An Interview With Laura Whitehorn
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Remembering-Safiya-Bukhari-by-Angola-3-News-100217-87.html
February 20, 2010
By Angola 3 News
Former political prisoner Laura Whitehorn has edited the new book,
The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther,
Keeping the Faith in Prison, & Fighting for Those Left Behind (The
Feminist Press, 2010). The War Before features the writings of the
late Safiya Bukhari, who was born in New York City and joined the
Black Panther Party in 1969.
Imprisoned for nine years, for charges related to the Black
Liberation Army, Bukhari was released in 1983 and went on to co-found
the New York Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition and other organizations
advocating for the release of political prisoners. She died in 2003
at the age of 53 years of age.
A preface by Wonda Jones (Bukhari's daughter), a foreword by Angela
Y. Davis, an afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal, and an introduction by
Whitehorn are also featured alongside Bukhari's writings.
Just released this month, The War Before has been reviewed by Lenore
J. Daniels, Dan Berger, and Ron Jacobs. The website
www.safiyabukhari.com states: "The War Before traces Bukhari's
lifelong commitment as an advocate for the rights of the oppressed.
Following her journey from middle-class student to Black Panther to
political prisoner, these writings provide an intimate view of a
woman wrestling with the issues of her time--the troubled legacy of
the Panthers, misogyny in the movement, her decision to convert to
Islam, the incarceration of out spoken radicals, and the families left behind.
Her account unfolds with immediacy and passion, showing how the
struggles of social justice movements have paved the way for the
progress of today."
--
Angola 3 News: When did you first meet Safiya Bukhari?
Laura Whitehorn: I met Safiya in the visiting room of the Federal
Correctional Institution (for women) in Dublin, California, in
1997--but when we embraced, it felt as if I'd known her all my life.
At the time, Safiya was traveling to various prisons, visiting
political prisoners to talk with us about Jericho '98, the national
campaign, beginning with a march rally to the White House, that she
was organizing (with Herman and Iyaluua Ferguson, political prisoner
Jalil Muntaqim, and others).
I was in Dublin, along with six other women political
prisoners--Puerto Rican Independentistas Lucy and Alicia Rodriguez,
Carmen Valentin and Dylcia Pagan, and my codefendants Marilyn Buck
and Linda Evans. Another North American comrade who had been in
Dublin with us, Donna Willmott, had recently been released.
Safiya's heart was so deeply involved in the cause of supporting
political prisoners--and fighting for their recognition and
release--that she immediately felt like an old friend with whom I'd
been on the barricades, so to speak.
A3N: What can you tell our readers about who Safiya was as a person?
LW: Safiya lived her politics, exuded solidarity from every pore and
in every fiber of her being. She acted on her beliefs--and she was
constantly questioning, refining and developing those beliefs. When
you read her book, you will see that fighting for justice was a
necessity to her.
Resolving the inequitable, brutal situation of Black people and other
oppressed groups was her bone-deep desire. She spent every ounce of
her being trying to figure out how to proceed, evaluating past
actions, pushing others to revitalize dormant work and struggles. And
she loved her comrades behind bars in the most revolutionary way--by
refusing to let them be forgotten.
She took all political exhortations very personally, trying to apply
them in practice, and trying to submit them to scrutiny and honesty,
to bring them from the realm of the bullhorn to the arena of what you
do when you get up every day. Safiya was not just a revolutionary
during the revolutionary times of the 60s and 70s. She struggled to
live as a revolutionary woman during the non-revolutionary times that
followed and persist.
A3N: Can you please tell us more about the role Safiya played in the
movement supporting political prisoners? What role have women in
general played in this movement?
LW: Some part of the answer to this question is contained in my
previous response, she worked hard, and gave leadership through her
work. But more than that, Safiya applied ruthless honesty to her own
practice. She did not merely educate people about what COINTELPRO
was; she spent much attention (and anguish) examining how she and
others of us in the movements of the 60s and 70s had, through our own
weaknesses, enabled COINTELPRO to destroy our work.
She didn't only talk about the devastation prison causes for the
families of political prisoners; she felt it in her heart and
expressed it by being always available to the prisoners and their families.
Safiya, along with women like Yuri Kochiyama, set the standard very
high for what it means to refuse to abandon our imprisoned comrades.
She led with creativity and commitment. In her writings you see the
depth of what it meant for her to be a woman who led in creating
support for political prisoners. She grappled constantly with how to
do that, and some of the answers she found will surprise many of us
who try to continue her work.
In The War Before, you will read of her attempts, over the years, to
build a viable support and advocacy system for the prisoners. Safiya
led (as many women do in this work--and everyone comments on how many
of the people involved in supporting political prisoners are women)
because she not only did the work, she also figured out what
political principles underlie that work.
I guess what I am trying to say is that it has often been assumed
that men provided the ideological and strategic thinking, and that
women lead by doing the work. But Safiya's book shows that women did
the ideological and strategic thinking as well as the work--and that,
by providing a unique, flowing-both-ways combination of theory and
practice, women have contributed to a more vital political framework
for this and other radical work for social justice.
A3N: When did you first begin working on this book?
LW: I began working on the book four or five years ago, when Wonda
Jones, Safiya's daughter, made a very important decision: In our
grief at Safiya's way-too-early death, we should not allow her work
to be lost. It was a big project, as it turned out, because Safiya
didn't spend much time (none, in fact) planning for a book--she was
too busy organizing. In my introduction to The War Before I describe
the process of creating the book.
A3N: How has it been received so far?
LW: So far the reception has been warm and enthusiastic, but it is a
bit early to tell how far this will go. Wonda and I did the book
largely in order to get Safiya's work and thinking, and the question
of political prisoners, to people who have yet to learn of the
wonderful men and women from our movements who remain behind bars.
A3N: What do you think are the central messages of the book?
LW: I think there are several, and different readers may draw
different ones. Mumia Abu-Jamal, who wrote the afterword, says that
by reading Safiya's words we get an infusion of strength and spirit,
enabling each of us to fight more creatively for justice. Angela
Davis, in her foreword, says she hopes the book will encourage
readers to join the fight for freedom of political prisoners, and to
fight for prison justice.
I think both of those are central messages of Safiya's writings; I
think another is that the quest for justice is worth working on with
all one's might--and with honesty, lucidity and clarity, so that we
can create social justice among ourselves, renewing our own humanity
as individuals and as a group while we fight against the system that
promotes instead capitalist, inhumane values.
A3N: What else can activists today learn from Safiya's life?
LW: We need to understand, embrace, and feel in our core beings the
values we fight for--and to apply those in practice. Safiya lived as
she spoke: If you say you want justice, then you can do something to
achieve it. She also shows why and how the battle to win release for
political prisoners is completely fundamental to achieving justice as a whole.
Safiya's collected writings also help us to understand that the
revolutionary movements of the mid-20th century do not belong in a
box marked "history." The tenets that underscored that era continue,
in different forms, today.
What made the period revolutionary was not just the levels of
struggle in which we engaged, but the understanding we had that a
fundamental change of the system of imperialism was necessary. I hope
that recognizing the holistic view of political history Safiya
depicts will help us agitate among Left groups throughout the U.S. to
add to their programs the demand to free all political prisoners.
--
Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free
the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the
latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media
projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the
Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary
confinement as torture, and more.
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