Prison Writing and the Literary World: Imprisonment, Institutionality and Questions of Literary Practice 9780367616236, 9781003105787

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: A Wide and Worlded Vision of Prison Writing
Problems and Silences
1 The Credibility of Elves?: Narrative Exclusion and Prison Writing
PoWs and Purges
2 German Military Internees Writing the First World War: Gender, Irony and Humour in the Camp Newspaper Stobsiade
3 The Prison Writings of Nikolai Bukharin
Prison Spaces and Nation (Re)Making
4 Prison Writing and the Algerian War of Independence
5 Writing from Robben Island: National Identity and the Apartheid Prison in South Africa
6 Writing South Africa’s Prisons into History
Censorship, Advocacy and Text Creation
7 “His Enemy’s Language”: African American Prison Life Writing, the Literary Forms of Institutional Power and George Jackson’s Soledad Brother
8 PEN and the Writer as Prisoner
9 Scribo Ergo Sum: Creating and Publishing Guantánamo Diary
From Life to Fiction
10 Writing Against the Regime: Metafiction in the Arabic Prison Novel
11 Anarcha-Feminism, Prison and Utopia: The Abolitionist Politics of Alison Spedding’s De cuando en cuando Saturnina and La segunda vez como farsa
Women, Theatre and Clean Break
12 Something About Us: Clean Break’s Theatre of Necessity
13 Unlocking Potential: The Role of Theatre Writing in Prisons in the Work of Clean Break
Literary Workshops
14 Literary Studies and the Teaching of Prison Texts
15 Folsom Prison Writing Workshop
Index

Citation preview

Prison Writing and the Literary World

Prison Writing and the Literary World tackles international prison writing and writing about imprisonment in relation to questions of literary representation and formal aesthetics, the “value” or “values” of literature, textual censorship and circulation, institutional networks and literarycritical methodologies. It offers scholarly essays exploring prison writing in relation to wartime internment, political imprisonment, resistance and independence creation, regimes of terror, and personal narratives of development and awakening that grapple with race, class and gender. Cutting across geospatial divides while drawing on nation- and region-specific expertise, it asks readers to connect the questions, examples and challenges arising from prison writing and writing about imprisonment within the UK and the USA, but also across continental Europe, Stalinist Russia, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East. It also includes critical reflection pieces from authors, editors, educators and theatre practitioners with experience of the fraught, testing and potentially inspiring links between prison and the literary world. Michelle Kelly is a Departmental Lecturer in World Literature in English at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on South African and world literature, confessional narrative forms, the intersections between law and literature, and literature and other art forms. She has published several articles on J.M. Coetzee, and is completing a monograph on Coetzee and confession. Claire Westall is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her forthcoming book is The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature. She is also co-author of The Public on the Public (2015), and co-editor of both Cross-Gendered Literary Voices (2012) and Literature of an Independent England (2013).

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

121 Painting Words Aesthetics and the Relationship between Image and Text Beatriz González-Moreno and Fernando González-Moreno 122 The Role of the Literary Canon in the Teaching of Literature Robert J. Aston 123 The New American West in Literature and the Arts A Journey Across Boundaries Edited by Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo 124 Lorca in English A History of Manipulation through Translation Andrew Samuel Walsh 125 War Comics A Postcolonial Perspective Jeanne-Marie Viljoen 126 Trauma and Transformation in African Literature J. Roger Kurtz 127 Spatial Literary Studies Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination Edited by Robert T. Tally Jr. 128 Prison Writing and the Literary World Imprisonment, Institutionality and Questions of Literary Practice Edited by Michelle Kelly and Claire Westall

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Prison Writing and the Literary World Imprisonment, Institutionality and Questions of Literary Practice Edited by Michelle Kelly and Claire Westall

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business ©2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Michelle Kelly and Claire Westall to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Westall, Claire, editor. | Kelly, Michelle, (Professor of English), editor. Title: Prison writing and the literary world : imprisonment, institutionality and questions of literary practice / edited by Michelle Kelly and Claire Westall. Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Prison Writing and the Literary World tackles international prison writing and writing about imprisonment in relation to questions of literary representation and formal aesthetics, the “value” or “values” of literature, textual censorship and circulation, institutional networks, and literarycritical methodologies”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020026583 | ISBN 9780367616236 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003105787 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Prisoners as authors. | Prisoners’ writings— History and criticism. | Prisoners—Intellectual life. Classification: LCC PN494 .P88 2020 | DDC 809/.89206927—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026583 ISBN: 978-0-367-61623-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-10578-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: A Wide and Worlded Vision of Prison Writing

ix xv 1

C L A I R E W E S TA L L

Problems and Silences

19

1 The Credibility of Elves?: Narrative Exclusion and Prison Writing

21

S A R A H C O LV I N

PoWs and Purges

39

2 German Military Internees Writing the First World War: Gender, Irony and Humour in the Camp Newspaper Stobsiade

41

A N N E S C H WA N

3 The Prison Writings of Nikolai Bukharin

58

H OWA R D C AYG I L L

Prison Spaces and Nation (Re)Making

75

4 Prison Writing and the Algerian War of Independence

77

E M I L I E MOR I N

5 Writing from Robben Island: National Identity and the Apartheid Prison in South Africa DA N I E L RO U X

93

vi Contents 6 Writing South Africa’s Prisons into History

110

J O N N Y S T E I N B E RG

Censorship, Advocacy and Text Creation

121

7 “His Enemy’s Language”: African American Prison Life Writing, the Literary Forms of Institutional Power and George Jackson’s Soledad Brother

123

S I M O N RO L S T O N

8 PEN and the Writer as Prisoner

139

M I C H E L L E K E L LY

9 Scribo Ergo Sum: Creating and Publishing Guantánamo Diary

156

M O H A M E D O U O U L D S L A H I A N D L A R RY S I E M S

From Life to Fiction

171

10 Writing Against the Regime: Metafiction in the Arabic Prison Novel

173

R . S H A R E A H TA L E G H A N I

11 Anarcha-Feminism, Prison and Utopia: The Abolitionist Politics of Alison Spedding’s De cuando en cuando Saturnina and La segunda vez como farsa

189

JOEY W H I T F I ELD

Women, Theatre and Clean Break

207

12 Something About Us: Clean Break’s Theatre of Necessity

209

C AO I M H E M c AV I N C H E Y

13 Unlocking Potential: The Role of Theatre Writing in Prisons in the Work of Clean Break A N N A H E R R M A N N , D E B O R A H B RU C E A N D C L A R E B A R S T OW

227

Contents  vii

Literary Workshops

237



Notes on Contributors

Clare Barstow studied Classics and Ancient History at Royal Holloway College before taking a diploma in Journalism at the London College of Printing. She has worked on many diverse titles including Tatler, Music Week, Travel Bulletin, The Hardman Trust Directory and Inside Times. She has had articles, short stories and poetry published in books nationally. For many years she reviewed plays, films and music gigs for Radio Thamesmead. As a visual artist, she has exhibited at Belgravia Gallery, the Royal College of Arts, KPMG, the Old Diorama Arts Centre, the Watts Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Royal Festival Hall. She has also curated two exhibitions at spaces managed by the arts charity Uthink in Holborn and Purley. She has written several plays which have been performed at various theatres in London, nationally and internationally. She does voluntary work for several charities and has helped in the setting up of a hostel in Brixton for women with complex needs. Deborah Bruce  is a freelance playwright and director. She has taught and directed plays in many prisons across the UK, including HMPs Blundeston, Wayland, Norwich, Downview and Send. As a writer, her plays include The Distance (Orange Tree and Sheffield Crucible), Godchild (Hampstead Theatre), The House They Grew Up In (Headlong/Chichester Festival Theatre) and Same (National Theatre Connections). Deborah was Resident Writer at Clean Break for eighteen months and has written Joanne and Dixon and Daughters for the company. Howard Caygill  is Professor of Modern European Philosophy in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. His most recent book is Kafka: In Light of the Accident (Bloomsbury, 2018). His previous books include On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (2013), Levinas and the Political (2002), Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (1998), A Kant Dictionary (1998) and Art of Judgement (1995). He has also written on the prison notebooks of Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Levinas.

x  Notes on Contributors Sarah Colvin is Schröder Professor of German in the University of Cambridge, and a Steering Committee member for the National Alliance for Arts in Criminal Justice. She is currently completing a prisoner’s-eye history of Germany called The Story of Germany Told by its Prisoners. She has published on gender, culture, prison writing and arts in prisons, and co-authored evaluations of the Creative Scotland-funded arts in prisons project (Inspiring Change 2011) and Clean Break’s theory of change (2016). She is the author of three monographs: Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism (2009), Women and German Drama (2003), The Rhetorical Feminine: Gender and Orient on the German Stage (1999), and the editor of (most recently) Women, Global Protest Movements and Political Agency: Rethinking the Legacy of 1968 (Routledge, 2019, with Katharina Karcher), Gender, Emancipation, and Political Violence: Rethinking the Legacy of 1968 (Routledge, 2019, with Katharina Karcher) and The Routledge Handbook of German Politics and Culture (2015; paperback 2018). Anna Herrmann is Joint Artistic Director of Clean Break. She has been working in the field of theatre and social change for thirty years, specialising in theatre and participation in the UK and abroad. She has been with Clean Break since 2002 as the Head of Education, leading the company’s award-winning work with women in the criminal justice system and women at risk of entering it. Anna is co-author of Making a Leap – Theatre of Empowerment: A Practical Handbook for Creative Drama Work with Young People (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1999). She has an MA in Arts Education from Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and a PG Cert (Distinction) in Race and Ethnic Relations. She is a regular visiting lecturer on Applied Theatre courses at Universities across the UK and between 2006 and 2018 she was a trustee of Leap Confronting Conflict – a UK-based national charity specialising in youth and conflict. Anna is also a trained coach and regularly mentors artists in participatory settings. Michelle Kelly  is a Departmental Lecturer in World Literature in English at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on South African and world literature, confessional narrative forms, the intersections between law and literature, and literature and other art forms. She has published several articles on J.M. Coetzee, and is completing a monograph on Coetzee and confession. Caoimhe McAvinchey is Professor of Socially Engaged and Contemporary Performance at Queen Mary University of London. Prior to this she established the MA Applied Drama programme at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her publications include Theatre & Prison (2011), Performance and Community: Case Studies and Commentary (2013),

Notes on Contributors  xi Phakama: Making Participatory Performance (2018), with Lucy Richardson and Fabio Santos, and Applied Theatre: Women and the Criminal Justice System (2020). She is currently working on a monograph about Clean Break theatre company. Emilie Morin is a Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. She has a particular interest in forms of political writing. Her books include Beckett’s Political Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and the co-edited collections Theatre and Human Rights after 1945: Things Unspeakable (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Roger Robinson is a writer and educator who has taught and performed worldwide and is an experienced workshop leader and lecturer on poetry. He was chosen by Decibel as one of fifty writers who have influenced the black-British writing canon. He has received commissions from the National Trust, London Open House, BBC, the National Portrait Gallery, V&A, INIVA, MK Gallery and Theatre Royal Stratford East, where he was also associate artist. He is an alumnus of The Complete Works. His workshops have been part of a shortlist for the Gulbenkian Prize for Museums and Galleries and were also a part of the Webby Award-winning Barbican’s Can I Have a Word. He is the winner of the 2019 TS Eliot Prize and his latest poetry collection A Portable Paradise was selected as a New Statesman book of the year. He was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize, the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize and highly commended by the Forward Poetry Prize 2013. He has toured extensively with the British Council and is a co-founder of both Spoke Lab and the international writing collective Malika’s Kitchen. He is the lead vocalist and lyricist for King Midas Sound and has also recorded solo albums with Jahtari Records. Simon Rolston  is an expert in twentieth-century and contemporary American literature, with a focus on life-writing, crime and the American prison system. He teaches in the Department of English at Langara College in Vancouver, BC, Canada. His work has been published in American Studies, Critical Survey and MELUS, and he is currently completing a book project with Wilfred Laurier University Press about prison life-writing and the literary history of the American prison system. Daniel Roux  is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. His research focuses specifically on South African prison writing. He contributed a chapter on South African prison writing to The Cambridge History of South African Literature, as

xii  Notes on Contributors well as a chapter on Nelson Mandela’s writing to The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela, in addition to publishing a range of research articles on apartheid and post-apartheid prison writing. He is also interested in the encounter between early modern literature and the prison, and is one of the co-authors of the chapter on Shakespeare’s tragedies in South Africa in the Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy. Anne Schwan is a Professor in English at Edinburgh Napier University. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century literature and culture, gender studies, crime and critical prison studies. Her publications include How to Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (Pluto, 2011, with Stephen Shapiro), Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writing about Prison in Nineteenth-Century England (University of New Hampshire Press, 2014), and an article and special issue in Television & New Media (2016, edited with Sarah Artt) on Orange Is the New Black. Schwan set up an award-winning partnership with the Scottish Prison Service and Fife College and, in the context of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant for impact and engagement (2018, with Stefan Manz, Iain Davie and Andrew Frayn), oversaw the production of theatre and music performances as they would have been staged by German internees at Stobs camp in 1917. She is co-founder and convenor (with Sarah Armstrong) of the Scottish Universities-Prisons (UP) Network. Larry Siems is a writer and human rights activist whose work has appeared in a wide range of publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Slate and The Nation. He edited and introduced Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary (2015), the first-ever account of the notorious facility by a still-detained prisoner. He is also the author of The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program (2011), which drew, which drew on 140,000 pages of formerly secret government documents to construct a comprehensive narrative of the Bush administration’s torture programme, and Between the Lines: Letters from Undocumented Mexican and Central American Immigrants and Their Families and Friends (1992). He served for many years as director of the Freedom to Write Programs at PEN USA West in Los Angeles and then PEN America in New York, and is currently Chief of Staff of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Mohamedou Ould Slahi is a writer and an electrical engineer. He graduated from Gerhard Mercator University of Duisburg in Germany with a degree in Microelectronics/Telecommunications. In 2001, he was living and working in his home country of Mauritania when he was wrongfully detained and renditioned to Jordan, beginning an ordeal

Notes on Contributors  xiii that he would chronicle in his book Guantánamo Diary (2015). The manuscript, which he wrote in his isolation cell in the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, remained classified for almost eight years and was finally released, with substantial redactions, in 2013. It was first published in the USA and the UK in January 2015, and has since been published in twenty-five languages. After fifteen years of detention, Slahi was released on 17 October of 2016 to Mauritania. Since then, Slahi has been living in the city of Nouakchott, where he continues to write and speak and do as much as he can for humanity. Jonny Steinberg is Professor of African Studies at Oxford University and the author of several books about everyday life in the wake of South Africa’s transition democracy. Among them are A Man of Good Hope (2014), One Day in Bethlehem (2019), and The Number (2004). R. Shareah Taleghani is an Assistant Professor and Director of Middle East Studies at Queens College, the City University of New York. Her research focuses on the relationships between dissent, cultural production and human rights in the Middle East. She has published articles and reviews in The International Journal of Middle East Studies, Middle East Report, Afkar/Ideas, The Journal of Arabic Literature and The Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. She is the author of Readings in Syrian Prison Literature: the Poetics of Human Rights (Syracuse University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Generations of Dissent: Cultural Production, Intellectuals and the State in the Middle East and North Africa (Syracuse University Press, 2020). Claire Westall  is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her forthcoming book is The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature. She is also co-author of The Public on the Public (2015), and co-editor of both CrossGendered Literary Voices (2012) and Literature of an Independent England (2013). Joey Whitfield  is a Lecturer at Cardiff University where he works on questions of crime, justice and the state in twentieth- and twentyfirst-century Latin American culture. His book, Prison Writing of Latin America (Bloomsbury, 2018), is a comparative study of Latin American prison writing from Cuba, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Bolivia and Brazil.

Acknowledgements

As with any book, and especially essay collections, there are a good number of people to thank for helping bring the project to fruition. Of course, our most sizeable thanks must go to the contributors here whose chapters have provided the intellectual grounding, inspiration and detail necessary to make the book. They have also enlivened the editing process as we have progressed. Their generosity, professionalism, insight and collegiality have been important to us as editors and have reinforced our sense of the supportive and important networks that are built through collaborative work. In this context, we also want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their blend of positive and constructive feedback in the early phase of our book plan. Before this project was a book, or even a book proposal, though, the thinking behind it shaped some of our teaching in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, and motivated our commitment to a series of student projects and events under the project heading Prison Fictions and Human Rights (PFHR). We want to thank all of the students who’ve taken the Fictions of Human Rights module, especially those studying with us during its first three outings, between the summers of 2010 and 2013. Moreover, we want to highlight the extra-curricular interest that came from students connected to the PFHR project. We are particularly grateful for the hard work of the students who took on event marketing, preparation and organisation tasks via the @work initiative: Michelle Adams, Kate Argent, Joanna Barrow, Carys Brain, Edward Greenwood, Lydia Mihailovic, Katrina Northern, Mary O’Connor, Alex Pollard, Madeleine Scherer, Alex Swadling and Rebecca Tivey. We want to recognise all the students who helped establish the University of York’s English PEN Centre (York PEN), which gave expression to the energy behind the PFHR project and is an important part of its legacy. The students were aided immeasurably by the enthusiasm and support of Philip Cowell of English PEN. The number of students who contributed to running and bringing life to York PEN is too great for us to name everyone here but in addition to those already listed, special mention should go to Lucy Davies and Katie McKenna for establishing the first Facebook page, to Lucy Potter, Katie Markham

xvi Acknowledgements and Ruth Ramsden-Karelse for acting as first points of contact for other students, and to Seb Brixley-Williams for establishing York PEN’s wordpress site and acting as the branch’s first chair. Thanks also to all those who have contributed to the committee and running of York PEN since its launch, especially Connor Briggs for inviting Larry Siems to York, and to its current student leaders. Long may this student-led branch of English PEN continue! We also want to reiterate the thanks we have previously extended to all of the PFHR guests, whether internal staff and students or members of the public. We had sizeable audiences for all our occasions, and while we worked hard to make events happen and keep them open, it was largely the efforts of our students and the impact of our speakers that made the project a success. Hence, we want to thank again all the speakers who came to York and helped make the PFHR project so popular with and important to our students, and whose formal talks, informal conversations and explanations of working life helped shape our thinking about the connections between prison, writing and literary education. Some of these guest speakers have become contributors to this collection, but there are others we’d also like to name here: Stephen Beyer, as Chair of the Independent Monitoring Board at HMP-YOI Askham Grange, Kate Hendry, Anthony Levin, Robert McKay, Margie Orford, Lucy Powell, Lynda Radley, Gillian Slovo, Robert Sharp as Head of Campaigns and Communications at English PEN, Phil Tempest, as Head of Residential HMP Full Sutton, Baroness Jenny Tonge and David Wilson. Erwin James deserves a special note of warm thanks for responding to unsolicited student enquiries early on, and for coming to multiple events at York in response to sustained student, staff and public interest. We also want to recognise the contribution of Helen Cadbury, a successful York-based writer who taught at Askham Grange and came to talk to our students about writing workshops in prison settings. Sadly, Helen passed away as this book was being created. We remember her warmly and continue to offer our condolences to her family and loved ones. During the PFHR project and the work for this book, we have benefitted from collegial, departmental and institutional support, including when things were very far from smooth sailing. As our, then, Head of Department, Helen Fulton backed our events and activities, and also gave permission for an English department student visit to Askham Grange to watch the Clean Break production There Are Mountains in November 2012. She also endorsed our nomination by other senior (and notably supportive) departmental colleagues, namely, Matthew Campbell, Hugh Haughton and Derek Attridge, for a Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in the Inclusivity Category – an award gratefully received. From these early beginnings onwards, we have sought and obtained the funding necessary to bring our research, teaching and publication

Acknowledgements  xvii activities together, and to do so in a way that allows students, staff and members of the public to engage in open and ongoing intellectual exploration. We have used our funding to support visitor events, to pay authors, to organise events and trips, and to ensure that attendance at any PFHR or related occasion is open to all and free. We have always sought to use our funding to make our events and this publication as inclusive as possible, and we hope this spirit continues in any conversations initiated by the ideas mapped out in the book. For such funding support we want to thank the University of York’s Research Led Project and Rapid Response funds for their support across 2011–2013, the British Academy for a 2016 Small Grant which supported some of the research and events that took place at Oxford, and the University of Oxford’s John Fell Fund for a 2018 award that helped ensure contributions for this book could come from writers working outside of universities and/or in conjunction with professional authors beyond the academy. At Oxford a one-day colloquium in 2016, “Writers, Rights, Institutions”, brought together scholars working at various intersections of literature and rights, with a strong focus on prison writing, and was possible thanks to funding from a British Academy Small Grant, Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute and TORCH. Thanks go to the speakers at that event for bringing such a variety of perspectives on the ways in which the links between literature and human rights take shape within institutional settings – a way of thinking that has been important in the development of this book. Participants included Sarah Colvin, Emilie Morin and Larry Siems, who contribute to this volume, as well as David Attwell, Poul Duedahl, Ann Harrison, Michael Holland, Marina MacKay, Peter D. McDonald, Asha Rogers, Lyndsey Stonebridge and Preti Taneja. Conversations over the years with Kate Highman and Peter McDonald have been particularly fruitful, as have the conversations that developed with Rachel Potter and Katie Cooper through their invitation to speak at the University of East Anglia, and the Writers and Free Expression AHRC-funded project that all four are involved in. Thanks must also go to Tessa Roynon, Jonathan Herring, Charles Foster and Imogen Goold for the interdisciplinary possibilities opened up by the Oxford Fiction and Human Rights Network, as well as to TORCH and the Bonavero Institute for Human Rights for supporting the network. Special thanks are due to Helen Small and Dan Wakelin in the Faculty of English at Oxford for their invaluable advice at key moments of various funding application processes. Ideas have also been quickened and sharpened by several cohorts of MSt students at Oxford, especially those who took the Prison Writing C Course in 2017 and 2019, and we anticipate future contributions to this field from them. We want to thank a gaggle of academic colleagues and friends (not yet mentioned) for supporting our initiatives at York, Oxford and beyond: Anna Bernard, Elleke Boehmer, Ziad Elmasafy, Mary Fairclough, Paul

xviii Acknowledgements Gready, Mary Luckhurst, Zoe Norridge, Bryan Radley, Deborah Russell and Lars Waldorf, and to the administrative staff at York and Oxford, past and present, who’ve helped us along the way – particularly Helen Barrett and Katie MacCurrach. Where our personal debts of gratitude extend far and wide to all those offering us – individually and collectively – emotional and intellectual support, we also have a debt of thanks to the publisher for the many pragmatic ways in which this project has been helped along and through to completion. At Routledge we want to mark our appreciation for the early commissioning interest and advice of Polly Dodson, the review and contractual oversight of Jennifer Abbott, the assistance that came from Mitchell Manners’ ability to answer all manner of minor questions at submission, and, more broadly, for the copy editing and production assistance we received. Thanks also go to Stephanie Lambert for creating our index. There are others. We appreciate you all.

Introduction A Wide and Worlded Vision of Prison Writing Claire Westall

When you are interested in prison accounts as a genre you will soon see that prisons are pretty much the same the world over. (Breytenbach, 1984, 339)

Opening The drive to incarcerate is a global phenomenon, and one that has accelerated, especially along race and class lines, with the neoliberalisation of first world economies (Wacquant, 2009). There is also growing interest – popular, media and scholarly – in what life is like “inside” carceral spaces: inside prisons and young offender institutions, detention centres and military and paramilitary locations where people are held or “disappeared”. Such locations should be of interest to us all. Not because of some spectacularising and exploitative voyeurism (think fly-on-the wall TV and tabloid headlines, just to start), but rather because they provide important counterpoints to the day-to-day security and mobility, the freedom, that most of us take for granted. Prisons are particularly intriguing in this sense because their “public” status, ubiquity and physical enormity sit alongside a common view of them as hidden and sealed spaces beyond the comprehension of those “outside”. Consequently, bridges between the “inside” and the “outside” are important for any conception of prison and its effects. Prison writing is one such bridge. As well as presenting prison life to external readers, prison writing, in its varying modes, can also provide opportunities for the incarcerated to express themselves, critique the system of detention, and document their struggle for survival and sanity – a struggle similar to the people incarcerated alongside them and even those far away, in other times and places. Within and beyond the individual and context-specific details of any single text, prison writing from across the world shares key features and tensions in its efforts to address imprisoned life, and specifically in its negotiation with the authority of the prison system and the authority, as authenticity, expected of and attributed to inmates who write. As Breyten Breytenbach writes in The True Confessions of

2  Claire Westall an Albino Terrorist (1984), there is an international continuity to the manner in which modern carceral spaces function and are experienced, and there is also an international or worldly continuity evident within prison writing. Prison Writing and the Literary World examines underexplored examples of prison writing and writing about imprisonment from across the globe. It is premised upon a worlded view of the structural violence underpinning global imprisonment practices and an appreciation of the complicated ways in which prisons can become sites of creativity and resistance. Across its collected essays, the book investigates political and artistic representations of detention, the nuance and impact of writing from prison, and efforts to retell or recreate carceral pressure points within prison writing. It is also concerned with the values associated with literature, and the connections between prison writing and the institutional and cultural networks that inhibit but also shape such work and its reception. The chapters tackle the detainment of known writers and the emergence of new authors, individual and collective resistance, creative freedoms, self-expression, censorship and survival tactics, alongside and within analyses of literary genre, formal aesthetic strategies, and the complexities of text creation and dissemination. Many of the essays extend and intensify the important idea of prison life-writing as a unique mode of life-writing produced under formidable conditions of inequality and systemic as well as interpersonal violence: as Ioan Davies summarises, prison writing is “centrally about violence” (1990, 16). As a whole the collection is founded on the idea that prison conditions mean that any literary analysis gains substantially from an interdisciplinary lens or dialogue. So, while some areas of sociology, criminology and law dealing with penal practices are beyond our remit, contributors mobilise insights from socio-political, historical, economic and architectural domains of knowledge as part of literary-critical readings. The book also weaves in a number of directly reflexive essays in which authors, editors and educators revisit and probe their own experiences of prison writing – with some recounting their personal and/or professional experiences of the fraught, testing and potentially inspiring links between the prison and the world of literature. In this way, and with an interest in the position of prison writing within English Literature, we hope that readers will access debates about imprisonment and literature through a recognition of the compromising battles that bring prison writing to its audiences – audiences who typically enjoy a clear degree of privilege in relation to those behind the stories. Within a world-literary frame (WReC, 2015), the essays here stretch forward historically from the First World War, and stretch out geographically to consider case studies from the UK and the USA as well as from continental Europe, Stalinist Russia, Africa, the Americas and the Middle East. The chapters tackle primary sources originally written

Introduction  3 in German, French, Russian and Arabic, as well as English (in multiple forms). Typically, contributing authors translate materials directly themselves, including for rare, difficult to obtain or previously untranslated or unpublished works. In its historical, geographical and linguistic range, the book is deliberately broad, and this broad approach is also seen in the inclusion of different categories of prison and prisoners, covering wartime internment, political detention, independence movements, regimes of terror, and narratives of individual awakening and development that grapple with race, class and gender. Where some essays focus on prison-bound texts and authors, individually or comparatively, others address wider debates about the overlaps between imprisonment, institutionality and writing, covering, for example: writing within or about particular carceral institutions; charities or NGOs whose advocacy activities have a writing focus; literary and creative programmes within prison; the activities of publishers and educationalists; and state policy. In many ways, then, the collection might be defined by the differences the essays point up. For us, though, there is more commonality than diversity at issue, and more to be gained from an understanding of similarity and inter-relation, especially given the various forms of segregation and exclusion presented, and the way that all prison-bound writing strikes as “political” in the face of state control and large-scale, international patterns of exploitation and population management. It seems to us that even (or especially) when inmates or protagonists are not marked as politically motivated actors and commentators, their effort to speak from or about incarceration is always-already political because it unmasks, challenges and redefines what is seen, heard and addressed as meaningful, including within the field of literature. Relatedly, then, the range on display here also compels us, as editors, to explain our internationalised and expansive appreciation of prison writing and writing about imprisonment as something that can tell us about our investment – as readers, writers, scholars and students – in the significance of literature and the operations of the literary world-system.

Definitional Grounds and Boundaries In this context, and as in any introductory piece, we here map this book’s connection to existing scholarship, and unpack our key and titular terms – “prison writing” and “the literary world” – so as to establish the definitional grounds and boundaries framing the contributions to follow. Turning to “prison writing” first, then, we recognise that this domain, often labelled “prison literature”, has gained some academic traction since the 1960s and 1970s, most obviously in the USA with the efforts of Bruce Franklin and others. More recently, since the early 2000s approximately, there has been a rise in interest – though it remains a relatively niche area – in the relationship between prison and the arts, and

4  Claire Westall how prison writing and education programmes might be more closely bound to external activities and institutions, including universities. The growing academic profile of prison writing and other artistic endeavours within prisons brings a need to move beyond (yet still with) efforts at raising awareness of existing texts, authors, genres and artistic techniques arising from carceral spaces, and into new modes of critical examination. This approach was taken in two journal special issues from 2011 and their editorials helped us imagine the foundations of this collection. In her field-guiding editorial for Critical Survey’s “Reading and Writing in Prison” issue, Anne Schwan made the case for the “cultural significance” of “prison writing beyond canonical authors” and argued that “a space for radical pedagogy and social transformation” can spring from consideration of prison texts (2011, 1). Relatedly, in their editorial opening for “Prison Writing/Writing the Prison in Canada” in Canadian Literature, Roxanne Rimstead and Deena Rymhs explained that they included – as we do here – essays tackling writing directly from prisons alongside fictional texts about imprisonment, noting that prison is used as “both metaphor and experience” across an eclectic range of texts that meet or intersect “around the scripting of prison”, “the carceral state”, voice and the functions of “space and collectives beyond as well as within prison walls” (2011, 1–2). They also suggested that “prisoners are not as isolated from literary culture […] as one might believe” and that “it is literary criticism that has yet to catch up with [the] rich pollinations” that arise from considering prison and writing together (2), – a sentiment that we would like to echo. Like Rimstead and Rymhs, we use the term prison writing, and, as with prison literature, we take this to mean writing produced by authors with experience of incarceration – largely, but not only, prisoners and former prisoners – and writing, including fiction from beyond the prison, that seeks to engage the experience of imprisonment directly. With well-known texts and authors, carceral compositions and reflections are sometimes found within specific literary subfields or theoretical approaches without their prison context being a key point of attention (as with the writing of Antonio Gramsci, for example). Prison writing, understood as a genre, is not part of the canon or even commonly found on the periphery of literary studies. In fact, prison writing is most often the kind of writing that emerges within prisons and rarely makes it beyond the prison walls or prison-linked education and journalism activities. When such writing does get “out” it is mostly in the form of small and independent print runs for supported projects and groups. Sometimes, though, it is anthologised and circulated in small- or medium-scale print releases linked to specific prisoners’ groups or advocacy work. In 2011, as we began our Prison Fictions and Human Rights project (see below), we drew on two such anthologies: Robin Levi and Ayelet Waldman’s Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons (2011) and

Introduction  5 Bell Gale Chevigny’s Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing (1999) (which features in Chapter 8). And our thinking is informed by many more anthologies than it is possible to list here. As such anthologies attest, prison writing includes prose, poetry and drama. Its dominant modes are the memoir, diary, letter and related forms of (auto)biographical representation and testimonial narrative. When fiction emerges, it is often tellingly close to the author’s life and prison involvement – so close, in fact, that Joyce Carol Oates coined the term “memoirist fiction” to describe the fictional reimagining of prison offered as “vividly realist” (2014, 15). Not all prison fictions, though, are “vividly realist”, even when they draw on personal experiences of imprisonment. Hence we also want to use the term prison writing to include examples where the bind between author experience and narrative is looser: where metafictional playfulness might complicate the relationship between reality, prison and prose (Chapter 10); where fiction is produced within prison but offers a utopic counter-logic (Chapter 11). We also, though, want to allow prison writing to encompass works that do not arise from personal experience at all, appreciating that fiction can help render and give voice to hard-to-hear stories of incarceration, as was recently recognised when Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019) won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In Chapter 14 the construction of inmate authenticity and the class politics of an entirely fictional prison (or more exactly borstal) in Alan Sillitoe’s “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” help illustrate the teaching of prison writing and film. That said, nearly all of the authors studied here are “prison authors”, some having been authors imprisoned because of their politics while others turned to writing during their incarceration – those Yenna Wu calls “cell-made writers” (2011, 2). As Wu suggests, writers put into prison frequently become “more mature and effective” authors while “inside”, and other inmates are often motivated to write because of their detention experiences (2). Geoffrey Bould similarly explains how, for authors entering prison the “urge to communicate overrides all else and [can give] them the will to live”, and for many others “imprisonment awaken[s] a creativity born of the need to sort out their feelings” (2005, xii). While this need for emotional work implies a strong focus on the individual and their singular story of self-management, it is clear that within prison writing there is an ongoing and complex negotiation between the individual story and its communal representativeness, its ability to speak for a group and about common experiences as it expresses the fate of a single body and voice. This nexus of individual and collective experience, witnessing and story-making is in evidence across the chapters here, in relation to prisoners of war, nationalist freedom fighters and future leaders, Black Power figures and female prisoners. In adopting the term prison writing over prison literature, we are taking a step back from the value judgements that determine whether

6  Claire Westall or not particular texts are understood as literary and thereby worthy of attention and analysis. We take much from scholarly efforts to bring prison literature into the academy, and to demonstrate the abundance, insight and impact of authors with experience of imprisonment. We recognise that efforts to advance prison literature have often centred upon the appreciation of prison authors understood as (let’s say) “ordinarily criminal”, who often lack formal education and have had relatively little exposure to literary culture. Such authors are typically received – when they are received – quite differently from political prisoners or prisoners of conscience, including imprisoned writers who are more commonly endorsed within literary circles (perhaps because their imprisonment is more readily open to critique and their cultural positions are frequently closer to those studying their work). Thus, the category of prison literature is a legitimising one, amplifying texts and voices that would otherwise go unheard, but also, perhaps, reinforcing the need for legitimation and acceptance within an established (and institutional) understanding of literature. Our sense is that Franklin’s prison-inspired undercutting of the presumptions of literary studies is at its most forceful when the label “literature” is relinquished. Franklin suggests that prison literature “dramatize[s] starkly” the challenge posed by questions levelled at literature’s foundations: “Is ‘great’ literature distinguished by its timelessness and aesthetic excellence, or is the value of literature largely determined by its social content?”; “Are aesthetic standards themselves expressions of class, gender, and ethnic values?”; and “Are complexity and ambiguity the hallmarks of literary excellence or are simplicity and accessibility literary virtues?” (1998, 13). We contend that the challenge posed to literature by prison texts is diluted by the term prison literature, that prison writing is a more appropriate category for such a critique, and that prison writing helps resist the canonising privileging of some texts over others, which is another of literature’s exclusionary strategies. In the opening chapter here, Sarah Colvin takes up this debate and supports Dylan Rodríguez’s critique of “prison literature” as an “exercise in domestication” looking to establish “order and coherence” in a way that undermines the challenge of disorder and chaotic survival present in prison writing (Rodríguez, 2002, 409–411, original emphasis). This resonates with our efforts to focus on the institutions through which prison writing emerges and circulates, and our concerns about the conditions under which institutionalised acceptance occurs. Colvin also indicates, in her chapter, that the term prison writing helps reinforce how such writing is “readable not only as literature but [also] as history and documentary”. Again, this seems right to us and, like Colvin, we want to remember that recognition of the important freedom-creating potential of prison writing should not erase the fact that neither prison writing, nor academic engagement with prison writing, is always or only emancipatory. Complications abound.

