Dear Friend,
It was an afternoon like you might spend with any friend – any particularly brilliant, well-read, compassionate and insightful friend. We shared a sandwich and a bottle of water, chips and chocolate. We discussed Franz Fanon and John Edgar Wideman. He laughed when I described the opening of Wideman’s Fanon book as “trippy.” He talked about ideas of Fanon’s that had troubled him and how his perspective shifted from Black Skin, White Masks to Wretched of the Earth. I told him about computer scientist Joy Buolamwini’s work at MIT in facial recognition that only “recognized” her face when she literally donned a white mask.
We discussed his current research on women of the Black Panthers “Really, when you look at the bulk of the program – it was primarily a women’s organization.” He invited me to consider how things might have been different if the press had depicted the Party as a women’s project – emphasizing the sisters serving breakfast and running clinics community service rather than the young men and their weapons.
We called out the obscenities of Trump’s “Riviera” plan for Gaza, and I told him about Ta Nahisi Coates’ discussion with Rashid Khalidi. “Coates explained that he understood viscerally and immediately the work of Martin Luther King in a deeper way, with more respect and understanding, after being on the ground in East Jerusalem and experiencing the consequences of building a future exclusively mired in the trauma of the past.” My friend nodded, and added an adage I have heard in and around prisons “hurt people hurt people.”
We talked about my recent layoff after teaching at a state university for 20 years; the decimation of the writing program for first generation college students that occurred simultaneously with the launch of a “bold new initiative” with Open AI to “make learning, research, professional development and teaching tools—including ChatGPT—available to all students, faculty and staff.”
We paused for a moment to consider the moment in history in which robots are poised to take over writing, and even art. But then we comforted ourselves with the reminder that humans need to create art – it is part of the human experience: and that the same communities which have always been outside formal structures of linguistic power have at the same time been some of the most powerful influences: Open AI is not the first attempt to “whitify” English – and that effort has never been successful.
This brought to mind a mutual friend, her constant art creation, her promising son. She had sent some artwork to share and we poured over it together, noting the African influences, the delicate drawings, the love of beauty present in all of her work.
He told me about the first chapters of his dissertation: charmingly excited at the praise he had just received from his advisor on his first chapter. We talked about the inevitable book that would come out of that dissertation – exploring the decolonizing of Fanon’s consciousness.
We shared our ailments – his vision problems, my stiffness. We laughed at the indignities of aging. We had to discuss the new president. He laughed wryly as he pinpointed how the Democrats launched the greatest public works program of this century with their mass incarceration: securing generations of jobs for otherwise de-industrialized workers, workers who then, in a shift in loyalty and partisanship , turned their backs on the party that put food on their prison-guard tables.
It had been many years since we had visited in person, but the warmth and ease was palpable. It was like so many conversations among long-term activists and comrades. I took photos of him during our first visit, in 1992 and 1993, but on this visit we relied on a prisoner “trustee” to use the approved prison camera to take a photo of us together.
In our analysis and our laughter, we – for a short time – created a space of liberation from the distortion that is the incarceration nation.
At the end of the visit, I went out one door – to my car, and the highway. And he went out another – to a strip search and his cell.
Mumia Abu-Jamal has offered the movement for social change all kinds of leadership, but perhaps his biggest gift had been his refusal to allow his mind to be incarcerated, his insistence on his own full creative and intellectual life, and his profound commitment to the people. I want to thank him for his body of work, for his deep-seated dignity, for his shining example of unrelenting consciousness and love, and for his resilience in the face of unspeakable challenges.
And I want to thank Noelle and Team Prison Radio for their decades long commitment to keeping his printed work published and his voice on the airwaves.
Now more than ever, it is time to work toward freedom
With Love, Not Phear
Jennifer Beach
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