Martin Espada And Mumia AbuJamal Essay Research

Martin Espada And Mumia Abu-Jamal Essay, Research Paper

All Things Censored: The Poem NPR Doesn’t Want You to Hear

by Mart.n Espada

Source: http://www.weeklywire.com/ww/xtra/espada/

I was an NPR poet. In particular, I was an All Things Considered poet. All

Things Considered would occasionally broadcast my poems in conjunction with news

stories. One producer even commissioned a New Year’s poem from me. "Imagine the

Angels of Bread" aired on January 2, 1994, in the same broadcast as the news of the

Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. But now I’ve been censored by All Things Considered and

National Public Radio because I wrote a poem for them about Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Mumia is an eloquent African American journalist convicted in the 1981 slaying of

police officer Daniel Faulkner in Philadelphia-under extremely dubious circumstances.

Officer Faulkner was beating Mumia’s brother with a flashlight when Mumia came upon the

scene. In the ensuing confrontation, both Faulkner and Mumia were shot. Though Mumia had a

licensed .38 caliber pistol in his taxi that night, and the gun was later found beside

him, the initial judgment of the medical examiner who removed the fatal bullet was that it

came from a .44 caliber weapon. Several witnesses claimed to see an unidentified gunman

fleeing the scene, leaving both Faulkner and Mumia severely wounded in the street.

What happened in court was a tragic pantomime. The trial featured aprosecutor who tried

Mumia for his radical politics, including his teenaged membership in the Black Panthers

and his journalistic defense of MOVE. Witnesses were coached in their testimony or

intimidated into silence by police, and the trial was presided over by a judge notorious

for handing out death sentences to black defendants. In August 1995, Mumia came within ten

days of being executed by lethal injection. He is seeking a new trial.

Enter NPR. In 1994, National Public Radio agreed to broadcast a series of Mumia’s radio

commentaries from death row. The Prison Radio Project produced the recordings that April.

Suddenly, NPR canceled the commentaries under pressure from the right, particularly the

Fraternal Order of Police and Senator Robert Dole. Mumia and the Prison Radio Project sued

NPR on First Amendment grounds. That litigation is pending.

This April, I was contacted by the staff at All Things Considered, their first

communication since my New Year’s poem. Diantha Parker and Sara Sarasohn commissioned me

to write a poem for National Poetry Month. The general idea was that the poem should be

like a news story, with a journalistic perspective. They suggested I write a poem in

response to a news story in a city I visited during the month. Parker called to obtain my

itinerary so NPR could give me an assignment relevant to a particular city. Fatefully,

they could think of no such assignment. But the idea had found a home in the folds of my

brain.

Since April is National Poetry Month, I traveled everywhere. I went from Joplin,

Missouri, to Kansas City, to Rochester, to Chicago, to Camden, New Jersey. And then to

Philadelphia. I read an article in the April 16 Philadelphia Weekly about Mumia

Abu-Jamal. The article described a motion by one of Mumia’s lawyers, Leonard Weinglass, to

introduce testimony by an unnamed prostitute with new information about the case. This

became the catalyst for the poem.

I also visited the tomb of Walt Whitman in nearby Camden, and wasdeeply moved. Whitman

wrote this in "Song of Myself":

The runaway slave came to my house

and stopt outside,

I heard his motions crackling the twigs

of the woodpile,

Through the swung half-door of the

kitchen I saw him

limpsy and weak,

And went where he sat on a log and

led him in and assured

him,

And brought water and fill’d a tub for

his sweated body and

bruis’d feet.

In my poem, Whitman’s tomb became a place ofrefuge for the "fugitive slave,"

first for a nameless prostitute, then Mumia.

I faxed the poem to NPR on April 21. On April 24, All Things Considered staff

informed me that they would not air the poem. They were explicit: They would not air the

poem because of its subject matter-Mumia Abu-Jamal-and its political sympathies.

"NPR is refusing to air this poem because of its political

content." I asked. "Yes," said Diantha Parker. She cited the

"history" of NPR and Mumia, a reference to the network’s refusal to air his

commentaries. She further explained that the poem was "not the way NPR wants to

return to this subject." Such is the elegant bureaucratic language of censorship.

Parker would later admit, in an interview with Dennis Bernstein of KPFA-FM, that she

"loved" the poem, and that "the poem should have been run, perhaps in a

different context."