into my office." He pointed toward the kitchen and pulled out a chair. I sat down. "The black men in army coats are men who came home from the Vietnam War." I didn't know what he was talking about. He went on to explain that there had been a war in a faraway place. The black men I saw in the green coats had fought in the war. They had seen a lot of ugly things like blood and death. He said they had killed other men, women, and children. They didn't want to do it, but they were ordered to do it, otherwise they would be put in jail or even killed. He said that the people in charge of America had sent these black men to go fight for them. It was against the law for them to refuse to go. He said the people in charge were white punks who sent strong black men to go and fight their battles. He compared the people in charge to the "punks around the way who talk a lot of shit and can't back it up when it's time to throw down. So they run and get somebody else to fight their battles for them." He said the black men in the green army coats fought hard for the "white government punks" and some of them had even lost their legs, arms, and lives. When the ones who made it out returned, the white pinks who were in charge, but always hated them anyway, wouldn't give them jobs, pay them money, or respect.
ReplyDelete"So," he said, "some of them are crazy because they killed other human beings in Vietnam. Some of them are crazy because they couldn't find jobs to support their own selves or family when they got home. Some of them went crazy because they saw their friends get killed. Some of them are crazy because they are on drugs." He then looked me in the eye and said, "But no matter how crazy they are, always remember the black team is your team. That's all you have to work with. That does't mean you can always trust the black team. But better than being scared of the people on your team is being smart.
No Disrespect
Sister Souljah