Black August Through the Eyes of Incarcerated Artist Donald 'C-Note' Hooker
Timely article highlights from the world's most prolific prisoner artist Donald "C-Note" Hooker his experienced perspective on Black August including his visual and poetic works.
Black August was started as a way to draw attention to the struggles of African-Americans both inside and outside of prison walls, but even with its popularity on the rise, most people don't know the real story behind this movement that has now gone international. In an exclusive interview with Donald "C-Note" Hooker, the world's most prolific prisoner artist shares his experienced perspective on Black August including his visual and poetic works.
Black August - A Month of Solidarity
Black August - Los Angeles, 2016, C-Note
Black August is a month of solidarity, when people from all over join together to commemorate those who lost their lives inside prison due to state sponsored terrorism. Black August started in 1979 as a commemoration of Khatari Gaulden, who was killed the year before on Aug. 1 as a result of medical neglect by San Quentin Prison authorities. Instead of adding Aug. 1 to the existing days of observation that marked the deaths of activists like W.L. Nolen, Alvin Miller, Cleveland Edwards, and George and Jonathan Jackson, the prisoners standing in resistance to the massive California prison-industrial complex, declared the whole month to be Black August. While Black August as a month-long in-memoriam occurred after the 1978 death of Khatari Gaulden, it was inspired by the first in-memoriam of the August 21, 1971, Death of George Lester Jackson in San Quentin.
As Black August attempts to bring more of the masses into its conscious-fold, it has been co-opted to give broader meaning to an arduous, centuries-long struggle between White colonization of Black lands, and Black people. While Blacks did enslave other Blacks in the time of the transatlantic slave trade, what does that have to with the World Bank's enslavement of Africa through debt-loan usury schemes? Or racial-covenant schemes practiced by U.S. states not just in the South to restrict where African-Americans could or could not live? Even the people's president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had New Deal funding exclusionary rules against African Americans.
What is clear however, is that Black culture has been under attack by White supremacy and capitalism for centuries. This resulted in Black people being forced into slavery, marginalized as second class citizens, discriminated against in housing and employment opportunities...the list goes on. In the past ten years, we have seen many examples of racism through police brutality against unarmed Blacks such as Michael Brown Jr., Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor...the list goes on. In fact these instances are so common they have become normalized within our society creating a social acceptance towards violence against Black bodies.
Although Mumia Abu Jamal has remarked that Black August (at least in the West) begins in Haiti, referring to the Haitian Revolution, which also began in August, we can not be blind to a practice in the United States of co-opting movements or moments. As noted by one African American writer, "As we attempt to engage more people in the tradition of Black August, we must remain steadfast in centering the struggle of political prisoners during this month."
Here, Artivist Rapper Min King X Aka Pyeface poses with a print of C-Note's 2016, first political work, Black August - Los Angeles.
Hip Hop Prison Art & Long Term Solitary Confinement
Reflecting on Black August and his life inside, a new book by C-Note will cover his life in solitary confinement, insights into hip hop prison art (his expertise), and his reflections on racism. This is an excerpt from BAR WORK: The Prison Experience Told Through Paint:
My Dilemma (2009)
9 in. x 12 in.
Wax on paper
Donald "C-Note" Hooker
My Dilemma is the artist's first painting. The artist brought in the Millennium in administrative segregation, the hole, as a result of a prison riot between prison guards and Black prisoners at High Desert State Prison. While in the hole, he began drawing; he was 34 years old. A decade earlier, the seed to be a visual artist was planted after reading the Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, written in 1645. The book informed him that occidental martial arts teach, painting with a brush or calligraphy are extracurricular martial arts exercises. As a student of martial arts, he knew he needed to develop this skill. When he was released out the hole and placed in transitory housing, he had these raps he had written. Writing poetry, songs, and short stories, were a hobby of his as a teenager. Now he was trying to figure out how to get his work out to the public. Does he send them to Death Row Records, where they may be trashed or used without credit? He reasoned, it would be more economical if he did drawings, as a picture has a thousand words. Later he would learn, poetry and painting were considered Sister Arts. The poet paints pictures with words; the painter tells stories with paint.
