Mavin X, A Man of Multiple Personalities: Rumi, Saadi, Hafiz, Jeremiah, Mark Twain, et al.

Marvin X, also known as Marvin Ellis Jackmon and El Muhajir

Marvin X was born May 29, 1944 in Fowler, California, near Fresno. Marvin X is well known for his work as a poet, playwright and essayist of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT or BAM. He attended Merritt College along with Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. He received his BA and MA in English from San Francisco State University.

Marvin X is most well known for his work with Ed Bullins in the founding of Black House and The Black Arts/West Theatre in San Francisco. Black House served briefly as the headquarters for the Black Panther Party and as a center for performance, theatre, poetry and music.

Marvin X is a playwright in the true spirit of the BAM. His most well-known BAM play, entitled Flowers for the Trashman, deals with generational difficulties and the crisis of the Black intellectual as he deals with education in a white-controlled culture. Marvin X's other works include, The Black Bird, The Trial, Resurrection of the Dead and In the Name of Love.

He currently has the longest running African American drama in the San Francisco Bay area and Northern California, ONE DAY IN THE LIFE, a tragi-comedy of addiction and recovery. He is the founder and director of RECOVERY THEATRE.

Marvin X has continued to work as a lecturer, teacher and producer. He has taught at Fresno State University; San Francisco State University; University of California - Berkeley and San Diego; University of Nevada, Reno; Mills College, Laney and Merritt Colleges in Oakland. He has received writing fellowships from Columbia University and the National Endowment for the Arts and planning grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Read: Marvin X Unplugged An Interview by Lee Hubbard

Marvin X is available for lectures/readings/performance.  Contact him jmarvinx@yahoo.com,
www.blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com.

BEYOND RELIGION, TOWARD SPIRITUALITY, ESSAYS ON CONSCIOUSNESS

Black Bird Press
1222 Dwight Way, Berkeley CA 94702


November, 2006
280 pages, $19.95

Marvin X has done extraordinary mind and soul work in bringing our attention to the importance of spirituality, as opposed to religion, in our daily living. Someone'maybe Kierkegaard or maybe it was George Fox who'said that there was no such thing as "Christianity." There can only be Christians. It is not institutions but rather individuals who make the meaningful differences in our world. It is not Islam but Muslims. Not Buddhism but Buddhists. Marvin X has made a courageous difference. In this book he shares the wondrous vision of his spiritual explorations. His eloquent language and rhetoric are varied'sophisticated but also earthy, sometimes both at once.

Highly informed he speaks to many societal levels and to both genders'to the intellectual as well as to the man/woman on the street or the unfortunate in prison'to the mind as well as the heart. His topics range from global politics and economics to those between men and women in their household. Common sense dominates his thought. He shuns political correctness for the truth of life. He is a Master Teacher in many fields of thought'religion and psychology, sociology and anthropology, history and politics, literature and the humanities. He is a needed Counselor, for he knows himself, on the deepest of personal levels and he reveals that self to us, that we might be his beneficiaries.

All of which are represented in his Radical Spirituality'a balm for those who anguish in these troubling times of disinformation. As a shaman himself, he calls too for a Radical Mythology to override the traditional mythologies of racial supremacy that foster war and injustice. If you want to reshape (clean up, raise) your consciousness, this is a book to savor, to read again, and again'to pass onto a friend or lover.
'Rudolph Lewis, Editor, ChickenBones: A Journal

In the Crazy House Called America
Click to order via Amazon

ISBN: 0964067218
Format: Paperback, 204pp
Pub. Date: January 2003
Publisher: Black Bird Press 

In the Crazy House Called America is available from Black Bird Press,

"Rarely is a brother secure and honest enough with himself to reveal his innermost thoughts, emotions or his most hellacious life experiences. For most men it would be a monumental feat just to share/bare his soul with his closest friends but to do so to perfect strangers would be unthinkable, unless he had gone through the fires of life and emerged free of the dross that tarnishes his soul. Marvin X, poet, playwright, author and essayist does just that in a self-published book entitled In The Crazy House Called America.

