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BREAKING THE SILENCE FOR MUMIA
by
Mark Lewis Taylor, Educators for Mumia | 05.15.2007
A Philadelphia city official’s silence rose up at the end of my phone connection when I asked, “So, can Educators for Mumia use the City Council Chamber or the Caucus Meeting Room for our May 16 panel discussion of Abu-Jamal’s case?” My application to use those rooms had been under consideration for three days. In fact, EMAJ had held a press conference for Mumia in the Philadelphia City Council Chamber five years ago. But now, in 2007, as this official responded to my request, silence. Then, “I’m sorry…..”, and more silence. The apologies were filled with a near pleading, “I’m sorry, I just can’t.” Then came a series of explanations about “fearing for our security,” the usual reasons for not allowing a Mumia event in Philadelphia. But then, more silence and plaintive apologies, as if I had unleashed a great affliction upon her by making my request for this meeting space. (The Teach-In will take place at Drexel University.) This got me thinking. What keeps Mumia behind bars and can get him killed is not just the will to execute in political elites, nor the venom of radio disc jockeys like Philly’s Mike Smerconish, nor the blatant antics of the Fraternal Order of Police. Consider also this plaintive, regretful silence of everyday people in public and official places. It’s the spirit that faints, taking state powers to be too formidable, too unquestionable, to take on: “I’m sorry, I’m busy, I just can’t . . .”. We must think on silence and power. In the waning years of Franco’s barbarous fascism in Spain, Franco planned in 1975 to execute (by strangulation) a group of Basque movement activists. French political philosopher/activist, Michael Foucault, went to Madrid with a team of other distinguished writers and activists to present a letter of protest, and so dramatize international solidarity with the condemned Basques, two of whom were women, one pregnant. In Madrid, before the French dignitaries could begin their press conference or unpack their suitcases, security police surrounded them, hustled them back to the airport for a return flight to Paris. As the French writers and Spanish journalists were rounded up and handcuffed, hundreds of passersby watched in obvious sadness – and silence. Foucault remembers: “The way people watch without seeing anything, as though they had witnessed the scene hundreds of times before… It was feeling the presence of fascism that frightened us…the silence of the crowd, watching and saying nothing.” In USA 2007, as state power continues to sanction war and torture, while steeping its public in cycles of fear, complicity and silence, it is crucial that we break silence. Dramatic war escapades by the U.S. regime quash many people’s voices with spectacles of firepower, promoting shock and awe. Even the chaos and ruin of U.S. policy in Iraq seem to lead many to a silent helplessness, to the inaction of the onlooker. The legacy of white racism persists, in part, because of the silence of those who know better. And the continuing sanctioning of torture - whether practiced in U.S. precinct stations, prisons or detention centers like Guantánamo – takes further aim at the voice of people. As torture victim, Jacobo Timmerman, wrote in Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, torture reduces speech to babbling sounds. Torture destroys democracy because it dissembles voice. It then cows others to quell their own voices as rumors spread of the State’s ways of torture. Under torturous conditions, Mumia has not been silent. He has preserved voice and quickened so many others’ voices. He has been an example of what another French philosopher, Alan Badiou, has called a life that dares to affirm an alternative way of building the world, fighting for “the positive creation of the new.” Badiou has lived and worked in St.-Denis, France, the city that named a street after Mumia Abu-Jamal. At the Teach-In at Drexel University (May 16) and then at the courthouse (May 17), there will be opportunities for breaking silence, for lifting voices. Kudos to the Drexel University Students for Peace, who labored to get the venue for the EMAJ Teach-In on May 16. The presenters at the Teach-In offer words to take our struggle for Mumia, for all political prisoners, and for justice and peace issues in this country, to new principled and intelligent levels. And all of us on the Philadelphia streets on May 17 can break silence, lifting our voices to let the powers know, “We will not serve you with our silence. We will face down the fear and the fascism that encroach upon our living.” Mark Lewis Taylor is professor of theology and culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. His most recent book is Religion, Politics and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Powers and American Empire.
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