Читать книгу Death Blossoms - Mumia Abu-Jamal - Страница 9

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 heart of all human exile: the inability to go home. Homelessness, like noiselessness and lack of physical contact, is at the core of American “correction.” It is the experience of being at home or not, of being able to go home or not, that sustains the sense of self or begins to shatter it. And it is one of the amazing strengths of this book that Mumia has turned his mind into his home, showing us in the process how out-of-our-minds we may have become in the “open” society outside. Mumia’s inner home is so limitless that when we exit this book, it is into our own materialistic, petty reality-cells that we enter, apparently of our own “free” will.

This is not classic autobiography or even “intellectual” biography. It is the narrative of an escape from prison into the liberated territory of the mind, a pacing not of the cage but of the psyche, a jogging not in the pen but in the open space Mumia calls “reaching beyond.” We are privileged that he takes us with him on a liberating tour of his own freedom. Resolutely on’a move within his own spiritual quest, Mumia makes us understand that “free” men and women can imprison and arrest their own revolutions just as “inmates” can set free a boundless revolution of the mind. As Frantz Fanon, the late psychiatrist and freedom fighter, wrote in his Wretched of the Earth, “Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”

Our minds are indeed bombarded with media hype and racial stereotypes. Who does not recall the Disneyland face of a womanchild tearfully describing (for primetime consumption) the black “monster” who murdered her two small boys? Except that this killer turned out to be the figment of her own homicidal imagination. . . . Yet how many Mumia Abu-Jamals were arrested or harassed before the truth was duly established? Who does not remember a Boston-based Italian-American as he testified, convincingly, to witnessing the murder of his wife by a black “thug?” Except that this dark fiend turned out to be a projection straight out of the husband’s criminal mind. . . . But, meanwhile, how many Abu-Jamals? Who can forget a tear-streaked widow telling over and over again how the defendant (Mumia) smiled diabolically as the prosecution showed the jury the blood-stained shirt of her policeman-husband? Except that the minutes of the trial prove that Judge Sabo had barred Mumia from the courtroom that day. . . . And so the pattern repeats itself as we are told that a certain Wesley Cook, a.k.a. Mumia Abu-Jamal, killed a police officer who happened to be brutalizing his brother. But who is the real Mumia beyond these false, cold-blooded projections?

Death Blossoms is a personal and collective answer to this question, a generous and human song of innocence for all the unseen, voiceless men and women imprisoned by guilty stereotypes way before they set foot in a penitentiary.

Predictably, another “invisible man” haunts this case: he was seen running away from the scene of the shooting by at least three witnesses (Dessie Hightower, William Singletary, Veronica Jones), and all have since spoken up concerning the police intimidation they underwent simply for insisting that this man was not a figment of their black folks’ imagination. . . .

ALTHOUGH MUMIA’S LIFE-FORCES are sealed off and preyed upon by a carceral onslaught tantamount to hi-tech slavery, he distills in these pages the ultimate rebuttal of his imprisonment: mental and spiritual autarchy.

Death Blossoms displays a deceptively simple meshing of form and content. In fact, one of the most fascinating figures in Mumia’s “carpet” is quite literally the carpet itself, the weaving of a web of words. Revealingly, towards the end of the book, Norman, an inmate, marvels at a spider’s defiance of prison rules as it spins its web under his sink. Mumia, who soon discovers a spider of his own, weaves anecdote into antidote, and we begin to see that the book we hold in our hands is also a web spun out of the creative threads of a mind-made home; just as Anansi, the spider of ancient African folklore, is the source of a life-web unraveled from within.

As is uncannily the case with much of Mumia’s writing, the psychological truth is also borne out scientifically. Randy Lewis, a molecular biologist who has been studying spiders’ secrets for years, has recently written that “spider silk absorbs more energy before it breaks than any other material on earth.” The writing in Death Blossoms is as prison-proof as the silk for vests, currently derived from imprisoned, anesthetized spiders, is bullet proof. And from his carceral lab, Mumia’s word-threads reach through and beyond prison bars; they are symbols of the essential twine of bonding with those on the outside. Together they form a web which is an almost literal image for those “holes in the soul” he writes of. But the same web also healingly re-creates in prison the reality of “the whole connected web of nature” and holds us all together as a community in spite of the most brutal assaults. As he notes in reference to the bonds that unite his beloved brothers and sisters of MOVE even after numerous sinister, programmed attempts to destroy their community: “Using neither nails nor lumber, John Africa constructed from the fabric of the heart a tightly cohesive body.”

Many of us will not emerge from this book unsnared, for to the extent that we cannot deny the knowledge of what we have read, we are faced with a vital question: Knowing what we know, having become witnesses, can we continue to live and let die?