My Dilemma was done in 2009. It is a highly deceptive work of art. It was made with an ink pen and colored pencils. In 2002, he received a $13,000 life insurance settlement as a result of the death of his mother in 1999. He spent heavily on art books. My Dilemma was his coming out, after extensively studying the techniques deployed by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Another influential teaching guide was a book, From Pencil To Paint. The book demonstrated that pencil work can be developed to look like a painting, and a brush work can be developed to look like a pencil. The artist holds the opinion that colored pencils have not captured the Public's imagination of being a fine art, and classifies these works as wax on paper. He does so based on the medium used to bind pigment, oil for oil paintings, acrylics for acrylic paintings, and wax for colored pencils. My Dilemma was the artist's moment, like Vincent van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, or Edvard Munch's Scream. It was not a work he created on his own volition; he was driven to it. It was created out of a mental madness. He had spent several years scrutinizing and studying some of the great works in the Western World; especially Renaissance religious works. Works designed to influence not on a cerebral or mental level, but to affect one on an ethereal or spiritual level. But what he saw on the page did not match the reality of the scene he was witnessing off the page, the drab, dreariness, of the prison setting. My Dilemma was a work created not from inspiration, but from frustration.
The frustration that led to the creation of My Dilemma would manifest itself in the work. A rose placed onto the walkway of a prison cell block is an object that is foreign or alien to that environment. My Dilemma is full of such visual dichotomies. There is the classical versus the contemporary; the trained academia style versus the untrained outsider style. The pen work was chosen specifically to maintain the Integrity of traditional prison art. In other words, the untrained Outsider artist, while the rose was done in The classical academic technique of sfumato. There is the vertical position of the prison bars versus the horizontal position of the rose. The inanimate prison bars versus the animate rose. The static nature of the prison bars versus the dramatic nature of a nascent bloom.
C-Note Speaks About His Artistic Journey as an Artist in Solitary Confinement
Strange Fruit, 2017, Donald "C-Note" Hooker
As The King of Prison Hip Hop, I live by the credo, "The pen is mightier than the sword," and fortunately, I paint pictures with words, and tell stories with paint. So I write and draw your attention to the living Hells that go on behind prison walls, or electrified barbed wire fences.
"Prison culture and Street culture have always played a vital role in Hip Hop," says C-Note.
"One of Hip Hop's founding art forms, Graffiti, was started in prison. I call my work Hip Hop because in the early days of Rap, rappers were called news reporters. The American mainstream press did not cover the plight of the inner city, so our stories reached the public through Rap. Photojournalism can show you what it looks like to be locked up, but only the artist can tell you what it feels like to be locked up, and it's Hell. What mainstream media outlet is reporting these stories? With so many people in our communities locked up, predominantly for quality of life crimes, a real Hip Hop consciousness is right here in prison. So the next time you hear about the death nails of Hip Hop, tell'em nah, 'Hip Hop ain't dead; it went to prison. '"
Black August is when we as African Americans should be looking inward to better ourselves spiritually and mentally. Black August is a time for us to ask ourselves what we can do about our own problems that have been inflicted upon us by the dominant culture (White America) for 400 years.
In 2016, I created Paintoems. Paintoems- are poems inspired by paintings or drawings; or paintings or drawings inspired by poems. They are combined together as a single work of Digital art. All paintoems are classified as Creative Commons (CC). This means the public has the right to freely use these works as long as the artist or artists are acknowledged.
Strange Fruit, is to draw attention to a report that I read in the October 2016, edition of the San Quentin News. It stated, "During an 18-month period in 2014-15, the suicide rate at the California Institution for Women (C.I.W.) was eight times the national average for women prisoners and five times the rate for the entire California prison system."
When the dominant culture refuses to utilize their media to highlight missing Black women or girls, you know damn well they don't care ape-shit what is happening to them behind-the-wall! That is the role of Hip Hop. That's Hip Hop consciousness. And these are the things and the lives we should be reflecting on during Black August.