Introduction  7 In addition, the term prison writing is specifically useful for drawing attention to both the end product – the text created – and the process of creation, the act of writing itself. This strikes as appropriate because writing within and about prisons is never easy. There are always psychological, physical and institutional hurdles at work – as many of the chapters demonstrate. Writing can be prohibited, require contraband, demand secrecy and present risk. With the label prison writing, there is also recognition of the unconventional forms of inscription that can occur in such circumstances, as with messages on walls or, as Bould recounts, writing “between the lines of other books, on soap or on linen sheets” (2005, xxii). Examples abound in the essays that follow. An emphasis on writing also acknowledges the necessity of always having to manage the censorship regimes in place, especially when writing letters – possibly the prison form par excellence. In these and other related ways, prison itself implies mediated, monitored and managed communication, and the label prison writing helps remind us of the complexities of acts of writing, the lengths to which some have had to go to get their words out into the world (Chapter 9), and the discursive scripts that structure the lives of prisoners, and influence their writing and the stories they tell of themselves, in print and otherwise. But writing can also be demanded by prison and state authorities in ways that produce informative texts not readily understood as literature. A number of chapters (most explicitly Chapters 3 and 10) describe writing as part of a strategy of torture and propaganda, and how the production of confessions runs alongside furtive efforts at self-expression, sometimes becoming fiction. The following essays also point towards collaborative authorship (often eschewed in literary circles), orality, communal storytelling and other forms of inscription – physical and discursive – as part of the far-reaching picture of prison writing. This idea of the far-reaching also informs our use of the phrase “the literary world”. With this term we have in mind, on the one hand, the new, comparative and theoretically informed view of world-literature, coming via the Warwick Research Collective (WReC, 2015), in which textual production is bound up with the politically informed and economically sensitive processes of a “combined and uneven” worldsystem, and, on the other hand, the efforts of scholars who, following Pascale Casanova (2007), are working to chart the patterns of textual production, circulation and reception that characterise world-literary networks, increasingly through institution-oriented and archive-based scholarship. Our contributing authors need not have precisely the same understanding of world-literature, and we cannot provide coverage of “the whole world” in one book, but by soliciting and conjoining chapters that approach their subjects from different angles we hope to stimulate a worlded and wide picture of imprisonment and literature. This worlded picture cuts across geospatial, linguistic and institutionally determined

8  Claire Westall divides to acknowledge and make consequential similarities of experience and struggle across different times, places and modes of incarceration. It emphasises an inter-relational (as well as international) mode of address oriented towards exposing and thereby puncturing the carceral logic and practices that characterise the capitalist world-system. In this way, our version of the literary world moves past earlier comparative and postcolonial literary models, without forgetting the strengths of those fields. This means that where previous studies of prison writing tended to focus on particular countries or regions, or specific types of prisoners, we have gone further, drawing on the multi-lingual benefits of comparative literature and the resistance-based roots of postcolonial studies as we establish a worldly horizon of interconnection. Indeed, despite writing from prisons being abundant within postcolonial literature relatively little work has been done, especially comparatively, on anticolonial, independence-creating and new nation writing emerging from prisons and other sites of detention. Two (relatively) early and influential studies, though, do spring to mind. First, Davies’ Writers in Prison, from 1990, which also cites Breytenbach’s claim to the worldliness of prison writing as it examines canonical literary figures connected to prison, and the manner in which prison and writing are bound, across literary studies, and via the imprisonment of writers and other conscience-based detainees. And second, Barbara Harlow’s field-shaping 1992 study Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention which builds upon her influential earlier book Resistance Literature (1987). Exploring the kinds of political writing emerging from the liberation struggles of the mid- to late-twentieth century, including prison texts as resistance texts, Barred focuses almost exclusively on the prisoner of conscience, and is one of the first postcolonial studies to address the question of a link between literature and human rights. This work comes fifteen years before interdisciplinary approaches to human rights would flourish – for example, with Melissa McCarthy’s edited collection Incarceration and Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures (2010) – and the subdiscipline of literature and human rights would take shape against the backdrop of a new carceral crisis precipitated by the US-led “War on Terror”. In addition, Harlow’s book benefitted from a strongly activist framework that signalled the institutional intersections between universities, NGOs and human rights activists. Harlow’s comparative view of imprisonment is extended in Colonial and Postcolonial Incarceration (2001) edited by Graeme Harper, which moves from captivity in the early modern period through to twentiethcentury South Africa and Ireland, and on to an assessment of the “War on Terror”. It is also revisited in a more globalised approach with Wu and Simona Livescu’s collection Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Writing (2011), which includes example cases from China, Egypt, Russia and the USA as contributors probe the aesthetic strategies

Introduction  9 emerging in texts by prisoners of conscience. Moving out from these works, this book has a more inclusive view of different types of prisoners, and some of its contributors develop and challenge Harlow’s arguments (most obviously in Chapters 8 and 10) as part of an effort to trace the shifting role of narratives of incarceration within debates about human rights, activism and the academy, including their place within literary studies and its evolving worldly ambitions.

Book Origins and Teaching Overlaps With an understanding of the asymmetries that structure encounters between prison writing and the institutions of the literary world, we also use the phrase “the literary world” in a more day-to-day fashion, with the working practices of authors, publishers, academics and students standing as part of what we take the matrix of connections to include. As our acknowledgments demonstrate, this book is partly derived from an earlier project and set of collaborations linked to that matrix. Part of that project’s remit was to ask contributors to reflect on their experience of prison writing: its creation, editing, production processes, and even its teaching. Consequently, in this introduction we want to briefly explain the origins of the prison writing project behind this book and to offer something of the practice-based self-reflection we have requested from some of our contributors – our practice, that is, as researchers and teachers in departments of English, together and separately, at the University of York and Oxford University. In the 2010s, we taught together at York on a new first-year undergraduate module, Fictions of Human Rights, that combined staff expertise in postcolonial and world-literature and sought to respond to the growing focus on literature and human rights in the wake of the “War on Terror”. We built on student interest by developing links between curriculum content, staff research and university-driven employability activities, setting up the Prison Fictions and Human Rights (PFHR) project, between 2011 and 2013, prompting and supporting our students to establish a student centre of English PEN, named York PEN, and organising related events and activities. During the early phase of the PFHR project there were periods when we were teaching, running weekly guest speaker events, preparing for the Prison Fictions Research Day, mentoring two @work student groups, and liaising with English PEN. We were drawing first-year undergraduates into dialogue with postgraduates and staff, while seeking to engage a public audience and establish connections with our local prisons (which we did quite modestly with a representative from HMP Full Sutton’s staff coming to one of our events and some of our students attending a Clean Break production at HMP & YOI Askham Grange). We make these points to introduce the origins of this book for us as editors, and in turn to crystallise for readers our sense that an encounter

10  Claire Westall between prison, writing and literary studies at university – the context in which many readers will come to this book – provokes reflection on the nature of the literary world that we participate in. Our effort to engage students outside the classroom was motivated by a desire to convey some of the practicalities, limitations and ordinariness involved in becoming a professional author. To this end we arranged for each visiting author to participate in a “career interview” with our student group, giving those students interview practice as well as some insight into authorial and publishing practices. When things became difficult – when an event brought pre-emptive protest messages and threats of disruption – the students involved were able to decipher the tensions and conflicts (professional, personal and institutional) that came with exploring sensitive topics and freedom of expression issues in a public or semi-public domain, where “the University” stood between intellectual freedom and public-facing social responsibility (and this was before the no-platforming upsurge of recent years). Relatedly, students involved in the PFHR project often recognised just how supportive our own departmental colleagues were and the value of this support in ensuring that research, teaching and extra-curricular projects were possible. Some students, particularly postgraduates, noted that our extra-curricular efforts indicated how far beyond “contracted hours” junior, especially fixed-term, staff were working. In these and other ways, students were seeing into the university’s literary and working world. Moreover, students were genuinely interested in prison writing, especially the intellectual and pragmatic challenges arising with and from it, and they were sincere in their investment in free speech, human rights and the power of literature. In fact, some of those engaged in the PFHR project have gone on to be more fully involved in related areas (the law, volunteering for prison-based charities and the publishing of work by prison-linked authors). One recently wrote to offer a “belated thank you” for her “favourite” experience at university – that being her part in the PFHR project. As staff, though, we have always felt compelled to reflect on our own position and the positions, views and difficulties expressed by our students, to challenge their ideas (often glamorous and canonical) of what constitutes Literature, and to encourage awareness of the ways in which cultural and other kinds of capital gained via university can, all too quickly, be used to dominate, usurp or exploit the voices and textual efforts of writers coming from other, notably less entitled, experiences and institutional spaces. Consequently, with this collection we want readers to come to the chapters with a recognition of the striking asymmetry typically in play between the position of the prisoner-as-writer (and especially writers understood as “ordinarily criminal”) and the scholar-as-reader (whether paid academic or paying student). We also want to express our awareness of the ways in which prison writing and culture – as well as human rights

Introduction  11 more generally – can occupy a marginal and yet attractively spectacular position within contemporary literary studies.

The Chapters and Debates to Come Before mapping the chapter contents and connections to follow, it is worth mentioning briefly that there were a number of additional people we had hoped to include but who for various reasons – most often workload and health – were not able to participate. This has impacted our coverage of black and Hispanic men in prisons across the Americas, our coverage of Asia, and our ability to include more male writers with experience of incarceration. That said, the collection draws together scholars well known for their interventions on prison writing and those emerging as key analytical voices. Individually, they responded generously to our invitation by posing both new and familiar questions of their material, and offering original and intellectually generative insights. Together, their work is expansive and compelling enough to justify the worldly ambitions of our project and to provoke new ways of conceiving of the worlded nature of the prison and prison writing. We hope that their work, and this book, will prompt further exploration. In the single chapter that establishes our first section, Problems and Silences, Colvin builds out from this introduction to establish the critical terrain, attempting to determine “how and why writing from prisons is culturally overlooked”. Working comparatively across prison texts from Germany, the USA and the UK, Colvin argues that because being believed “relies on being recognised as human” and thereby “being narratively included”, the “disqualified” knowledge of prisoners and the multiple forms of “silencing” (direct, structural and cultural) they experience mean they are denied credibility as human subjects, and so remain “narratively excluded” and vulnerable. The second section, PoWs and Purges, brings together writing in response to the military detention of prisoners of war and as a consequence of ideological purges. In Chapter 2 Schwan examines the prisoner of war newspaper Stobsiade, “produced by German military internees at Stobs Camp in Scotland during the First World War”. Schwan describes Stobsiade as “a form of communal life writing” giving voice to both individual and collective concerns. She also describes the impact of censorship on the newspaper, its impressive scale of circulation, its polyvocal performativity, including the mix of English and German, and the small details of camp life on display. Punning on “camp”, she argues for a reading of the newspaper’s humour as both reinforcing and undermining PoW identity through a diversification of acceptable models of military masculinity. Next, in Chapter 3, Howard Caygill traces the writings of Soviet theoretician and friend of Stalin, Nikolai Bukharin, during his confinement in 1937–1938 as part of “the Great Purge”. Caygill tells of

12  Claire Westall the four prison manuscripts Bukharin produced while simultaneously being forced to compose his own “confession” for the greatest of Stalin’s “show trials”. According to Caygill, not only is Bukharin’s work “one of the most impressive bodies of prison writing”, it is also evidence of his ability to resist “the pressure to confess to counter-revolutionary conspiracy” by “maintain[ing] a fictional space of immunity against the deadly fictions imposed upon him by his interrogators”. Where section two deals with those separated from their country in war and via post-revolutionary backlash, section three, Prison Spaces and Nation (Re)Making, draws together three chapters about nation making, one on Algeria and two on South Africa, and with this African focus it might be read in conjunction with Jack Mapanje’s anthology Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (2002) and Rachel Knighton’s excellent 2019 study Writing the Prison in Africa. Like Knighton’s book, this section deals with nation-building resistance, the roles of particular prisons and the literary-oral activities conducted within them in helping to establish new national identities and stories of allegiance. In Chapter 4, Emilie Morin probes the “testimonial literature” of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) written by political prisoners detained at Barberousse-Serkadji – the prison, as Morin explains, where the Algerian national anthem was written and where many prisoners were guillotined as those around them sang in “tribute” and “protest”. Morin tracks the ways in which “writing became a communal act” in the prison, explains how prison documents by women acting with the National Liberation Front (FLN) have been marginalised, and reads poignant and informative prison accounts by Henri Alleg, Jacques Charby and Mohamed Khemisti. She argues that Barberousse’s “momentous history parallels the colonial history of Algeria”, to the extent that it (eventually) becomes a national museum, and that the prison speaks of the underlying tensions and ambitions shaping Algeria’s emergence as an independent state. In a similar discussion, Daniel Roux, in Chapter 5, argues that the “material realities of prison life on Robben Island played an important role in shaping the narrative of nation-building, democracy and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa”, meaning that the new nation is “built on the ruins of the prison”. Roux explains how the dominant narrative of Robben Island emerged through the silencing of alternative views and readings of history, as enacted by Nelson Mandela’s The Long Walk to Freedom (1994). He also shows how the material conditions of Robben Island are evident in the autobiographies it provoked, drawing attention to their strategies for dealing with the prison’s own negotiation between individual and “collective understanding and action”. Roux also charts how the addressees of such autobiographies have changed over time so that such texts now appeal to a “universalised” and “vague […] global readership”. Closely related to Roux’s interest in prison and national memory, Jonny Steinberg, in Chapter 6, argues that

Introduction  13 “prison gang culture has had an integral place in modern South African history” but that recognising this means derailing South Africa’s story of a progressive “movement towards freedom”. In what is the first of our essays of reflection, Steinberg re-examines his book The Number (2004) and its reception, suggesting that notwithstanding its success the book “failed entirely” to “demonstrate the centrality of criminal history to political history”, and was instead taken up – like much prison writing – as a kind of “travel book”, full of the exotic, violent and wondrous, in its efforts to (re)tell the story of Nongoloza and the creation of the Number gangs. Like Roux, Steinberg pinpoints how former prison sites – as with the Fort in central Johannesburg, which is now the location of the Constitutional Court – mark not only the history but also the damning continuities, or “sad carousel”, of imprisonment that haunts contemporary South Africa. Notwithstanding this section’s regional focus, this point – that nations are or can be founded upon imprisonment and the space of the prison – is one that reverberates out into the world. Moving us from radical black thinking through to the “War on Terror”, section three works out from and then back towards the USA. This means that useful counterpoints for reading might come from D. Quentin Miller’s collection Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States (2005) and Caleb Smith’s The Prison and the American Imagination (2009). The section explores the interweaving of Censorship, Advocacy and Text Creation. In Chapter 7, Simon Rolston uses his knowledge of prison writing during America’s “Treatment Era”, roughly 1945–1976, to reconsider George Jackson’s autobiography Soledad Brother (1970), arguing that despite or, better still, even with the text’s “well documented militancy”, the autobiography is “surprisingly affected” by the prison system’s “rehabilitative pressures”, including its censorship and the parole practices of “Adult Authority”. Most significant, for Rolston, is evidence of Jackson’s repurposing of his “prison education” into a journey of radical development – via Marxism, postcolonialism, philosophy, African and African American history. Where Jackson became political and a writer while inside prison, Michelle Kelly considers the position of the writer as prisoner within writers’ organisation PEN International and its claim to political neutrality. By revisiting some key moments in PEN’s history and drawing on its archives and anthologies, she charts the pivotal role played by the imprisoned writer in the organisation’s structures and activities, focusing on the foundation of the Writers in Prison Committee in 1960 in the context of the organisation’s Cold War neutrality and engagement with emerging postcolonial states. Moving from PEN’s history to an example of how the kind of work it does can eventually result in internationally significant publications about detention, Chapter 9 is our second reflection chapter. Here Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Larry Siems jointly reflect on their production of the international best-selling prison memoir Guantánamo Diary

14  Claire Westall (2015), as, respectively, the (now former) Guantánamo detainee and the human rights (and PEN-linked) American advocacy-based editor. They tell of the creation of this text within Guantánamo Bay as well as the full decade and two major rounds of editing (by the US government and by Siems) it took before the “466-page handwritten manuscript” Slahi composed in 2005 would be published in 2015. They also explain how the first edition was reviewed and re-worked before the second was released in 2017. As well as a first-hand account of the “secret places” in which prisoners share stories, the different motives behind guards sharing their tales, the links between torture and writing, and a detainee’s recollections of Arabic poetry, the piece provides a window into the personal and ethical negotiations in play when politically provocative and internationally poignant prison writing is shepherded into the public domain. Where the first three sections concentrate on prison writing as an authentic, experienced-based narrative, section four, From Life to Fiction, moves into fictional realms, pushing against any simple correspondence between realism, truth and radical politics, while still, our contributors suggest, mobilising insights from the prison. In Chapter 10, R. Shareah Taleghani tracks the metafictional strategies within Arabic prison literature. Traversing the Middle East, Taleghani reads Syrian Sami al-Jundi’s My Friend Elias (1969), before moving to consider East of the Mediterranean (1975) by Saudi novelist ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif, and then contemporary texts with Yalo (2002) by Elias Khoury of Lebanon and I’jaam (2004) by Iraq’s Sinan Antoon. Taleghani argues, in a response to Harlow, that rather than always “emphasising a collective call to action”, metafictional prison novels in Arabic can be part of an effort to grapple with the unstable and incoherent reality experienced in detention. Hence they can “interrogate, challenge and rescript the capacity of language to represent macro- and micro-violences” of imprisonment and official state narratives. In a parallel reading arising from a different context, Joey Whitfield, in Chapter 11, reveals the dynamic and politically pressing relationship between fiction and ethnographic study by reading comparatively the two texts Alison Spedding wrote while imprisoned for drug offences in Bolivia. Setting Spedding’s Saturnia (2004) novel – “a queer, anarcha-feminist cyber punk fantasy” – against La segunda vez como farsa (2008), her pessimistic narrative of women, femininity and life in prison in La Paz, Whitfield presents the “utopian elements of the novel [as] acting as positive negations of the experiences described in the ethnography”, where an anti-prison ethos is woven “formally and aesthetically” into a utopian imaginary. He concludes that such work suggests the ways in which prison texts can be read not just for their direct detailing of the horrors and struggles of prison, but also for how they might provide positive reconfigurations of the future. In shifting from fiction to drama, section five, Women, Theatre and Clean Break, provides two chapters about the work of Clean Break, the

Introduction  15 women’s theatre company created at Askham Grange. Although only considering Clean Break here, we want their forty-year commitment to theatre in prisons to be thought of in connection with the work of other theatre companies operating within prisons and with prisoners and ex-offenders (with examples from the UK including TIPP, Geese, Synergy and Kestrel Theatre), and the many more arts-based projects engaging with prisoners. Additionally, our inclusion of drama – as an extension or outgrowth of writing, but not only this – builds specifically on two earlier edited collections. The first is Prison Theatre: Practices and Perspectives (1998) edited by James Thompson, which records Clean Break’s instigatory role. The second is Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice (2004), edited by Michael Balfour, which builds on the Thompson collection, and works comparatively with example cases from the UK, the USA, Brazil and South Africa. Both collections draw on the experience of women prisoners in relation to drama, as do our section contributors. In Chapter 12, Caoimhe McAvinchey builds out from her book Theatre & Prison (2011) and her ongoing study of Clean Break’s history. Here McAvinchey analyses Clean Break’s early years, drawing on “the personal archival materials of Clean Break’s founder members”, Jenny Hicks and Jacqueline Holborough, as well as recent interviews with them. McAvinchey documents the particular and changing pressures of the prison contexts in which their theatre practice took shape, and closely reads two of Holborough’s early plays. Echoing Colvin’s concern with voice and the importance of credibility, this chapter contends that Clean Break’s ethos carries the typically unheard and discredited voices of incarcerated women through “a distinctive body of prison theatre”. McAvinchey identifies an authenticity of voice as central to Clean Break’s emergence, a voice that recognises the power of collective action, of feminist endeavour, and of the need to educate and work with incarcerated women. Sustaining this interest, Chapter 13 is a co-written reflection piece coming from within Clean Break. Anna Herrmann, joint artistic director of the theatre company, explains its spirit, policies and educational practices. Deborah Bruce, a professional playwright commissioned by Clean Break to provide in-prison writing workshops, explains in prose-poetry her experience of entering prison to teach. Her contribution might be set alongside other accounts of the experience of teaching or being a “writer in residence” within prison – as with Jessica Berens’ account of her work at Dartmoor in Short Sentence (2016). Finally, Clare Barstow’s contribution compellingly portrays her experience of a Clean Break writing workshop while in prison and how this helped spur her on to write and paint, until she was winning writing awards, having plays performed professionally, and exhibiting work as a visual artist. Barstow’s personal story offers insight into the frustrating realities of trying to write while incarcerated, but also conveys the challenges of

16  Claire Westall continuing to write after prison. We hope that this chapter works within the kind of feminist and prisoner-focused ethics that Wendy Wolters Hinshaw and Tobi Jacobi (2011) call for in their analysis of the efforts and shortcomings observed in the film What I Want My Words to Do to You (Katz, 2003). This film follows Eve Ensler’s writing programme at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York, and Wolters Hinshaw and Jacobi expose how, for all its positive efforts, the transformation of prisoner stories into professional performance risks obscuring, and even misrepresenting, the original voices and subjectivities of the writing. Wolters Hinshaw and Jacobi also reflect on the practice of facilitating creative writing in prison, and there are a growing number of reflections on teaching in prison, including the teaching of literature, coming out of North America. However, we have not encountered related critical-scholarly accounts of teaching prison writing within university literature departments. The closest example we found was a thoughtful article by Melissa Dearey et al. (2011) reviewing the teaching of prisoner (auto)biographies and true crime narratives within a criminology degree programme, and reflecting on the student input and written work submitted. This reflexive article sits productively alongside Colvin’s article “Why Should Criminology Care About Literary Fiction?” (2015), in which she uses the example of aufBruch, a Berlin prison theatre company, to suggest that prisoners are not automatically alienated by canonical and/or literary works as is often assumed, and that multi-perspective and complex texts, or “nuanced narratives” in Colvin’s terms (216), can enable prisoners to reformulate their understanding of themselves. This, she argues, might prove useful to narrative criminology by challenging the model of redemption associated with prisoner advancement. With these examples in mind, we wanted to reflect on the experience of teaching prison literature in different settings, and specifically to include a student-informed reflection on the teaching of prison writing from within a university literature department, and with a concern for “nuanced narratives” and the “rhetoric of redemption” that filters into the public and (hence) student consciousness. The collection’s last section, Literary Workshops, fulfils this aim with two strikingly different reflections on workshop teaching and prison writing. In Chapter 14, Claire Westall reflects upon her experience of teaching prison writing and film at university while establishing close readings of three of the very distinctive texts taught. Westall reviews some of the thoughtful and engaged responses coming from students alongside some of the pedagogical dilemmas arising from such teaching. She notes how students can be sensitive to the ways in which studying prison writing can be part of a useful yet problematic legitimising process while nevertheless remaining reticent about their own (relatively, given their position within a university) privileged, perhaps

Introduction  17 voyeuristic, interest in prison writing and film. Thereafter, in a similar vein to Bruce’s contribution in Chapter 13, Chapter 15 ends the collection with a poem by Roger Robinson, winner of the TS Eliot Prize 2019, reflecting on his professional visit to Folsom State Prison, California, and crafted specifically for this book – “Folsom Prison Writing Workshop”. We hope this closing piece reverberates outwards, and back across the book’s efforts to investigate institutionality, imprisonment and the literary world.

Works Cited Balfour, M., ed. 2004. Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice. Bristol: Intellect Books. Berens, J. 2016. Short Sentence: Three Years in Dartmoor Prison. Guildford: Grosvenor House Publishing. Breytenbach, B. 1984. The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. London: Faber. Bould, G. 2005. “Introduction”. In Conscience Be My Guide: An Anthology of Prison Writings, edited by G. Bould, xvii–xxvi. London: Zed Books. Casanova, P. 2007. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chevigny, B.G., ed. 1999. Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing. New York: Arcade Publishing. Colvin, S. 2015. “Why Should Criminology Care About Literary Fiction?” Punishment & Society 17.2: 211–229. Davies, I. 1990. Writers in Prison. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Dearey, M. et al. 2011. “Prison(er) Auto/Biography, ‘True Crime’, and Teaching, Learning and Research in Criminology”. Critical Survey 23.2: 86–102. Franklin, H.B. 1998. “Introduction”. In Prison Writing in 20th-Century America, edited by H.B. Franklin, 1–18. New York: Penguin. Harlow. B. 1987. Resistance Literature. New York and London: Methuen. Harlow, B. 1992. Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press. Harper, G. 2001. Colonial and Postcolonial Incarceration. London: Continuum. Knighton, R. 2019. Writing the Prison in African Literature. Oxford: Lang. Levi, R. and A. Waldman, eds. 2011. Inside This Place, Not Of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons. San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s Books. Mapanje, J., ed. 2002. Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing. Oxford: Heinemann. McAvinchey, C. 2011. Theatre & Prison. London: Red Globe Press. McCarthy, M., ed. 2010. Incarceration and Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Miller, D.Q., ed. 2005. Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Oates, J.C. 2014. “Introduction”. In Prison Noir, edited by J.C. Oates, 13–22. Brooklyn, NY: Akashic Books. Rodríguez, D. 2002. “Against the Discipline of ‘Prison Writing’: Toward a Theoretical Conception of Contemporary Radical Prison Praxis”. Genre 35: 407–428.

18  Claire Westall Rimstead, R. and D. Rymhs. 2011. “Prison Writing/Writing the Prison in Canada”. Canadian Literature 208: 6–11. Schwan, A. 2011. “Introduction: Reading and Writing in Prison”. Critical Survey 23.3: 1–5. Smith, C. 2009. The Prison and the American Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thompson, J. 1998. Prison Theatre: Practices and Perspectives. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Wacquant, L. 2009. Prisons of Poverty, expanded edition. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Warwick Research Collective (WReC). 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Whitehead, C. 2019. The Nickel Boys. New York: Doubleday. Wolters Hinshaw, W. and T. Jacobi. 2015. “What Words Might Do: The Challenge of Representing Women in Prison and Their Writing”. Feminist Formations 21.1: 67–90. Wu, Y. 2011. “Introduction”. In Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Writing, edited by Y. Wu and S. Livescu, 1–17. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Problems and Silences

1

The Credibility of Elves? Narrative Exclusion and Prison Writing Sarah Colvin

prisoners, although they understand what is wrong with the system better than any criminologist, judge, cop, or outsider, have the credibility of elves. In this sense prison writing’s dead wood. (St John, 1999, 121)

What is prison writing? For Paul St John, writing in Eastern New York Correctional Facility in 1994, it is “dead wood”: insider knowledge that nobody outside wants (1999, 121). Writers in prison know they are largely invisible and inaudible in the world outside (Lopez, 2005, 63; Colvin, 2017). Michel Foucault’s analysis of how isolation behind walls replaced the public spectacle of punishment has fed a reading of prisoner experience as “hidden or lost knowledge” and secrecy as “the essence of the prison” (Foucault, 1977; Franklin, 2008, 235; Schwan, 2014, 12). Once revealed, writing from the prison should therefore be welcomed by a reading public that has always loved the revelation of secrets. Yet most prison writing appears in small print runs with specialist presses on the back of huge efforts by its editors to find a publisher; it almost never appears in a second edition. So, the knowledge it contains is not just “hidden or lost”, but also culturally elided. It belongs to what Foucault called the “disqualified” knowledges, “low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity” (Foucault, 1980, 83): the barely saleable fruits of the experience of human beings who lack human status. For as Foucault hints, St John clearly knows, and Judith Butler would later specify, having one’s experience recognised as real, and mattering, is both the sign and condition for a life that “counts as human” (Butler, 2004, 20). In describing the elfin credibility of writers in prison, St John is simultaneously acknowledging and “talking back to” dominant culture (Smith, 1993, 398). Deena Rymhs has observed in the Canadian context how prisoners “write back” against the constraints of prison and cultural stereotypes of prisoners: writing is especially significant for imprisoned authors, who not only assert an identity in the face of their threatened erasure in

22  Sarah Colvin the prison, but also […] locate an authority to represent prison life against dominant narratives told by the media and the state. (2009, 315) That chimes with a pervasive view, among scholars and writers in prison,1 of prison writing as resistance to the “total institution” (Goffman, 1961). Writing does many things, of course. In a nuanced exploration, Bell Gale Chevigny, who worked in American PEN’s prison writing programme, observes some of the multiple functions of writing in prison: resistance, but also a way of communicating “hidden experience”, and an act that “helps writers to find themselves, make themselves whole, forge significant contact with others, and make reparations” (2005, 253). As Chevigny explains, writing can enable people in prison to “sustain relationships”, “recover feeling” and live in the face of death (on death row); and for many the writing act becomes an alternative to acts of violence (2005, 253). D. Quentin Miller calls writing from US prisons a “demonstration of personal freedom” (2005a, 3), and a writer in a northeastern women’s penitentiary in the USA finds that prison has given her both a space to write and, paradoxically, “a new understanding of what freedom means” (Novek, 2005, 293).2 Acknowledging all of the work that writing in prison does, I want here to look at an epistemological problem: why do writers in prison have the credibility of elves? Dylan Rodríguez has pointed with some urgency to “the political relation between imprisonment and writing” (2002, 409). I follow Hannah Arendt in seeing the essence of politics in the interaction of human beings – “in dem Zwischen-den-Menschen” (2003, 11);3 thus political agency – being believed – relies on being recognised as human, which means, I shall argue, being narratively included. Some experience writing in prison as liberating; simultaneously, in the words of St John, “prison writing is as free as the author” (1999, 121). The discursive constraints and penalties that affect all writers – where “the social milieu in which communication takes place modifies not only what a person dares to say but even what he thinks he chooses to say” (de Sola Pool, 1957, 192) – operate alongside prison-specific practical constraints such as lack of pen, paper, typewriter, or permission to write at all, as well as penalties if those in power object to what has been written (Morris, 2002; Rodríguez, 2002, 409). “The writer in prison”, agrees Rodríguez, “is never simply free to write” (2005, 85; original emphasis). The potential penalties for academic readers of prison writing are not the same as for incarcerated writers. Cannibalising Rodríguez and Ithiel de Sola Pool, I suggest nonetheless that the reader of prison writing is never simply free to read, because the social milieu in which communication takes place modifies not only what a person dares to read but even what she thinks she chooses to read. Neither prison writing nor academic engagement is only emancipatory. Gayatri Spivak, focusing on women

Narrative Exclusion and Prison Writing  23 writing in the context of colonial production, asked “can the subaltern speak?”, pointing to the duty of “the collective of intellectuals who may be called the ‘Subaltern Studies’ group”, who “must ask” that question (1988, 78). The collective of intellectuals engaged in prison writing studies must similarly ask: “can the incarcerated speak” – and, if so, who is listening? Academics prefer not to talk about the difficult fact that their status (as elfin or heavyweight purveyors of knowledge) is closely linked to the status of the knowledge they engage with. To engage with the writing of marginalised groups is to “dance through the minefield”, as Annette Kolodny (1980) described the activity of second-wave feminist scholars who called women’s writing literature. At around the same time, H. Bruce Franklin (1978) was working to bring writing from prisons into US American literary studies, and similarly countered the writers’ epistemic exclusion by calling the writing literature. Four years later the German scholar Sigrid Weigel (1982) followed suit with Germany’s first “literary history” of “prison literature”. Subsequent German-language scholarship preferred the spatially less confining term “prisoner literature” (Koch, 1988; Keßler, 2001),4 while some English-language academics, including Franklin, shifted to “prison writing” (Franklin, 1998; Chevigny, 1999). Rodríguez has objected to the designation literature, reading it as “an exercise of domestication” and “a discursive gesture toward order and coherence where, for the writer in prison, there is generally neither” (2002, 409–411). It is an important objection, but ignores the epistemological project of his academic predecessors: the designation literature draws writing into a category of recognised value. “Prison literature”, by that naming, demands credibility and recognition as writing that is “worth reading”, and simultaneously as something “worth writing about” – ergo it becomes acceptable for scholars to engage with it. Literature is a vexed term, and the editors of this volume have opted for the less value-laden “prison writing”. Rodríguez raises another tenable objection, namely that the designation “prison writing” legitimizes and reproduces the discursive-material regime of imprisonment. To the extent that “prison” becomes a homogenizing modifier, designating the institutional location of the writer’s labor, the genre equilibrates state captivity with other literary moments and spatial sites in civil society, or the free world. (2002, 409) In focusing on the space of production, “prison writing” distracts from the diversity of the writers and the experience of prison in different individual and geopolitical contexts. Being a man or a person of colour or transsexual in prison is not the same as being a woman or white or a Jehovah’s Witness and in prison (for example); prison experience in 1968 was not the same, anywhere, as it was in 2018; a Stasi prison in

24  Sarah Colvin East Germany cannot be seen as equivalent to a contemporary US penitentiary. In that context I feel, like Rodríguez, tempted to “break from the epistemological and political confines of ‘prison writing’ as literary genre” (2002, 407). But a counterargument emerges out of the feminist literary project that has shaped my thinking about writing from prisons. Around 93% of prisoners worldwide are men, 5 and where writers in prison are known and published, they too are overwhelmingly men. Angela Davis writes of the “hyperinvisibility” of women prisoners (1999, xi), and this is not counterweighed by their visibility as stereotypes in fictional media. But “prison writing” has in common with the similarly problematic field of “women’s writing” that it is produced as a field by and in particular cultural and political conditions, and exists as a field, I would argue, for as long as those conditions exist. Even while a prisoner’s individual experience of exclusion is shaped by multiple factors, “prison writers” share the core experiences of criminalisation, disqualification and exclusion. Prisoners struggle with the “credibility of elves”, or what Miranda Fricker in Epistemic Injustice (2007) called a “credibility deficit” (17). Epistemic injustice is “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower” (Fricker, 2007, 1). Prisoners appear in culture not as knowers, but as known (stereotypes) or unknowable (exotic beings). They are thereby dehumanised. Seeing “prison writing” as a field provides a basis for recognising the human experience it transports as knowledge. It becomes readable not only as literature but as “history and documentary” that, among other things, does the important work of illuminating “a collective ethos founded on denial and exclusion” (Rymhs, 2009, 314; Colvin, 2017, 458). My carceral points of reference are the UK, North America and Germany after 1945. In the last case, the shifting political iterations of the nation (East Germany, West Germany and West Berlin, and the unified Federal Republic) help illuminate the relationship between politics, prisons, culture and narrative exclusion.

