The Literature of Justice

By on March 5, 2010 in ART, NONFICTION

Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A., Mumia Abu-Jamal. (City Lights Books) $16.95

Abu-Jamal has been writing the same rhetoric for years, but he has avoided sinking into rote regurgitation by narrating the fascinating stories of his fellow inmates. His intelligent reasoning traces the birth of the Prison Litigation Reform Act, maps the prison-industrial-complex, and chronicles the development of jailhouse law and its practitioners. His most compelling lesson, and certainly the recurring thesis of the book, is that the law is a much more slippery concept than we generally perceive it to be, based on precedent, dominant social systems, and the power of money.

Most compelling are his stories about specific legal cases, often those of his own acquaintances, some his own. The victories are exhilarating, especially the justified exonerations, and the failures more tragic. The book reads well and is entertaining, but ultimately fails to satisfy because of its lack of solutions. Yes, racism and oppression are central to the prison system in the United States; yes, jailhouse lawyers and their inmate clients deserve more access to legal resources, to fairer representation, to basic human decency; and yes, the law taught in our history classrooms is not the law we practice, based on precedent and stageplay. But recognizing problems is always the facile half of the equation, and though Mumia offers some suggestions for smaller improvements, his failure to provide a comprehensive solution to the larger problems of the prison-industrial-complex leave the book too anecdotal, unbalanced in its description and prescription.

X

World War 3 – #39, ed. Peter Kuper & Kevin Pyle. (Top Shelf Comix) $5

A loosely themed magazine-style anthology of comics focusing on oppression, justice issues, pacifism, and anarchy, this issue of WW3 is a mixed bag. Though it does contain several notable comics, like “Steps of Another Man’s House” by Onur Tukel, editor Kuper’s “Going for a Last Walk,” about his time in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Andy Singer’s “Middle Management,” many others are quite droll, seemingly tied together only by their annoyingly blatant neo-liberal agenda, rendered with very little art. The retellings of indigenous folk tales, as in “El Amaru” by Carlo Quispe and “Anna and the Calabash” by Rebecca Migdal, are perhaps the most disappointing stories in the volume, as they serve primarily to exoticize their originators, failing to provide necessary context.

My favorite pieces are the most conceptual, like Barron Storey’s “Speech Impediments,” a single-page spread of faces contorted in different positions, speech snaking from their mouths in bursts and twists of air, and Mac McGill’s “Song for Katrina,” a longer piece that does a good job of personifying the storm and its affected. “Wordless Worlds,” an essay by David A. Beronä, is a particular high point, as it contextualizes this wordless issue of WW3 among earlier practitioners of wordless narratives and comics, including woodcut novelists Franz Masreel and Lynd Ward. Though certainly worth its $5 price tag, this issue occasionally dips into disappointment, owing primarily to its lack of editorial cohesion. This may be because of its allegiance to a larger sense of the World War 3 vision, as its longevity as a series has lasted decades; unfortunately it allows its weaker work to diminish the impact of its better work.

DS

About David Shook

Shook studied poetry at Oxford. His work appears widely, then disappears. Recent and forthcoming publications include work in Ambit, Poetry, Poetry London, PN Review, Wasafiri, and World Literature Today, as well as selections in the anthologies OxfordPoets 2010 (Carcanet) and Initiate (Blackwell), and a chapbook of poems translated from the Isthmus Zapotec of Víctor Terán (Poetry Translation Centre). His translation of Mario Bellatin's Shiki Nagaoka is forthcoming from Phoneme Books.
View all posts by David Shook →

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  • http://www.worldwar3illustrated.net Rebecca Migdal

    Hey DS- Thanks for reviewing last year’s issue of World War 3 Illustrated. Why not pick up a copy of the new one? It’s just come out and the theme is “What We Want”–addressed by the Left toward the Obama administration and the middle-of-the-road polity in general.
    I must admit I’m utterly mystified by your reference to a “blatant neo-liberal agenda” in WW3. No publication could be further from the Neo-Liberal camp than this collectively published anthology, which is entirely volunteer run and has its roots in the anarchist squatter movement in NY in the late seventies and early eighties. Frankly, if we were “neo-liberals”, World War 3 would not exist, because we would all be too busy making a buck to donate our time to creating and self-publishing radical comics about things like indigenous land rights, anti-war protests, prisoners’ rights and racial profiling.
    Neo-liberalism is of course a capitalistic philosophy that proposes a market-based solution for social problems, essentially synonymous to the policies espoused by huge, corporate-driven pseudo-nonprofits like the World Bank — policies which have been roundly criticized in the pages of WW3 over the years. I’m sure your grasp of the political definitions you use is not so vague and misinformed as to confuse a radical, grassroots social justice movement with neo-liberal patronage, so apparently the issue has missed the mark for you in transmitting its message.
    WW3 #39 is, to be fair, probably one of the least overtly political issues to date, and this Wordless issue also has the experimental aspect of eschewing text, a decision made to make the magazine more inclusive to non-English-speaking readers and artists. Sad to say, you’ve apparently utterly misread the intent of these artists. A reliance on imagery alone may at times have blunted the message, and perhaps the medium failed to deliver the cultural contextualization some Americans need in order to inhabit the perspective of someone from another culture without falling prey to the temptation to “exoticize” it, as you put it. It was never our intent to conflate a commitment to inclusiveness with cultural colonialism, but much inevitably gets “lost in translation” when honest attempts are made to build bridges.
    Please do take a look at the new issue, still only $5 and now available at Top Shelf. I hope when you consider the motives and context in which the artists are working, and the utter lack of material compensation, support or censorship we receive from corporate Amerikkka, you will look a little more kindly on our feisty little magazine and view its flaws with a less jaundiced eye.