This latest piece from Marvin X offers a peek into his soul and his psyche. He lets the reader know he is hip to the rabid oppression the West heaps upon people of color especially North American Africans while at the same time revealing the knowledge gleaned from his days as a student radical, black nationalist revolutionary forger of the Black Arts Movement, husband, father lover, a dogger of women did not spare him the degradation and agony of descending into the abyss of crack addiction, abusive and toxic relationships and family tragedy.

Perhaps because of the knowledge gained as a member of the Nation of Islam, and his experiences as one of the prime movers of the cultural revolution of the '60, the insights he shares In The Crazy House Called America are all the keener. Marvin writes candidly of his pain, bewilderment and depression of losing his son to suicide. He shares in a very powerful way, his own out of body helplessness as he wallowed in the dregs of an addiction that threatened to destroy his soul and the mess his addictions made of his life and relationships with those he loved. But he is not preachy and this is not an autobiography. He has already been there and done that. In sharing his story and the wisdom he has gleaned from his life experiences and looking at the world through the eyes of an artist/healer,.."
'Junious Ricardo Stanton

Love and War: Poems
by Marvin X. Preface by Lorenzo Thomas

Format: Paperback, 140pp.
ISBN: 0964967200
Publisher: Black Bird Press

Book of poetry by Black Arts activist, preface by Lorenzo Thomas. "When you listen to Tupac Shakur, E-40, Too Short, Master P or any other rappers out of the Bay Area of Cali, think of Marvin X. He laid the foundation and gave us the language to express Black male urban experience in a lyrical way." James G. Spady, Philadelphia New Observer.

Related Links

Read: Marvin X Unplugged An Interview by Lee Hubbard
http://reviews.aalbc.com/marvinxunplugged.htm

Movie Reviews by Marvin X on AALBC.com include:

Ali 
http://www.aalbc.com/reviews/ali.htm 

Baby Boy
http://www.aalbc.com/reviews/baby_boy.htm

Ray
http://www.aalbc.com/reviews/ray.htm

Traffic
http://www.aalbc.com/reviews/traffic.htm

Faye Carol and John Santos at Black Rep., Berkeley

“Music from the Black Diaspora”

 The Dynamic Ms. Carol Faye

The Hot & Spicy John Santos

 Saturday, August 25, 2012

Black Repertory Group

3201 Adeline Street, Berkeley

It will be cooking !

Gwen Zoharah Simmons on Race and Violence in the USA

From: Aishah Shahidah Simmons <afrolez@gmail.com>
Subject: Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons' response to the Muslim Public Affairs Council's "When a Culture of Hate Turns to Violence"
To: "AfroLez Productions" <afrolez@gmail.com>
Date: Friday, August 10, 2012, 5:34 PM

In her response to the Muslim Public Affairs Council's "When a Culture of Hate Turns to Violence," statement, African-American (US) Civil Rights Veteran, Feminist Islamic Scholar and Muslim Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons contextualizes the vicious and virulent her/history of violence in Ameri-KKK-a, which dates back to its' founding days ground in both the genocide of millions of Indigenous peoples of this land and the enslavement of millions of African people. 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Simmons,Gwendolyn Delores <zoharah@ufl.edu>
Date: Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 2:04 PM
Subject: Response to your very good statement on the recent shooting & killings at the Sikh Temple
To: "hoda@mpac.org" <hoda@mpac.org>

Dear Hoda,

My name is Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons. I teach Religion and African American studies at the University of Florida. I am also a Muslim and am African American.

I greatly appreciate what you wrote and understand that this is the seeming response from Non-African American Muslims to the recent spate of violence directed at Muslim mosques and the recent killings at the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin.  Your obvious aim is to remind Americans ( understood to be mainly white Americans) of the founding principles of equality and justice for all upon which the U.S. was supposed to be grounded. I think this is a good strategy as long as you understand that the U.S. has rarely operated from those principles. I was a foot soldier in the Civil Rights Movement as a college age student. I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And I was a field secretary in SNCC ( the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee). I was jailed and beaten in Atlanta, Georgia and in Mississippi in the efforts to tear down this country's form of apartheid called Jim Cow and to secure the right to vote for all people in this country. I worked as a full time volunteer for several years in this great movement which enabled many of the non African American Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhist and other non- white people to immigrate to this country and prosper as a result of the legal changes the Civil Rights Movement brought about.