Narrative Exclusion he wakes up blood testifies to their treatment the taut swelling bruises from the humane system a calming cell in tender shade of green rounded corners and a shit-hole in the floor the prisoner caused injuries to himself 6 (Dittrich, 1982, 132; original emphasis)

Narrative Exclusion and Prison Writing  25 The credibility deficit prisoners have leaves them open to abuse. In this poem called “Alibi”, published in a collection of “communications from prisoners” edited in 1982 by the West German prisoner, writer and gay activist Karlheinz Barwasser, Peter Dittrich presents the voices of the isolated prisoner and of his guards, who speak in the plural voice of power (“the prisoner / caused injuries to himself”). The poem’s title, “Alibi”, evokes the legal processes that underpin power’s credibility. “Having power”, writes Catharine MacKinnon, means, among other things, that when someone says, “This is how it is”, it is taken as being that way. When this happens in law such a person is accorded credibility. When that person is believed over another speaker what was said becomes proof. (1987, 164) Powerlessness, she goes on, “means when you say ‘this is how it is’, it is not taken as being that way” (164). That is elfin credibility, and it engenders the kind of discursive exile I am calling narrative exclusion (Plummer, 2019, 7). Like the exsilium that was an alternative to execution in ancient Roman law, narrative exile is life threatening: it creates precarious lives (Butler, 2004). Writing from prisons often tells the story of life-threatening violence. Ralf Axel Simon’s prizewinning short story of 2008, written from a prison in Angela Merkel’s Germany, describes what it is like to hear prison officers arrive in the night and to listen to a neighbour being brutally beaten: a hectic banging of doors, and the trampling herd is getting closer. […] he can hear them breathing. a short pause before the key is pushed into the lock. a moment later cries of pain that sound like a dog whimpering, punctuated by furious shouts: “this is for running the girl over the second time, after she was dead!” – “yell all you like, no-one’s listening to you!” “push his head down, push it down!” the cries for help disappear into the distance and disappear without an echo. for a moment gerd is relieved that the cup has passed him by. (2008, 101)7 The free indirect style gives the reader access to the prisoner’s-eye view while maintaining an authorial distance; the third-person form implies fictionality, and strategically circumvents penalties that the implied truth of the autobiographical first-person form might have incurred – where prisoners who report actual violence potentially face defamation and proceedings for slander or false accusation. “I never reported what happened”, writes Michelle of her victimisation and rape in another German men’s prison in the 2000s (2010, 73). As a transsexual Michelle

26  Sarah Colvin presented, in her own words, “the absolute burn-out syndrome for the mills of justice” (73). Despite identifying as a woman, she was sent to a men’s prison, where her rape by other prisoners was co-ordinated by an officer: “it was obvious they’d talked about it and planned it beforehand” (73). Her act of speaking out was enabled by a writing project in the women’s prison she was later admitted to; but at the time of the rape her response was silence, because “no-one would have believed me anyway” (73).8 Extreme violence is linked to elfin credibility and both are linked to silence, as a response to “uncomfortable truths” and “unpalatable realities” (Ben-Ze’ev, Ginio and Winter, 2010, 169). Silencing is well known as an effect or tool of narrative power (Fricker, 2007, 15). A West German prisoner writing in the 1960s described his brutal abuse in a secure psychiatric unit. It was followed by a particular kind of emotional abuse, when the officers responsible taunted him with the prospect of speaking and being disbelieved: “You’re welcome to make a complaint”, they told him, “we have the influence and it will all just rebound on to you, and you won’t be believed” (F.B., 1968, 153).9 The officers’ conscious abuse of narrative power echoes Dittrich’s poem, cited above. It also recalls a story told by Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved (1986), of an SS man in Auschwitz who mocked his prisoners for their elfin credibility: “even if someone were to survive”, he tells them, “the world would not believe him. […] [P]eople will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed; they will say that they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda” (Levi, 1989, 2). St John’s complaint that no-one is listening to US American prisoners in the 1990s is echoed (for example) by a German prisoner in 2008: “Should I go on writing? […] Why? Who wants to read anything I write? […] does anyone want to read about outcasts or about life in prison?” (Rose, 2008, 69).10 People can be silenced by being disbelieved or ignored, and by the expectation of being disbelieved or ignored, which hampers the will to communicate. Spivak wrote of the “epistemic violence” done to those who are disqualified as knowers (Spivak, 1988, 104, 76). It is possible to read writing from prisons as resistance not least because it expresses a refusal to be silenced in so many ways. The different operations of silencing can be distinguished and described with the help of Johan Galtung’s (1969; 1990) conception of direct, structural and cultural violence. Direct violence assumes an intention and a subject-verb-object relation (“I hit you”). Structural violence, by contrast, describes social injustice: when life expectancy is twice as high for the rich as for the poor, for example, that is structural violence, whose general formula is “inequality, above all in the distribution of power” (Galtung, 1969, 171, 175). Cultural violence plays on the beliefs and sensitivities of the mainstream to legitimise violence, to make it “look, even feel, right”; the subjected group “is forced to express dominant culture” (Galtung, 1990, 291–293). Writers in prison describe

Narrative Exclusion and Prison Writing  27 similar operations of silencing. Direct silencing imitates direct violence (“if you tell them I’ll kill you”). Structural silencing happens when, for example, a prison officer’s version of events is believed over that of a prisoner. Fricker calls this testimonial injustice (2007, 1). It is invoked by Levi’s SS man who tells his prisoners that their experience will not be credible to those outside; dominant culture will declare the stories “monstrous” and they will go unheard (as in fact did Levi’s own memoir If This Is a Man, completed in 1946 and initially rejected by his later publisher, Einaudi, who only agreed to publish it in 1957). Narrators who disturb mainstream beliefs and sensitivities often find their stories received as improbable, reductive, distorted or untrue; they are ignored and/or quickly forgotten. The more profound the disturbance, the more extreme the cultural inaudibility becomes. It can be alleviated by narrative framing, which involves not only a formal frame (such as the form of the short story, poem or memoir), but embedding in the framework of dominant knowledge (Linge, 2013; Colvin, 2017). Framing relies on a level of literary education or expertise, and on a willingness to negotiate with formal and epistemic conventions. In prison writing, Miller has argued, readers are more likely to encounter narratives “with unconventional structures, gaps, multiple voices, and a lack of closure” (2005b, 16). That lack of framing is an effect of cultural silencing, and relates to what Fricker calls hermeneutical injustice: “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization” (2007, 158). The experience of prisoners in East and West Germany to 1989 exemplifies the different operations of silencing. Not a single story told by an East German prisoner about their prison experience was published in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) before the fall of the Berlin wall; prison writing from East Germany almost exclusively takes the form of the memoir. The direct silencing of populations is widely recognised as belonging to the condition of dictatorship (Burns, 2017), and East Germany’s prisoners were directly silenced in the sense that their stories were not allowed to be told. Memoirists recall that they were also not allowed to be heard: André Baganz, a black East German incarcerated in East Berlin’s notorious Bautzen prison in the late 1980s, describes how he once told a prison doctor that his Stasi interrogators had given him drugs or poison but the doctor turned on his heel and left the room (2011, 166). Steffen Seidel, writing from an East German prison during the period that bridged the historic events of 1989 to unification in 1990, told the story of his friend and fellow prisoner Mike, who had died in a prison of the German Democratic Republic (GDR): They had chained him to a door and beaten him – those people made a cripple of him. They beat him pretty well impotent […].

28  Sarah Colvin I was party to so many people’s fates in there, so much degradation, and it’s too dangerous to write down the truth. (1991, 86–87)11 The fearful memory of direct silencing persists, and Seidel simultaneously writes and is afraid of writing his narrative. St John’s dictum that prison writing is as free as its author takes on another shade of meaning when writing is used to subjugate prisoners, rather than offering them agency. Former East German prisoners remember being made to write their biographies by interrogators who would then tear up the document, and make them start again. The persecuted communist politician Fritz Sperling described the Stasi’s extortion of confession narratives in the 1950s, from prisoners who were beaten, kept awake all night or forced to stand for hours (Sperling, 2007, 148–150). Carola Schacht, taken into custody in 1975 for attempting to cross the border to the West, remembers being interrogated for eight hours a day, five days a week during her first months in Stasi remand (2009, 158). Sleep deprivation was still being used to elicit confession narratives a year before the wall fell, recalls Birgit Schlicke, arrested in 1988 for communicating with an organisation in the West: she describes the “lights check”, where after a long day of interrogations the light in the cell was turned on every ten minutes throughout the night (2001, 35). West German prisoners in the post-war years report direct silencing rarely, though there are occasional reports of writing being torn up before a prisoner’s release, and of typewriters being refused “for security reasons” (Wolf, 1963, 15; 1968, 14–16). Particularly from the late 1960s on, prisoners in the Federal Republic were actively encouraged by academics, journalists and activists to write, to make their experience public; uncovering the hidden experience of prisoners became part of the project to make the new, democratic state distinctively different from its Nazi predecessor. Introducing a collection of writing from prison, the prison activist Birgitta Wolf summed it up: “In the past we made excuses, saying we ‘didn’t know what was happening’. This book is intended not least to prevent those kinds of excuses in future” (1963, 27).12 And still, in the words of a West German prisoner in the 1970s, “the people out there, on the other side of the wall, never believe a word we say” (Jörnschmidt, 1972, 76).13 Structural silencing is in play. It is in the nature of structural and cultural silencing to work invisibly, appearing “about as natural as the air around us” (Galtung, 1969, 173) in the cultural context that provides their preconditions. The radically changing political contexts of Germany in the later twentieth century help make the invisible visible again. For example, Walter Janka, head of an East German publishing house until he was arrested for criticising the regime, later described the Stasi’s water cells, where prisoners were

Narrative Exclusion and Prison Writing  29 immersed in cold water, hip-deep, sometimes standing in their own urine or faeces, until they were chilled to the point of hypothermia (2007, 190). But until he saw water cells with his own eyes, Janka admitted, he had refused to believe that such a thing could exist in the post-war socialist state. Looking back on the GDR as an idealistic project that became a totalitarian regime, it is easier to accept that such things existed; the GDR has gone down in history as an illegitimate state and stories of inhumanity in East German prisons now seem credible. That has an effect on the status of former prisoners and their writing. Prisoners who in the GDR had the credibility of elves have, since 1989, acquired the status of authors and purveyors of historical knowledge – because the state that imprisoned them is disqualified by history, their knowledge now qualifies. Disturbing though the East German prison memoirists’ stories are, they are “framed” and rendered credible by a dominant narrative: namely that bad people controlled the state system that has become contemporary Western culture’s moral Other. The experiences of East German political prisoners, like the stories of Nazi carceral victims before them, are retrospectively entering cultural memory with the status of knowledge. It is no coincidence that there is a marked preference, among academics and general readers, for the stories of political prisoners, which by definition have emerged from a discredited system (no legitimate system would admit to holding political prisoners). Political prisoners, even when they have committed recognisable offences, are understood to have offended against an unjustified system, and are therefore justified. Their stories can be received as legitimate knowledge and testimony. Criminalised prisoners of a system still judged acceptable, by contrast, have the credibility of elves. In political systems that are regarded as broadly legitimate, criminal labelling undermines the authority of a writer in prison (pretty much) absolutely, even if it is well known that the system is flawed. The recognised fact that if you are black and male your chances of being sent to prison in the UK or the USA increase astronomically does not ameliorate the spoiled identity of the black male prisoner, nor restore his legitimacy as a narrative subject. Reason might question that epistemic injustice and ask, with Jason Irizarry and John Raible in their recent essay on the silencing of young Latinos and Latinas in the USA, how we could possibly deny marginalised people authority as narrators “with no systemic analysis of the sociopolitical factors, including institutional racism and classism” (2014, 437). But meaning, as Sally McConnell-Ginet points out, “is a matter not only of individual will but of social relations embedded in political structures” (1998, 207). Authoritative narratives, argued Hayden White in his classic essay on history as narrative, rely on “the implicit invocation of a moral standard”, and indeed on the “moral authority” of the narrator (1981, 26).

30  Sarah Colvin White was unsentimental about morality’s source: the “social system”, he explained, “is the source of any morality that we can imagine” (14). Butler goes a step further, conceptualising morality as a “collective ethos” that easily acquires “repressive and violent qualities” (2005, 4). The cruelty of the collective ethos, but also the cruel fear that drives it, is illustrated in Levi’s story of a dream that he and other Auschwitz survivors had: Almost all the survivors […] remember a dream which frequently recurred during the nights of imprisonment, varied in its detail but uniform in its substance: they had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved person, and were not believed, indeed were not even listened to. In the most typical (and most cruel) form, the interlocutor turned and left in silence. (Levi, 1989, 2; emphasis added) The survivors have the credibility of elves. Levi makes us watch as the addressee turns away from the incommensurable story – as if narrative exclusion were infectious and contamination might occur. In a similar vein a former political prisoner of East Germany, Lucie Fischer, tells the story of returning home after surviving prison. At home Fischer found her bedroom and personal possessions gone and her family selectively deaf: “No-one in the family ever asked what it was like. My mother just said: ‘Leave me alone, I’ve suffered enough’” (2012, 37).14 Mary Douglas argued that the ideal order of society is “guarded by dangers which threaten transgressors”, whereby “certain moral values are upheld and certain social rules defined by beliefs in dangerous contagion, as when the glance or touch of an adulterer is held to bring illness to his neighbours or his children” (1966, 3). The East German family, like the “loved person” in Levi’s dream, turn away from narrative contagion; from the risk of sharing in the terrifying precarity of the narrative outsider. Every child in the schoolyard knows that contact with outcasts puts us at risk of becoming like them. We participate in silencing for fear of being silenced ourselves, by association. And cultural violence is not distinct from its direct correlate: “When Other is not only dehumanized but has been successfully converted into an ‘it’, deprived of humanhood”, wrote Galtung, “the stage is set for any type of direct violence, which is then blamed on the victim” (1990, 298).

Conclusions All societies, said the German novelist and social commentator Heinrich Böll, produce refuse (Abfall): human beings who are classed as garbage “in

Narrative Exclusion and Prison Writing  31 a moral and legal sense” (1978, 411).15 In the UK, Yvonne Jewkes (2006) has argued, prison has become a container for “society’s toxic waste”. And rubbish becomes tolerable only when it is has lost its individual identity: a long process of pulverizing, dissolving and rotting awaits any physical things that have been recognized as dirt. In the end, all identity is gone. The origin of the various bits and pieces is lost and they have entered into the mass of common rubbish. […] So long as identity is absent, rubbish is not dangerous. (Douglas, 1966, 160; emphasis added) By that argument, to allow writers in prison the status of knowers, of storytellers with identities and individual experience – to permit prisoner experience to enter culture as knowledge – would be tantamount to carrying contaminating waste back into the house. I have argued that to be criminalised is among other things to be sent into narrative exile (or exacerbated narrative exile, for the many who were excluded for other reasons even before they were criminalised). But systems and cultures change, and with them the status of human beings and their stories. In some historical situations, and twice in Germany in the twentieth century, the status of refuse (of being on the rubbish heap of history) has passed from prisoners to the systems that imprisoned them. Prisoner experience at the hands of the Nazis or the Stasi – Levi’s or Fischer’s stories about how people once turned away – has been reembedded as credible knowledge in the morality of the centre. Levi’s If This Is a Man, rejected by Einaudi in early 1947, is now one of the bestknown memoirs in the world, and the publication of Fischer’s narrative was supported by a foundation dedicated to uncovering East German history. More standardly, however, dominant culture has turned away. Structural and cultural silencing are in play when writers like St John express their sense that prisoner perspectives lack credibility, interest and appeal for those outside because “frankly, who wants to hear about loneliness, hopelessness, despair, loss of autonomy, harassment, contempt, or civil death […]?” (1999, 121). MacKinnon insists that “believing those who have been socially stripped of credibility” is “necessary to the epistemology of a politics of the powerless” (1987, 164). Paraphrasing St John, I might ask, “who wants an epistemology of a politics of the powerless?” How would such an epistemology resolve the epistemic injustice that the powerless always suffer? The problem is threefold. First, it is difficult to care about people who are narratively excluded. To be narratively absent is to be beyond empathy (if I can’t or won’t hear your story, it is difficult to care about what happens to you). That makes for precarious lives. Second, narrative exclusion is not only life-threatening but contagious, and listening to the excluded is therefore risky listening;

32  Sarah Colvin it feels safer, like Ulysses with the sirens, to stop our ears and turn away. Third, to engage with the writing of criminalised prisoners, recognising their experience and accommodating it as knowledge – believing them, as MacKinnon puts it – is to accord them a moral authority that directly contests dominant morality, which inscribes the system as credible and prisoners as discredited. Treating prisoner stories as knowledge is a countercultural act that brings with it the risk of sharing in the precarity of the excluded. That is why it is so difficult not to collaborate in the epistemic violence that makes prisoners radically vulnerable. The expressions of shock in the media when scandals around prison conditions and institutional violence emerge, as if the information about those conditions and that violence had not been in the public sphere for years, reflect the difficult fact that prisoner experience is not epistemically salient. There is a knowledge gap in societies that will not or cannot listen to the people who “understand what is wrong with the system better than any criminologist, judge, cop, or outsider” (St John, 1999, 121). Medina calls that inability to hear “cognitive immaturity”, or in its wilful form “active ignorance” (2013, 31, 39). How can writers in prison communicate their knowledge to a mainstream whose first response is to turn away? Framing helps. Dittrich’s poem “Alibi”, cited above, manages to tell three stories at the same time: the empowered account given by the prisoner officers (“the prisoner caused injuries to himself”), the social and political fiction of the “humane system” that we outside find it comfortable to believe in, and the “testimony” of the prisoner’s blood, which exposes the other two stories as lies. Simon, cited above, uses free indirect speech that simultaneously communicates and renders deniable a real-life experience. Numerous other writers cited in this volume find strategies for framing their experience in a way that helps readers overcome the will to dismiss or turn away from marginalised knowledge. Scholars in the field offer readers attached to high-status writing “prison literature”, or call the attention of those moved by social justice to the politically constituted field of “prison writing”. Rodríguez writes of “imprisoned radical intellectuals”, echoing (probably unconsciously) Spivak’s “postcolonial woman intellectual”. Both descriptors combine an epistemologically empowered element – the intellectual – with an epistemologically disqualified element – the postcolonial woman or radical prisoner, and both work towards reinscribing women and prisoners as subjects with credible stories. Writing by prisoners, like writing by women, has found its way on to (some) contemporary university courses. However, it is not a simple teleology, as the Brazilian president’s recent threat to remove feminist writers from the national college entrance exam makes clear (Perpetua, 2019). But it is possible for previously excluded narrators to acquire moral authority and become narrative collaborators, with the rest of us: perpetrators of stories, recognised as someone and therefore as human.

Narrative Exclusion and Prison Writing  33

Notes 1 The view of prisoner writing as resistance is too ubiquitous to be contained in a reference: iterations of the view can be found throughout the scholarly literature as well as in writing from prisons. 2 Women’s described experience of prison, more often than men’s, touches on freedom from the constraints or violence of life outside. Novek also notes that more than 40% of women in prison in the US have a history of sexual abuse (2005, 295). Recorded figures for the European Union indicate that up to half of the women held in European prisons in 2012 had been victims of domestic and sexual violence (European Institute for Gender Equality, 2012). 3 With thanks to Isabelle Zirden for the reference. 4 The terms used in German-language scholarship are Gefängnisliteratur and Gefangenenliteratur. Please note all translations are by the chapter author. 5 In 2017 women and girls made up just under 7% of the global prison population. That is not entirely consistent across continents: the World Female Imprisonment list shows only 3.4% in African countries but 8.4% in the Americas (6.3% if the US figures are excluded). Asia has 6.7%, Europe 6.1% and Oceania 7.4%. A few nations are numerical outliers, including Hong Kong-China with 20.8%, Laos with 18.3%, Macau-China with 15.4%, Qatar with 14.7% and Kuwait with 13.8% (Walmsley, 2017). 6 “er wacht auf / blut zeugt / von ihrer be-handlung / die prall gespannten / blutergüsse / vom humanen strafvollzug / beruhigungszelle / in zärtlichem grün / abgerundete ecken /scheißloch im boden /der inhaftierte / beschädigte sich sich selbst”. 7 “nach hektischem türenschlagen kommt die trampelnde herde immer näher. […] er kann ihren atem hören. ein kurzes sammeln, bevor der schlüssel ins schloss gestoßen wird. kurze zeit später schmerzensschreie, die an das winseln eines hundes erinnern, dazwischen wütende rufe: ‘dafür, dass du die braut noch einmal überfahren hast, als sie schon tot war!’ – ‘schrei ruhig, bei dir hört keiner zu!’ ‘den kopf runterdrücken, runterdrücken!’ die nach hilfe rufenden schreie entfernen sich, bevor sie ohne echo verhallen. für einen moment ist gerd erleichtert, dass der kelch an ihm vorübergegangen ist”. 8 “‘das absolute Burn-Out-Syndrom für die Mühlen der Justiz […] diese Sache war abgesprochen und geplant, so viel war mir klar. […] Ich habe dieses Erlebnis nie zur Anzeige gebracht, wie auch, mir hätte eh keiner geglaubt”. 9 “Sie können ruhig eine Anzeige machen, wir haben die längere Hand, es fällt nur alles auf sie zurück u. sie werden nicht geglaubt”. 10 “‘Soll ich weiterschreiben?’, frage ich mich. ‘Wozu? Wer will lesen, was ich schreibe? […] will irgendjemand über Aussätzige, über das Leben im Strafvollzug lesen?’” 11 “Ihn hatte man mit Hand- und Fußfesseln an einer Gittertür angekettet und geschlagen, zum Krüppel haben diese Leute ihn gemacht. So gut wie impotent haben sie ihn geschlagen. […] So viele Schicksale habe ich dort miterlebt, so viel Erniedrigung, zu gefährlich, um die Wahrheit zu schreiben”. 12 “Unsere Verantwortung als Mitmensch und Staatsbürger ist größer, als wir wahrhaben wollen. Wir haben uns schon einmal damit herausgeredet, daß wir ‘von nichts wußten’. Dieses Buch ist auch deshalb entstanden, damit wir uns nicht mehr herausreden können”. 13 “Die draußen, vor der Mauer, glauben uns sowieso nichts”. 14 “Mich hat auch keine in der Familie jemals gefragt, wie es mir ergangen ist. Meine Mutter sagte nur: ‘Lass mich in Ruhe, ich habe genug gelitten”’.

34  Sarah Colvin

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Narrative Exclusion and Prison Writing  35 Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by A. Sheridan. London: Allan Lane. Foucault, M. 1980. “Two Lectures”. In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by C. Gordon, 78–108. Essex: Harvester. Franklin, H.B. 1978. The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison. New York: Oxford University Press. Franklin, H.B., ed. 1998. Prison Writing in 20th-Century America. New York: Penguin. Franklin, H.B. 2008. “The Inside Stories of the Global American Prison”. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 50: 235–242. Fricker, M. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Galtung, J. 1969. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research”. Journal of Peace Research 6: 167–191. Galtung, J. 1990. “Cultural Violence”. Journal of Peace Research 27: 291–305. Goffman, E. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Anchor. Irizarry, J.G. and J. Raible. 2014. “‘A Hidden Part of Me’: Latino/a Students, Silencing, and the Epidermalization of Inferiority”. Equity and Excellence in Education 47: 430–444. Janka, W. 2007. “Das Kellergefängnis”. In Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen: Stasi-Häftlinge berichten, edited by H. Knabe, 174–191. Berlin: List. Jewkes, Y. 2006. “Punitive, Populism and the Creation of Public Acquiescence: The Case of Harry Roberts”. Unpublished Manuscript. Private Email Communication with Chapter Author. Jörnschmidt, P. 1972. “Alter: 30. Verurteilt: 1968”. In Lebenslänglich: Protokolle aus der Haft, edited by K. Antes and C. Ehrhardt, with afterword by H. Hannover, 42–84. Munich: Piper. Keßler, N. 2001. Schreiben, um zu überleben: Studien zur Gefangenenliteratur. Mönchengladbach: Forum Verlag Godesberg. Koch, H.H. 1988. “Anklage, Klage, Widerstand: Gefangenenliteratur nach 1945”. In Gefangenenliteratur: Sprechen Schreiben Lesen in deutschen Gefängnissen, edited by U. Klein and H. H. Koch, 88–115. Hagen: Reiner Padligur. Kolodny, A. 1980. “Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism”. Feminist Studies 6.1: 1–25. Levi, P. 1989. The Drowned and the Saved, translated by R. Rosenthal. London: Abacus. Linge, I. 2013. “Bodily Relations, Bodily Creations: Representations of Embodiment in Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing of Gender and Sexual ‘Deviants’”. Unpublished Paper. Presented at the Conference “This is my Body”, University of Cambridge, School of Clinical Medicine/CRASSH, 18 November 2013. Lopez, T.A. 2005. “Critical Witnessing in Latino/a and African American Prison Narratives”. In Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States, edited by D.Q. Miller, 62–77. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

36  Sarah Colvin McConnell-Ginet, S. 1998. “The Sexual (Re)Production of Meaning: A Discourse-Based Theory”. In The Feminist Critique of Language, edited by D. Cameron, 2nd edition, 198–210. London: Routledge. MacKinnon, C.A. 1987. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Medina, J. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance. Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Michelle. 2010. “Tagebuch einer Chaosqueen”. In Ich muss zurück ins Rattenloch: Unerhörte Geschichten aus dem Frauenknast, edited by R. Neufeld and H. Koch, 73–76. Oberhausen: Assoverlag. Miller, D.Q. 2005a. “Introduction”. In Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States, edited by D.Q. Miller, 1–14. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Miller, D.Q. 2005b. “‘On the Outside Looking In’: White Readers of Nonwhite Prison Narratives”. In Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States, edited by D.Q. Miller, 15–32. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Morris, J.M. 2002. Jailhouse Journalism: The Fourth Estate Behind Bars. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Novek, E.M. 2005. “Heaven, Hell, and Here: Understanding the Impact of Incarceration through a Prison Newspaper”. Critical Studies in Media Communication 22: 281–301. Perpetua, S. 2019. “Will Brazil’s Women Writers Lose Progress under FarRight President Bolsonaro?”. GlobalPost. 3 January 2019. Online. Accessed 15 April 2019. https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-01-03/will-brazils-womenwriters-lose-progress-under-far-right-president-bolsonaro. Plummer, K. 2019. “‘Whose Side Are We On?’ Revisited: Narrative Power, Narrative Inequality, and a Politics of Narrative Humanity”. Symbolic Interaction. Online. Accessed 9 October 2019. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.449. Rodríguez, D. 2002. “Against the Discipline of ‘Prison Writing’: Toward a Theoretical Conception of Contemporary Radical Prison Praxis”. Genre 35: 407–428. Rodríguez, D. 2005. Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rose, I. 2008. “Schreiben gegen den Schmerz in der Stille: Zwei Humoresken”. In Geräusche der Nacht: Literatur aus dem deutschen Strafvollzug, edited by Ingeborg-Drewitz-Literaturpreis für Gefangene, 63–75. Münster: agenda. Rymhs, D. 2009. “‘Docile Bodies Shuffling in Unison’: The Prisoner as Worker in Canadian Prison Writing”. Life Writing 6.3: 313–27. Schacht, C. 2009. “Ich wurde während des Prozesses fast nur angeschrien”. In Hohenecker Protokolle: Aussagen zur Geschichte der politischen Verfolgung von Frauen in der DDR, edited by U. Schacht, 2nd edition, 152–191. Leipzig: Forum Verlag. Schlicke, B. 2001. Knast-Tagebuch: Erinnerung einer politischen Gefangenen an Stasi-Haft und das Frauenzuchthaus Hoheneck. Wiesbaden: Books on Demand. Schwan, A. 2014. Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writing about Prison in Nineteenth-Century England. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press.

Narrative Exclusion and Prison Writing  37 Seidel, S. 1991. “Steffen Seidel”. In “Ich kam mir vor wie’n Tier” – Knast in der DDR, edited by T. Heyme and F. Schumann, 67–115. Berlin: Basisdruck. Simon, R.A. 2008. “moral ist der arglistige versuch der herrschenden… ”. In Geräusche der Nacht: Literatur aus dem deutschen Strafvollzug, edited by Ingeborg-Drewitz-Literaturpreis für Gefangene, 95–110. Münster: agenda. Smith, S. 1993. “Who’s Talking/Who’s Talking Back? The Subject of Personal Narrative”. Signs 18.2: 392–407. de Sola Pool, I. 1957. “A Critique of the Twentieth Anniversary Issue”. Public Opinion Quarterly 21.1: 190–198. Sperling, F. 2007. “Opfere dich für die Partei!”. In Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen: Stasi-Häftlinge berichten, edited by H. Knabe, 147–153. Berlin: List. Spivak, G.C. 1993 [1988]. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by P. Williams and L. Chrisman, 66–111. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester. St John, P. 1999. “Behind the Mirror’s Face”. In Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing, edited by B.G. Chevigny, 119–125. New York: Arcade. Walmsley, R. 2017. “World Female Imprisonment List: Women and Girls in Penal Institutions, Including Pre-Trial Detainees/Remand Prisoners”. 4th edition. 9 November 2017. Online. Accessed 15 April 2019. http://www.prison studies.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/world_female_prison_ 4th_edn_v4_web.pdf. Weigel, S. 1982. ‘Und selbst im Kerker frei…!’ Schreiben im Gefängnis: Eine Literaturgeschichte der Gefängnisliteratur. Marburg: Guttandin & Hoppe. White, H. 1981. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”. In On Narrative, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell, 1–12. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wolf, B., ed. 1963. “Einführung”. In Die vierte Kaste: Junge Menschen im Gefängnis. Literarische Dokumente, edited by B. Wolf, 7–53. Hamburg: Rütten & Loening. Wolf, B., ed. 1968. “Orientierung”. In Aussagen: Briefe von Strafgefangenen, Ebenhausen bei, 7–44. München: Langewiesche-Brandt.

PoWs and Purges

2

German Military Internees Writing the First World War Gender, Irony and Humour in the Camp Newspaper Stobsiade Anne Schwan

Among the 8.5 million men who experienced captivity during the First World War were over 325,000 German military internees who had surrendered to the British; over 100,000 spent some time in internment camps in Britain (Panayi, 2012, 1; Feltman, 2015, 2–3). Stobs camp near Hawick in the Scottish Borders was the largest camp north of the border with a maximum capacity of 6,000 (Manz, 2002, 59).1 At the beginning of the First World War, it initially served as a civilian camp, housing so-called “enemy aliens” and then a mixed civilian and military PoW population until summer 1916 when it transformed into a military camp, with the last internees being repatriated in spring 1919 (Manz, 2017, 125–126). While Stobs has been described as “a standard camp” with relatively “decent accommodation” (Panayi, 2005, 35), such seemingly humane conditions cannot detract from the physical and emotional hardship suffered by the men. In her study of violence against PoWs, Heather Jones has challenged the “benevolent captivity interpretation”, pointing out that all wartime captivity came with varying degrees of mistreatment or injustice, including forced labour or shortened rations (2011, 7, 249). Despite such circumstances, internees at Stobs, as in many other camps, demonstrated often surprising levels of resilience, establishing what John Davidson Ketchum (1965), a civilian internee in Berlin, called “prison camp societies”, including a largely self-administered infrastructure of schools, libraries, vegetable gardens, music, theatre and sports societies, and more. Camp newspapers, run by camp inhabitants, were also a common feature of this infrastructure across Europe and the world (Pöppinghege, 2006; Cross and Myers, 2012). At Stobs, internees produced the German-language newspaper Stobsiade, which was launched by civilians in September 1915 and continued by military internees from October 1916 after the civilians had been moved to the Isle of Man, where the original editors continued their work under the title Knockaloe-Lager-Zeitung (Draskau, 2009, 87). While acknowledging the hardship of life in internment, this chapter turns its attention to the internees’ creative outputs as a coping mechanism. With a focus on irony, humour and representations of gender,

42  Anne Schwan this chapter asks to what extent Stobsiade allows us to complicate existing critical notions about camp life and the role of camp newspapers. Brian Feltman, for example, suggests that military camp activities, including newspapers, were meant to emphasise the Germans’ “unbroken nationalism” and sought to construct a “redemptive” masculinity, helping captives overcome feelings of inadequacy and shame in light of their inability to participate in the war effort more actively (2015, 106). Through Stobsiade as their official vehicle of communication, the combatant internees at Stobs, too, broadly conceptualised their educational and creative efforts during captivity as purposeful activity in the future service of their home nation (1, 4; and “Zukunfts-Arbeit” 2, 2). 2 Yet, Stobsiade’s content as a whole invites a more nuanced assessment; the diversity of viewpoints, reading practices and educational activities reflected in the newspaper, as well as some of the original contributions by military internees, suggest that camp life was not solely concerned with a reconstruction of masculinity and nationalistic ideals in an uncomplicated way. As the following analysis will demonstrate, moments of subversion of patriotic narratives emerge through skilful use of tone, humour and sentiment, while the paper’s complete run offers a multifaceted picture of the different camp identities the men inhabited and imagined for themselves and their peers. In addition, mixed use of German and English, especially towards the end of the paper’s run, suggests an engagement with local language and culture, evoking a liminal identity between two European nations. Overall, I read Stobsiade as a form of prison-bound communal life writing which, in light of the internees’ challenging living conditions, offered readers and writers in the camp a sense of agency and opportunities for identification. As I will show, the paper also fulfilled an important role externally by communicating a carefully curated image of prisoner identities to the world.

Approaching Stobsiade’s Publication History and Agenda The military internees took the original, civilian edition of Stobsiade as a template when they published their first issue with explicit permission from the War Office in October 1916. Comprising twenty-five issues, the paper ended in January/February 1919, having also serviced some work camps from May 1917. Each issue consisted of four pages of text without illustrations, ranging from richly metaphorical accounts of camp life to more descriptive reports on educational and recreational activities, quizzes, competitions and advertisements for laundry, watch-repair and barber services. The paper drew on a number of genres, including diary and travel writing. Most issues also contained literary works, either in the form of poems or aphorisms by well-known authors or original contributions by internees, typically published anonymously. Stobsiade’s content contained a range of themes, although two issues focused on a specific

German Military Internees Writing WWI  43 topic (no. 4 on Christmas and no. 15 was dedicated to the memory of dead comrades). With up to 4,500 copies, Stobsiade and KnockaloeLager-Zeitung on the Isle of Man had by far the largest print run of all papers in British camps (15, 4; Pöppinghege, 2006, 320). Approximately 900 copies were sold at Stobs and its work camps, with the majority of papers sent to Germany and other countries (24, 2). The paper therefore played a comparatively significant role in shaping images of PoWs in Germany and elsewhere. Typeset within the camp by internees and printed at Scott & Paterson’s in Hawick, the paper was financed through subscriptions and supported by donations from prisoners’ aid societies in Germany and the USA, YMCA and the London-based half-German chemist Dr Karl Emil Markel (24, 2; 25, 4). As the first issue of the civilian edition had noted, the paper was to have an internal function for camp inhabitants, and an external one for friends and relatives at home. This agenda is discussed more extensively in the first military edition’s article “Ziele und Wege” (“Goals and Ways”). The emphasis here lies on making visible the mundane, the seemingly insignificant joys and sufferings of camp life; in this regard, Stobsiade functions as a form of collective life writing through which the incarcerated reclaim authorship and thereby a degree of agency. More specifically, Stobsiade played an important role in validating prisoners’ lives by showcasing their potential contributions to society. With this in mind, the paper aimed to familiarise external readers with the facilities dedicated to the development and education of internees, and their achievements in sports competitions, or arts and craft exhibitions. While by their own admission, recreational gatherings provided the men with much needed entertainment, “Gemütlichkeit” and pleasant memories (14, 2–3), elsewhere they are anxious to point out that the camps were not only places of enjoyment but of earnest endeavour (13, 4). Such self-justification occasionally takes on an oddly mixed tone, combining defensiveness with sarcasm and provocation in view of the (imagined?) disapproval at home: Calm down, my readers! At Stobs, too, there are many, many things that are anything but entertainment or music […] After being unlucky enough to end up as prisoners, should we constantly ponder over our misery in melancholy fashion and give in to dull hopelessness? That would not be the soldier’s way. (21, 2) Rather than accepting entertainment as antithetical to a soldier’s existence, the effort to stay positive and alert through distraction is presented as the true duty of the combatants. It is only in occasional asides that readers gain a glimpse of the more complex reality beyond the rhetoric of purposeful activity, since camp life was equally marked by boredom and listlessness. One article

44  Anne Schwan sarcastically comments on the relative lack of engagement in sports activities and envisions the success of a sleeping competition that would easily attract 800–1,000 participants (24, 2). Elsewhere, powerful images of misery convey a sense of the emotional toll of long-term internment – with some men spending four years at Stobs (26, 2). In one example of this, a prisoner is immobilised at the prospect of yet another move within the camp: “abandoned by God and man he sits on his meagre belongings, hands crossed in his lap, staring sorrowfully. Truly, Jeremiah on the ruins of Jerusalem could not have presented such a wretched and pitiful sight” (24, 3). The biblical comparison lends particular pathos to the scene and elevates the internee to mythical status, thus highlighting the pain and sacrifice endured by prisoners. In light of such enforced inertia, the creative activity of writing gained particular significance. Camp papers therefore served important psychological functions for interned readers and writers, counteracting the risks of depressive states brought on by long periods of confinement; evocative imagery is used throughout Stobsiade to reflect on internee identity and the paper’s role within the camp. Whereas the first civilian edition portrays the paper as a metaphorical sunray for those in captivity (CE 1, 2), the combatant editors see Stobsiade as a vehicle to lend internees wings for raising themselves above the narrow confines of camp existence. Stobsiade was meant to offer mental stimulation for “barbed-wire comrades” (1, 1) and encourage active involvement in camp life, combining a philosophical with a practical-pragmatic approach. The editors produced some of the paper’s content while also soliciting contributions from men of different ranks, imagining themselves as merely the conductors of a diversity of voices reflecting the “symphony” of camp life (1, 2). Although the names of changing members of the editorial team (“Schriftleitung”) and other contributors are announced in some numbers (1; 9; 14; 15; 17; 21; 22), individual texts are usually printed anonymously, with very occasional author attribution. This approach to authorship emphasises Stobsiade’s nature as a polyvocal text that, on the one hand, allows for individual perspective and, on the other hand, functions as an anonymised, communal vocalisation of concerns. Reinforcing this notion of the paper as a conduit between individual experience and collective expression, the first military issue compares the paper to a diary, giving insight into the inner and outer experiences of Stobs prisoners. In this vein, “Vom Wecken bis Zapfenstreich” (Nos. 7 and 8) offers an account of everyday camp life “from dusk to dawn” with humorous and atmospheric descriptions of landscape, mood and relations between the men; while the contribution captures communal experience and implies that this account is representative of camp life, it simultaneously affirms individual voice and subjectivity by switching between a third-person report of camp routines and first-person observations, for example on the character of the writer’s bunk neighbour

German Military Internees Writing WWI  45 (“mein Strohsacknachbar” 7, 1). The author emphasises differences in individual responses, contrasting the “average PoW” with his neighbour’s deeper, philosophical-analytical approach to mundane aspects of camp existence. This diurnal aspect is articulated even more explicitly in articles presented as excerpts from prisoners’ diaries, although it can be assumed that these were edited for public consumption (see untitled lead article in no. 14, which claims to be taken from the diary of a long-term internee, and “Aus dem Tagebuch eines Kriegsfreiwilligen”, 19, 2). Aside from informing an external audience, Stobsiade’s editors attributed another distinctive function to the paper, even beyond release, as it would allow PoWs to recall memories of fellow internees and the camp (24, 1). The publication thus had the potential to assign retrospective meaning to a phase of life that might otherwise be seen as lost time, hence affirming each prisoner’s identity through shared experience.