  • http://www.rebelbookseller.com Andy Laties

    Many of the pieces in World War 3 Illustrated point outward into the world where their authors are engaged in direct action.

    Readers of this blog may be interested to view the animated slideshow version of Rebecca Migdal’s “Ana and the Calabash” posted on Youtube (linked below). Her performance troupe has presented the piece live in many venues, and also on the radio in New York City and Western Massachusetts (in a version with words of course).

    “Ana and the Calabash” is not a folktale (as purported in the review posted above); it’s an original narrative that was developed in direct collaboration with–and for use by–indigenous Maya activist organizations in Southern Belize. When indigenous populations with whom organizers work are illiterate, wordless comics can play an important role in activating the critical consciousness of these victims of oppression. I was with the artist during her trips to Belize, and I witnessed the wholehearted endorsement of the comics medium–and of this artist’s work–among local activists. Far from being a neo-liberal NGO minion, this artist was putting her talents at the requested service of these indigenous activists. In fact I was personally present when this piece was commissioned by a local Maya organizer.

    Background: The brilliant Maya land-rights activist Julian Cho, whose bravery and 1998 martyrdom are depicted in this comic, had his efforts vindicated in the major Supreme Court victory of 2007 that gives communal land rights to Maya villages that choose it by consensus of the villagers. The court decision impedes logging and oil extraction in the rainforest. The organization Cho’s sister-in-law founded–Julian Cho Society–strives to ensure that the court’s decision is implemented despite government intent to ignore it and propagandize against it.

    From the cited Youtube video page:

    “Ana and the Calabash”

    Can the courage of one small girl change the fate of an entire village?

    One morning while Ana is picking beans in her father’s milpa, an enormous bulldozer comes and destroys the family farm. That night Ana dreams about a butterfly, a magic calabash head and the Lord of Xibalba astride a bulldozer. The next morning the butterfly appears and guides Ana to take a stand against the developers’ monster machines. Based on a true story.
    http://www.youtube.com/user/RebeccaMigdal#p/u/6/JmDHjMVTvnU

  • http://moloss.us David Shook

    Dear Rebecca and Andy,

    Thanks for reading and responding to my review. I appreciate the conversation. I’d like to note from the outset that I do look kindly on your feisty magazine: I admire the work you’re doing and since this review I’ve shared it with several friends and colleagues. Perhaps in my review I too have failed to communicate my admiration for what you’re doing, and for that I apologize.

    Thanks, Andy, for the contextualization of Rebecca’s comic. I was actually in Oaxaca when I wrote this review, among several groups of Zapotec friends (both Valley and Isthmus). I’m relieved to hear of its genesis, with my “jaundiced eye[s],” and I look forward to re-reading it. In fact, your explanation here has radically altered my opinion, and I wish I had known from the outset that the work was one of collaboration and voice-giving, two of comics’ most admirable qualities.

    Thanks, too, to you, Rebecca, for clarifying the philosophy of WW3. Coming to the magazine as a newbie, perhaps especially because this issue is wordless–something I do admire conceptually, especially as a fan of Lynd Ward and other woodcut novelists–I obviously missed much of what its creators and editors were trying to communicate.

    A reviewer’s misunderstanding is of course dependent on the experience of the reviewer, and though I do routinely review comics and would even consider myself quite in line with the political philosophy espoused by the magazine–especially its subversion of the World Bank/UN big development narrative–I clearly missed the message of this issue of WW3. I will happily review another issue, if sent to our address for review copies.

    Thanks again!

    David

  • http://www.rebelbookseller.com Andy Laties

    David,

    This is a very sweet response!

    I do think it would have been wise for Peter Kuper to write a one page introduction that clarified some of these issues you raise. I also think Rebecca Migdal’s piece should have been printed larger, on an extra two pages. However the printing of WW3 is entirely funded by the money saved up from sales of the previous issue, and by advertising sales to a rather small pool of advertisers. The production budget is extremely tight and therefore page count is a big issue for the editors. They tend to use every page to squeeze in more comics: they don’t usually print an introductory essay. In this issue, what with Peter’s decision to print the David Berona essay, I guess an introductory essay was rendered even less likely to happen. That’s my take, anyway.

    Andy Laties

  • http://www.worldwar3illustrated.net Rebecca Migdal

    Thanks David for your thoughtful response, and thank you Andy for clarifying the context of my piece. I wanted to add that I am currently looking for funding to get Ana and the Calabash printed as a codex style book for distribution in the villages of southern Belize, on behalf of the Julian Cho Society. The plan is to have the comic printed with an accompanying text in English, plus translations in Mopan and Kekchi Maya.

    I for one really appreciate getting review for World War 3 in a literary journal. It’s incredible how the magazine has survived for 30 years, during which most of which it was completely ignored by the media and critics, despite the many prominent artists who’ve published work in its pages. I do understand that it’s difficult to classify work that exists simultaneously in an artistic and journalistic realm. Most of our contributors look to artists like Goya, Diego Rivera and Kathe Kollwitz as their inspiration, but it’s common for this kind of work to be dismissed by contemporaries as agitprop, since it’s essentially the first hand reporting and memoir work of artists who are also grassroots activists.
    Anyway, it’s good that WW3 is starting to be taken seriously. Of course we’d be delighted to send you a review copy of the new issue. You may also be interested in seeing issue #38–it has a comic written and illustrated by Mumia Abu Jamal himself, on the torture in Abu Ghraib.