While there are lots of ways of committing suicide, I think hanging is the most salient in our human consciousness. That being the case, this brings me to Strange Fruit. Strange Fruit is the title of a song, sung by Billie Holiday. The tenor of the song is about all this strange fruit hanging from these trees in the South. What was this strange fruit? Nooses around the necks of dead African-Americans. That's why the piece is entitled 'Strange Fruit.' That's why there's a noose around her neck. The poem is a play on the theme song to the CBS television show Green Acres. Green acres is the place to be/Farm livin' is the life for me/Land spreadin' out so far and wide...'
I hold up Sandra Bland as our 21st Century's Emmett Till. Emmett Till, like Sandra Bland, was a fellow Chicagoan who went down South. Emmett allegedly in 1955 made a whistling sound in the general area of a white woman. He was only 14 years of age. He was bludgeoned to death. His mother, from the North (Chicago), wanted an open casket burial to which a Jet Magazine photographer snapped a picture of his gruesome remains. It was the shot (photo shoot) heard around the world. Well, I've been holding up Sandra Bland to go with the theme of this work. She is our 21st Century version of Emmett Till. What was her offense that caused her to lose her life? It started with a traffic stop; whose legitimacy is dubious at best. But an officer who physically feels the need to pull a motorist out of their car for smoking a cigarette? An activity that is associated with a high degree of stress, to which this encounter with law enforcement obviously was. But I think anytime a person comes in contact with law enforcement, and especially an African-American with a white officer, it is very harrowing; because an African-American never knows where this thing is going. And Ms.Bland allegedly or apparently committed suicide while in a jail holding cell for a nonsensical lane change violation, to which the officer was fired as a result of this incident. In certain activist circles, it's common to hear women say, "Prisons were not designed or intended for women."
This is no different than the isolation felt in those torture-chambers called long-term solitary confinement, and when the opportunity presented itself to put my body on the line for those men and women who were living through that, I proudly did so.
10th Anniversary of Prisoner Hunger Strike: Where Organizers Are Now - IPS Inter Press Service Business
The Importance of Freedom and Self-Determination
Incarceration Nation, 2017, Donald "C-Note" Hooker
Freedom is never free. That's why we celebrate Black August, when our ancestors declared their freedom from oppression and slavery. As C-Note says, "I tell you a tree that grows up in prison ain't gonna have many leaves."
The freedom to make choices and control your own destiny is something that cannot be taken away from you unless you let it happen. By sharing his thoughts and artwork, C-Note reminds us that we must respect ourselves to be able to respect others. We honor Black August by celebrating those who have used their voice to challenge society to be better -- because if we can't do it for ourselves, how can we expect anyone else to do it for us? In C-Note's words" "Our fight isn't over yet."
Just as slaves fought against their oppressors with prayer, so too are modern prisoners doing what they can to speak out against injustice within America's corrupt prison system. In addition to writing letters and speaking out on social media, some prisoners use art as a means of expressing themselves while behind bars. These men (and women) are often referred to as prison artists or incarcerated artists -- whatever you call them, there's no denying that these individuals have an amazing talent for making beautiful things out of trash. Take artist Donald "C-Note" Hooker, for example.
Here, Editor Nube Brown (L) of the Black National Newspaper San Francisco Bay View poses with a C-Note original artwork Incarceration Nation.
C-Note's Incarceration Nation seen high on a billboard in Silicon Valley, California, as headlined in the Saturday, Oct. 30, 2021 - The Neo Jim Crow | Black Prisoner Invades Tech World.
C-Note's Incarceration Nation featured in the fashion line Mercy, by Fashion Designer Makenzie Stiles.
Status Quo vs. Speaking Out
C-Note's poetry is designed to invoke deep emotional passions to stir the writing of wrongs done today, or in times past. There is no other better time to do such a deep empathetic dive than Black August. C-Note's poetic thoughts are written as a stream of consciousness, primarily about his perspective on Black lives.
