Thursday, September 16, 2010

2011 Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar is now available!

Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2010 16:32:37 -0400
Subject: 2011 Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar is now available!
From: torontoblackcross@gmail.com

Order now at www.certaindays.org. Join us on Facebook
(http://facebook.com/certaindays) and help spread the word.

A GREAT FUNDRAISER FOR YOUR GROUP – AND A MEANINGFUL GIFT!

Political Prisoners: Still in the Struggle
We are proud to be celebrating our TENTH ANNIVERSARY with 42 gorgeous
colour pages featuring:

ART
• Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez
• Leonard Peltier
• Melanie Cervantes
• Dave Ron
• Malaquias Montoya
• Favianna Rodriguez
• Molly Fair
• Herman Wallace
• Kevin "Rashid" Johnson
• Kara Sievewright
• Santiago Armengod
• Jacobo Silva Nogales

WORDS
• Released From Prison, Still Fighting For Freedom (by Ray Luc Levasseur)
• Medical Treatment and Neglect in Prison (by Sundiata Acoli)
• Solidarity with Palestine (by David Gilbert)
• The Struggle Is Everywhere: Women Prisoners Continue to Organize
Despite Isolation (by Safiya Bukhari)
• From Noose to Needle (by Mumia Abu-Jamal)
• Communicate to Educate, Educate to Liberate (by Jaan Laaman)
• The House that |Herman Built: The Power of Collaboration (by Herman
Wallace and Jackie Sumell)
• Learning From Our Elders: Analyzing History to Understand the
Present (by Akili Castlin)
• Terror, Prisons and the Time to Rebuild (by Matt Meyer)
• "Little Guantanamo": Exposing the CMU (by Daniel McGowan)
• Prisons, Social Control and Political Prisoners (by Marilyn Buck)
• The Politics of Imprisonment (by Alvaro Luna Hernandez)

Funds raised from the sale of this calendar will be divided between
the New York State Task Force on Political Prisoners, the Palestinian
NGO Addameer, and the G20 Legal Defense Fund.

Visit www.certaindays.org for a peek at what’s inside.

In the decade since this calendar was first published, a lot has
changed, and yet so much has stayed the same. At the project’s
inception, the organizers who became the calendar collective were
building relationships with political prisoners Herman Bell, David
Gilbert and Seth Hayes — corresponding, visiting, forming friendships
and exchanging political ideas. To us, the interconnections were
obvious: political prisoners come out of our movements — anti-racist,
anti-imperial and anti-war struggles, queer and women’s liberation,
and ecological justice to name a few — and as such we owe them our
solidarity. Besides, many political prisoners continue to organize,
both inside and beyond the prison walls. New organizers have so much
to learn, both from the successes of earlier liberation movements and
from their errors. And yet, political prisoners were largely isolated
from the then-emerging movement against globalized capitalism. When
Herman proposed that we produce a calendar, it seemed like the perfect
way to make our political prisoners more visible, on a daily basis.

In the early years of the calendar, the events of September 11, 2001
transformed the political landscape in ways we were still coming to
understand: new imperialist wars had begun, and here at home the state
was using the post-9/11 climate as a carte-blanche to step up
repression and retract hard won social gains. As we go to print, in
July 2010, the dust is still settling from the largest mass arrest in
Canadian history. Over 1000 people were detained or arrested in
connections with the protests against the G20 meeting in Toronto. Some
are facing charges that potentially carry serious prison time. In
certain cases the charges are based on information gathered by
infiltrators at the very core of their organizations. Now more than
ever, we need the insights of political prisoners to be part of our
organizing.

So this year, for the calendar’s tenth issue, we’re going “back to
basics,” putting the focus on the theme of political prisoners: their
voices and perspectives, their contributions, the particular issues
they face inside prison. Political prisoners are still in the
struggle: as organizers, as mentors, and as comrades in need of our
solidarity to win their freedom.

- The Certain Days collective

No comments: