PROUD FLESH #5 – EDITORIAL: "PRISONERS AND CAPTIVES"

PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness

ISSN: 1543-0855

Issue 5 (2007)

PROUD FLESH #5 – EDITORIAL: “PRISONERS AND CAPTIVES”

Greg Thomas

“We’re captives of this thing termed Amerikan.”
— George Jackson (1971)

Here is what was at first “The Prison Issue,” but what became this issue entitled “Prisoners and Captives.” It’s about us, all of us, of course. For it does not think one-dimensionally about imprisonment, since captivity is captivity and it takes a variety of forms, often simultaneously. On this very note, speaking of George Jackson’s murder on August 21, 1971, Bob Dylan once sang:

Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground.

In November of that same year, before the posthumous publication of Blood in My Eye in 1972, Walter Rodney wrote in similar terms of Africans in North America from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania:

Once it is made known that George Jackson was a black revolutionary in the white man’s jails, at least one point is established, since we are familiar with the fact that a significant proportion of African nationalist leaders graduated from colonialist prisons. . . . Furthermore, there is some considerable awareness that ever since the days of slavery the U.S.A. is nothing but a vast prison as far as African descendants are concerned. Within this prison, black life is cheap.

In her autobiographical testament, what’s more, Assata Shakur militated against the idea that there were some Black people here who are “free” and others who are not by substituting this distinction for one between the “maximum security prison” of what is generally called prison—or jail—and the (by comparison) “minimum security prison” of the whole U.S. nation-state, a settler colony and super empire. Earlier, Huey P. Newton had informed us that “prison is the microcosm of the outside world,” while Elaine Brown would later unpack the “barracoons” of “New Age Racism” in her contemporary analysis of “inner-city” ghettos to be reconquered for “Reverse White Flight” via the genocidal mass imprisonment schemes of a “New World Order.” This school of thought reflects Comrade George’s earlier statement on incarceration—more widely construed: “We’re captives of this thing termed Amerikan.”

And who isn’t, now, really? Really? The list must be short as the captors rule on.

If many, others speak of the “prison-industrial complex” or, like Juanita Diaz, the “prison-military industrial complex,” this must still be thought in terms of the plantation complex, the whole historical complex of “Plantation America.” “Prisoners and Captives.” Considerations of institutionalized bondage should not start, conceptually, centuries too late in the game.

So what’s up with this issue? “Prisoners and Captives.” Who’s up in this issue?

For starters:

The name Dhoruba Bin-Wahad may be unknown to many of us, but there are some of us who know it quite well. He spent nearly two decades in NY dungeons until hidden FBI files revealed that the State used false witnesses to gain convictions that left him imprisoned for a lifetime. With the release of these files came his freedom, and release into a society greatly changed since his days as a leader of New York's Black Panther Party. From his home in West Africa, the former political prisoner writes scathingly of the recent state murder of the former Crips co-founder, Stanley “Tookie” Williams. Bin-Wahad explains that Tookie was “a product of social and political forces” that Black Americans have allowed to gain control in our communities. Writing an article that appeared on numerous e-mail addresses, Bin-Wahad notes:
“Street gangs that started out as expressions of our community’s inability to control our own streets and in opposition to police terror, were led down a certain path by the likes of Tookie. These gangs became predatory, apolitical, and reactionary. Our communities suffered as a consequence. Those who followed in Tookie’s footsteps did so because not one Black institution existed that embraced and channeled their warrior spirit in a positive direction. Black nationalist[s] were to[o] busy “getting the right political line”; The Black Clergy was to[o] busy mobilizing themselves to influence a body politic that considered them nothing more than mouth-pieces for the Black middle class; Black professors and militant academician[s] were hollering at white educational institutions for inclusion and relevancy . . . none spoke the language nor harnessed the energies of our street soldiers. The only organization that did so was the Black Panther Party—and that was destroyed by a potent combination of forces over three decades ago. Nothing ever replaced it” [fr. Bin-Wahad, Dhoruba al-Mujahid, “The Ethics of Black Atonement in Racist America: The Execution of Stanley Tookie Williams,” 12/16/05, p.1 of printout].

That’s Mumia Abu-Jamal on Dhoruba Bin Wahad--at www.PrisonRadio.Org.

This issue begins with letters from Abu-Jamal. They speak for themselves, marvelously. This issue ends with Bin Wahad. There is his lecture in Ghana, at Legon, “On the Occasion of Ghana’s 50th Anniversary Celebration,” but also a post-political imprisonment, arguably “post-American” interview with him as well. We thank both of these veterans in the struggle, immensely.

And likewise, we thank Chairman Fred Hampton, Jr., for the serious, serious interview he granted us here.

In between, there’s a lot--a lot that recast what we think of as and about prisons and captivity, socially ordained confinement. There is Monifa Love, who is author of Freedom in the Dismal (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1998), a novel, writing poetic words on Amadou Diallo, walking him home; Carole Boyce Davies on the prison writing or poems of Claudia Jones, “Black Woman Communist of West Indian Descent”—CBD’s book (Left of Marx, Duke UP) is forthcoming, by the way, and just great; various poems by “Native Alien” and Jessica Alarcon as well as Emily Kabir who writes a series of poems inspired by Malcolm X, the man always among the first to insist that we were all in one big prison, for sure. There is also Allen Frimpong’s reprise of the thematic of police murder in North America, now that the forty shots fired at Diallo have been surpassed by the fifty-plus shots which killed Sean Bell in New York City.

In addition, there is a wonderful and thought-provoking art exhibit by Peter Rodrigo.

There is an incisive essay on incarceration and the rhetoric of rehabilitation by David Stein in addition to an important, journal-style report on the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s “Black August International Hip-Hop Project” (its recent trip to Brazil), by Nicole Edwards, who visited a prison in Bahia with MXGM last Summer.

Now, Racquel Simone has reminded me that I keep referring to her remarkable “HOW” piece as a poem. She would call it a story. I think it works as an essay, too! (You can let us know what you think!) However poetic, we are thrilled to publish this story—this extraordinary text, resisting the constrictions of genre; and we are thrilled to publish it in this particular issue, specifically.

Finally, there is a special review section on George L. Jackson’s Blood in My Eye. Were there, are there any reviews of this text out there, anywhere? If there are, we couldn’t tell—excluding the memo-review written and recently released by the FBI. The review section of this issue thus consists of three review-essays, none of which are affiliated with the state. One by Moustapha Diop; one by Thor Ritz; and one by the editor. May everyone else join in and continue to ground with “The Dragon’s” Blood in My Eye in the future.

“We’re captives of this thing termed Amerikan.”

Does not the proclamation of pseudo-emancipation in the vein of thirteenth amendment to the U.S. settler-colonial constitution simply signify an “internal slave trade,” locally, shipping Black bodies from one space of legalized slavery (“plantations”) to another (“prisons”), en masse, in socio-historical effect? In The Groundings with My Brothers, Rodney said that wherever Black people are in this global system, poverty finds them—us. And does not slavery, official and unofficial, of course?

“Captives.” “This thing.” “Amerikan.” Let’s discuss! We hope “Prisoners and Captives” can help in some way to elucidate the significance of this line in some serious way, since the time that has elapsed since it was written in 1971. Our associate editor Phyllis Lynne Burns called for this issue a little while ago. So here it is. . .

Citation Format:

Greg Thomas. “PROUD FLESH #5 – Editorial: “Prisoners and Captives”,” PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness: Issue 5, 2007.