by Faruq
On Feb. 3, 2025, The Strike, a documentary of the Pelican Bay State Prison hunger strikes of 2011 and 2013, will air nationally on PBS. The documentary recounts the crucial moments in the strikes and includes previously unavailable footage from the prison itself, like the actual negotiations between the prisoners and prison officials. Revisiting this important page in the long history of prison revolts is an opportunity for critical recollection that speaks to today’s reality.
The strike, which ended the internationally recognized torture of perpetual solitary confinement at least in California state prisons, resulted in my release from solitary in 2014 after 20 years. Before the strike, I had no hope of ever leaving solitary alive. Eventually I was released from prison in 2019. (For my and others’ writings as the strikes were unfolding, see the 2012 publication, Pelican Bay Hunger Strikers: “We want to be validated as human” and many articles in News & Letters.) As a participant in the strike, I was interviewed by Lucas Guilkey, one of the directors and producers of the documentary.
‘THE STRUGGLE TO FEEL THAT WE ARE HUMAN’
When I was speaking about the strike, it was to give people a taste of what we were reduced to, to see the depth of how hard it was to even feel that we are human. In prison we were deprived of most of what constitutes a human life, especially contact with others. Once “validated” as a gang member, it was impossible to leave solitary. Racial animosity, a hallmark of prisons’ method of control, was encoded into gang designations.
What made the strike successful was that we were no longer going to let race divide us. The guards believed there would not be many joining us, because they believed they knew us, they believed we were firmly divided by race. The strike generated an “Agreement to End Hostilities.” The Agreement was a sea change in the thinking of prisoners who were coming around to the idea that we are not enemies of each other.
The strike was not only a total rejection of being defined by race, but an active expression of wanting to be “validated” as human. That’s what speaks so profoundly to today—both inside and outside prison. I wrote many articles about coming out of prison NOT being a moment of freedom, but the unfreedom I saw on the street every day in the sorry state of human relations toward those left behind, the unhoused and mentally ill.
The story of the strike illuminates contradictions in the society at large. The dehumanization of the “other,” even to the point of extermination, is a way to turn attention away from the failure of the system—both the prisons and the society—and focus the blame on the “other.”
NEED FOR NEW HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS
Today the contradictions are getting sharper. In order to merely survive, we are sacrificing our humanity: compassion, time to develop ourselves. There are a lot of movements in response to that: Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, workers’ strikes, etc. While those address specific issues, we need to reflect about the needed new human relations: between races, between men and women, between workers. Human relations that are not based on things—commodities and capital—but on free association was Marx’s answer to the system that divides and conquers, isolates and fragments us.
I continue to learn to appreciate the relevance of the breakthrough achieved by the Agreement To End Hostilities, especially when today humanity’s very survival under capitalism is in question: from its global return to fascism and threat of total extermination in a war or the complete assault on nature which enables life, specifically human life, to flourish. The reach to recreate human relations does not end with leaving prison. The Pelican Bay Hunger Strike showed the way forward, revealing a fundamental way of being with one another as recognizing the “other’s” humanity as our own.
Watch The Strike as more than just history. It is an opportunity to reflect on the present and, hopefully, help us determine a different future.
hope Faruq will resume writing a regular column. Also would like to see coverage of the closing of FCI Dublin which I understand was opposed by many women prisoners.