“Zwischen den Zeilen”3: Censorship, Irony and Humour in Stobsiade Stobsiade’s production was a complex operation due to the censorship process which took four to six weeks, meaning that the paper was only shipped abroad about eight to ten weeks after work on each issue had begun (24, 2). Number twenty-three was censored, and elsewhere, a significant gap in text suggests partial censorship after typesetting (6, 2). Similar to the regular press, which was subject to censorship in all combatant European nations during the war, camp newspapers were scrutinised for political and military content (Pöppinghege, 2006, 204). A template of Stobsiade was sent to the central censorship office in London before being returned to Hawick for printing (24, 2). Official assessment was compounded by “self-imposed censorship” to make the prisoners’ reality more digestible for external audiences, or to pre-empt disapproval (Horne, 1988, 31). The article “Die eigene Meinung” (“One’s own opinion” 16, 2–3) covertly tackles the question of censorship and self-censorship with gentle wit and self-critique. The writer sets out to conduct a poll among internees of different ranks and educational backgrounds to get a diverse account of personal views on Stobs. After several conversations characterised by evasiveness, the final interviewee informs the reporter that his project is futile, since it is precisely personal opinion that cannot be printed; what remains is, simply, the “general opinion”. The article, at its core, is marked by an absence: what the personal or general opinion on Stobs actually is, is never spelt out, thus confirming the final interviewee’s judgement and providing jokey commentary on the censorship process by implicitly withholding content. The piece leaves writer and audience suspended in a mixture of humorously resigned self-reflection on the limitations of Stobsiade’s project and a subtle observation on the insidious effects of institutionalisation

46  Anne Schwan and censorship. Yet, despite the constraints of censorship and individual internees’ apparent qualms about the paper’s ability to express subjective opinion and experience, Stobsiade managed to communicate a diverse picture of camp life and perspectives. As Rainer Pöppinghege notes, the sheer volume of material and limited linguistic abilities cast doubt on the effectiveness of the censorship process on a practical level (2006, 215). Skilful use of language, tone and humour would have likely escaped the censor’s attention. Gentle wit and humour therefore functioned as a political-stylistic tactic, as much as tools for survival. The first military issue rejects predictable humour in favour of the genuine cheerfulness that the editors hope to promote (1, 1). Such aims jar with the somber, gothic mood occasionally evoked in later issues, for example the article “Tage der Einkehr” (“Days of Introspection”) in December 1916, in which the transition into a new year symbolically represents the beginning of a new phase of life and heralds a future yet to come, marked by feelings of uncertainty: “Uncanny it is, this crossing over into a new phase of life: as if we were entering a fresh snowfield, shuddering insecurely as the field stretches endlessly to the horizon, with no footprints in sight” (4, 2). Despite a general emphasis on encouraging and cheerful content in Stobsiade, a gloomier, thoughtful tone coexists throughout, culminating in original poems such as “On Rainy Days” and “Wild Homesickness” by Hals Puls (a member of the editorial team from July 1918), which are depressing accounts of longing and hopelessness (25, 1). The quotation above is emblematic in reconciling the camp life’s tension between such despair, anxiety and hope, captured in the powerful landscape imagery of the untrodden snowfield and horizon. Although the military editors came to regard the tone and humour adopted by their civilian “ancestors” as increasingly unbearable (24, 1), they also stress the importance of humour for their own publication, and its ability to make life tolerable in a way that cold reason (“der kühle Verstand”) could not. Jakub Kazecki has noted humour’s “subversive and affirmative abilities” in other German First World War narratives (2012, 26). In Stobsiade, the humour deployed ranges from the irreverent to the bitter, with the title encapsulating the self- deprecating irony and dark humour that characterises parts of the paper. As the combatant editors speculate in their historical overview of the publication’s history (24, 1), the name is likely to derive from Wilhelm Busch’s illustrated Bilder zur Jobsiade (1872), based on the grotesquely comical mock heroic poem Die Jobsiade (1784) by Karl Arnold Kortum, about the ne’er-do-well Hieronymus Jobs who fails at his education and various occupations before dying as a night watchman. Humouristic literature was popular among German soldiers in the First World War, with Busch being one of the most widely read authors (Sprengel, 2004, 777–778). The comical poem as an intertext constitutes a significant

German Military Internees Writing WWI  47 generic choice, especially in the context of the military edition, since it allows the editors to simultaneously affirm and humorously undermine their own PoW identity as heroic. The importance and specific nature of humour in Stobsiade appears to have escaped contemporaneous commentators such as the anonymous one in the American periodical The Living Age, who, in an article on trench journals, also remarks on Stobsiade and civilian camp newspapers. Reading the papers’ tone and content as markers of cultural difference – or, more likely, confirmation of the writer’s preconceived ideas about national characteristics – the author contrasts “German seriousness” with a British penchant for “irony and fun” (Anon., 1917, 300) and French “simple and serious rhetoric” (301), claiming “the tone of these German papers is grave, literary, artistic – pretty much what one used to mean by ‘cultured’. They contain few jokes and little humor, unless imitations of Goethe and Nietzsche can be called humorous” (300). However, reading in between the lines and understanding Stobsiade’s intertextual reference enables us to identify complexity underneath the surface and a particular brand of German gallows humour that “presents the twin concepts of death and self-irony, or doubt” to be found throughout German art and literature (Unsigned Editorial, 1985, 2). This gallows humour is well represented in Busch’s Bilder zur Jobsiade as Stobsiade’s intertext, since the protagonist’s comically flawed journey ends with his demise and an image of the Grim Reaper. Ideas of heroism are further undermined in a mock-scientific treatise on baldness poking fun at the camp inhabitants’ masculinity while constituting a fiercely ironic attack on the notion of Germany as a cultural leader. Other camp newspapers, largely those by civilian internees, emphasised the superiority of German culture, in line with the dominant patriotic narrative (Pöppinghege, 2006, 253–254). In “Die Prinzipien der Phalakrologie. Grundzüge einer wissenschaftlichen Behandlung des Problems der menschlichen Glatze”, printed over two issues, a “camp philosopher” (“Lagerphilosoph”) offers a “systematic account of his profound studies in Phalakrology” in which he analyses the alleged causes of baldness and how to accelerate its development, based on the absurd premise that baldness is desired by all internees:4 Stobsiade, with its ambition to promote culture among humanity, offers the author this opportunity to reflect on baldness, with the conviction that we are thus closing a tangible gap in our German culture. In this way we will help secure the German nation’s honour as the most distinguished leader and supporter of culture. (10, 2) This absurdly satirical account makes nonsense of the celebration of German rationality and scientific-philosophical interrogation, covertly

48  Anne Schwan echoing the anti-rational and internationalist stance of the emerging Dada movement in Switzerland. The treatise on baldness can also be read as a symbolic statement on the men’s waning youthful masculinity which threatens to erode layer by layer during their prolonged stay at the camp. The article’s comment on excessive sexual activity as one of the causes behind baldness is particularly ironic in this context, since the men were shut off from sexual encounters – at least heterosexual ones. As the following section will detail further, self-deprecating humour and irony were central to the internees’ reflections on gendered and sexual identities.

Gender, Sexuality and Sentiment: Camp Masculinities As Feltman, drawing on Swiss medical doctor Adolf Vischer’s classic study of barbed wire disease, maintains, internees, consisting of young and middle-aged men, “often suffered tremendously from the deficiency of female company” and printed “Suggestive artwork” in some camp publications (2015, 129). Both Vischer and physician Kinnier Wilson, who wrote the introduction to the English edition of Vischer’s study, hinted at masturbation and homosexual practices in the camps. Sexually explicit content is not evident in Stobsiade, but the paper engages with the men’s gender and sexual identities in covert and often ironic ways. Rare encounters with local women are mentioned to underline their special status. One essay comments on the added cruelty of an escorted walk outside the camp because the men were able to catch a distant glimpse of a female, making them blush due to the sight’s unusualness (10, 2). Such musings on the absence of female companionship exist alongside other examples demonstrating the importance of family, marriage and fatherhood. The paper deals with some of the men’s longing for their own offspring when they encounter local children (22, 4), and the attempts of some to channel their feelings during toy-making (8, 1). Stobsiade’s penultimate issue draws attention to a newlywed man who has never met his three-year-old son, and the uncertainty of whether the child will welcome or fear his unknown father upon return (25, 2). Reporting on the Christmas celebrations of 1916, an article describes a married father of four’s transformation from an “angry and bitter” attitude – because he thinks of his wife and children who have to spend a third Christmas without him – as he joins in the German carols: “Now he sings bravely and loudly, unashamed of his tears” (4, 3). Elsewhere, Stobsiade suggests the particular significance of Christmas and its nostalgic value for Germans; the camp leadership supported this cultural tradition by providing Christmas trees for each hut (26, 2). Depicting the holiday season as a catalyst for cathartic release, the newspaper’s report on communal carol singing here mobilises a language of sentiment that

German Military Internees Writing WWI  49 validates the family man and affective models of masculinity in contrast to contemporary ideals of the hypermasculine warrior. Stobsiade’s regular essay competitions also encouraged engagement with personal questions such as “How do I imagine my future home?” or “How do I imagine my future marriage?” (11, 4). Elsewhere, contributors engage with such serious domestic questions in a more lighthearted tone, humorously advertising the skills acquired during internment as desirable traits for future brides: Hence, ye German maids, who want to be housewives, rejoice: those among you who will be lucky enough to take a former Prisoner as your husband are to be envied, for he has been educated in all perils of life. (24, 3–4; “Prisoner” also used in the German) An ironic advertisement for a marriage partner plays on the gender reversal experienced during the war, which saw many women perform conventionally masculine forms of labour. Although such role reversals would prove to be temporary (Stibbe, 2014), soldier newspapers, too, implicitly engaged with this threat to the gender order (Nelson, 2002, 78), and at Stobs, the reversal clearly impacted on the internees’ sense of self and their humorous imagination: “Pretty young man with own savings, educated at Stobs in cooking, frying, baking, poaching, roasting, drying, tailoring, laundering and ironing seeks female acquaintance with secure modern position, preferably: shell lathe operator, shrapnel girl, railway employee or night guard” (21, 4). Pöppinghege has commented on German camp publications’ desire to reinstate masculine warrior ideals (2006, 170), but these examples from Stobsiade suggest that prisoners’ engagement with traditional gender roles (and their dissolution) was more complicated, though the self-deprecating humour and irony works ambivalently, potentially reaffirming traditional models of masculinity in the process of undermining them. The men’s metaphorical feminisation is further underlined in repeated analogies between the camp and a female boarding school to stress the absurdity of the men’s existence, culminating in a humorous advertisement in the final issue that promotes the isolated camp as an ideal site for such an institution (25, 4). While elsewhere, an article describing an escorted walk beyond the barbed wire explicitly feminises the British officer rather than the internees, synecdochically comparing the military man in charge to the “sweetly smiling mother’s eye”, the prisoners are feminised by association with the officer, due to their passivity, dependence and confinement (10, 1). Depictions of traditionally feminine roles and duties in Stobsiade also offer brief insights into the nurturing tasks internees exercised for their fellow inhabitants, such as the orderly on

50  Anne Schwan duty who looks after his comrades’ physical and mental well-being “like a housemistress” (“wie eine Hausmutter” 8, 3). As Michael Roper shows in his study of British men in the First World War, “Soldiers may have imagined home and trench as opposed worlds, but in fact on the Western Front they were more deeply involved in domestic work than they had ever been before the war” (2009, 122). At Stobs, the German internees similarly executed and benefited from domestic duties performed by fellow men, with the gendered simile in the quotation above signalling the oddity of camp life as much as quiet appreciation. Extending their metaphorical feminisation, some men adopted female roles in the theatre productions staged within the camps, a common practice in the First World War (Pörzgen, 1933; Draskau, 2007–2009). Rather than merely upholding the illusion of a female presence (Feltman, 2015, 131), such performances contained “both disruptive and normalizing potential” and partially “sanctioned forms of homoerotic relations and transgender identifications” (Rachamimov, 2006, 364). Sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, in his monumental study The Sexual History of the World War (1941), suggests that “antipathy to homoerotic love” among prisoners decreased partly due to such impersonations (239). Even without necessarily playing on homoerotic desire among all actors and observers, such “camp” performances – in the dual sense – functioned as carnivalesque moments disrupting the everyday order of the camp to provide entertainment and escapism. At Stobs, such shows regularly occurred, with some men specialising in female roles. Hawick Museum holds a collection of theatre programmes listing characters and actors’ last names; “Bock” and “Boening” repeatedly appeared in female parts. Vischer noted in 1919 that the impersonators held on to their character names even after the performances “and each ha[d] ‘her’ young man or lover” (42), which may well allude to the existence of a homoerotic subculture. He also speaks of dances attended by half the men in ladies’ clothing. The review in Stobsiade of a revue evening on Easter Monday 1917 mentions the performance of a Gavotte in Biedermeier costume, featuring “three ‘ladies’ and three gentlemen”, deeming it a “pretty novelty in Stobs” (9, 4). Only a passing reference elsewhere hints that some prisoners were discomfited by “‘Ladies’ with deep voices” (20, 3). Hirschfeld discusses different forms of “intimate comradeship”, ranging from “the consciously erotic; the unconsciously erotic; [to] the unerotic” (1941, 135); the internees’ relationships with the drag performers have to be seen as part of this spectrum of possibilities. Homoerotic undertones are also evident in a highly ambivalent poem by the German writer Ernst Preczang printed as an epigraph to Stobsiade in June 1918 (21, 1). Largely unknown today, Preczang was one of the most widely read social-democratic writers in the first third of the twentieth century (Höffner, 2001). One of his socially conscious plays, Der verlorene Sohn (1900), was performed in an internment camp on

German Military Internees Writing WWI  51 the Isle of Man on 1 May 1918 (Sprengel, 2004, 451). His “Gefallen, ein Mann”, a homage to an unnamed everyman fallen at war and originally published in the social-democratic paper Vorwärts, was reprinted in Bab’s 1914 anthology of German war poetry. In Stobsiade, “Vision” describes a dream-like encounter between the convalescent speaker and an ungendered addressee who visits and comforts the patient with tenderness and loving care. The visitor’s movement (“soft steps”) and body parts (“gentle hands”) are coded as feminine, although the visitor’s direct speech (“in my arms, dear comrade”) suggests that we may be witnessing one military man speaking to another. While the ambiguous poem leaves room for interpreting this encounter as one between man and woman, the Whitmanian theme of secret longing also supports a homoerotic interpretation, perhaps imagining two “friends” who had begun “to associate like lovers”, which, according to Vischer (1919, 42), was not an uncommon occurrence in internment camps. An illustration for Stobsiade depicting two men holding each other while gazing out to the sea is similarly suggestive in terms of the men’s reliance on physical and emotional comfort without being sexually explicit.5 Meanwhile, the Preczang poem’s gothic and oppressive ending, underscored by the use of pathetic fallacy – the patient wakes up with a start during a storm, finding himself alone – echoes the feelings of despair and loneliness that internees experienced during the restless nights and haunted dreams described repeatedly in Stobsiade. For example, haunted dreams and traumatic war memories are addressed in the poem “Schlaflos” (9, 1), with sleeplessness also serving as a feature of camp life in “Vom Wecken bis Zapfenstreich” (8, 3). The paper as a whole thus offers scope for broad identification by those experiencing war-related trauma, physical injury, homesickness for partners or longing for illicit love. In this way, Stobsiade gives voice to the continuum of “intimate comradeship” described by Hirschfeld. Engagement with sentiment, and the desire for (homoerotic) touch and emotional care conflict with more traditional models of masculinity upheld elsewhere in the paper. Similarly, Nelson (2002, 72) has shown that images of military virility competed with concepts of tender and caring masculinity or homoerotic friendship in German soldier newspapers produced at or near the front by and for soldiers. An excerpt from Cäsar Flaischlen’s collection Heimat und Welt, used as an epigraph to Stobsiade in the new year 1918 (17, 1), demands acceptance of life, with an appeal to the collective “we” to remain patient, to continue to fight, and to toughen oneself. A Swabian poet, dramatist and writer (Zentner, 1961), Flaischlen was awarded the “Red Eagle Order” by the German Emperor for war poetry of “particular value” (Sprengel, 2004, 788). The epigraph’s rhetoric ties in with the more general emergence of metaphors of holding out (“Durchhalten”) in Germany in the middle of the war (Reimann, 2000, 280). Flaischlen’s stoic warrior ideal echoes heroic

52  Anne Schwan images of masculinity circulating at the time, as in the motif of “iron Roland” (Reimann, 2000, 51). Such heroic masculinity is evoked elsewhere in Stobsiade as an ideal, albeit an unattainable one, notably in the diary extract of a man who had volunteered for military service (rather than being drafted): Back home women act as breadwinners for the fatherland. In the field mature manhood offers itself to death. And us? We must be passive observers of this great sacrifice that unfolds on a daily and hourly basis. We can only wait, wait… (19, 2) Underlining the internees’ inaction and uncertainty of release through repetition of the verb to “wait” and use of ellipsis, the passage portrays prisoners as doubly impotent in their incapacity to act as the nation’s breadwinners – a role now undertaken by women – and their inability to fight, the latter an honour reserved for those bravely facing death on the battlefield. Similarly, the poem “Abseits” (22, 1) deals with the regret of being on the sidelines; it is a rare example of a text in Stobsiade that explicitly condones warfare and the destruction of the enemy. Such contrasting lyrical examples highlight Stobsiade’s role as a platform for diverse models of (military) masculinity. Original contributions and reprints of literary texts – the camp library contained over 3,000 donated books (18, 3) – thus offered the men tools for personal reflection and collective identification, demonstrating the role of creativity and literature in internment camps.

Re-constructing Civic Identities: Language and Liminality in Stobsiade As a consequence of the debilitating features of internment, many internees feared that the home nation saw them as “shirkers” (Pöppinghege, 2006, 162) or, worse, as traitors, and therefore sought to present themselves as active men with valuable potential to contribute to society in the future. The March 1918 edition of Stobsiade explicitly reflects the internees’ worries and the importance of validation from the outside world. Responding to the gift of a Christmas calendar issued by the Kriegsgefangenenfürsorge (PoW relief agency) Bern and supplied by the Swiss Red Cross, the lead article “Thank you…” highlights that the calendar had addressed the prisoners personally as “Dear Compatriots”. Stobsiade thanks the artists who had contributed to the calendar – including Swedish Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf, German painter Hans Thoma and poet-novelist (and later Nobel Prize winner) Hermann Hesse, who was extensively involved in supporting prisoners of war (Mileck, 1977, 41) – for their faith and belief in them,

German Military Internees Writing WWI  53 noting “We can look you in the eye and don’t have to feel ashamed” (19, 1). Social science research has long established the lasting effects of social stigmatisation on those incarcerated in prisons or other “total institutions” (Goffman, 1963); although the military internees were not delinquents in the strict sense of the law, spending time in captivity potentially criminalised them in the eyes of their government and simultaneously put them at risk of social ostracising. A decree by Emperor Wilhelm in May 1918 required that every returning PoW prove they had been taken captive against their will, ironically presented as a regulation in the men’s own interest, to protect them against defamation of character (Pöppinghege, 2006, 270). As if to preempt the suspicion attached to the label “PoW” and counteracting the reductive function of it, Stobsiade’s authors employed a diversity of identity categories to describe their situation. Terms such as “Lebenskünstler” (8, 2), “Kochkünstler” (8, 2) and “Stimmungskünstler” (8, 3) emphasise the inhabitants’ creative coping mechanisms under adverse living conditions.6 Striking is also the writers’ stress on their civic identity through variants of the term “Bürger” (citizen), despite the fact that as prisoners they were stripped of basic civic rights. Terms such as “Stacheldrahtbürger” (barbed wire citizens, 3, 1), “Lagerbürger” (camp citizens, 10, 3; 16, 1) and “Stobser Bürger” (citizens of Stobs, 22, 3) not only accentuate the men’s civilian rather than military identity but also indicate that the prisoners reclaimed the camp as a microcosm of civic society with related privileges (e.g. education) and duties (to the camp community and home nation). In Stobsiade’s final issue (“Stobser Weltgeschichte” 26, 3), through humorous exaggeration, Stobs camp is elevated to a civilisation with different phases and types of Stobs inhabitants (“mehrere neue Gattungen des Stobser Menschen”), elsewhere ironically described as “Homo Stobsiensis” (1, 4) or, more neutrally, as the “Stobser” (21, 4). Half-seriously and half-jokingly, the final issue also compares Stobs to a big city (“Stobs – eine Grossstadt” 26, 4), detailing the camp’s infrastructure and self-administration. This urban analogy echoes earlier accounts of the hustle and bustle of a densely populated camp and various types of strollers, including urban flâneurs (“die grossstädtischen Bummler” 7, 1). Competing with such positive and light-hearted, if sometimes ironic, affirmations of civic identity are a number of animal metaphors – a common trope in prison writing – highlighting the dehumanising features of imprisonment. Stobsiade compares the men to livestock (“Herdenvieh” 6, 2), horses and aurochs (10, 1) and an injured bird (12, 3). Such imagery is appropriated in more positive ways by the singing quartet “Caged Bird”, stressing musical ability despite captivity (19, 4). Elsewhere animal metaphors hint at the difficulties of adjusting to life outside of the barbed wire, as in the report of the journey to Dalmellington work camp. Depicting the arrival at the camp, the writer notes with bitter-sweet irony: “We were actually quite

54  Anne Schwan glad to be within the barbed wire again; without it one feels like a fish cruelly cast ashore by a wave” (13, 2). The range of civic identities cited above conflict with an increasing use of the reductive “prisoner” label in English towards the end of the paper’s run, although this could be read as a form of reverse discourse. Such re-appropriation of the prisoner label coexists with other English words in the German-language text, as in the poem “Abschied” (“Farewell”) in the last edition: “Endlich hat es doch gegolten / Und man sagt’s an allen Orten: / Stobs ist finished. Zwar so mancher / Zweifelt, ob’s auch richtig sei. […] Plenty gibt es an Parolen – / Mög’ sie doch der Teufel holen!” (26, 1; emphasis added).7 The mixing of languages gives expression to what had become a liminal identity for many of the men, some of whom had spent several years in captivity abroad by this point.

Conclusion Transcending the physical confinement imposed on camp inhabitants, the stigma attached to internment and the challenges of censorship, Stobsiade’s imprisoned authors exercised a degree of creative agency, offering a range of identities to describe the men’s lives and thus providing tools for identification internally and externally. Although it is impossible to gauge how representative each Stobsiade article was of the majority of the camp population – Pöppinghege (2006, 41) highlights the editors’ role in selecting and shaping content – the examples discussed here are meant to offer a glimpse of the variety of psychological and emotional responses to internment and attitudes to the wider sociopolitical context, within the constraints of censorship of course. Indeed, a focus on textual ambiguity and diversity of perspective – rather than representativeness – has wider political implications in that it counteracts homogenising narratives about national or gender identity while also working against dehumanising assumptions about a uniform “prisoner” identity. The history of internment is by necessity an international history; uncovering the history of internment camps and their cultural productions is therefore not about the recovery of a particular national tradition or national trauma. Rather, when placed in a wider European and global context (Manz, 2017), approaching the experiences of PoWs through publications such as Stobsiade contributes to our understanding of international relations. Stobsiade and the many other papers produced by First World War internees – including civilian internees who had been imprisoned as “enemy aliens” after building personal and professional lives in the host country – also stand as a powerful reminder of national and ethnic prejudice, and the human cost of war and imprisonment.

German Military Internees Writing WWI  55

Notes 1 Thanks to Rachael Durkin for introducing me to Stobs camp, and Andrew Frayn for helping to get this journey into First World War history started and for sharing his expertise. I am indebted to Stefan Manz for commenting on an early draft, for sharing knowledge, and for his generous and collegial approach to collaboration. Thanks also to Andrew Jepson and Dianne Swift at Stobs Camp Project/Archaeology Scotland; the staff at Hawick Museum, especially David Hill; and David Sutherland for inspiring conversations on matters of translation. Most of this research was conducted while on a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. I am grateful to IASH for providing such a conducive environment. 2 The first number refers to the issue number of the military edition, followed by the page; the newspaper is un-paginated. The military edition starts with issue one, but the first nine issues include a continuous number in brackets to acknowledge the paper’s prior life as a civilian publication. Cross-references to the civilian edition are preceded by “CE”. All translations are my own. Since completion of the research and translation for this article, translations of Stobsiade, alongside the original editions, have become publicly available at http://stobsiade.org/, funded through an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant that I have been involved in. 3 CE 1, 2. 4 Falakrόs is Greek for “bald”. Thanks to Ben Fletcher-Watson for the translation. 5 See https://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/Highlights/StobsiadeCropped Small.jpg 6 These terms do not translate directly into English. A “Lebenskünstler” is somebody who knows how to make the best of life (who understands the art of living); a “Kochkünstler” is somebody who has mastered the art of cooking, or who knows how to make a meal with few ingredients; a “Stimmungskünstler” is a person who tries to be of good cheer despite difficult circumstances. 7 “Finally it came to be / And we hear it everywhere: / Stobs is finished. Some still doubt / If it’s really true. […] / Plenty of rumours circulate – / May the Devil take them!”

Works Cited Anon. 1917. “The Trench Journal”. The Living Age 292. January–March: 298–301. Online. Accessed 16 February 2019. https://babel.hathitrust.org/ cgi/mb?colltype=updated. Bab, J., select. 1914. Der deutsche Krieg im deutschen Gedicht, Vol. 2 “Zwischen den Schlachten”. Berlin: Verlag Morawe & Scheffelt (UCL Special Collection. Olden Collection 22.2). Busch, W. 1924. [1872] “Bilder zur Stobsiade”. Humoristischer Hausschatz. Band 2. 305–373. München: Bassermann. Cross, J.G. and A.K.D. Myers. 2012. “‘Orgelsdorfer Eulenspiegel’ and the German Internee Experience at Fort Oglethorpe, 1917–19”. The Georgia Historical Quarterly 96.2: 233–259. Draskau, J.K. 2007–2009. “Prisoners in Petticoats: Drag Performance and its Effects in Great War Internment Camps on the Isle of Man”. Proceedings of the Isle of Man Natural History and Antiquarian Society 12. April 2007– March 2009: 187–204.

56  Anne Schwan Draskau, J.K. 2009. “Relocating the ‘Heimat’: Great War Internment Literature from the Isle of Man”. German Studies Review 32.1: 82–106. Feltman, B. 2015. The Stigma of Surrender: German Prisoners, British Captors, and Manhood in the Great War and Beyond. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Goffman, E. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Hirschfeld, M. In Collaboration with World-Famous Physicians, Scientists and Historians. 1941. The Sexual History of the World War. New York: Cadillac. Höffner, R. 2001. “Preczang, Ernst”. Neue Deutsche Biographie 20. Online. Accessed 19 October 2017. https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd116281383. html#ndbcontent. Horne, J.M. 1988. “The German Connection: The Stobs Camp Newspaper, 1916–1919”. Transactions of the Hawick Archaeological Society 132: 26–32. Jones, H. 2011. Violence Against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kazecki, J. 2012. Laughter in the Trenches: Humour and Front Experience in German First World War Narratives. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Ketchum, J.D. 1965. Ruhleben: A Prison Camp Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kortum, K.A. 1883 [1784]. Die Jobsiade: Ein Komisches Heldengedicht, edited by F. Bobertag. Berlin and Stuttgart: Spemann. Manz, S. 2002. “New Evidence on Stobs Internment Camp 1914–1919”. Transactions of the Hawick Archaeological Society 146: 59–69. Manz, S. 2017. “‘Enemy Aliens’ in Scotland in a Global Context, 1914–1919: Germanophobia, Internment, Forgetting”. In Minorities and the First World War: From War to Peace, edited by H. Ewence and T. Grady, 117–142. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mileck, J. 1977. Hermann Hesse: Biography and Bibliography, Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nelson, R.L. 2002. “German Comrades – Slavic Whores: Gender Images in the German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War”. In Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany, edited by K. Hagemann and S. Schüler-Springorum, 69–85. Oxford: Berg. Panayi, P. 2005. “Prisoners of Britain: German Civilian, Military and Naval Internees During the First World War”. In“Totally Un-English”?: Britain’s Internment of “Enemy Aliens” in Two World Wars, edited by R. Dove, 29–44. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Panayi, P. 2012. Prisoners of Britain: German Civilian and Combatant Internees during the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pöppinghege, R. 2006. Im Lager unbesiegt: deutsche, englische und französische Kriegsgefangenen-Zeitungen im Ersten Weltkrieg. Essen: Klartext. Pörzgen, H. 1933. Theater ohne Frau: Das Bühnenleben der kriegsgefangenen Deutschen 1914–1920. Königsberg: Ost-Europa Verlag. Preczang, E. 1900. Der verlorene Sohn: in einem Aufzuge. Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts. Rachamimov, A. 2006. “The Disruptive Comforts of Drag: (Trans)Gender Performances among Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914–1920”. The American Historical Review 111.2: 362–382.

German Military Internees Writing WWI  57 Reimann, A. 2000. Der Große Krieg der Sprachen: Untersuchungen zur historischen Semantik in Deutschland und England zur Zeit des Ersten Weltkrieges. Essen: Klartext. Roper, M. 2009. The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sprengel, P. 2004. Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur 1900–1918: Von der Jahrhundertwende bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges. München: Beck [Band IX/2 der Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart]. Stibbe, M. 2014. “Women’s Mobilisation for War (Germany)”. In 1914–1918Online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, edited by U. Daniel et al. Berlin: Freie Universität. DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10025. Stobsiade. Civilian Edition. No. 1–2. Hawick Museum. Stobsiade. Military Edition. No. 1–26. Special collection. National Library of Scotland. Unsigned Editorial. 1985. “From Kaiser to Führer”. Apollo: The Magazine of the Arts 121.275. 1 January: 2–11. Art and Architecture Archive. Online. Accessed 25 October 2017. https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/ docview/1367013309?accountid=10673. Vischer, A.L. 1919. Barbed Wire Disease: A Psychological Study of the Prisoner of War, introduced by S.A. Kinnier Wilson. London: Bale. Zentner, W. 1961. “Flaischlen, Cäsar”. Neue Deutsche Biographie 5. Online. Accessed 19 October 2017. https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd1186838 29.html#ndbcontent.

3

The Prison Writings of Nikolai Bukharin Howard Caygill

Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938) was arrested on his way to a plenary session of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party on 27 February 1937 and executed a year later during the night of 15 March 1938 after an eleven-day show trial. He was the most prominent victim of Stalin’s purges and the centre of the third Show Trial described by Robert Conquest as “The greatest trial of all” (1971, 496). Bukharin’s reputation as the most brilliant and charismatic of the Bolshevik leaders, his close friendship with Lenin, his prolific theoretical writings, his work as an editor of Pravda between 1919 and 1929 and then Izvestiya between 1934 and 1937, and even his membership of the Central Committee did not save him from the grotesque and utterly implausible charges of espionage and counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Critically, Bukharin understood that the “infernal machine” he was about to enter was dedicated to inventing fictions of conspiracy and treachery and compelling implausible confessions (Larina, 1988, 343–344). His courageous but inevitably unsuccessful public defence at the trial parodied the confessional fiction he had been coached for almost a year to create: “I accept responsibility even for those crimes about which I did not know or about which I did not have the slightest idea” (Kotkin, 2017, 560). However, this and similar passages were deleted by Stalin from the final transcript of the trial (Kotkin, 2017, 560) and Bukharin’s last words to his leader, written in pencil on a scrap of paper moments before he was shot – “Koba, why do you need me to die?” – were kept for the rest of Stalin’s life in a drawer in his desk (Medvedev, 1980, 161). Given these circumstances, it is remarkable that during his year of captivity and prolonged interrogation in the Lubyanka prison, Bukharin was able to complete four manuscripts. They mark, along with Gramsci’s prison notebooks, one of the most impressive bodies of prison writing of the twentieth century, but unlike the Italian’s notebooks, Bukharin produced largely finished works in four different genres, namely: Marxist political theory with Socialism and National Culture (2006), poetry with Transformations of the World: (Verse about the Ages, and about People) (2009), philosophy with Philosophical Arabesques (2008) and fictional autobiography in How It All Began (1998). After his execution

Prison Writings of Nikolai Bukharin  59 the manuscripts were passed to Stalin and confined to his personal archive until recovered by Bukharin’s wife and son after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The diversity and the often personal character of the writing raise a number of important questions not only for understanding Bukharin and Soviet cultural history during the 1930s, but more widely for the understanding of writing under conditions of confinement. Bukharin himself distinguished between Socialism and National Culture and the three later manuscripts, begging Stalin in a letter from late 1937 to save the latter: “I fervently beg you not to let this work disappear […] Have pity! not on me, on the work!” (Cohen, 1998, vii; original emphasis). The Socialism and National Culture manuscript completes a project Bukharin began soon after his arrest and finished within four weeks. Bukharin then moved on and began working on his poems in mid-June 1937. The first manuscript testifies to continued contact with a reality in which Bukharin remained a leading Marxist theoretician while the subsequent writings responded to an escalation of the intensity of Bukharin’s interrogation. Consequently, they may be read as counterfictions, creations of a world distinct from the fictional world of the “investigator”. Writing in the 1970s the Soviet dissident Roy Medvedev claimed that “Practically nothing reliable is known about the way in which the ‘investigation’ of Bukharin’s case was carried out” (1980, 139). Since then, however, Stehen Cohen and Vitaly Shentalinsky have illuminated the methods employed by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (or NKVD) to ensnare their victims in their malevolent conspiratorial fictions. Shentalinsky’s analysis of the interrogation files of Isaac Babel chillingly illuminates the interrogation method reserved for intellectual victims of the NKVD, including Bukharin. Babel himself referred enigmatically to “valuable literary works” held “in the GPU”, the State Political Administration, and even explained what would become his own fate: “Whenever an educated person is arrested and finds himself in a prison cell, he is given a pencil and piece of paper. ‘Write’ they tell him” (Shentalinsky, 1995, 28). The permission to write, far from being a privilege, formed part of the process of inducing victims to confess the existence of a fictional world of betrayal and conspiracy. The case of Babel is instructive since even though forewarned of this “investigative” technique he nevertheless “created for himself an extraordinary new fictitious identity and provided an imaginary account of the pernicious influence of the Trotskyists” (Shentalinsky, 1995, 27). This technique for inducing confession through creative writing seems to have been well established and even routine in the Lubyanka prison or “Stalin’s top factory of false confessions” (Cohen, 1998, xv). Bukharin resisted attempts during interrogations “to extract his testimony for the script being dictated and constantly enhanced by the Kremlin” and held out for three months against threats of torture, threats against the safety

60  Howard Caygill of his family and confrontations with colleagues forced to implicate him in false confessions until, in Cohen’s words, “on June 1 he capitulated and began inventing ‘testimony’” (1998, xv). Unlike Babel, Bukharin was given an educated interrogator – Captain Lazar Kogan – but the method of supplying materials for writing confessional fictions remained the same. It was indeed during the same June of 1937 that Bukharin began work on his last three manuscripts, writing by night in parallel with the detailed fictional confessions produced under the malign inspiration of his “interrogator” during the day. This technique might explain Arthur Koestler’s perplexity regarding Bukharin’s preposterous confession in Darkness at Noon (1940). But what Cohen has shown consistently and convincingly since his 1973 biography Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution is that the question raised by Bukharin’s “confession” is quite different. What we should ask is: how was it possible for Bukharin to maintain the political and personal equilibrium and sense of identity that allowed him during the trial to defiantly turn around the accusations and vindicate the Bolshevik revolution deep within its Stalinist Thermidor? Bukharin’s prison writings offer important insight into how he was able to turn the confessional technique against his adversaries and to maintain a fictional space of immunity against the deadly fictions imposed upon him by his interrogators.