If you become a student of this country's  "true" history you will see that the blood letting against people considered "others" has been rife here from the country's earliest beginnings. Beginning with the Ethnic Cleansing of this land mass's Native People to the most brutal form of enslavement of African Americans and the attendant torture, rapes, mutilations that were daily occurrences. If you look at the long history of communal lynchings of African Americans you will see that often throngs of white men, women and children held picnics at these gruesome and macabre events as they watched black men, women and even children burned at the stake, hung from trees and had their appendages cut off and sold as souvenirs to the grinning white throngs. There are numerous photos of these Sunday Picnic Lynchings where law officials did little to nothing to stop these brutal community sanctioned rituals ( they often were leading the lynching parties) and the judicial system did very little to bring any of these whites to trial. This went on for over 100 years. ( If you would like me to send you titles of books on these annals of our country's history, please let me know )

Unfortunately, The U.S. educational system rarely teaches students about these horrible realities, preferring to sweep these sordid histories under the rug ( or push them deep into the collective psyche) where they fester and erupt from time to time in these "lone wolf" acts of violence by angry white men against people who they perceive as "OTHER."

I urge Muslim Americans and others to please study this sordid "true" American history as a part of your efforts to understand this land that many of you and/ or your family members have emigrated to and now call home.  Racially motivated violence is as American as Apple Pie.

As Salaam Alaikum,

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons

Zoharah@ufl.edu

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer in Religion with a primary focus on Islamic Studies and African American Studies at the University of Florida. In addition to her academic studies of Islam, Simmons spent seventeen years as a student of the contemporary Sufi Master, M. R. Bawa Muhaiyadeen, and is a founding member of the Bawa Muhaiyadeen Fellowship and Mosque. Simmons spent her early years as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement, working for several years as a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinting Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s, primarily in Georgia and Mississippi.

Solitary Confinement and Black Revolutionaries

Solitary confinement: 

Torture chambers for 

black revolutionaries

An
estimated 80,000 men, women and even children are being held in
solitary confinement on any given day in US prisons.

 

Last Modified: 10 Aug 2012 18:04

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/20128694647587767....

"The

torture technicians who developed the paradigm used in (prisons')
'control units' realised that they not only had to separate those with
leadership qualities, but also break those individuals' minds and
bodies and keep them separated until they are dead." -

Russell
"Maroon" Shoats

Russell "Maroon" Shoats has been kept
in solitary confinement in the state of Pennsylvania for 30 years after
being elected president of the prison-approved Lifers' Association. He
was initially convicted for his alleged role in an attack authorities
claim was carried out by militant black activists on the Fairmont Park
Police Station in Philadelphia that left a park sergeant dead.

Despite

not having violated prison rules in more than two decades, state prison
officials refuse to release him into the general prison population.

Russell's

family and supporters claim that the Pennsylvania Department of
Corrections (PA DOC) has unlawfully altered the consequences of his
criminal conviction, sentencing him to die in solitary confinement - a
death imposed by decades of no-touch torture.

The
severity of the conditions he is subjected to and the extraordinary
length of time they have been imposed for has sparked an international campaign to release him from
solitary confinement - a campaign that has quickly attracted the
support of leading human rights legal organisations, such as the Centre
for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild.

Less
than two months after the campaign was formally launched with events in
New York City and London, Juan Mendez, the United Nations Special
Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment
or Punishment, agreed to make an official inquiry into Shoats' 21 years of solitary
confinement, sending a communication to the US State Department
representative in Geneva, Switzerland.

What
the liberals won't tell you

While

the state of Pennsylvania has remained unmoved in this matter so far,
some in the US government are finally catching on. Decades after rights
activists first began to refer to the practice of solitary confinement
as "torture", the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on the constitution,
civil rights and human rights held a hearing on June 19 to "reassess"
the fiscal, security and human costs of locking prisoners into tiny,
windowless cells for 23 hours a day.

