Bobby Sands: Nothing But an Unfinished Song

Bobby Sands Nothing But an Unfinished Song New Edition

Denis O’Hearn

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First published 2006 New edition published 2016 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Denis O’Hearn 2006, 2016 The right of Denis O’Hearn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978 0 7453 3633 6 978 1 7837 1809 2 978 1 7837 1811 5 978 1 7837 1810 8

Paperback PDF eBook Kindle eBook EPUB eBook

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

Printed in the European Union

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Contents Foreword Preface

to the New Edition by Mumia Abu-Jamal

to the New Edition Prelude

ix xiii xix

Chapter 1.

Growing Up in Utopia

1

Chapter 2.

Violence and Anger

9

Chapter 3.

Into the IRA

17

Chapter 4.

A Change of Scene

25

Chapter 5.

A Trip to the South

39

Chapter 6.

Prison

45

Chapter 7.

Things Get Hot

59

Chapter 8.

Learning to Rebel

69

Chapter 9.

Leaving Long Kesh

89

Chapter 10.

Putting It into Practice

97

Chapter 11.

A Bad Day in Dunmurry

113

Chapter 12.

Castlereagh

127

Chapter 13.

Back to Prison

143

Chapter 14.

Solitary Confinement

157

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Chapter 15.

On the Blanket

165

Chapter 16.

Escalating the Protest

179

Chapter 17.

H6: Building Solidarity Within

211

Chapter 18.

H6: Extending the Protest

227

Chapter 19.

Toward the Inevitable

247

Chapter 20.

Hunger Strike

275

Chapter 21.

Step by Step

303

Chapter 22.

The End

333

Chapter 23.

The Beginning

371

Notes

387

Acknowledgements

421

Index

425

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For those who die too young.

For my nephew, James Padraic O’Hearn.

May your heart always be joyful, May your song always be sung.

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In the twilight of my last morning I will see my friends and you, and I’ll go to my grave regretting nothing but an unfinished song . . .

Nazim Hikmet, Bursa Prison, Turkey, 11 November 1933

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Foreword Culture Flies through Walls

by Mumia Abu-Jamal

It is delightful to learn that the saga of Bobby Sands is still being read in dungeons and solitary prison cells around the world. From Ohio’s death row to California’s supermax cells, Bobby’s tale of struggle and resistance on behalf of Irish independence resonates. From Long Kesh to Pelican Bay—from hole to hole.

This is a bright shimmering example of how culture, especially the culture of resistance, can seep, like water, through brick and steel, across oceans and through the false barriers imposed by the illusions men have erected and called race.

My memory of Sands listening to soulful Motown stars like Diana Ross and Freda Payne was only exceeded by the surprise that, as a youth, his favorite movie was Zulu, an epic tale of the Zulus’ attack on and destruction of the British imperial army at Isandlwana (and British revenge at Rorke’s Drift). This told me all I needed to know.

Denis O’Hearn, in his now classic Bobby Sands: Nothing But an Unfinished Song, recounts the seething rage of Irish youngsters watching (and often experiencing!) British army foot patrols harassing guys in the streets of Belfast. Jimmy Rafferty, a friend of Sands, comes to him frothing with anger: “Did you get seeing Zulu last night?” [Bobby] asked Rafferty, referring to the classic film starring Stanley Baker, Michael Caine and a raft of unknown African actors and extras.

“Aye, I did,” replied Rafferty.

But he didn’t want to talk about the film; he wanted to vent his anger about being spread-eagled against the wall.

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x Denis O’Hearn

“I’m wrecked, Sandsy,” he told Bobby. “These here Brits had me up against the wall for over an hour. One of these days I’m going to get laid into them bastards.”

Bobby just gave him a disdainful look and referred back to [his favorite scene in] the previous night’s movie where the British army, out of ammunition, was wiped out by the Zulus in hand-to-hand combat.

“Look, Raff, are you gonna be Stanley Baker or are you gonna carry a spear?!”

With these words we see a young man who was giving voice to his internationalist and anti-imperialist instincts.* In the prisons of the occupier (Britain), Sands and his IRA comrades used everything—and nothing!—to resist the forces of repression and foreign occupation.

Nothing? Their hunger strikes in H-Block segregation in Long Kesh prison—hunger until death—gives “nothing” a new meaning, as does their struggle for human dignity.

That action has morphed into legend and has inspired men and women from Long Kesh to California’s infamous Pelican Bay, to Ohio’s death row non-contact visiting rooms, to supermax joints in Turkey, and beyond.