The Prison Poems Bukharin’s first creative response to the pressure to confess to counterrevolutionary conspiracy was to produce a large cycle of 187 poems with the title Transformation of the World (Verse about the Ages, and about People). The first fourteen poems are missing, with the remainder dating from 26 June through to 18 November. Bukharin provided both chronological and “systematic” listings (Bukharin, 2009, 526–533) that distributed the poems across nine smaller cycles: I “Endings and Beginnings” (fourteen lost poems); II “Precursors” (thirteen poems); III “Civil War” (fifteen poems); IV “Nature-Mother of All” (thirty-two poems); V “Heritage” (twenty-eight poems); VI “War of Worlds” (twenty-eight poems); VII “Lyrical Intermezzo” (twenty-nine poems); VIII “Epoch of Great Works” (twenty-three poems); and IX “The Future” (five poems). The differences between the chronological and systematic listings correlate to internal differences of form, intent and content within the larger cycle. While it is not possible to assign dates to the lost poems of cycle I, it can safely be assumed they preceded the earliest assignable surviving poem “Nature – Mother of All” dated 26 June. The poems making up cycles II and III date largely from September, with only cycle II containing two poems from July and August. Cycle IV begins with a chronological sequence of eighteen poems dating from 26 June to

Prison Writings of Nikolai Bukharin  61 4 August, followed by two poems from 4 and 28 of September and two from 8 August, and then has two chronological blocks of four poems from July and six from late September. For this cycle Bukharin on five occasions wrote three poems in an intense, single sitting. Cycles V and VI show no discernible chronological pattern while cycle VII comprises two compressed chronological blocks from 24 to 30 of August and 22 September to 5 October, concluding with the late poem “Night” from 18 November. Cycle VIII largely alternates between poems drawn from July and September while the closing cycle IX comprises four poems from 11 to 13 of August and a single poem from 13 July. Bukharin prefaced the poems with a vitalist manifesto aligning the opposition of life and death with that of revolution and counter-revolution: “Communism is the life giving leaven […] the great fermenting force that produces new life” while counter-revolution wants “to drown our luxurious meadows in a sea of scarlet blood and tears of salt” (2009, xlviii–xlviiii). The preface identifies poems and the creative acts of the revolutionary proletariat with flowers, which Bukharin proposes “to lay on the communal grave of those who have given their lives in the affirmation of Life Itself, for the cause of our country, for the happiness and earthly joys of the peoples of the world” (2009, liii). The preface also describes the cycle of poems as a wreath for those who died in affirming revolutionary life – an affirmation of life from one who knew he was soon to leave it. Bukharin’s decision to write poetry at this stage in his interrogation can be understood in a number of ways. First, the formality of poetry to some degree immunises his writing from being directly appropriated by the interrogation process. Second, Bukharin had a long- standing passion for poetry, both classical and contemporary Soviet poetry, including Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, Pasternak and Akhmatova. His use of cycles within cycles of poems and his practice of precisely dating each poem recall Akhmatova while his concept of nature owes more to the Mandelstam of Stone than to dialectical materialism even though his personification of heroic proletarian figures and actions irresistibly recalls Mayakovsky. And third, Bukharin’s awareness of Stalin’s sensitivity to poetry and poets meant that poetry was a powerful means of addressing the Dictator – as Mandelstam had already learnt to his cost. The uneven articulation of the chronological and systematic lists points to a number of interesting features that need further exploration. The lost first cycle, with listed poems on “Marx”, “Russia” and “Lenin”, seems to establish the matrix for the historical and revolutionary poems making up cycles II, III, V, VI and VII. In these cycles, Bukharin aligns the precursors of revolutionary struggle and the socialist enlightenment with militant actions during the Russian Revolution and Civil War. They are punctuated by the two very different cycles of poems – IV and VII –

62  Howard Caygill that were written in concentrated chronological bursts making up over a third of the content of Transformation of the World. The collection of poems comprises two very distinct poetic projects: a revolutionary/historical epic of the rise of socialism and a pantheistic philosophical meditation on life and nature. The eponymous poem of cycle II, “Precursors”, from 13 September programmatically announces the affinity of revolt and thought to be explored in the historical and revolutionary cycles. It contrasts the dreams of great minds with “The flame of new doctrines and principles” (Bukharin, 2009, 18) that leap out of the abyss of woe. This is followed by evocations of revolts and their thinkers, including the Levellers, Campanella, Babeuf, Fourier and Saint Simon. These “golden dreams” in spite of their “many holes” presage a “brighter future” (20). Bukharin takes evident pleasure in reviewing the sequence of revolutions running from 1789 to 1905, presenting them in orthodox Marxist Leninist style as “precursors” of the proletarian revolution of 1917. These historical poems written in September 1937 mark a firm return to orthodoxy, followed in cycle III, “Civil War”, by poems on the Russian Revolution, as with “Lenin at a Factory” written on 16 September. This poem reads like a film script with a factory crowd assembled to hear “their leader and native son”, and Lenin arriving, talking – in a way that “seems so simple” (59) – and departing again, with his “hand in farewell” from his car and a sense that “A sea of ardent love has flowed / selfless and wholehearted” (62). These revolutionary poems from September, placed early in the overall cycle, perfect the cinematographic evocation of the revolution, with artful cutting and adoption of points of view. The poems that make up the fifth cycle, “Heritage”, are guided by the broad notion of socialist progressive culture that Bukharin defended in Socialism and its Culture. Once again the eponymous poem that opens the cycle describes the inextricable links between “the efforts of millions of hands” and the “glory of their sages” (Bukharin, 2009, 179). It evokes a procession of thinkers, beginning with the “Philosophers of Hellas”, accompanied by the echoes of the “voices of China and India”, followed by an assembly of “Abstract thought”, moving through da Vinci, Shakespeare, Kant culminating in “grand old Hegel’s immortal works” (180). This is followed by poems evoking the history and thought of Greece, India, China, Mexico and Europe. The poem “Voices of the Past” confronts the living and the dead, with the poetic “I” contemplating the portraits of past rulers, and law tables, while hearing “sounds from underground, the voices of ancient times long since gone by” resurrected as “reborn before our eyes / thanks to the spadework of our minds” (204– 205). Bukharin pursues this practice of poetic rebirth through poems on Bacon, Spinoza, Goethe, Pushkin and Darwin arriving at Nietzsche, the “Prophet in thrall to the mania dark / behind King Capital’s gilded crown” (239), who serves as a transition to fascism and the fascist hero.

Prison Writings of Nikolai Bukharin  63 The closing stanza of the last poem of the cycle dated 26 July announces the theme of cycle VI, “War of the Worlds”, and the struggle for “A different ending to the World’s disaster” (244). Cycle VI moves from the evocations of the people and their thinkers to the conflict of workers and oppressors understood in terms of the class struggle between Soviet and National Socialist/Fascist power. The poems address emotions such as greed, brutality, selfishness and jealousy from the standpoint of class oppression and struggle as well as the recent history of the Spanish Civil War. One of the most striking features of this cycle is the poetic meditation on cities: Paris, Berlin, London, New York and Leningrad. The parallels between these and the ruins of biblical and classical cities of Babylon, Carthage, Tyre, Nineveh, Sidon and Susa are made explicit in the final poem of the cycle, “Birth of Humanity”, as it prophetically evokes the final struggle between the giants of Communism and Fascism and the birth of the human age. The poems “Paris, Light of Wing”, “Octopus London” and “New York with its Towers” flutter between praise for the beauty of the cities and their culture, on one hand, and prophetic denunciation of the misery this is based on, on the other. In the case of Paris the opposition is sexualised into a conflict between the “warped, enticing luxury” of the “banks and swampy mires of commerce” and “working class Paris, with its sturdy arms” (Bukharin, 2009, 265–266). The scenario of “Octopus London” contrasts the “monstruous tentacles […] sucking, / The juices, gold and bloody, of half the world” with the “dark obstructions of misery” in poor neighbourhoods, prophesising that “The demon of Revolution” will emerge from such obscurity (272). In the same way, Bukharin contrasts the towers, the shop windows, banks and restaurants of New York with the “dirty, rundown neighourhoods of the immigrants”, prophesying a hurricane in which “the Kingdom of money will sink / Beneath Oceanus’s mighty wave” (273–277). The contrasts structuring the poems of the capitalist cities are handled very differently in the two poems dedicated to Berlin. “Berlin Barracks” is set in a time of National Socialist ascendancy in which “The workers’ quarters are dismal. / Karl’s grave has been desecrated. / The swastika’s grim power / Is darker than autumn night” (Bukharin, 2009, 268) while “Berlin Zoo” is a zoomorphic allegory in which the Nazis are compared with crayfish, hyenas, wolves, buzzards, crocodiles, polecats and wild asses who will meet their appropriate fates in due course (307–311). The cycle of city poems concludes with Leningrad and the realisation of the prophesy when “This giant city became the great heart/of our fearsome revolution” (295). Yet the description of the city as a “giant” is equivocal since for Bukharin Communism should promise the end of the era of giants and the rise of the single human family. Nevertheless, “Untiring, this giant creates and creates / The base for a worldwide commune / This valorous warrior awaits without fear / The menacing prospect of

64  Howard Caygill oncoming war” (296). The giant of warrior communism, Bukharin predicts, will in its turn surrender after a final conflict with fascism and the beginning of the human age. The intimations of the human age are most clear in the penultimate cycle of poems “Epoch of Great Works”. If cycle VI evoked the biblical prophets in announcing the fall of the proud capitalist cities, cycle VIII opens with a parallel between Stalin, Moses and the Law Tables of Sinai and the new constitution of the Soviet Union. What Bukharin had in mind is clear from his poem “The Stalin Charter” as it describes the “creation […] growing in the land of labour / made by hands and minds” (2009, 424). Moscow takes the place of Leningrad as the capital of worldwide revolution and the following poems, many focusing on the achievements of Soviet women, present the achievements of promised land of the young Soviet Union where labour, creativity and life are united. Bukharin develops this unity more formally in Philosophical Arabesques, which is, in part, a theoretical accompaniment to the communist epic described in cycles I, II, III, V, VI and VIII of The Transformation of the World. The remaining cycles, IV, VII and IX, are of a quite different timbre and character though. In the first and eponymous poem of cycle IV, “Nature – Mother of All”, Bukharin describes a natural or geological world in which humans are not directly present. Although the two continents of the USSR are described as “our land” and “our free fatherland” (Bukharin, 2009, 109), the poem and those that follow emphasise neither human labour nor creativity. The contrasts that structure this poem are between the ocean and the mountains, deserts and polar icescapes, polar silence and tropical exuberance, rivers and endless forests, and, finally, the earth and the “remote, extraordinary worlds” of the stars (110). In each of the poems nature is aligned directly and indirectly with infinity, as in the endless forests of “Nature – Mother of All”. This leaves no place for an anthropocentric, labour-oriented view of matter. The second poem of cycle IV describes a plane journey with its indirect evocation of a human presence, echoed later in a description of a raft journey. But apart from these and other exceptions – the rider in a raft, the watching hunter in a tree, the mushroom hunters – the human labour and struggle that filled the horizon of the other poetic cycles are strikingly absent. The poem “White Nights” sets the key for the impersonal poems of nature that surround it as it culminates in the lines “Unlimited white serenity, / and silence. Tramsparent depths of waters, / coldly crystal clear” the poet interjects “O world! I am yours!” (118). Here, then, the world of nature does not belong to human beings; they belong to it and its infinity. The poems of cycle IV achieve a reduction of human history with respect to nature, but also of nature with respect to the cosmos. In “Stars Above Ice” the stars are reflected in the ice of a glacier and “The cosmos watches earthly life in its fast-fleeting / course” (Bukharin, 2009, 129).

Prison Writings of Nikolai Bukharin  65 The tone of cycle IV is profoundly inhuman, emphasising the insignificance of human struggles. This sits uneasily with the epic cycles of labour and class struggle that surround it and it is hard not see these poems as consolations for their author’s predicament. What after all is a single human life compared to the infinities of nature? The final poem of cycle IV, “Sunset”, sees in the chromatic cloudscapes at sunset an allegory of the “swirling chaos” of both history and nature (175) with an all- consuming fire in which “everything is churning […] / as the ruddy ball of fire sinks, expiring” (175). As one of the last of the poems to be written, this nihilism in the face of infinity sits uncomfortably with the historical epics and praise of the Soviet Union. The seventh cycle or “Lyrical Intermezzo” shifts from the impersonality of the poems of nature to the intense lyricism of the poems to his wife and child. The poems were written in two blocks at the end of August and September, the first addressed to the second person singular and the second to the first person plural. The first block is full of the pain of separation, while the second evokes memories of a happier past. The key to the cycle is set by the opening poem “Tristia” or “Sorrows” with an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno as the poet descends into Hell and hopelessness. The title itself is a complex allusion, first to Ovid and his poems from exile that bring together memory and appeals to an unjust Emperor, but also to Mandelstam’s mediation on Ovid in his poem and collection Tristia from 1922. The political tone of the “Lyrical Intermezzo” is set with a clear and sorrowful allusion to Mandelstam’s “science of parting”, but without the Nietzschean consolation of eternal return so important to Mandelstam: “Everything’s been told before, everything will happen again, / and all that’s sweet is the instant of recognition” (Mandelstam, 1973, 109). Bukharin’s poetic premise is bleaker – “You are not here, my lovely gentle friend, my dearest. / Into thin air, all that we had has vanished” (Bukharin, 2009, 327). Although written in August, the second stanza of “Tristia” evokes autumn mists, Ovidian chill and the repetitive drumming of the rain as “the drip of icy tears” (327). Mandel­ stam’s ecstatic eternal return has become empty repetition – Nietzsche’s greatest weight – and his “sweet instant” of recognition has become two misshapen trees rubbing together, two skeletons whose “dead bones / are rubbing, grinding, grating” (328). The final stanza calls for the beloved to come quickly, to sit beside and comfort him. Comfort is offered in memories addressed first of all to a past shared with the beloved. The imagined autumn mists of “Tristia” are followed by the evocation in “Remembrance” of the sound of music from the village, drowned out in memory by the rustling of the beloved’s silk dress (Bukharin, 2009, 329). In the early poems of cycle VII the prisoner revisits the beginnings of their love, their walking together, swimming, sailing, making love and conceiving their son. Yet this memory is seared by the realisation – expressed at the beginning of “Parting” – that “I am

66  Howard Caygill to go far, far away / And it may be forever” (341). It seems Mandelstam’s “science of parting” taught Bukharin that these memories are but rehearsals for the final moment – “As at death’s hour I disappear forever, Into those eyes I’ll stare” (334). Yet later in the poem Bukharin imagines that the beloved eyes will be closed, as they were when she slept after conceiving their son, suggesting a new future even after his own ending. After the intense burst of poems of comfort, from the end of August Bukharin wrote two poems in early September that return to the objectivity of the nature sequence: “Glory to Life”, which is an echo of St Francis’ “Fratello Sole” that glorifies life, the sun, stars, birds, labour, mothers and children but also the country and its party of fighters; and “Anthem to the Sun” that glorifies the sun that gave birth to terrestrial life, saying “You gave the earth the gift of joy, / We give you back a hymn of praise” (Bukharin, 2009, 354). These extraordinary life-affirming poems from a condemned man are followed at the end of September by poems of ambivalence and sudden jolts between hope and despair. In “The Young Woman’s Song” Bukharin adopts the persona of a young peasant woman waiting for her lover, asking “Can it be those lovely days / For me are gone away forever?” (358) and answering with the despairing affirmation “lovely days of Spring will come! / And in the oak grove, leaves are greening!” (359; original emphasis). And then the memories flood through, of a car chase, driving together, walking together on a summer night, sitting side by side on a bench at midnight, crossing a bridge in Leningrad only, and finally, in “A Dream”, to collide with the reality of solitary confinement. This poem begins with a repetition of “I was with you” in a shining “springtime of youth” and is accompanied by the sound of a babbling brook, even though the dream is set indoors and its idyllic domestic scene gives way to a cold awakening: “I press my troubled head […] And awake all at once, filled with longing, / All alone in the rigours of winter” (380–381). The separation is abrupt but necessary, for Bukharin by this point knew that the lives of his wife and son depended on his obediently confessing to the charges invented against him. The “Lyrical Intermezzo” closes with Bukharin’s last poem “Night” written on 18 November as he was working on the Philosophical Arabesques. The two quatrains of the poem seem to come from beyond death; there is no longer an I, you or a they, but only a fugitive “somebody” in a dark room with a plotting “sorcerer” outside in the silent night. The first quatrain opens with a “long and lonesome sound, / As train or factory whistles blow” (Bukharin, 2009, 392). The voice is already remote from the sounds of production and class struggle from epic cycles of the Transformation of the World. It is cut-off from labour. It can neither heed the call of the factory whistle nor respond to the movement of the train. It feels like the early hours of morning at the end of the night shift, and “Somebody’s pensive gaze is blurred” with tears from

Prison Writings of Nikolai Bukharin  67 “the pain and yearning we all know” (392). The “we” may still be the lyrical you and I of the preceding poems, it could be all human beings, but it is also the prisoners who know this pain and yearning better than most. The melancholy confinement of the first quatrain metamorphoses into a theatrical backdrop, “a sky of black” with a moon hanging “like a prop in a theatre” (392). But this darkness and its soundscape no longer evokes railways and distant factories but is the silent night where “the sorcerer” is at work “beyond the window frame” (292). The movement from the literal melancholy of sounds in the black night to the paranoia of the silent night of the machinations of the sorcerer is literally telling, but there is no third quatrain or closure, for this is a night without end. Philosophical Arabesques The programmatic philosophical poem “Meditationes” from 1 October 1937 was written as Bukharin began work on his philosophical work Philosophical Arabesques and shares its unresolved tension between the infinites of nature and of human reason and labour (Bukharin, 2009, 384). Bukharin begins the first of five quatrains by recalling the natural infinity of the poem “Nature – Mother of All” against which “individuals” flicker like shadows – coming into and leaving natural life – with the exception of humanity, “for mankind’s footprint is firmly fixed” (383). The assertion that humans leave a lasting trace on nature is questioned in the second quatrain, where the “meditating” soul breathes in time with nature’s breath and “Nature and world, embrace, encompass us” (383). The meditator is carried up by the crossings between nature and the human world “Like a wave, an ocean, age-old, multifarous” (383). The wave is both nature and the human world, meaning that the meditator is not simply contemplating the infinity of nature, but participating in its union with the human world. In the third quatrain Bukharin explains that we do not only breathe with nature “but with our scarlet blood we feel / All of life’s pulse, vast, universal” (384). Nature as the infinity of the sky and the stars breathes with us while nature as the infinity of life pulses within us. In the final quatrain we are given an intimation of the Bukharin’s understanding of the dialectical character of  the relation of human world and nature. On the one hand, “Submitting to her elemental force, / we bow to necessity’s laws, objective” while, on the other hand, “with those laws, we make her bow, in turn, / Before the wondrous-gleaming throne of Reason” (384). In Philosophical Arabesques Bukharin will try, not entirely successfully, to clothe this largely Kantian position in the rhetoric of dialectical and historical materialism as a contribution to Marxist philosophy. He did so by reinventing of the persona of Leading Soviet Theorist Nicolai Bukharin, a persona already given up for dead in the preceding prison writings. It represents a radical change in strategy from the poetry

68  Howard Caygill in that it defiantly assumes the public theoretical persona of the earlier Socialism and National Culture, adopting the bullying and pugnacious rhetoric that characterised philosophical debate in the Soviet Union. Insufferably rhetorical statements such as “Kantians, positivists agnostics, phenomenalists, and others – make your choice! Time is running out” co-exist with subtle evocations of Spinoza’s substance as “natura naturans and natura naturata simultaneously, stripped of their theological baggage” (Bukharin, 2005, 38, 90). This is the translation into philosophical, specifically Spinozist language of the position of “Meditationes” in which nature is both creative and created. Indeed, much of the Philosophical Arabesques consists in an apology for a Spinozist position regarding infinite nature, life, creativity and reason concealed behind a rhetoric of Leninist polemics. Philosophical Arabesques presents a scenario familiar to Marxist and Leninist philosophy of the opposition of crude materialism and idealism but puts in a third position which is not Marxist dialectic but rather Spinozist substance. Thus in the opposition of hylozoism and panpsychism set up in chapter 13 Bukharin refers to a third position “to which Spinoza was attracted, and which holds that the material and psychical, or ideal, are two aspects of one and the same substance” (Bukhrin, 2005, 139). On occasions Bukharin even plays with his masked Spinozism referring in chapter 17 to Plekhanov’s definition of Marxism “as a type of Spinozism” and adding in faux-polemical manner “And we all know what Spinozism is” (175). For Bukharin, Spinozism is the thought of the intersection of nature and human world, but his is a dialectical Spinozism which emphasises his view that every determination is a negation. The indirect approval of Spinoza is most evident in the discussion of freedom and necessity in chapter 19. Bukharin endorses Lenin’s view in his commentary on Hegel’s Science of Logic that human goals arise from the “objective world” and only appear as if they are acts of free will as “precisely the same view that Spinoza presented in his renowned Ethics” (Bukharin, 2005, 187). Bukharin continues, “Spinoza protested in every possible way against the widespread view that human beings have unlimited strength and depend on nothing apart from themselves” (187). Against this voluntarism – familiar in Stalinist theory and policy with regard to human power and nature – Bukharin proposes that the negation of “free will” and the recognition that necessity is not incompatible with a responsible freedom. The tension between the rhetoric of Marxist polemic and an affirmative dialectical Spinozism reaches its maximum in the concluding chapter 40 of Philosophical Arabesques, “Lenin as Philosopher”, in which Bukharin directly addresses Stalin. If Lenin was the philosopher and politician of revolution, Stalin is the thinker and politician of the “eternal” victory of socialism: “at the centre of whose thought and action has been the next great historical transition, when under his leadership,

Prison Writings of Nikolai Bukharin  69 socialism has been victorious forever” (Bukharin, 2005, 376). It would be a mistake to read this as the captive’s flattery of the captor; it is rather a reading of Stalin’s thought and political actions as if he was realising Bukharin’s own thought. The final paragraph of Philosophical Arabesques begins with what seems to be orthodox praise to Stalin, but modulates into something else altogether in the very last sentence. Bukharin begins with a questionable apostrophe to Stalin: “All of the major vital functions have been synthesised into the victorious completion of the great Stalinist five-year plans; theory has been combined with practice on an entire gigantic social scale, and in every cell of the social organism” (376). But after this praise of Stalin’s achieving the metabolism of socialism, Bukharin looks forward to the post-Stalinist future when the struggle to establish the conditions of biological life gives way to a Spinozist joy of life: “New questions of world significance are ripening, questions of the worldwide victory of socialism and of its youthful culture, full of the joy of life” (376). Philosophical Arabesques ends, then, in a world where the plans to secure the social metabolism and defence of the organism have been succeeded by the question of how to make life creative and joyful. Vremena or How It All Began Work on Bukharin’s last and most remarkable prison work, Vremena or How It All Began, started on the night of 12/13 November 1937, five nights after completing Philosophical Arabesques, and it broke off mid-sentence in the twenty-second chapter written during March 1938. How It All Began is an autobiography with a thin fictional veneer and is Bukharin’s most intense and beautiful work. Its distance from the strategy and tone of Philosophical Arabesques is striking; it is a loving reconstruction of childhood and the emergence of the young revolutionary, without rancour or retrospective resentment and it is informed by extremely beautiful and closely described experiences of nature. It is full of the joy of life in spite of the difficulty and even tragedy its author was experiencing in the final weeks before his trial and execution. Bukharin had completed seven chapters by mid-January 1938 when his trial was first publicly announced and then completed a further fifteen chapters during an extended adjournment of the court. The choice of autobiography deepened Bukharin’s strategy of counter-confession. In How It All Began, Bukharin writes an intense account of who he really was – the confession of a revolutionary rather than a counter-revolutionary. The description of a childhood imprisoned in the familial and educational institutions of Tsarist Russia is accompanied by moments of joy, with intimations of emancipation always tinged with the proximity of sickness, violence and death. It is an extraordinary exercise in memory and consolation, dwelling on detailed recollections of childhood and

70  Howard Caygill delicate descriptions of natural history. But as the dates of the trial and inevitable execution loomed, Vremya revealed itself as a sustained attempt to affirm death, his own death at the end of chapter 7 and finally in chapters 19–22 the death of his beloved younger brother, Andryusha. How It All Began starts with a third person report on the birth of Kolya Petrov, but is immediately diverted into a description of the neighbourhood and the school where his father worked, and then his mother, haunted by memories of the madness of her mother “whose mind was haunted by arrests, house searches, executions” (Bukharin, 1998, 9). After nine pages the narrative returns to the birth of Kolya, the child prodigy who could recite Lermontov from memory at the age of four. He already possessed an aviary filled with acquisitions from the Truba or bird market (11). Bukharin describes in loving detail the arrival of spring, the budding of the trees and the emergence of the insects, and the absorption of his character who “would get so wrapped up in this that he forgot about everything else” (12). At this point, though, the idyllic tone suddenly changes as Kolya experiences “his first burst of rage, the first foul language to come from his lips” (12). It was provoked by an act of thoughtless cruelty by one of his teachers who crushed a ground beetle he had discovered. His response is to cry out “Bitch lady!”, and he remembers this phrase for “the rest of his life” (12). He conceives of the teacher’s action as a crime of “worldwide significance” in two senses: in the child’s feeling of the absolute finality and injustice of killing the beetle, and as the inaugural moment of the revolutionary career of Nikolai Bukharin. The devastation caused by human and animal death runs throughout the novel. Its presence is particularly intense in chapter 7, written as Bukharin approached his own death. By this point in the story the family has moved from Moscow to Byeltsy where Kolya’s father has made a mistaken career change from teacher to official. There Kolya fled a smallpox vaccination and hid until the doctor had left. His punishment was to be locked into the bathroom, but he escapes to hide in the garden. From there he watches his mother come to the bathroom with a candle, and enjoys her fear as she looked into the bath to see if he had drowned: he began to imagine that he had actually gotten lost, disappeared, even died. His mama and papa were gazing at his corpse, weeping bitterly and regretting they had ever hurt his feelings. He wanted to think: it serves them right! But despite feeling sorry for himself and enjoying this vision of his parents repentance, he began to feel sorry for them too. He felt his tears already mingling with theirs. (Bukharin, 1998, 101) After this vision of a world continuing after his death, Kolya was soon indulging again in the joys of life “greedily gulping down cold cutlets,

Prison Writings of Nikolai Bukharin  71 thickly salted, followed by dumplings made from cherries” (101). And yet the joy of returning from the dead on this occasion remained touched by the proximity of death. The intimations of death reached a crescendo when the author-prisoner began to prepare himself for his own fate. He describes the sadness on his last walk around the orchard before leaving Byeltsy, comparing the hunt of the bees for nectar with Kolya’s own hunt for wildlife specimens: the bees had buzzed as they worked their way into those honeybearing calyxes in search of their booty; here among the burdocks on the just fallen virgin snow they had set our snares for goldfinches and greenfinches… and oh, how those wild, free birds had thrashed about in their nooses! And here was the place where Ivan Yegorych had killed the hamster with his shovel… It all came to life before little Kolya’s eyes, and went filing past him: the games, the friends, the butterflies, the trees, the sorrow, the thrill of success, the tears, Yelena Vladimirovna, Tosya. (Bukharin, 1998, 109) When writing this passage Bukharin believed that these were to be the last lines he would be able to write before his trial and inevitable execution. In them the childhood idyll darkens, haunted by captive birds and death. His character experiences a protracted dying: “Living chunks of flesh were being torn from his body, and they quivered, dying, but were unable to die” (110). His memories are dead yet by remembering them he keeps them in life, only not joyously. After the violent image of a dismembered body of memory, the point of the view of young Kolya is replaced by a voice from outside the narrative that reflects on death and other endings because “Time’s bell had run” (Bukharin, 1998, 120). In an intermediate state between imprisoned life and the trial that would bring his death, Bukharin returns for consolation to the eternal nature of “Nature – Mother of All” and the natura naturans, natura naturata of Philosophical Arabesques. Nature eternally changes, so do the human times that he has so lovingly described; there is a cycle in nature and history and “the Petrovs were already on their way back to their native haunts where they had their roots” (120). With the delayed trial date Bukharin took up writing again, describing the adolescence of Nikolai and his way to becoming a revolutionary. The last chapters written as he approached the definitive date of his trial are saturated with the consciousness of death and the questioning of what it might mean. They show why Bukharin maintained his belief in eternal nature alongside his Marxism until the very end. The unexpected death from meningitis of his “utterly fragile” but formidably intelligent and radical friend Tosya produced first shock, then numbness and finally

72  Howard Caygill questions such as “what was the point of living if, no matter what, you had to die” (Buharin, 1998, 286). Once again, Kolya’s method of investigation was to imagine his own death, lying at night under the covers without moving but rejecting the idea of nothingness because “there was a time when I too, didn’t exist, wasn’t that so? But other people had existed, and trees, and stars and flowers, the sun and the earth. What was strange about it then, after all?” (286). Yet something about the singularity of his friend’s death unnerved him: “that’s something that has been lost forever” (287), and so with his thoughts out of control Kolya fell asleep. The narrative then moves rapidly from the warm bed of the sleeping Kolya to “One of the clear frosty days of winter” (288). But this apparent change of scene is an intensification of the reflection on death. Kolya is sledging with his brother and friends when his brother has an accident, suffering brain injury and dying during the night. Bukharin describes the confusion and emotions of guilt and sorrow, and after weeks hoping it was but a bad dream he runs in distress to his father “Oh, Papa, Papa. Who will give me the answer? It was a question to which no-one would ever be able to give Kolya the answer” (290). The narrative is once again diverted into a description of a meeting between young Bolsheviks and Social Revolutionaries and a historical fantasy of the administration of the repression following the assassination of the Minister of Internal Affairs Sipyagin on 2 April 1902. But the final incomplete chapter 22, written during Bukharin’s last days, returns to the lessons of the death of his brother. At this limit of his authorship Bukharin describes how with the death of his brother “a bottomless abyss seemed to have opened before him and he was walking at its very edge. The whole world had lost its lustre, […] a deathly pallor lay over everything, filled with nameless dread and inexpressible sorrow” (Bukharin, 1998, 318). Bukharin, in extremis, reflects that Kolya’s soul “had tumbled against the world” but the world had “ceased to exist” (318) or become malign and he only continued to function automatically, as if under water. Through writing the sorrow he felt on the death of his brother Bukharin seems to begin an approach to his own death. He describes Kolya’s insomnia – the very same that he experienced in prison and filled by writing: “He kept thinking the same thing over and over. […] The clock on the wall beat out a rhythm with its pendulum: ti kvo ti kvo ti kvo (who are you?)” (320). Tormented by the remorseless question – also the question put to Bukharin by his interrogators, “who are you, what are you” along with their answer, “a fascist ­traitor” – Kolya attempts suicide; he “tied two towels together, made a noose” and with a “pounding” heart, “stuck his head in the noose and jumped” (321). By chance the suicide attempt failed, and at this moment of reprieve: For a second something like the joy of being alive flashed through him, and the sensations of life, his body, his consciousness, the

Prison Writings of Nikolai Bukharin  73 mattress beneath him, the moonlight, the sound of the clock suddenly filled him with a surging wave of courage. (Bukharin, 1998, 321) Coming back from his death in this way led Kolya to turn to Dostoyevsky’s A Raw Youth for help with understanding how people of the future would feel after they had lost their faith in God and the immortality of the soul and the consolation of their millennial faith. Bukharin wrote from memory the passage in which Dostoyevsky describes how such people would fall head over heels in love with life and the earth, and to the extent they came to realise their own transitory and finite nature, they would love no longer with the love they had before, but with a new and special love. (Bukharin, 1998, 323) But what of injustice and the unjust, “it was still necessary to cleanse the earth of them” (324). With his confusion now raised to a philosophical level, Kolya embarks on revolutionary politics and the study of philosophy. The final episode of How It All Began finds Kolya visiting his uncle George. The gratuitous murder of a bird by his friend in the woods led him to ask “What was the difference between this little bird and a human being. None. There had been life – now it was gone” (Bukharin, 1998, 331). His thoughts went from the death of the bird to humanity and the planet: The human race, too, will perish some day. And so will our Earth, our dear old planet, and its corpse, on which all life has ended, […] And yet out of this chaos new life will eventually rise as arose before… My, but it was good to be alive. (Bukharin, 1998, 331) How It All Began breaks off with an episode in which Kolya became drunk and offends the company by reciting Baudelaire’s Carrion from memory; Bukharin’s last words were “He felt very bitter and angry at himself” (333). Before executing his victims Stalin required they make a formal but always futile plea for clemency and mercy. Bukharin duly wrote two on 13 and 14 of March 1938. In the second Bukharin wrote, “The former Bukharin has already died; he no longer lives on this earth […] Let a new, second Bukharin grow – let him even be called Petrov” (Bukharin, 1998, xxviii). With this Bukharin imagined his own death as a fait accompli but at the same time imagined a posthumous life for the persona – Kolya

74  Howard Caygill Petrov – of his fiction. The macabre fiction of a counter-revolutionary conspirator would die with Bukharin, but the truth would live on in the story of the fictional Kolya Petrov patiently written by night as the trial and execution approached. Perhaps Arthur Koestler was wrong in Darkness at Noon to see Bukharin’s confession as testimony to the moral collapse of the first generation of Bolsheviks. While it is true that Bukharin confessed and was duly executed in order to save his loved ones, he also ensured that the writing meant to incriminate him served to protect his integrity both as a thinker and as a revolutionary.

Works Cited Bukharin, N. 1998. How It All Began, translated by G. Shriver. New York: Columbia University Press. Bukharin, N. 2005. Philosophical Arabesques, translated by R. Clarke. London: Pluto Press. Bukharin, N. 2006. Socialism and its Culture, translated by G. Shriver. Oxford and Calcutta: Seagull Books. Bukharin, N. 2009. The Prison Poems of Nikolai Bukharin, translated by G. Shriver. Oxford and Calcutta: Seagull Books. Cohen, S.F. 1980 [1973]. Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohen, S.F. 1998. “Bukharin’s Fate”. Introduction. In How It All Began, by N. Bukharin, vii–xxviii. New York: Columbia University Press. Conquest, R. 1971. The Great Terror. London: Penguin Books. Koestler, A. 1940. Darkness at Noon. New York: Macmillan. Kotkin, S. 2017. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1929–1941. London: Penguin Books. Larina, A. 1988. This I Cannot Forget: The Memoir of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow, translated by G. Kern. New York: W.W. Norton. Mandelstam, O. 1973. Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, translated by B. Raffel and A. Burago. Albany: State University of New York Press. Medvedev, R.A. 1980. Nikolai Bukharin: The Last Years, translated by A.D.P. Briggs. New York: W.W. Norton. Shentalinsky, V. 1995. The KGB’s Literary Archive, translated by J. Crawfoot. London: The Harvill Press.