Needless

to say, the hearing echoed in a whisper what human rights defenders
have been shouting for nearly an entire generation: that sensory
deprivation, lack of social contact, a near total absence of
zeitgebers and restricted access to all intellectual and emotional
stimuli are an evil and unproductive combination.

The
hearing opened a spate of debate: with newspapers in Los Angeles, New
York, Washington DC, Tennessee, Pittsburgh, Ohio and elsewhere seizing
the occasion to denounce the practice as "torture" and call for a
reversal of a 30-year trend that has shattered - at a minimum - tens of
thousands of people's lives inside the vast US prison archipelago.

But
as happens with virtually all prison-related stories in the US
mainstream media, the two most important words were left unprinted,
unuttered: race and revolution.

Any
discussion on solitary confinement begins and ends with a number: a
prisoner is kept in his or her cell 23 or 24 hours per day, allowed
three showers every week and served three meals a day. According to a
report by UN torture rapporteur Mendez, prisoners should not be held in
isolation for more than 15 days at a stretch. But in the US, it is
typical for hundreds of thousands of prisoners to pass in and out of
solitary confinement for 30 or 60 days at a time each year.

Human Rights Watch estimated that there were
approximately 20,000 prisoners being held in Supermax prisons, which
are entire facilities dedicated to solitary confinement or
near-solitary. It is estimated that at least 80,000 men, women and even
children are being held in solitary confinement on any given day in US
jails and prisons.

Unknown

thousands have spent years and, in some cases, decades in such
isolation, including more than 500 prisoners held in California's
Pelican Bay state prison for ten years or more.

Perhaps
the most notorious case of all is that of the Angola 3, three Black Panthers who have been held
in solitary confinement in Louisiana for more than 100 years between
the three of them. While Robert King was released after 29 years in
solitary, his comrades - Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace - recently
began their 40th years in solitary confinement, despite an ongoing
lawsuit challenging their isolation and a growing international
movement for their freedom that has been supported by Amnesty
International.

But
all these numbers fail to mention what Robert Saleem Holbrook, who was sentenced
to life without parole as a 16-year-old juvenile and has now spent
the majority of his life behind bars, pointed out: "Given the control
units' track record in driving men crazy, it is not surprising that the
majority of prisoners sent into it are either politically conscious
prisoners, prison lawyers, or rebellious young prisoners. It is this
class of prisoners that occupies the control units in prison systems
across the United States."

Holbrook's

observation is anything but surprising to those familiar with the
routine violations of prisoners' human rights within US jails and
prisons. The
prison discipline study, a mass
national survey assessing formal and informal punitive practices in US
prisons conducted in 1989, concluded that "solitary confinement, loss
of privileges, physical beatings" and other forms of deprivation and
harassment were "common disciplinary practices" that were "rendered
routinely, capriciously and brutally" in maximum-security US prisons.

The
study also noted receiving "hundreds of comments from prisoners"
explaining that jailhouse lawyers who file grievances and lawsuits
about abuse and poor conditions were the most frequently targeted.
Black prisoners and the mentally ill were also targeted for especially
harsh treatment. This "pattern of guard brutality" was "consistent with
the vast and varied body of post-war literature, demonstrating that
guard use of physical coercion is highly structured and deeply
entrenched in the guard subculture".

Race
and revolution

But
while broad patterns can be discerned, these are the numbers that are
missing: how many of those in solitary confinement are black? How many
are self-taught lawyers, educators or political activists? How many
initiated hunger strikes, which have long been anathema to the prison
administration? How many were caught up in the FBI-organised dragnet
that hauled thousands of community leaders, activists and thinkers into
the maws of the US "justice" system during the Black liberation
movement of the 1960s and 1970s?

Former
Warden of United States Penitentiary Marion, the prototype of modern
supermax-style solitary confinement, Ralph Arons, has stated: "The purpose of the Marion Control
Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in
the society at large."

One
of these revolutionaries is Russell "Maroon" Shoats, the founder of the
Black Unity Council, which later merged with the Philadelphia chapter
of the Black Panther Party. He was first
jailed in early 1970.