When prisoners went on hunger strikes in Pelican Bay’s SHU (Security Housing Unit) in 2011 and 2013, the leaders were a multi-racial bunch who had read of Sands in Nothing But an Unfinished Song and were inspired by the lads in Long Kesh. Their strikes, which drew an astonishing 30,000 strikers all across the California prison archipelago, had its inspiration in the H-Block struggle of Sands and his comrades.

Similarly, the men in Ohio’s death row, veterans of the 1993 Lucasville prison uprising, were sparked by Bobby Sands’s hunger strike against intolerable conditions. They struck, and demanded, among other things, contact visits with their families—and WON! One of these men (again a multiracial group) is named (or named himself, rather) Bomani.

Sound familiar? Well, to be honest, there’s no reason it should unless you, like Bobby, were a fan of the Zulu story of resistance to British imperialism. * Author’s note: This version of Bobby Sands’s conversation with Jimmy Rafferty differs slightly from that presented in this book on p.28. As often happens in prison, Mumia Abu Jamal had an earlier draft of this book, which I edited after reviewing the movie Zulu. While the moral of each version of the conversation is different, they both demonstrate Bobby’s budding anti-imperialist views.

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Foreword xi

In 1986 the South African Broadcasting Company produced a biopic of Zulu King Shaka. In the movie, featuring a glorious panorama of the tribe, when Shaka seizes the throne from his quavering half-brother he is assisted by Bomani, a powerful military figure.

Culture, especially the culture of resistance, is like the wind; a zephyr moving through brick and steel, through time itself, to touch other minds and souls.

It is usually outlawed, illegal, or deemed not acceptable—or banned.

Yet it continues to blow, moving here, moving there, until it refreshes another oppressed person with the human elixir of hope.

Then it moves on.

This book is like that.

May it continue to reach those it was conceived to reach; those who need a breath of fresh air, over the fetid stink of a sweltering segregation cell, or a barren, barred site called death row.

From the Prison-House of Nations (USA) Mumia Abu-Jamal “Slow” Death Row Fall 2015

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Preface to the New Edition I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.

—Richard Wright, Black Boy When Pluto Books contacted me to say that they wanted to release a second edition of this book to mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of Bobby Sands’s hunger strike, I was delighted. They said that they wanted to reach “a whole new readership.”

Indeed!

I am proud to say that this book continues to find new readers and, in some surprising ways, it has been a call to action for some remarkable people who found that the story of Bobby Sands and his comrades in Long Kesh prison back in the 1970s and 1980s provided the basis of a way forward in their own struggles.

This book has had a remarkable life. It never reached the bestseller list of the Sunday Times or the New York Times. Yet it hurled words into darkness, as Richard Wright put it, and it found echoes and awoke new wills to fight, new hunger for life.

Soon after this book was first published, the legendary civil rights activist Staughton Lynd organized a prison reading group that included some of the best minds in the United States prison system (Mumia Abu Jamal, Bomani Shakur, and others) and some of the most committed prison rights activists. This was their first text. Bomani, who is on death row in Ohio for his part in the 1993 Lucasville prison uprising, wrote to me after they read and discussed the book. I began visiting him in Ohio and over time we became brothers.

Bomani and others began giving me an education in the U.S. supermax prison system, where more than eighty thousand men and women are kept in solitary confinement for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Thousands of them never touch another living thing—human, plant, or

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xiv Denis O’Hearn

animal—for decades. They visit their loved ones through bulletproof glass. The intent of the system is to impose social death.

Turkey does something similar in their infamous F-type prisons, a system that the Turkish state introduced in the year 2000 with the encouragement of the EU and the ironically-named European Committee for the Prevention of Torture.

In 2009, Bomani suggested to me that we should teach a class together at my university in New York and that we should include supermax prisoners.

We gathered ten remarkable prisoners from around the United States.

They read the same books by academic “experts” as the campus-based students. Then, the latter students wrote to them asking questions about whether the things written by these academics corresponded to their real lived experiences in supermax prisons. We learned a lot from these ten men but, more importantly, we gave ears to their voices and we treated them as the real experts on prison life.

At Bomani’s insistence, everyone enrolled in the course read the book that you are now reading. Learning about Bobby Sands and his comrades was a revolutionary experience for everyone involved. After spending two to three decades in solitary confinement, many of the prisoners began to realize that they could fight the system through nonviolent resistance.