Prison Spaces and Nation (Re)Making

4

Prison Writing and the Algerian War of Independence Emilie Morin

“In this ‘Journey to the Night’s End’, I have discovered many shortcomings in myself, learned a lot, and lost a lot of illusions… But above all, I have learned to do without just about anything or anyone” (TalebIbrahimi, 1988, 62).1 It is on these powerful terms that, in 1960, in a letter to his brother, Ahmed Taleb-Ibrahimi summarised three years in French prisons following his involvement in the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Similarly, after five years in the prisons of Algeria and France, the French Communist Daniel Timsit – another FLN militant – evoked the price to be paid for the political and metaphysical revelations that detention can bring: They say: I cannot stand the prison any more, I am stifled by the days that are too heavy and the walls that are too naked. It’s not the prison that you can’t stand: it is yourself that you find intolerable. […] You can no longer stand the opaque mass that you have become. […] You drag your body like a ball and your soul like a chain. (2002, 462) These vivid reflections on the hardships of political detention are part of the immensely rich, diverse and historically significant body of literature tied to the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) – a conflict fought not simply in Paris and Algiers and on the vast Algerian territory, but also in cities abroad where nationalist militants had sought refuge, in the courts, at the United Nations, and in the prisons of France and Algeria, where FLN leaders and rank-and-file members were detained en masse. Much of Algeria’s future was played out in carceral spaces: poor conditions of detention made the maintenance of community ties a primary necessity, while enabling forms of dialogue – otherwise unthinkable – across boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, religion and class. In France in particular, the prison became “the only place […] in which brotherly relations between European and Algerian militants are possible”, as Jacques Mandouze observed in 1961 (Charby, 1961, 10). The literature from this period relates the unique forms of solidarity that emerged under duress, and describes how beatings, the continued

78  Emilie Morin witnessing of executions in prison yards, hunger, malnutrition and deep injustice contributed to federating prisoners across the social spectrum, leading many to perceive their own sacrifice as a necessary step towards Algeria’s liberation. The political stakes around political prisoners and their conditions of detention remained unusually high throughout the duration of the conflict. Algerian political prisoners were gradually made rightless by the emergency legislation which, from 1956 to 1960, identified them as common law offenders placed under the jurisdiction of military tribunals, and, thereafter, by new procedures which pushed them, as French subjects (and non-citizens) and as Algerians, beyond the guarantees offered by common law as well as beyond the protection of the Geneva Conventions. The FLN’s struggle to secure a differentiated status for political prisoners, fought by means of heroic hunger strikes, further focused solidarities; the protests ultimately generated an agreement for a semi-political regime in French prisons, which did not transfer uniformly to Algeria, and which the French government worked hard to dismantle (Kessel and Pirelli, 1962; Alleg, 1981). In a long interview with Robert Barrat, published under the pseudonym Mustapha G…, Mohamed Khemisti – a leader of the General Union of Algerian Muslim Students (UGEMA) – predicted that the “absolutely humiliating regime” of political detention would ultimately prove “immensely damaging” to relations between France and Algeria (G…, 1960, 58). Speaking on behalf of the FLN, Khemisti presented the prison as “a school, where the Algerian patriot must improve his learning and his political, social and civic education to perfection” (43), and as the laboratory of the new state because “in prison, we continue to learn how to handle our own affairs: we will all be called upon in the near future to contribute to the administration of our country” (38). The task at hand was of great magnitude in a country lastingly torn apart, with, by 1960, “40,000 [Algerians] in prisons, 20,000 in internment camps, 200,000 in exile, 100,000 fighting underground and as auxiliaries, 800,000 to 900,000 dead” (G…, 1960, 11). This chapter examines the distinctive ties that arose between writing and political detention during the Algerian war. Throughout this period, the prison offered a trigger for diary-keeping and letter-writing – ­ mostly in deeply fraught circumstances, with every written word smuggled outside representing a victory over the severe material restrictions and frequent searches imposed upon political prisoners. This testimonial literature describes strong solidarities, semi-clandestine forms of collective teaching (primarily of literacy and of Arabic and French), and a strict collective discipline which prevented conflicts between prisoners from arising. The men and women who penned these texts shared more than a belief in the vital necessity of Algerian independence: the vast majority had received a middle-class education, used French as

Prison Writing and Algerian Independence  79 their first language, and saw their detention as an unavoidable step towards a new political order which they would also have the freedom to shape. The literature issued from their experiences encompasses texts written in prison and published contemporaneously, texts drafted in prison and published after the war, retrospective memoirs, and fictional texts reimagining the period and crafted independently. With the exception of Allison Drew’s 2014 work on Henri Alleg’s prison testimonies, this literature – which includes different forms of recollections as well as poems, plays and prose fiction, and frequently crosses genres – has not received close attention. Most texts are out of print and can only be found in specialised library collections; few have been translated from the original French. Yet this body of work sheds precious light on the personal and collective histories that transformed writing into a uniquely emancipatory activity, enabling the transmission of first-hand experience as well as political reflections of wider significance. The prison literature of the Algerian war is tied to specific sites: to the Fresnes and La Santé prisons in France, which held large numbers of Algerian political prisoners and in which hunger strikes of great political import took place; to Maison-Carrée or El-Harrach, a fort in Algiers converted into a prison by the French colonial authorities in 1855, where many anti-colonialist and nationalist militants were held; and to Barberousse, the civilian prison of Algiers located by the Casbah, built between 1846 and 1851 by the French and designated Serkadji among the Algerians. In the large testimonial corpus generated by the Algerian war and its atrocities, this prison literature stands out by virtue of its emphasis on the promises held by life in general and detention in particular. Indeed, the vast majority of war testimonies relate experiences that are so horrific that a period of detention is often positioned as a moment of suspension and sometimes respite, with the arrival in prison marking a pause during which the articulation of experience becomes possible. Numerous detainees reached Algeria’s colonial prisons after long periods of interrogation and torture in the colonial villas and farms requisitioned by the French army in Algiers and the countryside, where many others disappeared without a trace. Contemporaneous evaluations of the number of political “disappearances” in France and Algeria between 1957 and 1959 show that the prison remained the lawful face of a colonial state that used emergency legislation to trample upon international human rights legislation (Vergès, Zavrian and Courrégé, 1959). Many suspects did not make it to an official cell but were taken to semi-official sites of torture and detention where their deaths could be concealed, or passed off as evasions or suicides (Branche, 2002). Within the prison, atrocity had some limits; elsewhere it did not. The preface to Alleg’s testimony Prisonniers de guerre (1961) describes Barberousse, notably, as “one of the many bastions of repression in Algeria”, but one which “has benefited from ‘privileged’ conditions, on

80  Emilie Morin account of the presence of several embassies, consulates and foreign journalists in Algiers” (7). Here, I focus in particular depth on texts written by political prisoners detained at Barberousse-Serkadji, including Alleg and Khemisti, who published especially powerful descriptions of prison life. The prison remains one of the war’s most powerful symbols. It is, as a character in Assia Djebar’s novel Algerian White: A Narrative (1995) puts it, “a symbolic place for all of us”: “The place of the first martyrs, just above the Casbah, heart of the capital, heart of the resistance both audacious and joyous!” (2000, 34). Barberousse is the place where Mufdi Zakariah wrote “Qassaman” (“We pledge”), the song that became the Algerian national anthem, and whose refrain is “bear witness!”; where Yacef Saadi was converted to the nationalist cause during a first period of incarceration at the beginning of the war (Horne, 1977), and subsequently wrote the memoir of the Battle of Algiers upon which Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film is based; where prominent political militants were detained, including Zohra Drif, Djamila Boupacha and other women who planted bombs in Algiers, as well as Alleg and other French members of the Algerian Communist Party. In the prison yard, many died under the guillotine; the political prisoners often invoked include Hamida Zabana and Abdelkader Ferradj, the first Algerians to be sentenced to capital punishment in 1956, and Fernand Iveton, the only French settler to be executed for his involvement in FLN actions. After the Evian Accords of 1962, the prison became a potent symbol of nationalist ambitions and victories. For the first President of Algeria, Ahmed Ben Bella, the building – with its walls featuring numerous messages written by nationalist militants – was the living memory of the struggle for independence. In 1965, shortly before Houari Boumédiène’s coup d’état, Ben Bella released prisoners and closed the prison, with a view to creating a museum dedicated to the war and to Algerian nationalism, as part of a major plan to convert prisons into sites that could serve the building of a socialist state (New York Times, 1965). Yet just ten years later, under Boumédiène, Barberousse-Serkadji became a prison again. Subsequently, plans to transform it into a museum were revived but failed, largely because the official war narrative prioritised the armed struggle over the achievements of the political struggle (Alcaraz, 2013). Upon Boumédiène’s death, the prison returned to its former high-security status, and continued to play a role in crushing dissent under Chadli Bendjedid and during the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s. The prison was eventually decommissioned in 2015 and converted into a museum, in a belated realisation of Ben Bella’s wishes. The building, reopened in March 2018, is now Algeria’s national museum, Prison Serkadji. In the abundant literature of the war of independence, BarberousseSerkadji is frequently invoked and reimagined, and remains tied to the memory of resistance and its difficult preservation. Notably, the

Prison Writing and Algerian Independence  81 characters in Mohamed Boudia’s play Naissances, written in 1958 during the author’s detention in France, reflect on the prison’s ironic proximity to Algiers’ large El Kettar cemetery and people’s inextinguishable desire to see the destruction of a building that “seems to defy even our dead” (1962, 41). Serkaji (dans l’ombre de Barberousse), a play by Hocine Bouhazer (real name Bouzaher) published in late 1960 and censored a few months later, zooms in and out of the prison building, retracing key moments in its history. The play’s narrator, cast as a former detainee, compares Barberousse to an “ugly, maniacal and unpleasant […] spider” that hosts the most extreme hatred against his people, and has “never cast a glance upon the city that surrounds it” (Bouhazer, 1960, 85). He evokes the many political prisoners condemned to capital punishment (anonymous detainees as well as heroes such as Zabana, Drif and all the political prisoners called Djamila – Djamila Bouhired, Djamila Boupacha and Djamila Bouazza); he describes the overcrowded cells, the severe damp, the collective wait for the guillotine, and the messages and drawings etched into the walls. Like others who remained free, Bouzaher – who spent some of the war acting as courier for the FLN between France and Germany (Morin, 2015) – was haunted by what he knew of the lives and deaths of political prisoners. For him as for other writers, the task of documenting the war was a primary ethical necessity in a country brought to its knees, already “declining the verb to survive in the future tense” (Bouhazer, 1960, 8). Barberousse, in these fictional texts as in testimonial accounts, emerges as one of the many monsters created by the colonial enterprise – a symbol of a political order whose putrefaction, while well-advanced, continues to foster the same relentless inequity and oppression. For all political prisoners, regardless of their persuasion and trajectory, developing communal forms of life was both a way to retain ties to life as experienced outside the prison and a way to continue fighting for justice and equality. For many among them, the small, fragile communities created within the prison cell brought new hope, and became a channel – often the only channel – to counter, and speak out about, the suffering inflicted by torture prior to their arrival, the terror caused by imprisonment and the anguish ignited by the continuous proximity to the prison guillotine. Writing became a communal act, not simply because it required the complicity of others: for those prisoners who were literate and had the kind of cultural and political assurance that enabled them to write, writing was a way of continuing to fight for all those who could not. The prison documents penned by women who had acted as FLN liaison officers and couriers stand out in this regard. These women were unprepared for the hardships of prison life but became highly effective at supporting one another (Amrane-Minne, 1993). The poems that Anna Gréki, Malika Lahsen, Leila Djabali and Zehor Zerari wrote at Barberousse bear testimony to their undefeated creativity and spirit

82  Emilie Morin of resistance. “Now I only know how to love with rage in my heart”, Gréki wrote; “This is my way of overcoming the pain / This is my way of setting fire to the ashes” (Barrat, 1963, 162). Torture and the struggle for independence are conjoined in a poem by Lahsen, where the war becomes synonymous with the carving of a woman’s body: “They are cutting to pieces / My flesh and my sun / […] They are cutting my flesh / To make History” (Barrat, 1963, 64). In a poem addressed to her torturer, “Lieutenant D…”, Djabali meditates on the ordinary life that her torturer inevitably continued to lead after she lost control of her mind, senses and sense of self under torture: “Your wife, Lieutenant – / Did she stir the sugar in your coffee? / Did your mother dare to tell you [you] looked well? / Did you run your fingers through your kids’ hair?” (Mapanje, 2002, 140). The same courage and political lucidity characterise the letters of protest written at Barberousse by women condemned to forced labour or death. To their lawyers, Zohra Drif, Baya Hocine and Djohor Akrou (the latter two were some of the many minors detained at Barberousse) reported beatings and insults from judges and prison officials; Drif described the prison as a privileged haven for racial hatred and injustice (Kessel and Pirelli, 1962). With Hocine, Akrou and others, Jacqueline Guerroudj – who belonged to the same Communist group as Iveton and had secured the bomb he used – wrote to the authorities during the Battle of Algiers to denounce the traces of torture that they could observe on the bodies of other imprisoned women (Kessel and Pirelli, 1962). In a later memoir, Guerroudj recalled how she and her co-detainees, all condemned to capital punishment, would sing and dance in the Barberousse yard in defiance, to bring some levity into their everyday (1993, 46). In letters to her family, she described a communal life dedicated to bringing comfort to one another by reading, writing, singing and doing gymnastics (Kessel and Pirelli, 1962). To these women, a pen meant more than writing. As Zerari later recalled, a simple biro came with the possibility of another life: “We would make ourselves up with a biro. […] We transformed the prison into a cultural centre without means” (El Korso, 1998). Their words offer a powerful corrective to literary and cinematic representations of the period, which consistently occlude women’s experiences of militancy and political solidarity, and cast female militants as mothers, daughters and sisters responsible for the maintenance of community and family ties. Although women make occasional appearances in anthologies of letters and prison poems, Barberousse has remained overwhelmingly associated with its male prisoners, notably in Pontecorvo’s iconic 1966 film The Battle of Algiers and in Hadj Rahim’s 1982 television film Serkadji (Amrane-Minne, 2007). Despite the corrective brought by Hassan Bouabdellah’s 1985 documentary Barberousse, mes soeurs, the visual iconography of BarberousseSerkadji emerges unchanged in Mohamed Sahraoui’s 2015 fiction film

Prison Writing and Algerian Independence  83 Barberousse (Serkadji) and in Joseph Andras’ 2016 prizewinning novel retracing Iveton’s life, De nos frères blessés. Barberousse was the first prison to which many political prisoners arrested in Algeria were taken prior to their transfer elsewhere in Algeria or France. As might be expected from such a nevralgic centre of detention, living conditions were particularly harsh and overcrowding particularly extreme. Like Alleg, who describes a prison “built for 700” which “counts more than 2,400 prisoners” (1961, 29), Khemisti describes cells of 15 by 5 metres, initially planned for 50 prisoners but housing 120 men, sometimes kept inside continuously for a whole month. The overflow of prisoners was occasionally transferred to Maison-Carrée – a prison portrayed by both Alleg and Timsit as a blessed place, animated by debates about global politics and the role of the UN in the conflict, and gifted with a clandestine organisation that proved especially effective at creating a measure of egalitarianism and redistributing food and goods between political prisoners. Nonetheless, conditions of detention in Algeria were immeasurably harsher than in France; Alleg remarked that the Algerians transferred to Barberousse from France “suffer[ed] a lot more than those coming from Algiers” (1961, 197). For his part, he experienced a real cultural shock upon his arrival at the Rennes prison, and had difficulties differentiating real information from jokes – when he was offered the possibility of ordering croissants on Sunday mornings, for instance (Alleg, 2012, 259). In an interview from 1962, he recalls finding a nail on the floor of his cell – “the prisoners’ most valued treasure” at Barberousse, but a discovery of no value in a French prison. The warder, who has seen him, warns him that the nail “must be rusty”: “Leave it”, he says, “I’ll give you a new one” (Giroud, 1962). This, Alleg explained, was the moment when he realised just how vast the difference between carceral regimes could be (Giroud, 1962). The prison life Alleg got to know at Barberousse could also differ sharply from the realities experienced by Algerian political prisoners: within the prison, everything remained indexed to colonial hierarchies, and differences of status between Algerian and French detainees remained as dramatic as elsewhere. Khemisti gives an alarming account of the violence exercised against Algerian prisoners: When a militant was lucky enough to get to Barberousse – since many at the time were summarily shot or died under torture – he would enter a new world of suffering. The welcome was often violent: kicks, punches, slaps are generously distributed by prison warders, ultra-colonialists for the vast majority, who are encouraged by the director, Mr Casabianca […]. Such brutality is integral to the tradition of psychological shock: its purpose is to create a kind of psychosis driven by fear, to ensure that the new prisoner stays quiet

84  Emilie Morin and puts up with the humiliations and rigours of the penitentiary regime without protest. One should note, since I am talking about the warders here, that many sons of settlers applied for jobs as prison warders in order to assuage their hatred of Arabs. It enables them to beat up Arabs in complete quietude. Patriots, when they arrive in the prison, are in a state of extreme physical weakness, and yet their moral resistance improves very quickly: they are immediately looked after by their brothers in arms who surround them with their solicitude and warm friendship […], and they teach them how to resist the provocations of the prison administration. (G…, 1960, 18–19) At Barberousse, French political prisoners like Alleg were spared some hardships; they benefited from the regimes of solidarity created around them by Algerian political prisoners and by other French Communists, and, in relation to the prison administration, from the extension of the privileges they had enjoyed as Frenchmen in the world outside. Alleg could nonetheless discern two major forms of segregation at Barberousse and other colonial prisons. The first was racist, and “distinguished between Muslims and ‘common law’ European prisoners”; the latter benefited from better living conditions and better jobs, while the former were allocated kitchen duties (Alleg, 1961, 20). The second was shaped by the fear of ideological contagion: political leaders, known militants, intellectuals and Communists (including himself) “who could still exert some influence” were put in the same cells, in parts of the building far removed from the main quarters (21). At Barberousse, some lost their sanity after surviving long periods of torture and ill-treatment elsewhere, others awaited their deaths, and everyone else waited alongside them. Singing to accompany their wait and their journey to the guillotine became the only possible tribute and mode of protest, as in other prisons with large numbers of Algerian prisoners (Kessel and Pirelli, 1962). The songs directed to the militants about to die represented, as Drif put it, “the gift of lucidity, the gift of fraternity” (1961, 16). At Barberousse, however, the singing protests gave rise to “unbelievable acts and scenes of violence” against Algerian prisoners; Khemisti indicates that the administration “would call the riot police and the paratroopers, who would beat everyone up savagely” to end the singing (eventually, the FLN decided that only the men condemned to capital punishment would be allowed to sing) (G…, 1960, 55). Alleg – who does not report on these beatings and may not have witnessed them first-hand – describes how, from the quarters of the men condemned to death, “the forbidden songs are heard every day, those magnificent melodies that always spring from the hearts of a people struggling for their freedom” (2006, 33). Within the prison, the collective singing of the political detainees – just like the silent commemorations orchestrated

Prison Writing and Algerian Independence  85 by their clandestine organisation (Alleg, 1961, 99) – marks moments of intense unity, and inscribes the risks taken and sacrifices made by individuals into a vast movement of resistance able to survive in the memory of all. To political prisoners who had taken particularly high risks, and to their families who knew all too well that disappearance was synonymous with torture and possibly death, the arrival in prison could be experienced as a true moment of grace. As Alleg observed, one suddenly stopped being a disappeared person and gained the ability to write letters: For the many who have been arrested, hope means, first and foremost, arriving at the prison alive. After two weeks, one month, two months in the cellars of the “Villa Sésini”, the “Casino de la Corniche” or elsewhere, the prison seems a haven: the arrest becomes official, it becomes possible to write to family members and to one’s lawyer, and to benefit from a minimum of guarantees. In principle, one becomes sheltered from new police interrogations; one is removed from the hands of the torturers. Tomorrow, many letters will start with the same words: “I have the pleasure to let you know that I am at Barberousse… ” Which also means, “I know you’ve been looking for me for a long time, but I am still alive… ” (1961, 14) Upon arrival, the relief at realising that one had survived could be overwhelming. Timsit remembered the day he entered Barberousse in 1956 as “one of the most beautiful days of [his] life”, the start of a future previously unforeseen. He barely elaborates on this feeling, yet in his recollection writing becomes the means to forget the symbolic deaths inflicted by the war: “I saw myself as dead, and had accepted it: I considered death as an ineluctable consequence of my political commitment. But I found myself alive, delivered from the police, from the fear of torture and of speaking” (2002, 27). Alleg recalled how “secondary” the difficulties of prison life seemed at first: “I had survived torture chambers. I had contributed to publicly accusing the torturers and thus bringing the truth into the light of day” (2012, 215). To arrive in prison is, somehow, to have made it through the worst, to return to a space in which some kind of law prevails, and to be able to look at the future again. Writing and retrospective telling become life-affirming in these recollections, to the point of partially erasing the violence and extreme hardship that prisoners nonetheless continued to experience. That so much was written at Barberousse is something of a miracle: searches were rigorous, and political prisoners were kept under tight watch. Some of the documents penned at the prison have never been recovered; others are forgotten. Others still had a determining influence

86  Emilie Morin on public perspectives on the conflict, in France and beyond, and continue to be widely discussed in histories of the period. Notably, Alleg’s censored testimony of torture La Question (1958), published in Paris by the Editions de Minuit while Alleg was still at Barberousse, federated dissent and support for the Algerian cause (Hubert, 2012), and exposed the techniques used by counter-intelligence services and paratroopers. It attracted commentary across the political spectrum, was greeted by close international attention and provided source material for politically militant artists such as Luigi Nono and his opera Intolleranza 1960. Even Alleg’s warders at Barberousse read about La Question and knew of its unprecedented impact; one of them gave Alleg a newspaper cutting about his book, asking him to destroy it as soon as he has read it, and commenting “what you have done is very good… ” (Alleg, 1961, 146). The testimonies issued by the Editions de Minuit and other maverick publishers sometimes found unforeseen readers within the semi-official carceral system that supplemented the prisons too. Jacques Charby, notably, reports being told, upon his arrest in Paris, that he has “five minutes to confess everything”; otherwise the “gègène” – the dynamo routinely used for electrical torture – will be brought out. Grabbing Charby by the ear, a counter-intelligence officer asks him whether he has read La ­Gangrène – a book describing the horrific torture that a group of Algerian students underwent in the offices of the counter-intelligence services in the centre of Paris. When Charby confirms that he has indeed read their testimonies, the officer screams, “well, it’s all true!” (1961, 21; original emphasis). La Question was written in microscopic script with the complicity and warm support of Alleg’s cellmates, on the paper that Alleg had been given to correspond with his lawyer, who smuggled the tightly folded pages out of the prison for his client (Alleg, 2012; Berchadsky, 1994). Barberousse is not named in Alleg’s account, becoming instead an unnamed symbol of all political prisons. The text opens with a startling description of “this enormous prison, in which each cell houses a quantity of human suffering”, and in which talking about oneself “is almost indecent” (Alleg, 2006, 33). Here as elsewhere, witnessing others waiting for death – living “by the pulse” of the men waiting “for their reprieve or their end” (33) – is depicted as central to prison life. During and after the writing of La Question, Alleg worked on another testimony: Prisonniers de guerre, which offers a scrupulous account of political detention and group dynamics. The text, partially shaped as a diary, was written at Barberousse and Maison-Carrée, prior to his transfer to France and escape from the Rennes prison. It begins with Alleg’s first impressions of Barberousse in August 1957 and ends at the start of June 1960, prior to his trial before the Algiers military tribunal alongside other members of the Algerian Communist Party. Like Charby’s memoir of detention at the Fresnes prison and Khemisti’s detailed exposition of

Prison Writing and Algerian Independence  87 the colonial carceral system, Prisonniers de guerre is an attempt to keep the memory of political detention alive. Alleg describes the vital roles played by education, group discipline and the prisoners’ internal networks (like Maison-Carrée, Barberousse had its own clandestine system, the Nidham – the organisation). He also details the ingenious modes of communication adopted by prisoners at Barberousse: news was transmitted via messages passed from cell to cell; via the many antennas of “Radio Barberousse”, among which the prisoners’ improvised barbershop played a major role; and, for a time, via the news bulletin created by Alleg and his cellmates, named Barberousse Républicain (titled after the newspaper Alger Républicain, for which Alleg had acted as editorin-chief). Prisonniers de guerre also registers the prison’s distinctive vocabulary and greetings, focused on affirmations of solidarity: saha no longer means good wishes of health or thanks, but friendship, courage or confidence in the future (Alleg, 1961, 55). Prisonniers de guerre has received considerably less attention than La Question and has not been republished since it appeared (uncensored) with the Editions de Minuit in 1961. Yet the text offers precious insights into the emancipatory power of writing and the political futures imagined within Algerian prisons during the war. It also sheds light on what it takes to write a testimony under extreme duress. Indeed, Alleg explains precisely under what conditions he wrote La Question: he found “new tricks to hide the pages” every day and to disguise his text as something else. Thanks to the “exceptional supply” of books suddenly provided by the prison administration, which mostly consist of religious and classical works, he got hold of an Arabic manual and a Russian grammar (Alleg, 1961, 98). The Russian grammar proved particularly precious. It offered the possibility “of writing ‘officially’ in phonetic French using Cyrillic characters” while evading suspicion: “When a warder finds my copybook and asks, ‘what is this?’, I answer, ‘my Russian exercises’. He puts it back respectfully, commenting, ‘that must be a difficult language to learn’” (98). Prisonniers de guerre was composed in the same fashion and was converted back into a full text after Alleg’s transfer to the Rennes prison; there, he benefited from the complicity of an Algerian FLN militant and former member of the Algerian Communist Party, who showed him how to hide sheets of paper behind the refuse of the infirmary, where he worked, and collected the pages for him thereafter (Alleg, 2012). Prisonniers de guerre revisits the facts central to La Question, relating the continued investigation into the death of Maurice Audin (the “disappeared” fellow Communist murdered shortly before Alleg’s arrest), Alleg’s return to the place where he was tortured, and his confrontation with his torturers (the names of these army officers, anonymised in La Question, appear in full in this sequel). Prisonniers de guerre also describes the seismic shocks that the publication of La Question produces

88  Emilie Morin at Barberousse: searches are intensified, every scrap of paper is seized, and the canteen stops selling copybooks, henceforth “banned by the military authority”; this leads a prisoner to ask, to everyone’s amusement: “and if we write on the walls, would they take them away?” (Alleg, 1961, 148). The book is discussed by “the whole of Barberousse” – by the prisoners, “just as pleased to see torturers denounced as to find out, even without having read the testimony, that it could have been written within the prison walls”, and by the warders, “reprimanded by the director for committing a professional fault, just as he was by his superiors” (145). “The question is not”, Alleg concludes, “to punish any guilty prisoner: the news would be heard beyond the prison. The director pretends to ignore everything, and that is the attitude he recommends to his subordinates” (145–146). In other circumstances too, the availability of books and paper remains a political matter, indexed to a wide range of factors. Access to books depends on demand and need (at Barberousse, the sorry collection, which mostly consists of adventure novels, is mostly kept out of the prisoners’ reach by the librarian, a veteran of the French Foreign Legion; books in Arabic are scarce and in high demand); on enshrined prison customs (Maison-Carrée, for example, is said to have an excellent library, but the books are rarely brought out); and on the circumstances that shaped the political fate of the detainees (Alleg, 1961). In January 1959, after De Gaulle’s return to power, rumours circulate around Barberousse that the prisoners condemned to capital punishment may be pardoned; cigarettes, lemons, sweets and soap are distributed, with the prisoners condemned to capital punishment receiving a copy of the Koran in Arabic. The new government, Alleg observes, is keen to “erase […] the embarrassing impressions left by the support previously lent to extremists and paratroopers” (1961, 199–200). The Barberousse library undergoes a revolution: the books requested by prisoners are purchased for the first time. “Nonetheless, at bottom, nothing has changed”, Alleg concludes: “Contempt for humankind, brutality and solitary confinement remain the system’s Holy Trinity” (200). In spite of the chronic paucity of resources, the prison emerges in the accounts given by Alleg, Charby and Khemisti as a place in which intensive forms of learning can also take place. Alleg describes the “extraordinary desire for education” that shaped interactions between French and Algerian political detainees, with the former realising that their colonial education, predicated on the idea that “the only source of human enlightenment was the colonising West”, “has deliberately betrayed or concealed the history of the Algerian people” (1961, 119). French and Arabic are widely taught within prison cells, and historical and political knowledges are shared. Khemisti’s account of life at Barberousse and Maison-Carrée evokes the conferences, discussions and political commentaries organised to facilitate the prisoners’ political education. He

Prison Writing and Algerian Independence  89 also depicts a mixed prison population – “lawyers, doctors, students of all disciplines, teachers, as well as poor peasants and manual workers who had never been to school and were completely illiterate” – among whom the teaching of literacy proved particularly fruitful: thanks to pencils and copybooks donated by the FLN, illiterate prisoners “would be able to write and read fairly well after two, three, four, or five months”, which in turn enabled their teachers to feel “that, in spite of difficult conditions, they were contributing to the great task of popular education awaiting us” (G…, 1960, 41–42). At Fresnes, among Algerian prisoners, Charby witnessed a better-resourced system, with different study strands incorporating school programmes as well as official state examinations up to baccalaureate level. He also found himself in the midst of a prison population bringing together three generations who had little in common beyond their shared commitment to independence: “elderly peasants who have more or less resisted throughout their lifetimes in their villages”, “younger men, who first joined the tolerated political parties when they became adults, then led semi-clandestine lives that took them from the prison to torture to liberation to new arrests” and “very young men […] who have only known the war” (Charby, 1961, 54). These testimonies depict different worlds, yet display a shared sense that, through the rigorous organisation of prison life, many political prisoners who had received no prior education (and were as a result relatively unpoliticised) were encouraged to think about history seriously for the first time. For many French militants for Algerian independence, the prison became the only place in which their part in the struggle for liberation was truly recognised, and a multi-ethnic Algeria encompassing French settlers seemed possible. Alleg’s and Charby’s accounts frequently verge on the lyrical, and often marvel at their closeness with the Algerian people – a closeness that social customs and colonial mores outside the prison would have precluded. The words of one of Alleg’s co-detainees, Sadek Hadjerès, are particularly moving: we shall see one another again… If only we survive […]. Without [the prison], we would never have met […]. Barberousse has enabled us to get to know one another. That’s what we will remember, brothers, before we think of our suffering… Tomorrow, when we destroy Barberousse… (Alleg, 1961, 249) At Fresnes, Charby – who was Jewish – felt great pride upon realising that he has become part of the lives and political thinking of his Algerian cellmates; he listened attentively to their discussions about “the history of the Arabs, the history of Algeria, the history of the conquest, of colonisation, of unjust laws, but also the history of the future: what

90  Emilie Morin the Algerians’ Algeria will be”, and recalls how a discussion of French colonial legislation ignited a large debate, with militants “want[ing] to see a serious scrutiny of the means to bring together the Arabs and the Jews, in order to eradicate racism, one of the creations of colonisation” (1961, 55–56). For FLN militants such as Khemisti, such moments of recognition, which were possible in prison but not elsewhere, were simply “the prefiguration of what will be tomorrow, since for us Algeria will be the country of […] all those who have stood for Algeria, accepted to suffer and shed their blood for its liberation” (G…, 1960, 52). Alleg, for his part, discerned in the Algerian prisoners of Barberousse “an extraordinary […] determination and contained force, tense and harsh, the force of the heroes in rags that makes all mass uprisings” (1961, 11). Recalling the internment camp of Lodi and the immense hardships that he had traversed, he writes in Prisonniers de guerre of Barberousse as the only place in which “our compatriots surround us with their affection and make us feel that among them we are at home” (55). He also evokes a moving gesture of recognition from one of the prisoners condemned to capital punishment, who shouts to him and his French cellmates, “‘greetings to all of you up there, particularly to our European brothers… ’, as though [they] deserve a special mention” (53). This is an instant of “true joy”, a fleeting moment of emancipation from his own compromised position as a Frenchman: We have suffered too much during these dreadful years from the attitude of the majority of Europeans; we have been too ashamed of racism and the cannibalistic hatred that had submerged European Algeria. During the times of clandestinity, when we had to disappear into the crowd, listen, watch and remain silent, we had to learn how to withstand the harsh and revolted stare of the Muslims who, without knowing us, were encompassing us into the same legitimate anger. How could things be otherwise, when those in charge of lynchings were applauded on the streets? (Alleg, 1961, 53) Alleg’s testimony ends with speculations about what might happen to Barberousse in a free Algeria, relaying a range of voices among which the author feels in his rightful place. The prison’s imagined transformations symbolise all the social achievements that political independence will enable: “a hospital! Some flats… No more shantytowns! A university to educate the young! A park would be better: there are no green spaces around here” (249). Sadly, prisons remained prisons, and the open democracy imagined by many political prisoners and militants, in which all voices would be heard and represented, died with the 1965 coup d’état. What emerges nonetheless from the powerful prison literature of

Prison Writing and Algerian Independence  91 the Algerian War of Independence is a sense that writing does not simply alleviate the terror and suffering synonymous with political detention; in circumstances of true political hardship, writing about prison life is also a way of imagining the future and its infinite possibilities.

Note 1 All translations from the French-language sources cited are by the chapter author.

Works Cited Alcaraz, E. 2013. “La mise en scène de la mémoire nationale: de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne au maqam al-chahid d’Alger”. In Autour des morts de guerre, edited by R. Branche, N. Picaudou and P. Vermeren, 21–45. Paris: La Sorbonne. Alleg, H. 1961. Prisonniers de guerre. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Alleg, H., ed. 1981. La guerre d’Algérie, Vol. 3, edited by H. Alleg, J. de Bouis, H. Douzon, J. Freire and P. Handiquet. Paris: Temps Actuels. Alleg, H. 2006. The Question, translated by J. Calder. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Alleg, H. 2012. The Algerian Memoirs: Days of Hope and Combat, translated by G. Walker. London: Seagull. Amrane-Minne, D.D. 1993. La guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962): Femmes au combat. Algiers: Rahma. Amrane-Minne, D.D. 2007. “Women at War: The Representation of Women in The Battle of Algiers, Trans. by A. Clarke”. Interventions 9.3: 340–349. Barrat, D., ed. 1963. Espoir et parole: poèmes algériens. Paris: Seghers. Berchadsky, A. 1994. La Question d’Henri Alleg: un ‘livre-événement’ dans la France en guerre d’Algérie. Paris: Découvrir. Boudia, M. 1962. Naissances, pièce en trois actes, suivie de L’Olivier. Lausanne: La Cité. Bouhazer, H. 1960. Des voix dans la Casbah: théâtre algérien militant. Paris: Maspero. Branche, R. 2002. La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie, 1954– 1962. Paris: Gallimard. Charby, J. 1961. L’Algérie en prison. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Djebar, A. 2000 [1995]. Algerian White: A Narrative, translated by D. Kelley and M. de Jager. New York: Seven Stories. Drew, A. 2014. We are no longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Drif, Z. 1961. La mort de mes frères. Paris: Maspero. El Korso, M. 1998. La mémoire des militantes de la Guerre de libération nationale. Insaniyat 340–349. Online. Accessed 15 July 2018. https://journals. openedition.org/insaniyat/11606. G…, M. 1960. Barberousse. Paris: Pierre Jean Oswald. Giroud, F. 1962. “Rencontre avec Alleg”. L’Express 576. 28 June.

92  Emilie Morin Guerroudj, J. 1993. Des douars et des prisons. Algiers: Bouchène. Horne, A. 1977. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962. London: Macmillan. Hubert, N. 2012. Editeurs et éditions pendant la guerre d’Algérie, 1954–1962. Paris: Bouchène. Kessel, P. and G. Pirelli, eds. 1962. Le peuple algérien et la guerre: lettres et témoignages d’Algériens, 1954–1962. Paris: Maspero. Mapanje, J., ed. 2002. Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing, Oxford: Heinemann. Morin, E. 2015. “Unspeakable Tragedies: Censorship and the New Political Theatre of the Algerian War of Independence”. In Theatre and Human Rights After 1945: Things Unspeakable, edited by M. Luckhurst and E. Morin, 21–38. London: Palgrave Macmillan. New York Times. 1965. “Algeria Converting Jails to Social Use”. 6. 10 April 1965. Taleb-Ibrahimi, A. 1988. Letters from Prison, 1957–1961. 1966. New Delhi: Allied Publishers. Timsit, D. 2002. Récits de la longue patience: journal de prison 1956–1962. Paris: Flammarion. Vergès, J., M. Zavrian and M. Courrégé. 1959. Les disparus: le cahier vert. Lausanne: La Cité.

