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