Not only this, they read about the solidarity and intense community that the Irish blanketmen created inside solitary confinement and they began to adopt similar practices. In the US, this usually meant transcending the racial barriers that the prison authorities use to keep prisoners at each others’ throats.

This book was a spark. But it was what the prisoners did with it that is important. In Ohio, Bomani Shakur and his death-row comrades Jason Robb and Siddique Hasan—an African American, a white man, and a Muslim—organized a hunger strike to achieve five demands (like Bobby Sands and his comrades) including the right to touch their loved ones on visits. They waited to begin their action while they organized a support movement on the outside. That, too, they learned from the blanketmen, as you will read in this book. Through just twelve days of hunger strike, they turned Ohio’s supermax system on its head, winning rights to touch their loved ones and to recreate together.

Out in California, the Security Housing Unit (SHU) of Pelican Bay state prison is particularly oppressive. There, more than a thousand prisoners are kept in small windowless cells the size of a parking space. The fronts of their cells are covered by a metal grating that barely allows them to see out. No matter, all they would see is a concrete wall.

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Preface to the New Edition xv

Jason Robb (front), Bomani Shakur (in rear) and friends celebrate what would have been Bobby Sands’s 60th birthday in Ohio State Penitentiary (supermax). They won the right to have such contact visits after a hunger strike that was motivated by the story of the Irish blanketmen.

Todd Ashker and Danny Troxell joined our class from the Pelican Bay SHU. They had been put in two “pods” of eight prisoners each who the state considered to be the most dangerous prisoners in California. Sitawa Jamaa was an African American, Arturo Castellanos a Latino, Todd and Danny were white. There were just two of twenty-four pods in a wing of the prison called the “short corridor,” where the state of California concentrated its most hated captives (just as Bobby Sands and the leaders of the blanketmen were segregated in H6 block in Long Kesh).

While they were taking our class, Todd and Danny began a discussion that culminated in the formation of a group called the Short Corridor Collective. In the Collective, men from a mix of races, who are supposed to hate each other, discussed freedom together. From their readings of Mayan cosmology (the Mayans are an indigenous people in Mexico and Central America) they learned about time and space, and how to identify opportunities to move to a better and higher way of living. They read radical activists and historians including Tom Paine and Howard Zinn.

The talk across the corridor was often loud and confused; some spoke in Spanish and some in English.

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But Todd Ashker says, “When Danny and I started talking about Bobby Sands and the Irish struggle, things went quiet … everyone was listening.”

The men in the Collective found ways to communicate with prisoners around Pelican Bay and, by developing social networks, with tens of thousands of prisoners across the state of California. They developed a policy document that called for an end to racial violence in prisons, which they sent throughout California’s prison system. Youth-gang members passed the documents around the streets of Los Angeles, proclaiming that “our brothers in Pelican Bay have shown us the way” and agreeing to end racial street violence.

Following the successes of prisoners on hunger strike in Ohio, the Short Corridor Collective began to plan and organize their own hunger strikes. They went on two hunger strikes in 2011 and another in 2013.

Thirty thousand prisoners across the state of California participated in the last strike: probably the biggest such mass action in world history. As in Northern Ireland and Ohio, they had five core demands, the central of which was an end to indefinite isolation.

They followed their sixty-day hunger strike in 2013 with a class action lawsuit, Ashker vs Governor of California. Change came quicker than expected. During the hunger strike, the four leading representatives from the Short Corridor told friends that they never expected to get out of solitary; they were hunger striking for the other prisoners in California.

Yet on September 1, 2015, the state of California, trying to avoid defeat in US federal courts, concluded an agreement with the plaintiffs of the class action, including Todd Ashker and Danny Troxell. It put an end to indefinite and extended solitary confinement. Two thousand men were released from solitary isolation into the general prison population. Some had been in isolation for more than three decades.

On November 3, 2015, I received a picture of Sitawa Jamaa, one of the four prisoner representatives in the Short Corridor Collective. He was embracing his sister for the first time in thirty-one years, on a prison visit where they could touch and break bread, as people are meant to do.

This book has been to other dark places. Kurdish and leftist prisoners have read it throughout Turkey, first in English and then in its Turkishlanguage edition. A number of them participated in a version of the “prison experiences” course that I taught at the Sociology Department of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. They built on its promises in their own ways.