5

Writing from Robben Island National Identity and the Apartheid Prison in South Africa Daniel Roux

In 2004, the South African Constitutional Court was moved to Constitution Hill, formerly the site of a notorious prison called the Johannesburg Fort. Under apartheid, hundreds of thousands of ordinary South Africans were imprisoned here for pass law infractions: in other words, for not possessing a valid pass that allowed black South Africans to work in white urban areas. The erection of the Constitutional Court on this site, then, was a remarkable architectural realisation of a logic of displacement: a symbol of oppression reborn as a symbol of hope for ordinary people. In Frederico Freschi’s words, the Court “consciously works with the embedded history of the site in order to reflect its contemporary reality and serve as a microcosm of an imagined ideal of citizenship” (2007, 33). In this sense, the dominant post-apartheid idea of citizenship, of national belonging, is built on the ruins of the prison. Or, to put it differently, the dominant historical narrative of nation is subtended by the spectre of the prison. But if the apartheid prison was a symbol of oppression, it was also a significant site of struggle. About 80,000 people were detained without trial between 1960 and 1990 – under apartheid law, a perfectly legal practice – and between 1920 and 1986, an astonishing figure of more than twenty million black South Africans experienced some form of incarceration, mostly for not possessing a valid pass (Gready, 2003, 1; Worger, 2004, 63). By 1994, nine of the thirty members of the newly elected democratic government had served long prison sentences, among them the president, Nelson Mandela, who had spent twenty-seven years of his life in prison, mostly on Robben Island. Under these conditions, it is little wonder that the prison became an important site of struggle, and that the prison memoir emerged as a privileged literary form. Of all prisons under apartheid, Robben Island, where Mandela was incarcerated for eighteen years, was certainly the most infamous. In his Robben Island Dossier, written at the height of apartheid rule in 1974, Neville Alexander could accurately contend: “Whatever the public stance of officialdom, there is no doubt that they realise, as everyone else does, that Robben Island Prison is the most important prison in South Africa” (1994, 11). Both as a symbol for the injustices and

94  Daniel Roux hardships suffered under the apartheid regime, and equally emblematic of enormous resistance, Robben Island was a place apart, a significant point of reference in the construction of an oppositional identity. In its long history before it became a political prison, Robben Island served as a site of political banishment under Dutch and English rule, and then as “a repository for the mentally ill, sexually deviant and medical outcasts like lepers” (Schalkwyk, 2012, 26). The first prisoner on Robben Island was Autshumato (known by the Dutch as “Harry the Strandloper”) and two of his Khoisan comrades, who were exiled to the island in 1658 by Jan van Riebeeck, the Dutch East India Company representative tasked with setting up the first European refreshment post in the Cape (Hutton, 1997, 20). Its history as an explicitly political prison can be traced to the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, when police murdered sixty-nine people during a protest against pass laws (Buntman, 1996, 93). The African National Congress (ANC) and its more radical, black nationalist splinter group, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), were both banned in the aftermath, and they subsequently turned to armed struggle (Buntman, 1996, 93). The ensuing laws created an unprecedented mass of political prisoners, and Robben Island became the preferred site of incarceration for the new waves of activists and freedom fighters. While the overwhelming majority of these early prisoners belonged to the PAC, the organisers of the Sharpeville protests, the number of ANC members imprisoned there increased in the 1960s and eventually outnumbered the PAC members. From 1965, when the “non-political” prisoners were removed from the island, Robben Island, unlike any other South African prison, became an exclusively political prison. There were also no prisoners classified as “white” by the apartheid government on the island. In the political imaginary of resistance politics, Robben Island enjoyed importance as an almost spiritual site of pilgrimage and suffering, as attested to by stories like Mtutuzeli Matshoba’s “A Pilgrimage to the Isle of Makana”, published in his anthology Call Me Not a Man (1979). Prisoners were aware of entering a space of exceptional symbolic significance, a “place of martyrs” (Zwelonke, 1989, 13). From the outset, they adapted their identity to accord with the status of the island: as much as the island is retrospectively reinvented in prison memoirs, the lives that are described by these prison autobiographies are always already invented, their subjectivities oriented towards the role imposed by the island as metaphor for resistance and survival. It is therefore simply not possible to isolate some anterior, authentic experience of Robben Island, because such an “authentic” experience is from the outset anticipative of historical judgement and marked by an element of the fictional. Robben Island had become a theatre of struggle unmatched by any other prison in South Africa. The special status of Robben Island has survived the demise of apartheid, having become an officially sanctified world heritage site and one of the principal signifiers of a post-apartheid national

Writing from Robben Island  95 identity. The island itself is visible off the coast of Cape Town, an inescapable visual coda that serves to confer a marketable, unifying identity onto a fractured nation, even as it remains a memorial to trauma and divisiveness. Indeed, Robben Island has enjoyed a certain global visibility that extended from its notorious status under apartheid rule to its current popularity as a tourist site, where visitors are drawn in particular to Mandela’s iconic prison cell. The close relationship between Robben Island and Mandela, its most famous inmate, ensures that this prison island has come to occupy an important role in the global political imaginary. Mandela’s international appeal, born both out of his significance for colonised people all over the world, and, in Rita Barnard’s words, out of “memories in Europe and the Americas of the dream of liberty and the exultation of release, from the sack of the Bastille, to the Emancipation Proclamation, to the collapse of the Berlin Wall” (2014, 4), is inextricably linked to the Robben Island prison site. According to Veronique Riouful, post-apartheid representations of Robben Island have tended to background painful and divisive aspects of life there in favour of descriptions of the prison as a place of community, resistance, survival and triumph (2000, 24–27). Riouful’s division between apartheid and post-apartheid understandings of the prison is echoed in a great deal of the critical literature on Robben Island. While it is clear that Mandela in many ways domesticated the Robben Island experience in Long Walk to Freedom (1994), and used it in order to develop a new post-apartheid value system, it is dangerous to insist that there is some impermeable boundary that separates apartheid and post-apartheid Robben Island narratives. New models for subjectivity under the post-apartheid state did not, after all, arise ex nihilo, but always in dialogue with the apartheid past. The very fact that Robben Island continues to be revisited, re-explained and reconstructed shows that a particular aspect of apartheid interpellation, exemplified by the prison as institution of control, remains unresolved and retains significance under the new dispensation. As the seminal Robben Island text, Long Walk to Freedom is interesting as much for the ways in which it differs from earlier Robben Island memoirs as for the ways in which it is the same. In this sense, Mandela’s autobiography is an important mediating document between apartheid and post-apartheid representations of the island, since it demonstrates how, through shifts in emphasis and subtle displacements, oppositional voices are transformed into the dominant voice. With this in mind, in what follows I will approach Long Walk to Freedom by comparing it with other texts that reflect on the experience of incarceration on Robben Island. While this chapter does not aim to provide a sustained analysis of these earlier texts, it refers to them in order to show how Long Walk to Freedom echoes and transforms many of the themes and issues that they introduce. At the same time, we can point to the importance of

96  Daniel Roux Robben Island in the construction of South African identity to remark that, as useful and powerful as the island is as a symbol of resistance and triumph, its importance has also tended to occlude other forms of oppression and imprisonment that were essential to the apartheid state’s coercive power. In fact, even now, a large section of the population remains relegated by various forms of structural violence to a kind of permanent state of immobility. Insofar as Robben Island served both as a site of production for the story of a new democratic dispensation and as an enduring symbol of this imaginary, it is worth foregrounding two interlinked observations. First of all, Robben Island autobiographies were written under conditions of contestation: if Robben Island has historically displaced other stories of incarceration under apartheid, the Robben Island story was itself founded on a series of displacements. These contestations and displacements occurred in a very specific, contained environment: the prison. Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom presents itself as a kind of consensus document, a bildungs-narrative that culminates in the mature, synthesising view of an elder statesman. We see, for instance, how Long Walk to Freedom tends to downplay differences of opinion among ANC members. In particular, Mandela makes no mention of his long feud with Govan Mbeki around the issue of participation in apartheid structures (Mandela believed that the ANC should entertain the possibility of supporting participation, while Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba firmly rejected this stance) (Buntman, 1996, 125). Where Mandela describes differences of opinion, it is frequently in the context of a debate that results in consensus, or in order to make the point that the choice for unity should supersede localised conflict. When confronted by a new wave of militant Black Consciousness prisoners in the wake of the 1976 riots, Mandela dismisses the Black Consciousness philosophy as “sectarian” and “immature”, assuming the role of an “elder statesman who might help them [the new young prisoners] move on to the more inclusive ideas of the Congress Movement” (1996, 578). Second, it is necessary to remain alert to the ways in which Robben Island, as a very specific material space, exercised an influence on the stories that emerged from it. The prison is not simply an object of description, it also plays an active, productive role in framing and mediating narration. While most appraisals of Robben Island and political imprisonment under apartheid justifiably focus on the ways in which prisoners drew on their own considerable resources in order to construct new forms of consensus to demand their dignity and freedom, one should not lose sight of the way in which the prison, as a material environment explicitly designed to promote a certain form of subjectivity – to reach the mind through the body – mediated, constrained and engendered specific narrative forms and collective ideals. In other words, if the dominant understandings of the historical struggle against racial injustice and notion of a new

Writing from Robben Island  97 post-apartheid society were constructed in opposition to the prison, they were also formed by the penal institution: the idea of a new nation was effectively constructed using building blocks provided by the prison itself. One Robben Island figure that speaks to both these concerns – that powerful narratives necessarily operate through a process of exclusion, and that the prison plays an important role in determining the identities that speak from it – is Robert Sobukwe, the charismatic PAC leader who was imprisoned on the island from 1963 to 1969. Sobukwe was held in a bungalow completely separated from the other prisoners, effectively in solitary confinement, and managed to communicate with other prisoners only when they passed his cell on their way to work. Mmutlanyane Mogoba, a PAC activist imprisoned on Robben Island from 1963 to 1966, describes how he would sometimes acknowledge greetings from other prisoners with a salute, or by picking up soil and allowing it to run from his hand in reference to the emphasis of the PAC on the theft of land from the African people (2003, 30–31). Other prisoners were not permitted to look at him as they walked past: Indres Naidoo claims that “the warders shouted at us all the time to look straight ahead and not at him” (2000, 72). Currently, Sobukwe’s bungalow is only briefly acknowledged, if at all, in most tours of Robben Island. The focus is invariably on the “leadership section” of the prison, where Nelson Mandela’s cell was housed. Even in the post-apartheid moment, Sobukwe’s cell, despite his historical status as a significant leader of the ANC’s main rival party in South African resistance politics, is something separate and peripheral, a marker of an alternative possible history and an ideology of Black Consciousness that was displaced by the ANC’s vision of non-racialism and cooperation – both with other resistance parties and ultimately across the racial divide. Sobukwe belongs to an early chapter in the history of Robben Island, before ANC members began to displace the PAC as the dominant political voice in the prison. Mogoba points out that while he was incarcerated on Robben Island, Sobukwe was never counted with the other prisoners, but appeared instead as a kind of addition: He was kept in complete isolation without companionship. Even on the main board in the prison that showed the daily roll he was referred to as “Plus One”. If there were 988 prisoners in jail on a specific day, the board would read: 987+1. He lived a lonely life with his jailers as his only human companionship. (2003, 30) We could read beneath Sobukwe’s “special” nomination a more general ideological truth about prisons: every particular prisoner is a “Plus One”, both part of the general prison population and in some way held

98  Daniel Roux apart, individualised under the abstract and inhuman signifier of “one”. To say that the prison contains either a mass of 987 prisoners or merely one prisoner would both be false: the addition mark is a way of conjoining all prisoners, although it also serves the function of separating, of marking off. Even as the prison instates its mark of surplus/deficit, the mark itself becomes a locus of agency and struggle for the prisoner. Every prison memoir recounts, on the one hand, the experience of the “one”, and every prison memoir insists, on the other hand, on the task of addition, on the necessity of community in the face of separation and isolation. The addition mark stands for the sense in which the prison imposes a particular experience in the name of and in the interests of a single and more general ideological totality, but it also stands for the way in which particular experience is incessantly returned by the autobiographers themselves to a more general sense of political solidarity. A prison memoir necessarily reflects the experience of a single individual, but it is also itself the bridge that tries to link that experience to something beyond the self. When I claim that the activity of self-representation is governed by the prison, I am of course not discounting the world that prisoners bring with them to the prison, nor am I dismissing the importance of the context which regulates the production and reception of the text. My point is that the penal institution opens the discursive space for self-narration, and in important ways continues to mediate that narrative. In a properly Jamesonian sense, the material reality of the prison forms the “political unconscious” of the prison narrative – not because these memoirs are “about” prison, but because the prison, in ways that are often invisible, structures the text and conditions the aesthetic representation of consciousness. Robben Island in particular, in its role as the preeminent symbol of collective struggle, provided a 5.18 km 2 stage populated by a relatively small collection of people, whose names tend to appear time and again in all the prison memoirs. The struggle for dignity and rights on this small patch of earth was governed by individual personalities and particular historical contingencies. In Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela claims: “We regarded the struggle in prison as a microcosm of the struggle as a whole. We would fight inside as we had fought outside” (1996, 464). But a prison is a very specific kind of “microcosm”: while it distils and concentrates the operation of power in broader society, it is also governed according to laws, rituals and beliefs that are by definition cut off from the rest of the world; that serve to mark the distinction between “inside” and “outside”. One memoir that can be read as a kind of alternative to Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom is Moses Dlamini’s Hell Hole, Robben Island (1984), first published in the UK while Dlamini was living in exile in Tanzania. Dlamini was imprisoned on Robben Island from 1963 to 1966 for furthering the aims of the PAC. In his Robben Island Dossier,

Writing from Robben Island  99 Alexander identifies the years from 1962 to 1966 as particularly brutal and dehumanising and observes that “from 1962 to 1964 assaults, very often brutal and mass assaults, of political prisoners was a weekly, often a daily, occurrence” (1994, 11–12, 20). The hardship of life on Robben Island during this time was compounded by the use of criminal prisoners to demoralise and intimidate the political prisoners. Dlamini’s memoir, then, reflects on a remarkably violent and ruthless chapter of Robben Island’s history, and does so from a perspective informed by the politics of the PAC, whose members substantially outnumbered supporters of the ANC during 1963–1965. Dlamini published his memoir almost twenty years after he was incarcerated, at the inception of the most successful and wide-ranging mass mobilisation against the apartheid state under the auspices of the United Democratic Front. In this sense, the memoir does not just reflect on life under apartheid in the 1960s, but is fully engaged in the turbulent politics of resistance that characterised the early 1980s. While Long Walk to Freedom also recounts the early years of imprisonment on Robben Island (Mandela arrived on the island in 1964), its account is mediated by what Alexander calls the “relatively humane” conditions of life on Robben Island after 1973 (1994, 14), and by the need for nation-building and amity during the time of its publication in 1994, after the demise of apartheid. Moreover, the ANC’s politics have always been more receptive to compromise and in some senses more inclusive than the PAC’s generally hard-line Africanist ideology. In many respects, therefore, Dlamini’s account is at odds with Mandela’s: its tone is essentially pessimistic, focused much more on the day-to-day misery of life on Robben Island, and it is more explicit than Long Walk to Freedom about ideological tensions and personal ambivalence. Perhaps the most important difference between Robben Island memoirs written during apartheid and those written after the democratic election in 1994 is a shift in the addressee. In memoirs written during apartheid, the person who is being addressed is frequently foregrounded: the texts dramatise a contextualised self, and they explicitly serve a specific social function. Thus, in his introduction to his Robben Island Dossier, when it was first reissued twenty years after its original publication in 1974, Alexander explains how the style and the content of his account are informed by the political context and the intended audience of the dossier: The intended readership to a very large extent co-determined the content and style of presentation of the report. Besides a genuine commitment to reporting strictly only that which I knew to be true, I realized, of course, that any material produced in anger and without due regard to accuracy and probability would not be treated seriously by the men and women I was attempting to reach. Consequently, a certain pedantic meticulousness is there for all to read

100  Daniel Roux even though, on occasion, my real emotions broke through the screen of academic precision. (1994, viii) In his Robben Island memoir, Robben Island (1989), D.M. Zwelonke – imprisoned on Robben Island in 1963 – prefaces his fictional account of his incarceration with a chapter entitled “Why I Write”, in which he speculates on his aversion to discuss his experiences on Robben Island with anyone, and recounts his search for an appropriate audience: I did not know whom I should address, the businessmen, the intellectuals, the clergy, the students or the masses. The student was the person I always respected: I always remembered the number of students on the Island, whisked off there from the classrooms. (3) Even where the intended reader is not so overtly foregrounded, as in Dlamini’s Hell Hole, Robben Island, there is a very strong sense of the memoir itself as part of an ongoing struggle, as a socially useful document. Dlamini’s dedication suggests the nature of the intended audience, one closely associated with the PAC: “Dedicated to Sobukwe, to all Azanian patriots who are languishing in prison, and to those who died at the hands of the police and in prison in their noble struggle for a free Azania” (1984. n.p.). In his introduction to Island in Chains, originally published in 1982 in the UK by Penguin, Naidoo gives some indication of the social uses of his prison autobiography. He is reflecting here, of course, from a postapartheid perspective on his original intentions for writing the book Island in Chains was immediately banned in South Africa. However, ANC underground units managed to smuggle hundreds of copies of the book into the country. It was much sought after. In the Western Cape activists used the book in their underground political study groups. In the Johannesburg and Pretoria area comrades made photocopies of the book which went from hand to hand all over the country. (Naidoo, 2000, xii–xiii) In contrast to this strong sense of audience and social context, the addressee of post-apartheid memoirs is often much more tenuous. In Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela’s original reason for writing the memoir is unambiguous, and his intended audience obvious: One day, Kathy, Walter and I were talking in the courtyard when they suggested that I ought to write my memoirs. Kathy noted that

Writing from Robben Island  101 the perfect time for such a book to be published would be on my sixtieth birthday. Walter said that such a story, if told truly and fairly, would serve to remind people of what we had fought and were still fighting for. He added that it could become a source of inspiration for young freedom fighters. (1996, 567) The themes here are familiar ones: the autobiography is in a sense collaborative (Ahmed Kathrada and Walter Sisulu enjoin Mandela to write his story, and help him to edit it, hide it and smuggle it out of prison), it is designed as an instrument of struggle, its realism serves a political end, and its readers are “young freedom fighters”. To this extent, Mandela’s motives resemble those the activist terms of Naidoo: their books are conceptualised, first of all, as weapons of struggle, with a determinate audience. But who is the addressee of Long Walk to Freedom in 1994, in the post-apartheid moment? The memoir maintains a complex ambiguity where it is both acutely conscious of the historical contingencies that govern it, and in excess of these contingencies. It is not so much that the original context has been erased, as that it has been supplemented. This supplement arises in the interval between the “lost” original manuscript of Long Walk to Freedom (Mandela claimed that the original manuscript was lost in Lusaka after being smuggled out of prison) and its reincarnation at the end of apartheid. In the process, both the narrator and the addressee become universalised; the voice that addresses the reader arises for no particular reason from some indefinable, interior space, and it addresses a vague, inclusive readership – in fact, a global readership. It should also be noted that if the more recent autobiography contains vestiges of its “collaborative” authorship on Robben Island, this collaboration is supplemented by the fact that it is also in part ghost-written by Richard Stengel: that is, the earlier collaborative voice is extended to a form of collaboration that is by its very nature invisible, and directly related to the requirements of marketing the text. We see a similar process at work in a text like Jan Coetzee’s Plain Tales from Robben Island (2000). In this book, Coetzee provides heavily edited transcriptions of interviews that he conducted with ex-Robben Island prisoners. The very title implies that earlier tales, for all their claim to veracity, were not “plain tales”: that they served an ideological purpose, that their narrators enjoyed some kind of special status. This book carries all the trademarks of a revisionist reappraisal of history that seeks to denounce metanarratives and resurface the localised, textured experience of ordinary life. Coetzee claims that his book “focuses on individual people”, and that it provides “a door to understanding the grassroots experiences of the large number of ‘ordinary’ Robben Island political prisoners” (2000, 1–4). The stories have the appearance of spontaneous

102  Daniel Roux autobiography, but on closer reading they are obviously cobbled together from interview responses, as evidenced by comments such as “You ask me where did it all start?” (14). The theoretically fashionable focus on the ordinary and the everyday creates the illusion of voices that speak in some unprompted way about the everyday micro-politics of prison life, about their interior lives, about their friendships, about their “traditional culture”, and so on. In its attempt to escape from metanarratives, Plain Tales falls prey to one of the signal Western metanarratives: the naturalisation of the autobiographical voice, which it achieves through the suppression of the conditions that govern the emergence of the “I” that speaks. In his foreword to the book, Mandela betrays some of the ironies that underpin Plain Tales when he comments that “the stories themselves are re-told by the author in such a way as to capture the authenticity of the spoken word” (2000, v). The “authenticity” of the spoken word has to be represented in a re-telling of the “original”. Ultimately, what distinguishes post-apartheid memoirs from apartheid memoirs is not so much a definite difference in content as this shift towards a naturalised autobiographical voice addressing a universal audience. As the role of social context becomes de-emphasised in post-apartheid memoirs, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand the social and historical moorings of the voice that speaks, to notice the particular tensions that produce it. It is not so much that more recent accounts of Robben Island are historically “incorrect” as that their compelling promotion of a normative self, a “good” New South African citizen, belies the specific conditions that allowed and conditioned the emergence of such a self. It is therefore necessary not to read post-apartheid memoirs “against” apartheid memoirs, but to read them alongside one another. An important point of commonality across Robben Island memoirs, however, is the agonistic nature of the identity that they posit. Robben Island comes to embody apartheid ideology – metonymically, the rules of Robben Island represent the rules of apartheid, and the struggle for rights and dignity on Robben Island exemplifies the struggle for rights in South Africa. As Mandela observes: I was in a different and smaller arena, an arena for whom the only audience was ourselves and our oppressors. We regarded the struggle in prison as a microcosm of the struggle as a whole. We would fight inside as we had fought outside. The racism and repression were the same; I would simply have to fight on different terms. (1996, 464) Seemingly, identity on Robben Island is constructed through a systematic rejection of every aspect of apartheid ideology as it is manifested on Robben Island: prisoners simply refuse all attempts to interpellate

Writing from Robben Island  103 them. However, a closer reading of the texts soon reveals a more complex interrelationship between the discourse of power and the forms of resistance that inform many Robben Island autobiographies. Perhaps the most important aspect of the agonistic identity constructed across many Robben Island memoirs is the insistence on a collective identity against the prison’s attempts to individualise prisoners. Even in the case of the island’s most isolated prisoner, Sobukwe, the possibility of collective action is raised in Mogoba’s description of Sobukwe’s silent display of solidarity with the other prisoners: the salute, the soil that is picked up and allowed to run from his hand. Mandela’s description of the role of solidarity is echoed in almost every account of imprisonment on Robben Island: Our survival depended on understanding what the authorities were attempting to do to us, and sharing that understanding with each other. It would be very hard, if not impossible, for one man alone to resist. I do not know that I could have done it had I been alone. But the authorities’ greatest mistake was to keep us together, for together our determination was reinforced. We supported each other and gained strength from each other. Whatever we knew, whatever we learned, we shared, and by sharing we multiplied whatever courage we had individually. (1996, 463) Collective identity, in other words, is a form of resistance – one that is enabled by the “mistake” that the authorities committed in keeping the prisoners together, implicitly eroding the individualising nature of incarceration. As David Schalkwyk notes: “It is one of the reiterated and paradoxical platitudes of prison writing and its criticism that prison both depersonalizes the individual and renders communality indispensable” (2000, 280). Throughout Long Walk to Freedom, the “I” of the narrator slips into a collective “we”: Mandela constantly speaks on behalf of a community, in direct contrast to the prison’s explicit injunction that prisoners are allowed to speak only on their own behalf. In his 1987 memoir, My Fight Against Apartheid, Michael Dingake, imprisoned on Robben Island from 1966 to 1981, writes in some detail about the censorship of letters from Robben Island, and focuses in particular on the prohibition against the use of the word “we”. Reflecting on the difficulties caused by this kind of censorship, Dingake observes: The problem with restrictions or prohibition of any sort is that they hardly ever achieve their purpose. Every measure has its own countermeasure, every weight has a counterweight, every action has a counteraction. The victims of self-censorship developed styles of

104  Daniel Roux letter writing that meant absolute nonsense to the censors and yet were sensible and informative to the correspondent. If “we” was objectionable as the plural of “I”, many ways, varied construction in syntax and grammar existed to convey the same “we” concept. It was an exercise in futility. (1987, 168) It is worth looking closely at what Dingake is saying here. Prisons effect the separation of prisoners both physically and symbolically, by placing language itself under surveillance. The injunction against the use of the first person plural is an aspect of the modern penitentiary’s drive towards individualisation, recorded in detail in Michel Foucault’s landmark work Discipline and Punish (1977). However, language is fundamentally predicated on plasticity and polysemy. Dingake’s astute insight relates to the way in which it is possible to remain within the prescriptive discourse demanded by the prison even while exploiting the capacity of language to elude control. At the level of language itself, the “we” that is so important to the collective register that characterises the prison memoir, and the writing of resistance more generally, can always be recaptured, even without explicitly breaking prison rules. In order to ensure the coherence and stability of this imagined oppositional community, prison memoirs often underplay divisions among political prisoners and produce fairly static subjectivities. When Mandela receives the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize not as a tribute to his personal contribution to the struggle, but on behalf of “all South Africans and especially […] those who had fought in the struggle” (1996, 734), he is in a sense expanding the resistance to the prison’s interdiction of communal identity to a national level. It is for precisely this reason that Long Walk to Freedom functions as both an exemplary South African prison memoir and a seminal post-apartheid nation-building document: in the face of a history of division and individualisation, it posits an “us” that in due course became a kind of blueprint for a new national identity  – one that is ultimately so expansive that it includes even the former oppressors. To this, we can add that black activists were not individualised successfully by the apartheid prison partly because they resisted the process, but also because the prison resisted interpellating them as individuals, and largely refused to concede that they had a subjective interiority at all. White prisoners like Albie Sachs, Breyten Breytenbach and Ruth First were much more likely to be held in solitary confinement, and were in fact forced to discover a language that is capable of reflecting the experience of enforced solitude to a much greater extent than the Robben Island authors discussed here. While a leader like Mandela was still accorded a minimal “special status”, ordinary prisoners were frequently physically brutalised (at least until 1967) and constantly verbally abused

Writing from Robben Island  105 and denigrated. Alexander points out in his Robben Island Dossier that “there is no doubt that until 1965 in its intention, and until 1967 in practice, South Africa’s penology was largely retributive” (1994, 12). If the South African prison service paid some lip service to the notion of “rehabilitation”, the reality in prisons was starkly different. As Fran Buntman maintains: In theory, imprisonment is meant to rehabilitate a prisoner […] In the case of political prisoners in South Africa, the state had little hope of “rehabilitating” them. This would have involved a renunciation of the anti-apartheid struggle and an acceptance of the racist perspective of the gaolers. (1996, 111) The gaolers did not in general regard political prisoners as distinct individuals who could be “reformed”, but tended to see them as an amorphous, threatening mass, as wholly other. In his rather awkward tale of political conversion, Goodbye Bafana (1995), James Gregory, one of the warders on Robben Island, describes his original impression of the political prisoners: The dreaded Poqo: the band of criminals who had turned our beautiful land into a desperate battleground. Who were responsible for turning black man against white man. Who had made it very clear that they wanted what we had, earned by the blood and sweat of our forefathers […] I wanted them to be hanged, for my country to be freed from their evil. (8) If it was possible for political prisoners to invoke the sense of the collective, it was in the context of a punitive prison discourse that was not entirely inimical to the idea of collective identity. In the Benthamite model, individualisation is closely tied to the ambition to reform, and the apartheid prison was at best inconsistent in its pursuit of this goal. To a certain extent, the almost feudal attitude of the warders on Robben Island encouraged an awareness of commonality among the political prisoners, a sense of shared aims and ideals. While the official discourse of the prison promoted the notion of the penal institution as a site for the production of rational, reformed individuals, the prison often adhered to a completely different model in private. In fact, it is one of the characteristics of the apartheid prison that it is split in this way between a façade that seems consonant with Enlightenment notions of imprisonment, while its true operation proceeds in a completely obverse manner. In this sense, Dingake’s ability to enunciate a shared identity by varying syntax and grammar construction is enabled not merely by

106  Daniel Roux the polysemic quality of signs but also by the fundamental indifference of the prison to the purported purpose of its own rules. The prohibition against the use of “we”, in other words, is purely formal: as Dingake implies, the rule is enforced in a mechanical way so that its purpose is more to inflict “humiliation upon humiliation” on the prisoners than to effect individualisation (1987, 167). In other ways as well, the prison often inadvertently facilitated the sense of group identity eroded outside its walls by banning orders and the difficulties of living “underground”, on the run from authorities, and by general divisive apartheid legislation. Mandela describes the cell he shared with other political prisoners in Johannesburg in 1956, when he was charged with treason: Suddenly there were no Xhosas or Zulus, no Indians or Africans, no rightists or leftists, no religious or political leaders; we were all nationalists and patriots bound together by a love of our common history, our culture, our country and our people […] In that moment we felt the hand of the great past that made us what we were and the power of the great cause that linked us all together. (1996, 235) A similar sense of the prison as a place where imposed differences are collapsed runs through many of the Robben Island memoirs, although not always with Mandela’s idealism. It is almost entirely absent from Dlamini’s Hell-Hole, Robben Island, and much more complexly described in Dingake’s My Fight against Apartheid. When Dingake is locked in a communal cell in the Johannesburg Fort, he expresses a modest pleasure at being among people: Now here I was in a dim-lit No. 4 cell crowded with fellow awaitingtrial prisoners who had appeared in court that day and were remanded in custody. It felt good to be among so many people after almost 12 weeks of isolation. I knew it was a matter of time before I would recognise an old acquaintance, maybe a former friend, in the cell crowd. That would be super. (1987, 125) However, Dingake also describes the Fort as a “crime factory” (123) and depicts the chaos and intimidation that characterised his weekend in the communal cell: During the weekend I witnessed some of the most callous bullying of prisoners by fellow prisoners in the communal cells. Hardened prisoners, for sheer sport, bullied, terrorized and assaulted newcomers to prison […] When the ganging up against the cheeky ones took

Writing from Robben Island  107 place, an impromptu choir would be organised to sing some tune. Harmony or discord in the music did not matter, what mattered was the noise to drown the heartrending cries of the victims of assault. (124) Dingake is of course describing his experience in the Johannesburg Fort, which was a very different kind of prison to Robben Island and one that incarcerated prisoners for a wide range of offences, mostly everyday “crimes” like not having a valid passbook. The sense of communal identity in this space, while often benign, was also potentially dangerous and strategically shifting. While singing often serves to forge a sense of comradeship in South African prison memoirs, the singing in Dingake’s cell in fact disguises an assault. To a certain extent, Mandela’s ideal community reflects a certain potential for affiliation enabled by the prison (a potential registered also by Dingake), but de- emphasises the complex reality of this kind of fellowship. It is worth remembering, in this respect, that Mandela spent a large part of his sentence on Robben Island in a single cell, and was therefore somewhat inured from the day-to-day negotiations between people who are forced to share an enclosed space. While the prison’s drive towards individualisation was actively resisted through the constant hard labour of manufacturing a cohesive collective identity, the prison ambiguously also occasioned and demanded a kind of communality. And while it would be incorrect to claim that the sense of solidarity portrayed in Long Walk to Freedom and other prison writing is simply an immediate epiphenomenal reflection of the discourse of power in the prison, it would also be misguided to claim that it exists in a completely autonomous or entirely adversarial relation to this discourse. Indeed, neither the formation of a transgressive unity nor the discourse of the prison offers stable practices: both are haunted by structural antinomies and moments of equivocation, and both ultimately refer to and emanate from the same contradictory inner logic of apartheid. For Mandela, solidarity is ultimately about a kind of organic consensus, an inclusive agreement based on universal values. Other accounts of Robben Island, however, remind us that communality is forged against enormous difficulties and is by definition unstable and contingent. If the apartheid prison theoretically attempted to isolate prisoners from one another, its treatment of especially black prisoners relegated them to a mass, providing occasions for solidarity and political cohesion. The very racism that refused to recognise black subjects as individuals enabled prisoners to contest the prison’s reliance on individualisation as a form of control. At a somewhat more abstract level, Robben Island provides a remarkable example of the ways in which prisons can generate meaning, and place meanings in circulation. A prison is fundamentally predicated on

108  Daniel Roux the separation of inside and outside. In the case of Robben Island, the prison fence and the sea itself served as powerful material barriers guarding the distinction between what was included and what was excluded. Nonetheless, the dominant narrative of national identity, citizenship and belonging that ultimately defined the post-apartheid national imaginary was forged at least partially on an island prison. A prison is a site of production and circulation, generating itinerant and shifting meanings that are constantly reinterpreted according to the contexts in which they are disseminated. Long Walk to Freedom, the central text to this discussion, is traversed by disquiet and equivocation. As in some of the other influential memoirs discussed here, Mandela’s autobiography is divided, despite its eloquent and influential attempts to downplay the difference, between the adoption of the individual and the collective as centres of meaning. These are ultimately antinomies and tensions that confront new understandings of the South African nation: on the one hand, the nation as a totalised, imposed category, and on the other, the nation as something that is invoked in spontaneous and constantly shifting performative acts of self-definition; on the one hand, an understanding of the South African citizen as an autonomous individual, and on the other, as a committed member of a revolutionary collective. The point is that these tensions are not new – they do not arrive from nowhere at the moment of the inception of democracy in South Africa – but are present already in apartheid-era prison memoirs, where we find the specific material practices that helped to give rise to the consciousness of nation that now seeks to name and naturalise itself.

Works Cited Alexander, N. 1994. Robben Island Dossier 1964 – 1974: Report to the International Community. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. Barnard, R. 2014. “Introduction”. In The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela, edited by R. Barnard, 1–25. New York: Cambridge University Press. Buntman, F. 1996. “Resistance on Robben Island 1963–1976”. In The Island: A History of Robben Island, edited by H. Deacon, 93–136. Cape Town: David Philip. Coetzee, J.K., ed. 2000. Plain Tales from Robben Island. Pretoria: Van Schaik Publishers. Dingake, M. 1987. My Fight Against Apartheid. London: Kliptown Books. Dlamini, M. 1984. Hell Hole, Robben Island. Nottingham: Spokesman. Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by A. Sheridan. New York: Random House. Freschi, F. 2007. “Postapartheid Publics and the Politics of Ornament: Nationalism, Identity, and the Rhetoric of Community in the Decorative Program of the New Constitutional Court, Johannesburg”. Africa Today 54.2: 27–49. Gready, P. 2003. Writing as Resistance: Life Stories of Imprisonment, Exile and Homecoming. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Writing from Robben Island  109 Gregory, J. 1995. Goodbye Bafana. London: Headline Book Publishing. Hutton, B. 1997. Robben Island: Symbol of Resistance. Johannesburg: Sached Books/Mayibuye Books. Matshoba, M. 1979. Call Me Not a Man. Johannesburg: Ravan. Mogoba, M.S. 2003. Stone, Steel, Sjambok: Faith Born on Robben Island. ­Johannesburg: Ziningweni Communications. Mandela, N.R. 1996 [1994]. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. London: Abacus. Naidoo, I. 2000 [1982]. Island in Chains: Ten Years on Robben Island by Prisoner 885/63. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Riouful, V. 2000. “Behind Telling: Post-Apartheid Representations of Robben Island’s Past”. Kronos 26: 22–41. Schalkwyk, D. 2000. “Writing from Prison”. In Senses of Culture: South African Cultural Studies, edited by S. Nuttall and C.-A Michael, 278–297. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schalkwyk, D. 2012. Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare. Shakespeare Now! The Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury. Worger, W.H. 2004. “Convict Labour, Industrialists and the State in the US South and South Africa, 1870–1930”. Journal of Southern African Studies 30.1: 63–86. Zwelonke, D.M. 1989. Robben Island. Oxford: Heinemann.

