Who is Mumia Abu-Jamal anyway? Is he a cop Killer? A Messiah? Or just a man who got caught up in a bad situation, at the wrong time in history? It seems like it doesn’t really matter anymore what happened that night in 1981: whether he really shot an American cop Daniel Faulkner or was it a mere self-defense.

Years down, today Mumia is much more than a man sitting in the US death row. He is a symbol of the fight against African-American political repression. Like Malcolm X, another leader with hip-hop appeal, Mumia’s themes are nothing new. Societal ills like institutionalized racism, corruption and increasing alienation against the system has created a new generation of Mumia’s supporters: the marginalized youth.

The most critical factor in Mumia’s hip-hop acclaim is language. Hip-hop speaks to youth in a language they can understand and relate to, and Mumia seems will-versed in this regard. His essays and oral lectures have found their way into hip-hop radio shows, spoken word events and even modern dance performances.

Besides America, rap groups from across Europe, the Caribbean and throughout South America have produced songs written specifically for Mumia. There are reports that the ‘Free Mumia Movement’, as it has come to stay, has started in places where few know who he is, or the details of his case.

Some years back, a benefit concert in Berlin thrilled the audience when the special song titled Move for Mumia opened with the German slogan: USA-Hande weg von Mumia! (USA-keep your hands off Mumia!). Interestingly, Mumia is not a patch on Osama bin-laden but both are the growing bugbear, giving dingbats to Americans differently!

Be that as it may, there is but a zing thing about Mumia. His politicized hip-hop as a progressive activism has found the perfect medium for reaching a new American generation. The charged Afro-centric messages are filtered to the youth through the rap music, and it has certainly created the ripples.

What if Mumia vanishes from America and comes down the pike here in Kashmir for lending a voice to our disillusioned young generation? Will it work out when our youth are enmeshed in the cobwebs of fury and frustration, injustice and inquietude, horror and humbug?

Suffocated by the system stinking with nepotism, corruption, unemployment, political unrest, social and moral degeneration, ours is the lost generation, paying agonizingly for the sins they never committed. Even their genuine outbursts cost them dearly. Guns, bullets and stones only drive them to scary revolt and revulsion. The scaffolds and jackboots tamper with their psyche and dreams. Romantic visions and sloganeering never lends them any help.

Caught between chequered past and uncertain future, a kind of crafty crossfire, they pathetically turn out to be the generation of floaters and drifters—one who subsequently lose the sense of one crucial narrative that gives meaning to whole of life: the Absolute Truth.

Mumia can certainly be a figure to rally around, a focal point for such a generation to search for something to believe in. And what he can provide is of transient value—logic of living prone to miserable pulverization, for life has to be sustained beyond rap and hip-hop, beyond quixotic idiocy that enraptures today’s world-blind.

In contrast, the Absolute Truth gives a fixed reference point—that the cosmos is not empty, there is Almighty God; that the heavens are not silent, Almighty has spoken; and most important, that He has spoken a word of truth, a word of life.

This is no vapid moralizing. Homilies and sermons here create not even a halfway stir. The fact is that our young generation desperately needs someone: it’s not Mumia, its Almighty God. It needs Him because it is sick and can no longer make it alone. It needs Him to help it think because it no longer seems to be capable of thinking. It needs Him to help it to be tolerant as it no longer seems capable of tolerance. It needs Him to help it comprehend as it seems beyond any capacity to recognize things correctly.

It is no big deal for Mumia to invent an entire new culture of flimsy and friable activism in any godless community where movements stand out and collapse just like a house of playcards. But, sorry to say, for the youth of this wounded valley, Mumia’s mantra cannot be therapeutic.

Watching closely the ghastly battle of life and death, and lost in a sea of exploitation and ordeal, theirs is a different dilemma, a different dirge. The one that makes hearts bleed. Unbearably!

(The author teaches at Media Education Research Centre, MERC, University of Kashmir).

Lastupdate on : Sat, 17 Jul 2010 21:30:00 Mecca time
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