But a new wind may be blowing through the air; the cries of groups like Black Lives Matter and its spirited affiliates nationwide have burst open doors once chained and cemented closed.
Young people, bold as life, have identified these sites of state terror and are calling for their abolition. They have already run repressive district attorneys out of office in a half dozen cities across America.
May this work, now reaching its third life, give fuel and heft to their noble efforts, for only social movements truly change history.
From Life Row,
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Autumn 2019
FOREWORD
Cornel West
The passionate and prophetic voice of Mumia Abu-Jamal challenges us to wrestle with the most distinctive feature of present-day America: the relative erosion of the systems of caring and nurturing. This frightening reality, which renders more and more people unloved and unwanted, results primarily from several fundamental processes. There are, for example, the forces of our unregulated capitalist market, which have yielded not only immoral levels of wealth inequality and economic insecurity but also personal isolation and psychic disorientation. Then there is the legacy of white supremacy, which—in subtle and not-so-subtle ways—continues to produce new forms of geographical segregation, job ceilings, and social tension. We can also see how, in other arenas, oppressive ideologies and persisting bigotries (like patriarchy and homophobia) smother the possibility of healthy and humane relations among men and women. In short, our capitalist “civilization” is killing our minds, bodies, and souls in the name of the American Dream.
As one who has lived on the night-side of this dream—unjustly imprisoned for a crime he did not commit—Mumia Abu-Jamal speaks to us of the institutional injustice and spiritual impoverishment that permeates our culture. He reminds us of things most fellow citizens would rather deny, ignore, or evade. And, like the most powerful critics of our society—from Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, and Nathaniel West to Ann Petry, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and Eugene O’Neill—he forces us to grapple with the most fundamental question facing this country: What does it profit a nation to conquer the whole world and lose its soul? After decades of nightmarish jail conditions, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s soul is not only intact but still flourishing—just as the nation’s soul withers. Will we ever listen to and learn from our bloodstained prophets?
Cambridge, Mass
PREFACE
Julia Wright
Under a government that imprisons any man unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Henry David Thoreau, 1817–1862
Does the silk-worm expend her yellow labours for thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Cyril Tourneur, c. 1575–1626
There are all sorts of silences—as many perhaps as there are textures to our sense of touch or shades of color to the eye. But I will always remember the extraordinary silence that fell over a Pittsburgh courtroom on October 13, 1995, when an African-American journalist and world-known author walked in slow motion, his feet in chains, to present testimony in his own civil suit against his prison (SCI Greene) and Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections for violation of his human rights. His name—Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Ripples of silence froze in his shackled footsteps. As if on’a move waves could be stilled, this was a silence of total paradox: the volatile, scarcely hidden presence of loaded police weapons targeting the reined-in love of members of the family in the courtroom—men, women, and children who have been unable to touch him for fourteen years. I was reminded of Coleridge’s uncannily arrested sea: a spell cast against the forces of life. Having at last reached the stand in hi-tech noiselessness (America now produces silent chains for her prisoners’ feet), a gentle giant spoke and was unbound by his own words.
The defense team for SCI Greene proceeded to interrogate Mumia, asking him repeatedly whether he knew he was violating prison rules when he wrote his book Live From Death Row. “Yes,” quietly. (A tremor through the silence.) Did he know he was violating the same rules when he accepted payment for articles, commentaries, etc. . . ? “Yes,” in soft-spoken, vibrant tones. (The silence stirs.) Did he know that the current punishment for entering into “the illicit business of writing” behind bars was ninety days in the “hole” and a prison investigation justifying the monitoring of his mail and limited access to all categories of visitors including family, paralegals, spiritual counselors, the press? “Yes,” patiently, wearily. (The silence vibrates but congeals again, oily and ominous.)
“Why then, if you knew, did you go ahead and write that book?”
“Because, whatever the cost to me, I knew I had to offer to the world a window into the souls of those who, like me, suffer barbaric conditions on America’s death rows. . . .”
American silence shattered like cheap glass. Judge Benson suspended the hearing. . . .
THE BOOK YOU ARE about to read, Mumia’s second “crime” since Live From Death Row, breaks through American silence yet again as its author shares with us his prison-brewed antidotes against bars of silence more deadly than the cold steel he touches every day.
In the recent HBO-Channel 4-Otmoor documentary Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Case for Reasonable Doubt?, Mumia finds words to tell us about the inhuman experience of sensory isolation he has been exposed to for two-thirds of a generation:
Once someone closes that door, there is no sound. There is the sound of silence in your cell. There is the sound of an air-conditioner and the sound of silence, the sound you create in your own cell. The sense of isolation is all but total, because you’re cut off even from the sonic presence of people. Imagine going into your bathroom, locking the door behind you, and not leaving that bathroom, except for an hour or two [each day] . . . and staying in that bathroom for the rest of your natural life, with a date to die.
In Death Blossoms, Mumia’s victories against such sensory deprivation are as many prizes he has wrested from prison. (“Prize” and “prison” share the same root meaning: “to seize.”) However, he does not present us with ready-made, do-it-yourself, take-away prescriptions: that would be too simple. If a pattern of anti-carceral antidotes is to be found in the pages that follow, it is for us to learn how to detect them, just as Henry James believed that readers need to reach a certain stage of lucidity before they can make out the hidden “figure” in a writer’s “carpet.”
Nothing, Mumia lets us know, can begin without the word. Writing behind locked doors gives durable sound to prison silence, spiritual distance from a madding crowd of politicians and elected judges whose careers are built on the blood of others, creative dimension to the sound and fury of a world lost. In writing, there is a renewed bonding: unshackled hands grasping notebook, fingers touching pencil, pencil touching paper, paper touched by readers who are in turn touched by meaning. And something is badly needed to prevent the outside world from receding, to arrest the slowing-down of the metabolism of exchange with one’s remembered community. Do colors pale and falter with Plexiglas filtering? Is there a sepia-like transmutation due to the overexposure of much revisited memories?
Death Blossoms seems bathed in a shimmering translucency, as if remembered color ’n’ sound are bleeding out of prison-reality, and this existential hemorrhage can be stopped only by the “brilliant etching of writing upon the brain.”
CAN ALL THE CENTURIES of world philosophy even begin to visualize the dreams and nightmares of our death row inmates? The raw stuff of dreams draws on the immediacy of the sentient world—but when that world is suppressed, what happens to those dreaming processes which constitute one of the foundations of human sanity? Rollo May has written about that existential pain at the