Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience, Expanded Edition (City Lights Open Media) - Softcover

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Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist, political activist, and author. In 1981, he was elected president of the Association of Black Journalists (Philadelphia chapter) and was a radio reporter for National Public Radio (NPR). As part of a team of reporters at WHYY, one of NPR’s premier stations, he won the prestigious Major Armstrong Award from Columbia University for excellence in broadcasting.

On December 9, 1981, Abu-Jamal was shot, arrested, and charged for killing a white police officer in Philadelphia. In 1982 he was convicted and sentenced to death in a trial that Amnesty International determined “clearly failed to meet minimum international standards safeguarding the fairness of legal proceedings.” After he had spent over 28 years on Death Row, in 2011 Abu-Jamal’s death sentence was vacated when the Supreme Court affirmed the decisions of four federal judges who had declared his death sentence unconstitutional. He is now serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Throughout his decades of imprisonment, most of which was spent in solitary confinement on Death Row, Abu-Jamal has steadfastly maintained his innocence.

Abu-Jamal obtained his GED in prison in July 1992; he earned his BA from Goddard College in January 1996; he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Law degree from the New College of California in May1996; and in 1999, he earned a Masters of Arts degree from California State University, Dominguez Hills. He is currently working on his Ph.D.

Abu-Jamal has produced radio commentaries with Prison Radio for decades, and has authored more than 10 books, including Death Blossoms, Live From Death Row, We Want Freedom, Jailhouse Lawyers, The Classroom and the Cell, Murder Incorporated, Writing on the Wall, and Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?

In late 2018, Abu-Jamal’s right to appeal was reinstated by a Philadelphia judge. The ongoing fight for his freedom continues

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prisonradio.org/mumia-info

Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and holds the title of Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He has also taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard, and the University of Paris. Cornel West graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. His books include Race Matters, Democracy Matters, Brother West, and Black Prophetic Fire.

Julia Wright is the daughter of American author Richard Wright.

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 EXCERPT 

Foreword by 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 over fifteen years 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?

Preface by 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 translu- cency, 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...