DEATH BLOSSOMS raises the issue of the innocence of one man—any man—at the hands of an elitist society that manufactures and projects its guilt upon its citizens in order to enrich itself. I am reminded here of my father’s character, Fred Daniels, in The Man Who Lived Underground. Pursued by the police for a crime he did not commit, Daniels is robbed of his innocence and escapes underground into the city’s sewers to avoid capture. As he tries to survive in hiding by resorting to stealing, he takes to peering through cellar doors and invisibly watches others being robbed of their innocence as they are punished for his thefts. After an old watchman falsely accused on his account commits suicide, Daniels understands from the depths of his netherworld that we are all robbed of our innocence and are therefore all condemned to guilt. He emerges from the sewers with the urge to share this truth with the world:

If he could show them what he had seen, then they would feel what he had felt, and they in turn would show it to others, and those others would feel as they had felt, and soon everybody would be governed by the same impulse of pity.

Similar threads of poignant hope and faith in justice run through Death Blossoms, making visible witnesses of us all. Veronica Jones, a hounded witness in Mumia’s case, was moved by the same impulse when she recently came forward to set a false record straight, but she was arrested at the stand for sticking to the truth of what she saw—a man running away—and for courageously accepting the responsibility that goes with taking the truth out of the “underground.”

Our America, geographically so vast and rich, historically so young and green, has traditionally preferred the materialism of space to the invisible threads time spins through her landscapes and the experience of her restless peoples. Mumia’s writing reconnects us with a much-needed sense of continuity, with the history of our birth as a people on western shores through the Middle Passage, with our ensuing struggle down through time, ongoing, on’a move.

For Mumia, a wholistic struggle—the warp and woof of it—unfolds not only in terms of space-oriented internationalism, but also through the transgenerational glue contained in the web parabole. It is sadly ironical, though, that such an appreciation of the spiritual essence of time should come from a death row inmate who lacks the material wealth that buys life-time in America. But Mumia, with characteristic selflessness, enjoins us to look beyond ourselves at the fragile blooms of our children, and help them “dwell in the house of tomorrow,” where we may not be.

A BLOSSOM IS one of the life forms most bound up with the message of time. The fruit it becomes holds in its flesh the memory of the grand bud that came before it, and the foretaste of its passage through rot. According to the most haunting of blues, sung by the sister with the eternal magnolia in her hair, there were many “strange fruit” hanging from our Southern trees. But do our landscapes remember? According to legend, death flowers (also called “mandragore”) grew under innocent men who had swung high. These blooms held wondrous powers of fertility and continuum in the hands of the damned of the earth.

As I was reading the manuscript of Death Blossoms, I received a deeply moving letter from Mumia recounting his grief at the violent death of Tupac Shakur—a Panther family child, a promising but unfulfilled cub nipped in the bud. “What loss!” Mumia writes. “The son of a Panther who never knew his mother’s glory; who called himself a ‘thug;’ who never realized his truest self, his truest power.” Mumia’s words will strike a deep chord in those of us who have had to teach our children to become mental guerrillas, and to thread their way through the grim statistics of their own mortality. “Every two hours, one of you dies of gunshot wounds,” we force ourselves to teach them.

MUMIA’S INABILITY to touch the grandchildren born to him while on death row is, microcosmically, a double bind experienced by far too many in our decaying “communities:” the intergenerational connections of life are eroded, foreshortened at both ends of our life spans. Targeted by the FBI as a child, Mumia cannot bond with his own children, or theirs—and all have been robbed. My father, Richard Wright, would have met my children and theirs, had he not died in his prime, in unelucidated circumstances. Our generations are torn asunder and brushed aside like cobwebs; they are cut off and isolated—as if on their own death row.

Over half a century after Native Son, Bigger—my paper brother—still haunts America, because in his premature death at the hands of the state, there was a foretaste of coming rot. Tupac? Another real-life native son in the long chain since decimation. We live and breathe this state of recurrent loss! We need to be able to find the right rites to mourn so many thousands gone, if only to prevent the next ones from going. Because those slain in childhood will have no children. . . .

It is a healing strength of this book that Mumia, who lives at such mortal risk, can hand us the connective strands of a net to throw far over the great divide, towards generations of children we may never get to know or see or touch. But as he makes clear, we can love them ahead, preventively. And maybe this bond-net, flung far across time as a Love Supreme, will keep them from going too unfortified, too gentle into the bad night of renewed bondage.

Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol are prime examples of forbidden works written and banned at the end of the nineteenth century, only to become universally loved in the twentieth.

And so here are Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Death Blossoms — timelessly.

Paris October 1996