When two Basque political prisoners named Iurgi Garitagoitia Salegi and Aitzol Iriondo Yarza read the French-language edition, they translated

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Preface to the New Edition xvii

Sitawa Jamaa and his sister Marie Levin on a prison visit in October 2015. Sitawa was one of four main representatives of the Pelican Bay Human Rights Short Corridor Collective who led the mass hunger strike and class action suit that overturned California’s use of extended solitary confinement. Sitawa and Marie had not touched in more than thirty-one years. (Courtesy of Marie Levin) it into Euskara. Iurgi and Aitsol were introduced to me by a former Basque prisoner Mitxel Sarasketa. When he was imprisoned in the 1980s, Mitxel translated Bobby Sands’s great work One Day in My Life into Euskara. I am amazed how Bobby Sands lives on and gives courage and ideas to people in struggle, right down to this day.

So, here is a book that has moved tens of thousands of prisoners around the world. Whether “political prisoners” in the usual sense, or “ordinary decent criminals” who became politicized in prison, they were held in the worst conditions imaginable. The things that are narrated in this book gave them strength and hope. Hopefully, it will do the same for you.

Denis O’Hearn Occupied Iroquois Territory (New York) November 2015

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Page ix

Prelude

Thursday, December 18, 1980 The screws brought Bobby Sands back to his cell in H-Block 3 at a quarter to nine. They took him from the administrative area, in the crossbar of the “H,” down the long gray corridor to his cell at the bottom of the wing. As he passed by rows of solid steel doors on either side of the corridor some of the other prisoners called out to him.

“Right, Bobby?”

“Cad é an scéal, Roibeard?” (“What’s the news, Robert?”)

Sands finally reached his cell. The prisoners around him waited anxiously to find out what was happening. They had been waiting ever since the screws took Bobby away at a quarter past six. They expected him to return with the good news of a victorious end to the hunger strike that was now over two months old. At the very least, they expected some indication that they were closer to a successful resolution of their fouryear struggle to win recognition as political prisoners. They knew that one of the hunger strikers, Sean McKenna, was near death but there had been talk of last-minute British concessions to end the protest before a death ignited Irish society.

“Teapot” was in a cell beside Sands. What he heard next was “a bolt from the fucking blue.” What their friend and commanding officer told them made their hearts sink to rock bottom.

Sands spoke out the door in Irish to Bik MacFarlane, his second in command. He was bitter, deeply angry; he felt betrayed. There was more of Calvary than Bethlehem in his voice. It felt more like a week to Easter than a week until Christmas.

“Tá an stailc críochnaithe” (“The hunger strike is over”), he told Bik. “Cad é a tharla?” (“What happened?”)

“Fuair muid faic.” (“We got nothing.”)

Sands withdrew momentarily from the door. He could not settle. Well,

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xx X Denis D e n i s O’Hearn O’Hearn

he could never settle but now his mind was racing even more than usual.

He strode quickly to the back corner of his cell and lay down on his filthy sponge mattress by the heating pipe to talk to Teapot, who had his ear to the crack in the shit-smeared wall at the other side.

“Another fucking hunger strike . . . crazy . . . die . . . crazy,” were the jumbled words that Teapot could make out from Sands’s low voice. It was enough to tell him what Bobby had already set his mind to do.

Then, unable to sit still for even a few seconds, Sands rose and paced back to the cell door to speak to Bik. “Bhuel, Bik, beidh stailc eile ann.” (“Well, Bik, there’ll be another hunger strike.”)

“Tá an ceart agat.” (“You’re right.”)

And that was it. In the minds of the prisoners around Sands, the men who effectively made up the leadership of all the Irish Republican prisoners in the H-Blocks, the die was cast. They immediately began to plan another hunger strike, speaking through their cell doors in Irish. They talked over how it would go, but whatever way they played it the plot ended the same way. Bobby Sands would certainly die.

Friday, December 19, 1980 Sands met twice with the commanding officers (OCs) of the other HBlocks that housed protesting IRA prisoners. The screws brought them in to see him in the “big cell” at the bottom of the wing. He could not just repeat “we got nothing” to them, as that would wreck the morale of the whole prison. He had to give them some measure of hope. He told the OCs bluntly that the agreement they got after the hunger strike ended was not what they wanted, that it was full of holes. But maybe, he said, they could step through those holes to achieve some form of political status. At least, maybe, they could get their own clothes to wear and then continue struggling for more rights.

Seanna Walsh, OC of H5 and one of Bobby’s oldest friends, did not believe the positive spin he was hearing. He knew Sands too well and he could see right through him. He could tell from Sands’s demeanor that there was really little hope of getting anything concrete from the agreement that Margaret Thatcher’s government had offered them the night before. Not even their own clothes, much less their other demands, like the right to free association and freedom from prison work.

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