Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience. - book reviews

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a major popularizer of revolution. Although the conditions for his notoriety were very much imposed upon him, he makes the best possible use of his extremely painful, and potentially tragic, platform.

He has been on death row now for almost fifteen years. This time-lapse may well be unprecedented for a case so strongly and explicitly rooted in ideological struggle.

His nemesis through the whole period has been a "hanging judge" who, in addition to supporting a consistent pattern of intimidation of defense witnesses (among many other irregularities), encouraged overt ideological stereotyping as grounds for obtaining the death-sentence. (If the initial verdict of guilt was political in a veiled sense - as with many other convicts from oppressed communities - the sentencing verdict's politics were blatant, thus justifying Mumia's claim to be a prisoner of conscience.(1))

From the opposite direction, a worldwide movement of protest, culminating in the summer of 1995, forced the setting aside of the one actual death-warrant, less than two weeks before it was to take effect. As of February 1997, the case is before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

As the victim of a judicial and repressive nightmare (including censorship and reprisals against his efforts at public communication), Mumia Abu-Jamal deserves whatever support we can give him. As a writer and, in his own words, "a professional revolutionary," he amply repays the energies of the thousands who have rallied to his cause.

Mumia's previous book, Live from Death Row, was primarily a series of exposes (originally written for radio broadcast) of the conditions and the effects of death row itself. The present book, likewise made up of short takes, is more autobiographical and spiritual in content. We learn something of how Mumia got to be who he is: the setting in which he grew up; his painstaking search for a spiritual community; his sensitivity and responsiveness to every detail - human and inhuman - of his surroundings.

We get to know someone who, living under excruciating conditions of isolation and impending doom, has kept his head and his heart intact. Solid in his own grounding, he is free of bombast in his approach to others. He is open to whatever he can know of the world - from the drama of a besieged revolution (Cuba) to the spider in his neighbor's cell - but he is uncompromising in the affirmation of his core convictions. As he said of Wall Street, in a message to people demonstrating there in his support (December 1996), "It is fitting that we be heard here at America's highest court of appeals. Let the roar of revolution resound from here to all corners of this empire."

Reading Mumia's books, listening to his radio tapes, seeing his videotaped interviews, one can understand why the state's custodians want to get rid of him at all costs. Here is a man who has been a leader since his adolescent years (when he became one of the youngest independent subjects of FBI scrutiny). A skilled analytic journalist and a forceful speaker, rooted yet ecumenical, he can communicate with everyone - in particular, with every possible sector of the oppositional movement that is now struggling to define itself.

One reason, then, for supporting Mumia is that we actually need him, every bit as much as he needs us. He has the rare capacity to illuminate the underside of capitalist society, from first-hand experience, without descending into bitterness.

But there remains also a more general reason for supporting Mumia, one which he himself is the first to acknowledge. While it may be true, as earlier revolutionaries have argued, that all great struggles will ultimately be played out as life-and-death confrontations, it is equally true that the routine and systematic use of the death penalty is a capstone for the more diffuse failures of a social order. Advocacy of capital punishment and opposition to even the barest measures of social improvement have always gone hand in hand. Institutionalized killing perpetuates the culture of meanness which competitive priorities demand.

Mumia expresses all this in the form of anecdotes of discovery. They make for compelling reading.

NOTES

1. Mumia's unadorned first name, much like that of Fidel Castro, has come into general public use among his supporters, without a trace of condescension.

Victor Wallis teaches at the Berklee College of Music and is an editor of Socialism and Democracy.

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