About The War Before
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/whitehorn050510.html
by Laura Whitehorn
05.05.10
In 1968, Safiya Bukhari witnessed an NYPD officer harassing a Black
Panther for selling the organization's newspaper on a Harlem street
corner. The young pre-med student felt compelled to intervene in
defense of the Panther's First Amendment right; she ended up
handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police car. 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 outspoken
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. -- The Feminist Press
--
Hi, my name is Laura Whitehorn, and I edited a book called The War
Before, which is writings and speeches by a woman named Safiya
Bukhari. Safiya Bukhari's daughter, Wonda Jones, asked me, after he
mother died, to edit and put together some papers that Safiya had
left behind when she died. We began with a small stack of papers,
some of the things that Safiya had written while she was in prison
and soon afterward, many of them talking about the experience of the
Black Panther Party while she was in the Black Panther Party, what
happened to it, problems inside the party, the contradictions with
the government. Many of them were about political prisoners. Amy
Scholder of the Feminist Press said to us: You have a piece of book
here. So, we set out to find the other pieces, and we found,
probably, a hundred other things -- speeches, writings, interviews --
and we put some of those together, a selection, and we produced the
book called The War Before.
It's not a memoir. It's much more than that. It's Safiya grappling
with: What happened to the Panthers? Why was the government
successful in causing a split in the Black Panther Party, in causing
situations where people ended up killing each other, where people
ended up being assassinated by the government and were not able to
prove it for so many years that no one knew what happened? So, she
is mining her own experience and history and coming up with some . .
. not complete answers but pieces of the answer.
Safiya didn't look to a leader to tell her what to do. From the
minute she hit the ground running in the Panthers, she began to try
to figure out her own role, and what she should do, and what she
could think, and what she should teach. I think that's a very
important message for us because so often what people remember of the
Sixties is big names, people whose faces are recognizable, people who
are some sort of minor celebrities, and I think that is a very
destructive tendency. If we are ever to make social change in this
country, the beginning point is to trust one another, to trust all of
us who are not the people who are the architects of the wars that
this country carries out but have a stake in the future.
This book, while it's the writings and speeches of Safiya Bukhari,
represents a much larger body of people, with whom she worked, with
whom she fought, with whom she organized. In fact, some of the
writings in the book have other voices, especially the voices of
people like Herman Bell and Nuh Washington and Jalil Muntaqim, all of
whom are political prisoners. Although Noah died in prison, Herman
and Jalil are still inside. It has contributions and comments and
help by people like Pam Africa and Mumia Abu-Jamal and Angela
Davis. So, it represents a voice of a piece of history that is still
in process. We're still figuring it out.
Safiya wasn't writer. She didn't spend time writing these
things. These are essays, speeches, things that she wrote at 3 in
the morning when she was done leading a long conference or march or
some sort of demonstration. They are interviews she gave when she
was organizing support for political prisoners. So, they have a
passion to them, energy that flows, and you find out about the sorts
of people represented by Safiya by reading from the beginning to the
end. These are not position papers although she takes positions in
them. She does analysis . . . on everything from Islamic
revolutionaries to women in the Black Panther Party to the
post-traumatic stress syndrome -- something that no one talks about
-- which is a result of the government's attacks on the Black Panther
Party. If you read this book, you would get a sense of a woman who
fought all her life for the freedom of humanity and for the people.
.
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