In 2018, C-Note created the paintoem Today We Are Sisters. A paintoem that admonishes Pro-life and Pro-choice advocates for unity to demand reparations for California women prisoners who were forcibly sterilized. Shortly after the 2021 release of 1-Artist; 1-Subject; 21-Works, a video on C-Note's artwork, which ended with Today We Are Sisters, the California legislation finally broke with its tradition of denying these women reparations and authorized $7.5 million reparations package to victims of California's history of forced sterilization.
His 2015 epic poem It Must End! (BLACK FEMALE BOYCOTTS OF BLACK MEN IN THE PEN), warned of the alienation by Black women towards incarcerated Black men were leading some to turn to psychotropic medication as a result of feelings of alienation.
His 2018 epic poem The World's Greatest Threat: Being Black With Self-Respect informed us, this was the greatest fear of the dominant culture.
In 2018, C-Note wrote the epic poem Can't Black Lives Matter Too???. It is a 700 plus-worded comeback poem to the political punditry that "All Lives Matter''. "All Lives Matter'' is a political reactionary cry to the political statement "Black Lives Matter."
C-Note's approach to "All Lives Matter" in his poem was to acknowledge the American tragedies to most of America's minority and ethic groups from Chinese exclusionary laws, mass lynchings of Italians, and the millions who died in Poland as the result of simultaneous invasions by Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's Russia. But ultimately, his poetic storytelling of 400 years of Black life in the United States did warrant the political statement "Black Lives Matter," without it being seen as an infringement on the rights or lives of other Americans that would justify their outcry by stating "All Lives Matter."
His 2020 poem Journey to Afrofuturism was recited at the 30th Annual Celebration of African American Poets and Their Poetry. Speculative City Magazine paid him for the piece to be published in its Winter 2020 Issue, #10 Afrofuturism. Speculative Fiction critic Charles Payseur of Quick Sip Reviews called it, "The 'true' path of afrofuturism," and at the conclusion of the 2021 fall event Afrofuturism Then and Now, held by the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), Journey to Afrofuturism was recited to close the event.
In what some are calling a blatant act of plagiarism, his 2003 epic poem THE CRIMINALIZATION OF OUR AMERICAN CIVILIZATION (This Is Not A Manifesto), which was recorded and published on SoundCloud in 2015, is the impetus behind conservative news outlet Newsmax TV's 60 minute news show The Balance, where host Eric Bolling at minute 51:13, recites his C-Note inspired epic Labor Day 2022 poem ERIC'S ODE TO BIDEN NATION.
Here, composer, pianist, vocalist, and Juilliard trained Samora Pinderhughes, who is known to hear music everywhere, as he weaves poetry, music, and theater together to address issues like prison reform, racial capitalism, and police brutality in his lyrics, poses with a C-Note Incarceration Nation Paintoem flier.
Urban Creativity Behind Bars
Decarcerate Now! (Protest Poster), 2020, Donald "C-Note" Hooker
Black August, named after a month in which African Americans were killed in disproportionate numbers during slave revolts and protests, is an ongoing call to action for incarcerated artists who are rarely heard from beyond prison walls. While C-Note's work is not explicitly political-very little of his work is-his words come from an honest place and highlight his personal thoughts on Black August: My heart goes out to those who have been lost due to racism and prejudice. I believe that if our ancestors did not fight so hard against slavery and oppression we would not be where we are today. His artwork gives us a rare glimpse into life inside a prison cell. It shows us how art can help transform lives, even when they're behind bars.
Here, California Prison Focus Editor-in-chief Kim Pollak with Watani Stiner, who spent 40 yrs. in prison, with C-Note's 2020 Protest posters, Decarcerate Now! and #SayHerName
Conclusion
Here, Silicon Valley Fine Art and Real Estate Broker Anna D. Smith poses outside of the Alameda County Jail with a C-Note #SayHerName Protest Poster.
Black August is a necessary time for us to reflect on how we've as a society contributed to a justice system that disproportionately places African Americans behind bars. C-Note is using his art to raise awareness about his personal experiences, and I hope you were able to learn from them as well.