Hailing

from the gang-war-torn streets of West Philadelphia, Shoats escaped
twice from prison system, first from Huntingdon state prison in
September 1977 and then again in March 1980.

Shoats'

escapes - the first of which lasted a full 27 days, despite a massive
national search complete with helicopters, dogs and vigilante groups
from predominantly white communities surrounding the prison - earned
him the nickname "Maroon", in honour of slaves who broke away from
plantations in Surinam, Guyana and later Jamaica, Brazil and other
colonies and established sovereign communities on the outskirts of the
white settler zones.

Still,

it was not until Shoats was elected president of the prison-approved
Lifers' Organisation in 1982 - the closest thing to a union for
inmates, through which they demanded basic rights such as proper
visiting hours, access to legal documents and healthier food - that the
prison system decided he was a "threat" to administrative stability and
placed him in solitary confinement.

For
the past 30 years, Maroon has been transferred from one "torture
chamber" to another, where his best efforts to interact with his fellow
prisoners or resurrect his old study sessions for the younger
generation are thwarted at every turn.

In
2006, the US had an incarceration rate for black males that was more
than five-and-a-half times greater than that of South Africa at the
end of the apartheid era in 1993.

Yet
most mainstream authorities on the prison system in the US - such
as the eminent scholar Michelle Alexander, whose book The New Jim
Crow suggests that the prison system is racially "biased" - do not
come close to touching on the phenomenon of political prisoners, let
alone on the inmates who take up the cudgels on behalf of their fellow
detainees and attempt to carve out niches of justice in a massive
chamber of terror.

The
discussion of solitary confinement as a violation of a basic human
right comes five decades after Malcolm X first began to preach that
black people in America should take their grievances not to the US
Supreme Court, but to the United Nations, to appeal not for civil
rights, as white bourgeois parlance would have it, but for basic human
rights, as a colonised people.

He
argued not for "integration" into a system that had brutalised and
enslaved "Africans in America" for years, but for an overhaul of that
system and a transfer of power away from those who created and
maintained it. Not master walking hand-in-hand with slave, but an end
to mastery and slavery altogether.

As a
black revolutionary, Malcolm X's words were largely painted over by
mainstream historians. But if the struggle to end inhumane treatment
inside prisoners is to become anything more than a largely apolitical
movement for so-called "civil rights", it must put two long-ignored
points back on the agenda: race and revolution.

Kanya
D'Almeida is an editor for the Inter Press Service (IPS) News Agency,
currently based in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Bret

Grote is an investigator with the Human Rights Coalition, a
Pennsylvania-based prison abolitionist and prisoner rights organisation.

The views expressed in this article are the
author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial
policy.

--
Freedom Archives 
www.freedomarchives.org

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SIGN THE JERICHO COINTELPRO PETITION!

Free All Political Prisoners!
www.jerichony.org

Marvin X on Wall Street, WBAI Interview on the Black Arts Movement

Am I Plato Negro or Socrates?

I appreciate Ishmael Reed for bestowing the title Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland upon me. Indeed, I do teach on the streets of Oakland, specifically at 14th and Broadway, NE corner, outside Rite Aide.

And while it is true that Plato had a peripatetic academy, or a fluid, ever moving classroom, I am not going to live out the myth of Plato going into exile, specifically after his teacher Socrates faced the death penalty for corrupting the youth of Athens.

I am not going into exile since I already went there during the Vietnam war and never want to be cut off from my people again. Exile is the most pitiful existence any revolutionary can desire. Nothing is worse that being cut off from the revolution of one's people, although one can, as Che said, make revolution international, but there is no struggle like one's national struggle. Imagine, there may be Syrians who were a part of the Arab Spring in Egypt, but how can they feel truly vindicated until their homeland, Syria, is liberated?

And so we are here to go down with the Titanic, to help take it down, to take it straight into the iceberg,  since what choice is left the revolutionary, he must live or die with the revolution. Exile is no option, therefore I am not Plato, though you are free to call me Plato Negro, just to distinguish me from that Greek motherfucker that George M. James destroyed in his classic Stolen Legacy.