Literacy as a tool to combat incarceration/March 23, 2019 version

LITERACY AS A TOOL TO COMBAT INCARCERATION

Each mouth can liberate its own story.

One of the adult prisoners at Orleans Justice Center (OJC) whom I'd been helping to prepare to take the HiSet Exam handed me an essay entitled "Alone."  It was not a required assignment.  He wrote the piece as a way of dealing with his experience of  trauma, the profound tragedy which destroyed his grandmother, his parents, all of his siblings except one, and his three sons.  It was an excellent first draft,  and I urged him to submit it to Peauxdunque Review. The editors loved it, and it will be published. A gifted writer, the prisoner used  literacy as a tool  to combat the agony of incarceration. He used literacy and creative thought to tell his unique story and to deepen our  awareness of why "incarceration" is as much a mental state as a physical one.

Awed by his honesty,  courage and bravery,  I wrote a kwansaba for him:

ALONE

( kwansaba for Prisoner # _______)

Alone, when you alone, speak of alone

as spasms of light in black holes.

Or else, alone, you visit unknown dread,

itself alone in a blood black fist

that pounds against even odds of fate.

Did you ponder, alone, how your spirit,

being an egg, alone refuses to crack?

Incarcerated people use literacy  (decoding of signs) to deal with their plight ----confinement, the burdens of anger, guilt, and shame, segregation from people who are nominally "free," obligation to pay for acts that are deemed criminal by the rule of law. In the most tragic instances, they pay with their lives for acts which it may eventually be proved they did not commit. Their stories liberate us from thinking  narrowly about the nature of incarceration.  In 2019, incarceration is a primal metaphor for our human condition.

For example, Frederick Douglass's 1845 autobiography and other life histories narrated  by enslaved people; Austin Reed’s “The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, or the Inmate of a Gloomy Prison,” dated 1858; the 1930s prison stories written by Chester Himes;   Richard Wright's Native Son; The Autobiography of Malcolm X; the prison writing of George Jackson (which should be read in concert with Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth );  the poetry Etheridge Knight wrote in prison ----all of these works expand ideas about how incarceration is a socially constructed feature of the criminal justice/injustice system. Writing about incarceration exposes an urgent need to ponder the vast, historical  discrepancy between the rule of law and the role of law in the United States of America.

 Michelle Alexander wrote The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) specifically for "people who care deeply about racial justice but who, for any number of reasons, do not yet appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color as a result of mass incarceration" and "for all those trapped within America's latest caste system"(quoted from her Preface).  Her book engenders ideas that pertain to links between the laws and policies which defined American slavery and the current inequities (read inequity as iniquity) that define what we call criminal justice. We should certainly consider that she was writing as much about the new Jane Crow as the new Jim Crow, in order to erase the notion that incarceration is only a male entitlement.  From the angle of 2010, Alexander brought to the foreground the "eerie silence" (174) we too often find regarding women and the criminal injustice system, a system stunningly dealt with in such novels as Sherley Anne Williams' s Dessa Rose (1986) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987).

 From the angle of literacy and American cultural  history, Patrick Elliot Alexander's From Slave Ship to Supermax: Mass Incarceration, Prisoner Abuse, and the New Neo-Slave Novel (2018) is a superb treatment of imprisoned intellectualism.  Do we know what we should learn from the film adaptation of  James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk? Do we know how literacy informs  women's imprisonment in Toni Morrison's Beloved, and the real life stories being told in 2019 by formerly incarcerated women in Louisiana?  Do we know what to make of incarceration depicted in Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying?  I do not have answers.  You have to think out your own answers.  I only have three suggestions about literacy as a tool to combat incarceration:

1) Teach children, ages 6 days old to 6 years old, the value of possessing critical literacies in American society. We may increase the possibility they will not be criminalized and  lynched by criminal justice.

2) Use literacy to enable prisoners to recognize their innate intelligence and humanity  and to minimize the inevitable frustrations of being in jail.

3) Use literacy to help formerly incarcerated people to re-enter American society and to maximize their capacity to struggle positively with the endless challenges of being American.  We may help to retard recidivism.

Literacy  is a tool to combat forms of mental incarceration which seem to be rampant in the 21st century.  When we ponder the metaphorical dimensions of  the concept  of "incarceration," we may recognize that all of us are incarcerated by something in everyday life.  Criminal justice is a microcosm of the larger systems of human thought and  existence. If we arrive at such recognition, we may be moved to have compassion for those who made unwise choices and defied the rule of law.  We may be moved to do more than just talk about the material differences of incarceration.  In the name of social justice we may persuade ourselves to invest our energy in action and in teaching  rather than being enthralled by televised talk.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            March 23, 2019