The video for dead prez’s single "Mind Sex" begins as typical MTV fare, though stamped with the groups signature ethereal style it is, none-the-less, a flashy music video. However, a mid-video interlude provides a disturbing break from the norm. A young black man is taking a nap in a jail cell when a guard comes bye and wakes him up with a clatter of nightstick on steel bars "Wakey! Wakey ! You have a visitor," and the prisoner is ushered to the visiting room in shackles. There awaits a beautiful woman behind a bullet proof glass window ( from the content of the song and the way they interact, it can be assumed that they are lovers ), with a pan of the room we see this scenario is repeated with black and brown inmates smiling at their loved ones through the heavy glass. They smile and pick up the phone and thus begins the video’s excursion into the difficulty of carrying on a relationship through prison walls. Private phone calls and touching are impossibilities and sex is definitely out of the question, the members of dead prez (along with a host of other men of color, both young and old) portray prisoners braving the humiliation of daily prison life.. The video ends with an elderly prisoner performing a poem about a woman espousing the virtues of his beloved in a crowded chow hall. Through the seizure of the chow hall, the prisoners attempt to create an enunciative space from which to articulate the problems of developing love relationships inside prison walls; in her memoir "The Prisoner’s Wife" asha bandele explores the other side.

Writing from the same vein as playwright Ntozake Shange and scholar Michele Wallace, bandele’s work combats the idea of the black woman as an emotionless "superwoman" who is able to absorb all the hurt and strife and keep on. Some of the greatest moments in the book are when she lays herself bare and open and shows her weaknesses. "And I was always a girl. The girl who was frigid…She was the girl who had met men who touched her at her core, but men who she feared might discover what she believed was filth beneath her flesh. She would nearly freeze when those men touched her because she thought any honest move she made would give away the secrets that discolored her spirit."(156) Her discussion of her abusive relationships and even those which were simply unsatisfying; as well as her stories of healing and ritual makes this a very important black feminist narrative.

One of the most memorable scenes from the book is her first trailer visit. Trailer visits are when wives and family members are allowed to come and stay with their loved for a day or two. Newly married, asha arrives with her towels, sheets, sexy undergarments, condoms, romantic touches, and special food only to have her personal belongings put on public display by snooping cops. When she is finally allowed to go the trailer, she and Rashid attempt to transform the space, at least for a time into their own. Though having been together for three and a half years they were unfamiliar with each others’ bodies. She says, "…all those years when Rashid and I did not have the trailers, when we were forced to actually communicate on those six-hour visiting-room dates. Unlike all of my previous relationships, when, halfway through a discussion we would fall into bed fucking our issues away…." (157)They had not gone through many of the slow-paced rituals that so many lovers take for granted. So for a moment they tried to mentally carry themselves away and just enjoy being alone together. Though Rashid is no longer in his cell, the prison guards still come by for periodic head counts with loud raps of nightstick on trailer door; the intrusion of a state apparatus that is always already there.

I had a serious problem with Rashid’s one-dimensionality. As a reader I could not get really get a feel for the type of person he was and at points I actually rather disliked him ; and I felt that was due to misrepresentation. I would like to have seen the writer grapple more with issues of voice and representation. I am unsure as to whether this problem was due to the bandele’s writing style or the fact that prisoners have very little ability to be demonstrative of their opinions, wants, and desires. I just strongly feel that the writer could have worked on her portrayal of their interaction, because though this is, indeed, a love story the fact that he is a prisoner is what distinguishes it from many others, and she should not try to mute that fact.

Another criticism I have of this book is the writers inability to develop a clear political analysis of her relation ship on a greater scale. Though I have my own ideas that I read into the story I would be interested to hear the writer’s opinion. Though she talks about the way Rashid insisted on trying to mirror the relationship of George Jackson and Angela Davis, she does not explain in what way this highly-publicized relationship along with the relationships of millions of others contextualizes and politicizes her relationship from the very outset. I understand that the writer was trying to write her love story and was thus more poetic, but I would have appreciated her insights into the black genocide that the prison is (in no small part) facilitating.

- asha bandele (33)

This book, I would say, is not only an analysis of black love through prison bars but questions the black love under an oppressive racist state. While one old R&B crooner sang "I’m never ever gonna quit/ I’m never ever gonna stop…" , pop star Maxwell understands that they are only going be "rockin’ til the cops come knockin’." Many young black entertainers understand that regardless of their fame and wealth all of their relations are mitigated and defined by the state. Quotes such as the two above offer something to grapple with politically; the possibility that entering and maintaining relationships which are socially doomed or "down by law" can prove central to the construction of movements of political opposition.

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