6 Writing South Africa’s Prisons into History Jonny Steinberg

In 2004, I published a book – at once a biography of a Cape Town prison gang member and a broader history of South African prison gangs – called The Number. Fifteen years later, this piece constitutes a reflection on aspects of that book. My aim is to raise a specific question. Is it possible to write about South Africa’s prisons and the organisational forms and sensibilities to which they give rise in ways that do not exoticise them, but, on the contrary, show them to be an integral part of our common world? The overarching intention of the book I wrote – which was based, in the first instance, on nine months of research at Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town, where I conducted multiple interviews with several dozen inmates, and then a further year investigating the life history of one prison gang leader called Magadien Wentzel – was to demonstrate that South Africa’s political history cannot be properly understood in the absence of an appreciation of the history of crime and punishment. To truly grasp ourselves in the world in which we live, we need to understand prisons and the social phenomena they have spawned. Although the book was widely read and well received in South Africa, it failed entirely in its primary ambition. If its aim was to demonstrate the centrality of criminal history to political history, it may as well not have been written, to be honest. For in my experience it was read as a travel book, an account of a journey into a wondrous, almost inconceivably intricate world-unto-itself, all the more remarkable for being housed in buildings we see as we drive past them on the freeway. And so, a question I pose here is whether my failure is inherent to the very enterprise of taking prison as the explicit subject of a written text. * It is instructive to recount briefly how I came to write The Number. In 2002, I took on an assignment for an Italian magazine. It was devoting an issue to prisons. Two photographers and an editor had recently acquired permission to visit Pollsmoor Prison, one of South Africa’s largest and most famous, for two weeks. My assignment was to go with them

Writing South Africa’s Prisons into History  111 and write about the place. It seemed interesting, I was between projects, and the pay was good. Before the end of our first day in the prison I was utterly transfixed. I had not known until then that three prison gangs, the 26s, 27s and 28s – collectively, the Number – had existed continuously in South Africa’s jails since the 1890s; that their foundation was a narrative history of the industrialisation of South Africa, carefully passed from one generation of prisoners to the next; and that the narrative itself was animated by the veneration of a real-historical bandit, “Nongoloza” Mathebula. Most important of all was to absorb the fact that during the course of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workingclass South African men must have been exposed to the gangs and to the narrative history that gave them form and meaning. For one of the outstanding features of urban South Africa was its astonishing incarceration rates (Van Zyl Smit, 2004; Kynoch, 2008). On the day I walked into Pollsmoor I was a thirty-one-year-old white South African and had spent the duration of my adult life steeped in South African politics. I had studied it as an undergraduate and a graduate student; had spent my late teenage years and early twenties heavily involved in a student movement aligned to the African National Congress (ANC), a movement with an obsessive interest in recent history; had been peripherally involved for a long time in the trade union movement; had begun publishing on aspects of the uprisings against apartheid; and had written a book on race and land. I ought to have known something of this history and that I did not told a story. What I encountered at Pollsmoor, in other words, was not just my own ignorance, but an ignorance, or perhaps a forgetfulness, in the story the South African liberation movement told its cadres. My task here is to ask from whence this forgetfulness comes and why it so stubbornly persists. * It is impossible to do justice in this small space to the history and the practices of the Number. I confine myself here to a truncated account of its narrative foundations – in other words, to the history that is passed from one generation of prisoners to the next and which constitutes the architecture of the gangs themselves. It goes without saying that in doing so, I am altering the story’s form – indeed, I am also altering the language in which it is told (see notes 1 and 2). It is not just that I am rending a tale transmitted by mouth into writing. In the context of the prison, the tale of Nongoloza is above all a weapon used in the constant quest to garner authority and exercise power. For gang activity in South African prisons involves a metaphorical doubling: every action takes place both in the present and in the original story of Nongoloza. In that sense, the tale of Nongoloza is not

112  Jonny Steinberg so much told but enacted and, indeed, enforced in the context of a neverending tussle for dominance. The reader will get no sense at all of that here. For those interested in the orality of the story and its functions in prison life, The Number itself meditates at some length on this and related matters. The narrative is grounded in a mythologised account of the life of a real-historical figure called Nongoloza Mathebula. He was born in 1867, the son of labour tenants on a white-owned farm in the Midlands of the Natal Colony. At the age of twenty-one, Nongoloza absconded from his white employer, moved to Johannesburg, and, in an attempt to shrug off his past as a labour tenant, changed his name. This was two years after the discovery of gold; what he had moved to was one of the fastest and most chaotic urban explosions in modern history. Nongoloza gained employment with four white bachelors who lived together in a rambling house just south of the city centre. They kept strange hours, he noticed; they would sleep until noon, leave on horseback in the late afternoons and return sometime after midnight. Once they trusted him sufficiently, they took him along on their night-time sorties and he discovered, to his surprise, that they were bandits. They would stop at the side of the road pretending that a horse was injured or had lost its shoe; when a passing carriage stopped to help, its occupants would be robbed at gunpoint. On payday his employers would waylay mineworkers on the pedestrian paths on the outskirts of town. Within a short time, Nongoloza had left the employ of the four white men and recruited a group of bandits of his own. They lived in a series of caves in the Klipriviersberg hills south of Johannesburg from where they made sorties into town, usually to rob workers of their pay packets. In this, Nongoloza was not unusual. In the early days of both diamond mining in Kimberley and gold mining in Johannesburg, moving back and forth between formal employment to crime was quite typical. For instance, in the first twenty years after the discovery of diamonds, twothirds of Africans who arrived in Kimberley for work deserted within a week of entering employment. Many stayed and traded stolen diamonds. By the 1880s, the underground economy was reputed to involve 50% of the city’s residents (Coplan, 1985, 13). Both in Kimberley and, later, in Johannesburg, it took a great deal of systemic coercion to bring discipline to the early proletariat; it was not until a matrix of powerful bureaucratic institutions was in place – compounds, prisons, police, army – that South Africa’s early proletariat become firmly yoked to wage work. But if Nongoloza’s decision to rob and steal was not atypical, he was highly unusual in other ways: in his use of symbol and metaphor, in his charisma, and in his gift for organisation he was something of a genius. For he formed from his bandit followers an army, giving them a series of intricate ranks and functions drawn from the army of the

Writing South Africa’s Prisons into History  113 Boer Republic and the British colonial forces in Natal. And he imbued their activities with a powerful anti-colonial set of meanings. “I read in the Bible that the people of Nineveh rebelled against the Lord”, he told his captors many years later. “And so I called my band the Ninevites for they had rebelled against the Government” (cited in Van Onselen, 1985, 16). The Ninevites were to last for more than two decades. By the time the First World War broke out, they were more than a thousand strong. They were widely known and deeply feared among Johannesburg’s black working class. Indeed, an elaborate mythology had grown around them – it was said that they lived in underground palaces in which they made love to white women and kept a Scottish bookkeeper to run their finances. They had also taken control of several mine worker compounds. They were finally crushed in a series of army operations in 1915; Nongoloza himself had by then been in prison for some time and had been turned by a sympathetic and sophisticated warder and was working for the police (Van Onselen, 1985). The destruction of the Ninevites was one important moment among others in the project to bring order to early Johannesburg and to discipline its proletariat. And there is little doubt that the project was successful. But it was not without cost. As the Ninevites were sent to the prisons, so they, or at least a modified version of the form they had taken on the outside, took root behind bars and have flourished until this day. In this sense, South Africa’s carceral system came to incubate something homologous to the Freudian repressed. For the memory of the disciplining of the proletariat was not destroyed but went underground, as it were, into the prisons, becoming the narrative foundation of a centurylong culture of prison gang organisation, a culture that was to play an important role in shaping subsequent South African history. * During the course of its long existence, the Number gangs fashioned the biography of Nongoloza into an account of their own origins. A truncated version of the narrative, as it was told to me in Pollsmoor in the early 2000s, goes something like this.1 An old African man called “Ngulugut” watched the young men in his village leave one by one to go to work in the mines. For some reason, the narrative places him in 1812, three-quarters of a century before the discovery of gold. And the mines where the young men are going are not in Johannesburg, but in Delagoa Bay. Where exactly in southern Africa Ngulugut’s village is located the story does not say. When it dawned on Ngulugut that not one of these young men had ever returned, he went to the mines to see for himself what was happening to them. He found to his horror that the work underground was so

114  Jonny Steinberg hard that it was killing them, and retreated to a cave in the hills outside the town of Pietermaritzburg to reflect on what to do. One morning, from his vantage point on a perch outside the entrance to his cave, Ngulugut saw a cloud of dust approaching from the direction of Natal. He descended from his perch and intercepted the cloud of dust to find that in it was a young man called Nongoloza who told Ngulugut that he was on his way to work on the mines. “The gold in those mines is valuable”, he said, “but the work of digging it out will kill you. It is better to steal it from the white man than to work for him”. And he took Nongoloza up with him into the cave. 2 The following morning, Ngulugut saw a cloud of dust on the road from Pondoland. He went down to discover a man called “Kilikijaan”, also on the way to the mines, and, as with Nongoloza the day before, intercepted him and brought him up to the cave. This went on until fifteen young men had assembled. They broke into two groups, one of seven, the other of eight, and began their work of robbing and pillaging. As they did so, Ngulugut instructed them to keep a diary of their days; this diary would come to constitute the law of the bandits as it recorded how things were done at the beginning, which is how they should be done always. In a story too long to recount here, the law was lost and became a source of irresolvable dispute. One day, the two bands of men went out pillaging together. Nongoloza complained of illness and remained behind, and Kilikijaan offered for one his soldiers, a young man named “Magubane”, to stay and tend to him. When the bandits returned, they discovered Nongoloza making love to Magubane. Enraged, Kilikijaan drew his sabre and challenged Nongoloza to fight. Nongoloza protested that it was written in the law that bandits could have sex with one another, but this only enraged Kilikijaan further as the law was lost. They both survived the fight – although both were left knee-deep in one another’s blood – and each took his respective band a separate way. They did not see one another again for years. Ngulugut was dead by now; with the law lost and the founder of the bandits deceased, no authority existed to say who was right about the question of sex. When Nongoloza and Kilikijaan finally met up again it was in the Point Prison in Durban. They were wary of one another but reached a cautious modus vivendi. They also came upon a band of six men led by a somebody called “Grey”. These men played a game of chance and Nongoloza and Kilikijaan discovered, watching them, that they were enormously skilled con artists. This was novel to them. They knew how to use weapons to rob people. They had never seen guile and trickery used to persuade people voluntarily to part with their possessions. They were uttered seduced. They invited Grey and his men to join them.

Writing South Africa’s Prisons into History  115 And so the three Number gangs were born: Nongoloza’s gang of 8, Kilikijaan’s gang of 7 and Grey’s gang of 6. The “2” refers to the two original bandits: hence, the 28s, the 27s and the 26s. But from the start, it was an uneasy ensemble for the question of sex among bandits remained unresolved. Kilikijaan warned Grey not to trust Nongoloza and his 28s; they would want to make wives out of Grey’s men, Kilikijaan advised. Kilikijaan promised always to protect the 26s from the 28s. From this pact arose the gangs’ division of functions. The 28s were robbers. And they doubled up as an army to fight the prison warders when circumstances required violence. They were the gang’s brute force. And their ranks were divided between soldiers and wives – sex was permitted within the 28s. The role of the 26s was to steal by cunning, not violence. As for the 27s, they were the keepers of gang law – their job was to right wrongs. When a bandit broke gang law, it was for the 27s to administer retribution. But it was not right for bandits to hurt one another, and so the blood of a warder had to substitute for the bandit who had done wrong. The job of the 27s was thus thankless – it was to spill warders’ blood and be punished for it. This effectively meant not just that one spent one’s entire life in prison – for stabbing a warder meant being found guilty of yet another crime – it also entailed being subjected to the extreme violence of the warders as they took their own informal retribution when a colleague was stabbed. * What to make of the narrative the Number has made from the life of Nongoloza? Among its most striking characteristics is its familiarity. It shares so much with standard narratives of national liberation. A people is colonised by an occupying force. The heroic among the colonised resist. The history of their resistance becomes history as such. They hold the future of their people in their hands. But if the narrative is conventional, its cast has been substituted entirely. None of the heroic chiefs who resisted conquest is here – there is no Hintsa, no Cetswayo, no Bambatha. Instead there is Ngulugut, an enigmatic wise man without a place in a determinate geography or lineage. Absent, too, is the African National Congress or any of its rivals. Nor indeed are any of the standard heroic figures of South African liberation mythology there – no John Dube, Albert Luthuli nor Nelson Mandela; no Robert Sobukwe nor Steve Biko. The structure of the story is familiar, but those who people it have long vanished, their positions taken by bandit heroes – Nongoloza, Kilikijaan, Grey. From this I take it that the story that animates the prison gangs is in part a quest for recognition. The gangs have recast history with them at the very centre of it. The authors of the story – an authorship that extends across several generations of prisoners – are attempting to journey from

116  Jonny Steinberg the margins; they are nothing less than the protagonists in the grand tale of colonisation, industrialisation and resistance. And indeed, to spend time inside a prison talking to Number gang members is to witness a perpetual fragility, a brittleness, a sense that one is being erased. The story of Nongoloza is a great, yearning effort against social disappearance. One need not look at the story too closely, though, to see that there is something wrong at the heart of it. It may begin as a standard variant of a tale of national liberation. But such tales are of course by their nature teleological – they are a quest for freedom, after all. This tale, however, is soon waylaid. When it begins it has all the trappings of a teleological journey – the wise man diagnoses the severity of the situation, recruits a band of young men who begin to fight the good fight, and so forth. But in no time, the tale is diverted from its course and put on a new set of tracks; and these tracks lead nowhere; they simply go around and around. For the story is hijacked by an irresolvable dispute about whether the men telling the tale can have sex with one another – and this is a dispute without end. It is, then, closely allied to another quest which is also destined to have no end – the quest to put wrongs right and to punish transgressions. The heroic tale of liberation has been derailed by a series of chronic existential emergencies, I would argue, emergencies that attend upon living in a South African prison. The first concerns the perpetual problem of bringing order to life behind bars. In this short space, it is not possible to describe at any length how the prisons were governed over the course of the twentieth century (Van Zyl Smit, 1992). Suffice it to say that the authorities contrived a state of nature, making prisons an arena that was permanently dangerous for inmates, an arena in which the prospect of being murdered was perpetually in play. In the circumstances of a racial dictatorship, this was deemed the best way to exercise control. It was thus left to inmates to constitute the basis for order in the most difficult conditions. When I wrote The Number I had not yet read the work of René G ­ irard on the place of scapegoating and sacrifice in the constitution of order (Girard, 1989; 2013). Reading him years later was uncanny for the prison gangs exemplify what he describes – the offering of a sacrifice and the establishment of a fragile order via the veneration of the one who has been sacrificed. This is the vital function of the 27s, to spill blood and have one’s own blood spilled – to sacrifice both another and oneself – in order to right a wrong and thus establish a temporary and conditional peace. It is remarkable to watch the very structure of the story of the Number twist itself into a shape that makes sacrifice a necessity that will go on ad infinitum. The second perpetual exigency, intimately linked to the first, is the management of the scandal of sex between men behind bars. Again, there isn’t space here to go into the detail, but the energy consumed in making sex behind bars tolerable – the making of men into the most

Writing South Africa’s Prisons into History  117 misogynistic version of wives imaginable, for instance, in order that the boundary between masculine and feminised sexual partners never be confused – is extraordinary. One could say then that the story of Nongoloza and Kilikijaan strives to serve two ends that cannot be combined. The first is to recast those on the margins of South African history as its protagonists. The other is to manage the urgent existential matters that arise repeatedly behind bars – the maintenance of a fragile order and the upkeep of a ritualistic and narrative environment that allows for sex. There is some irony here. The second end derails the first; the fantasy of fleeing the margins is derailed by the daily tasks of living on the margins. Embedded in the very structure of the story is a failed attempt to escape invisibility and to appear in history. * And yet, Nongoloza’s children – and by this term I mean all the generations of South African men who committed crimes, went to prison, imbibed the story of Nongoloza, negotiated the world of the Number gangs – did in fact on several occasions during the twentieth century appear on the political stage to play a vital role. Their first appearance was also their most modest. From its formation in 1959 until it was effectively crushed in the early 1960s, the PanAfricanist Congress (PAC) attempted actively to recruit among the urban criminal classes (Gerhart, 1978; Glaser, 2000). Until this moment, the much more genteel traditions of the ANC had held the criminal classes at a safe distance. The PAC not only recruited from the margins, but made use of the distinctive skills and sensibilities they found there. Starved of funds, it encouraged its young supporters to form “work parties”, a euphemism for sorties of pillaging and robbery, to raise money for the organisation. After the PAC was banned in 1960 and its leaders fled into exile, some of these “work parties” banded together to form an armed wing of the PAC called “Poqo”. The task of work parties now was not to commit robbery but to kill functionaries of the apartheid state. After murdering more than a dozen black police officers, several white civilians and a few Transkei chiefs, the organisation was destroyed. Thousands of its adherents were imprisoned and more than thirty were executed (Lodge, 1986). One of the PAC’s chroniclers described Poqo as the manifestation of a “Fanonian apocalypse”, by which she means an eruption of violence without a programme or a strategic end (Gerhart, 1978). The next entrance of the criminal classes onto the historical stage was considerably more spectacular and consequential. The famous national uprisings of 1976, widely and rightly regarded as a signal moment in South African history, were triggered by school students protesting against, among the other things, the use of Afrikaans as a medium of

118  Jonny Steinberg instruction. School students may have been the harbingers of the protests, but once the state responded violently, members of the great Soweto gangs that had flourished in the 1950s and 1960s poured onto the streets, giving the uprisings their mass character and contributing in no small part to their violence. A debate erupted among the school student leadership on whether to accept them or spurn them; in the end they were spurned, but they had already played a crucial role in the rebellion (Glaser, 2000). Just under a decade later, from 1984 to 1986, South Africa was engulfed by a series of nationwide urban insurrections. Once again, the criminal classes played a crucial role. For the insurrectionary period finally put paid to the great gangs of twentieth-century South Africa as a generation of youths abandoned the gangs to join the uprisings (Glaser, 2000), assisting in sustaining them for more than two years until successive states of emergency finally brought a brittle (and in some places, brief) peace to South Africa’s townships. Why are these stories significant? Writing of the decolonisation of British, French and Belgium Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the historian, John Iliffe, asks a question which returns perennially: did the colonial powers walk away from Africa, or were they pushed? Iliffe provides a complex, qualified answer; but he does suggest that in so far as the colonial powers were pushed it was by the spectacle of large, unruly crowds of youths on the streets of the colonial capitals in the 1950s. These crowds, Iliffe argues, gave the post-war nationalist movements their “indispensable menace” (2007, 259). The same is very much true of the struggle against apartheid. It, too, was given its “indispensable menace” when it was joined, at vital moments in its history, by the increasingly large and barely governable marginal classes, the ranks of which swelled in the last quarter of the twentieth century as urban South Africa increasingly became a place of mass unemployment. I cannot prove it – it is indeed, unprovable – but it is certainly not unreasonable to suggest that the story of Nongoloza, generated and regenerated over decades in South Africa’s prisons, provided the narrative foundations for the periodic eruption of the criminal classes into history. To put it another way, the story of Nongoloza, imbibed by successive generations, reminding each that crime was fiercely political, may very well have kept the criminal classes primed, as it were, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, to join the struggle when circumstances permitted. * It is no wonder that attempts to read the history of crime and punishment into mainstream political history encounter stubborn resistance. For to do so is to throw a pall of nihilism over South Africa’s most sacred historical narrative. Accepting the true place of criminal history

Writing South Africa’s Prisons into History  119 in political history is to suggest that the South African story moved forward, as it were, when those at the margins, entrapped in the circuits of a recurring present, briefly burst forth to appear on the historical stage, only to slip back again into their circular world. Seen from the perspective of the margins, there is no progress, simply a sad carousel, one that keeps going around and around, notwithstanding South Africa’s transition to democracy. The depth of the resistance to the implications of this story is best illustrated by an anecdote. In a documentary film made in the mid-2000s celebrating South Africa’s Constitutional Court, Light on a Hill, Justice Albie Sachs, then a Constitutional Court judge, walks around the site on which the court was built explaining the decision to locate it there. The site of the new court was the Fort in central Johannesburg, which once housed a prison notorious among black South Africans throughout the apartheid era. Sachs says on screen that the Constitutional Court was built where it was to remind us of the past from whence constitutional democracy came. First the Boers built rampart against the British here, Sachs says; then the Boers locked up the blacks. We are tired of locking people up. On the day Sachs uttered these words, the per capita incarceration rate in South Africa was higher than it had been at any time under white minority rule (Van Zyl Smit, 2004; Steinberg, 2005). A man steeped in South African history, he was clearly oblivious to the terrible mistake he had made. And one can understand why. To acknowledge that a decade after the end of the long, bitter, bloodstained struggle against apartheid, the democratic state was locking people up with greater alacrity than its racist predecessors would shred the story of the journey to freedom, leaving in its place a tale too dark to tell in front of a camera. It was while watching Sachs that it struck me how dismally the project animating The Number had failed. The story of the prison gangs reads most comfortably as a side tale exemplifying the toughness of South African life and the immensity of the hurdles to overcome. To place the gangs more centrally, as an engine of our collective history, is to tell a story nobody wants to hear.

Notes 1 I asked about three dozen veteran Number gang members to recount the story of Nongoloza to me, both when in Pollsmoor, and, subsequently, on the Cape Flats. In addition to these formal interviews, accounts of fragments of the story emerged organically in conversation about other matters, for all important incidents and events in prison are inevitably interpreted through the story of Nongoloza. As with all orally transmitted accounts, there are discrepancies in the story. For the purposes of this essay, I tell a seamless tale, rendering the dissonances invisible. For those interested in variations and controversies about the narrative of Nongoloza, The Number contains ongoing discussions about these matters.

120  Jonny Steinberg

Censorship, Advocacy and Text Creation

7

“His Enemy’s Language” African American Prison Life Writing, the Literary Forms of Institutional Power and George Jackson’s Soledad Brother Simon Rolston

The predominant view of prison life writing can be summarised in the following formula: incarcerated people, deprived of their liberty, find freedom in writing about their lives. Certainly, prison life writing – and prison writing of many different forms, from letter writing to fiction to poetry – does provide prisoners with a measure of agency in a system that seeks to control and define them. However, I think this hermeneutic, this interpretation of prison life writing as inherently emancipatory, also elides the many ways that writing in prison intersects with disciplinary power. In particular, this interpretive framework often makes it harder to see where prison life writing accedes to rather than simply contests the demands of the prison and legal systems – systems that I suggest play an often overlooked role in shaping the narratives, even the discursive identities, of imprisoned people. In this chapter, then, I consider how the prison system sets limits on prison life writing and helps sculpt the kinds of identities that enter into autobiographical discourse. I explain how these institutional forces helped shape prison life writing during one of the most prolific periods for prison literature in the USA, from roughly 1945 to 1976, which has come to be known as the Treatment Era. I focus my discussion of prison life writing and its relation to institutional power on one of the most influential books of the genre: Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970), an epistolary autobiography that, despite its well-documented militancy, is surprisingly affected by the rehabilitative pressures of the Treatment Era prison system. The author of Soledad Brother, George Jackson, served time in California’s prison system during the Treatment Era, and he played an important role in the histories of the Black Power movement, the Black Panther Party and the Radical Left in the sixties and early seventies. His writing and activism, along with his dramatic and violent death during an alleged prison escape attempt, helped galvanise the radical prison movement (including the 1971 Attica Prison uprising). Lee Bernstein acknowledges his importance by

124  Simon Rolston calling the period in the 1970s when American prisoners became radicalised “the age of Jackson” (2016, 51). Although Jackson is certainly a revolutionary figure who confronts the prison system in Soledad Brother, this combative position is not entirely consistent throughout the book: at times, Jackson resists the prison system, often to the detriment of his own freedoms; at other times, he responds favourably to the prison’s rehabilitative demands, which dramatises how prison life writing was constrained and policed during the Treatment Era (and in succeeding decades too, although in different ways). However, most analyses of Jackson fail to consider the degree to which the prison influences some of the key features of the book, including Jackson’s revolutionary identity as it evolves over the course of his letters. For instance, Dylan Rodríguez writes that Jackson “advocates a form of political rupture that defies the possibility of rehabilitation” and rejects rehabilitation “as a modality of assimilation into the fabric of an essentially oppressive and white-supremacist civil society” (2004, 121). Although this is certainly true, it is not true for the whole book. It overlooks those moments where Jackson does not defy “the possibility of rehabilitation” but instead seeks to represent himself as rehabilitated – in precisely the kind of terms that the prison system requires of him in order for him to be released. Identifying where Jackson adheres to the rehabilitative demands of prison discourse, and in turn how the prison’s rhetorical and disciplinary forces impact Jackson’s evolving identity in the narrative, helps explain where Jackson’s revolutionary identity comes from, including how it emerges out of an engagement with, rather than a rejection of, the prison’s rules and regulations, state laws, and the discursive characteristics of these interlocking systems of power. Notably, Jackson’s Soledad Brother tells the story of a prisoner changed through reading and writing, practices promoted in California’s Treatment Era prisons as clear markers of rehabilitation and part of a transformation-through-education story that I call the “prison conversion narrative” (Rolston, 2011). However, as I will show, Jackson inverts the purpose of prison education: rather than change him from a criminal to a citizen, his prison education radicalises him; it transforms his “black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality” (Jackson, 1971, 40). I suggest that this deliberate misuse of the prison conversion narrative, which serves different purposes, emerges organically out of prison culture where prisoners often retool objects so that they serve new, often subversive, ends. I call this prison-specific cultural and literary technique corruption, a concept that uses but expands upon a theory of prison literary production that Jean Genet theorises in his introduction to Soledad Brother. And so, by identifying how institutional power affects prisoners’ autobiographical works, I am not simply arguing that prison life writing constitutes what David Guest calls a “discourse that

Prison Life Writing and George Jackson  125 enables […] the criminal justice system” (1997, xvi). Instead, I show how prisoners’ life writings often managed to subvert the ideology of the prison system by actually utilising prison discourse, particularly its rhetoric of rehabilitation. Ultimately, in order to understand Jackson’s revolutionary identity – an identity that, as Bernstein (2016) argues, is key to understanding an important moment in prison history, and, as Joseph E. Peniel shows, is also central to understanding the evolution of Black Power in America (Peniel, 2007, 251, 241–275) – one must address how this identity emerges in relation to the pressures of institutional power and how it is partly articulated through the discourse of the American prison system.

Penal Philosophy: George Jackson, the Indeterminate Sentence and the Adult Authority Born in 1941, George Jackson was raised in Chicago, but he moved with his father, Lester, to California in 1955 because his parents worried that their son was becoming increasingly involved in small-time neighbourhood crime and attracting the attention of the police. However, Jackson did not change as a result of his move to Los Angeles. Instead, beginning in 1957, he started getting arrested for crimes ranging from vehicle theft to burglary. In 1960, a nineteen-year-old Jackson was convicted of robbery and given a one-year-to-life indeterminate sentence (Liberatore, 1996, 8). And in part because of this indeterminate sentence, he would never leave prison. Hence, understanding his story, including how the prison system finds its way into his autobiography, means understanding the role of indeterminate sentencing laws in the lives of imprisoned people. Unlike a determinate sentence, where someone is sentenced for a specific period of time, an indeterminate sentence designates a wide range of time when someone can be behind bars. So, rather than receive a three-to-nine-year sentence for first-degree robbery, where an offender would generally know the duration of their imprisonment, someone receiving an indeterminate sentence might receive a one-year-to-life sentence, as Jackson did, and not know with any certainty how long they are likely to remain incarcerated. With the indeterminate sentence, prisoners had to produce evidence that they were rehabilitated if they were ever to be released. The people who adjudicated this evidence, who decided whether a prisoner had changed enough behind bars to merit their return to the wider community, was the parole board – or, as it was called in California during the Treatment Era, the “Adult Authority”. Prisoners had to demonstrate to the Adult Authority that they were genuinely rehabilitated. However, the Adult Authority’s expectations were often maddeningly vague. Malcolm Braly, author and former prisoner, describes

126  Simon Rolston how prisoners obsessively strategised so as to present the most successful demonstrations of their rehabilitation before the Adult Authority: There was nothing that interested us more and we logged years trying to thrash out a basis on which to predict the Adult Authority. This was our great debate. We knew which programs to try to associate ourselves with and we knew which ploys were now exhausted. We could gauge public pressure and the changing winds of penal philosophy. (1976, 252) As Braly explains, prisoners like Jackson who were serving indeterminate sentences – and that was most prisoners during the Treatment Era – obsessed about the parole board’s criteria. No clear model was available to them, causing them to anxiously cast about for ways to appeal to the board. Understandably, this led to frustration – and resistance. For Jackson, whose efforts at parole were repeatedly denied, the indeterminate sentence and the Adult Authority came to signify arbitrary rule by a hostile white supremacist system. Jackson had been resisting this system for quite some time and had been growing increasingly radicalised behind bars, but it was at Soledad Prison that his fight with the prison system received national attention. Jackson was transferred to Monterray County’s Salinas Valley State Prison, commonly known as Soledad Prison, in 1969 at a time when the prison was riven by racial tensions and violence – tensions stoked by the mostly white prison guards. On 13 January 1970, Jackson’s friend, W.L. Nolen, and two other African American prisoners, Cleveland Edwards and Alvin Miller, were killed by a guard sharpshooter named Opie G. Miller, and this event rocked the California prison system. After the killing of the men in the exercise yard was ruled a justifiable homicide three days later, a rookie guard named John V. Mills was attacked by prisoners, beaten, and thrown to his death from a third-floor tier. As Sun Min Yee notes, this was “the first killing of a guard in Soledad history” (1973, 35). Three men were charged with Mills’ murder: Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette and Jackson himself. They came to be known as the “Soledad Brothers”. In 1968, Huey Newton, co-founder of and Minister of Defense for the Black Panther Party and in prison for the murder of a police officer, had heard about Jackson and asked his lawyer, Fay Stender, to review Jackson’s robbery charges and indeterminate sentence (Berger, 2014, 101). When Jackson was charged with Mills’ murder in 1970, Stender served as his lawyer. Stender helped organise the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, and it was out of these efforts to solicit support for Jackson, Clutchette and Drumgo that Stender suggested that they publish Jackson’s letters, which would become Soledad Brother (Berger,

Prison Life Writing and George Jackson  127 2014, 109). Jackson’s epistolary autobiography was a literary sensation. Not only did it help garner support for the Soledad Brothers, but it ensured that Jackson’s reputation in prison as a scholar-warrior was also taken up by his supporters outside of prison. Jackson followed this book with another epistolary autobiography, Blood in My Eye (1971), which was published posthumously – after he mounted an attack from within San Quentin prison, killing three guards before being shot and killed in the yard. While Jackson was interpreted as a revolutionary by African American prisoners and by many on the Left and in the African American community, he was also interpreted as a deranged murderer by those on the Right and by some in the mainstream media. Indeed, as Dan Berger writes in Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (2014), Jackson’s image was complicated by different, often competing interests. Berger writes: The story of George Jackson is a story of cross-cutting narratives in which both Jackson the person and Soledad Brother the book were distinct figures among a large cast of characters. Jackson was caught between the story he wished to tell about himself not just in books but in actions and the stories that publishers, journalists, activists – and a long list of antagonists – wished to tell about him. (2014, 96) But even before Jackson was interpreted by “publishers, journalists, activists”, he was interpreted, and closely scrutinised, by a massive ocular system in the prison that served the Adult Authority. Berger and others rightly suggest that in order to understand Jackson we must look to his public persona and consider how it was shaped by multiple competing interests, from his lawyer to his editor to the Black Panther Party to Angela Davis to the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. However, as I will show, understanding Jackson also means considering how Jackson was shaped by the prison system and how that shaping affects Soledad Brother – the book that made him famous in the first place.

“Looks Bad on the Parole Board Report”: Soledad Brother and the Rehabilitative Gaze Jackson’s image as a revolutionary whose incarceration and resistance to that incarceration is representative of the black experience emerges out of a reckoning with prison discourse and the rehabilitative gaze of the prison system. By “rehabilitative gaze”, I am referring to the innumerable figures who observe prisoners – including prison guards, censors, counsellors or therapists, doctors, teachers, even prisoners’ families – and whose observations are recorded and compiled together in prisoners’

128  Simon Rolston files to be read and interpreted by the Adult Authority (along with other official bodies within the prison and criminal justice systems). Of course, this observatory network, which watches but also seeks to affect prisoners’ behaviour, resonates with Michel Foucault’s description in Discipline and Punish (1977) of the prison as a panoptic and disciplinary institution. As Foucault explains, the prison has to extract unceasingly from the inmate a body of knowledge that will make it possible to transform the penal measure into a penitentiary operation; which will make of the penalty required by the offence a modification of the inmate that will be of use to society. (1995, 251) Prisons in Treatment Era California conducted massive biographical projects about each individual prisoner; they tried to manage, control and change prisoners by first collecting a vast “body of knowledge” about them. Although Jackson’s Soledad Brother certainly mounts a sustained challenge to the prison system’s legitimacy, especially insofar as the prison has the right to determine the lives of black, brown and poor white people, it is also deeply influenced by this rehabilitative gaze. Examining how Jackson’s revolutionary identity is a reaction to this gaze – along with the indeterminate sentence, the Adult Authority and the prison conversion narrative – helps explain some of the aesthetic choices of Soledad Brother as well as the pressures prison discourse exerted on prison life writing during this period. The prison censor is perhaps the most immediately relevant example of how the rehabilitative gaze impacts Soledad Brother. The letters included in the book were invariably read by prison censors who not only adjudicated which letters to repress and which letters to mail; they also forwarded relevant information from the letters to prison officials to be compiled in Jackson’s file and read by the Adult Authority. San Quentin warden Clinton Duffy explains the role of the censor this way: We keep a careful record of every letter written or received by the inmates, and our censors read every line. This is a prodigious book-keeping job, but in the long run it benefits the men themselves. Letters are clues to a man’s thinking and emotions – they show progress or despair; they reveal an unreported illness, a family crisis that has affected a man’s behavior, or even evidence that may be vital to his chances for parole. (1950, 250) As Duffy suggests, the prison censor reads a prisoner’s letters in order to cull “evidence that may be vital to [the prisoner’s] chances for parole”, which is hardly as benevolent as Duffy makes it seem since the censor

Prison Life Writing and George Jackson  129 also searched for “clues” that justified denying a prisoner’s release. Invariably, whatever the censor’s particular motivations, their capacity to telescope the Adult Authority’s rehabilitative gaze influenced how prisoners represented themselves in their letter writing. When those letters are gathered together into a book like Soledad Brother, the prison censor’s proscriptive and prescriptive work is undoubtedly there too. The prison censor, and by extension the Adult Authority, thus constitutes another implied reader in Soledad Brother. In other words, when Jackson addresses a letter to his lawyer, Stender, and is thus writing to her most immediately, he is also writing with an awareness of the censor and the Adult Authority’s interpretive work, which subtly impacts what he includes in and excludes from his letter – and, as a result, what appears or does not appear in Soledad Brother. Sometimes, the impact of the prison censor on Jackson’s writing is not so subtle, however. For example, in a 30 March 1970 letter to Stender printed in Soledad Brother, Jackson writes, “I know they [prison officials] read these letters” (1971, 200). In the letter, he shifts between addressing Stender and implying that he is also addressing a prison censor who would be reading his letter before forwarding it out of the institution. At one point in his letter to Stender, Jackson addresses this institutional gaze directly. He names one of the captains at Soledad Prison in his complaint about white prisoners throwing feces at him when guards escort them past his cell: “I’m putting you on notice, Moody, the first time I get shit thrown at me the whole country will know how it displeases me” (201; original emphasis). Although Jackson’s letter is addressed to Stender, he knows that his letter is also received and read by multiple institutional readers who would convey Jackson’s warning to captain Moody – and might even be read by Moody himself with this inclusion. And so, in this moment, he openly hails an institutional reader whose influence on him and his letters is usually harder to gauge. Normally, the effects of the prison censor on his letters would appear as absences (letters returned rather than mailed, information excised or redacted). Or, Jackson would acknowledge the prison censor in ways that are harder to identify, like through self-censorship, or through the use of coded language or allusion that he might employ to circumvent the censor’s rules. In other words, by directly addressing this institutional reader in a letter to Stender, Jackson indicates how his letter writing is constructed with an awareness of this institutional reader and is thus, to a degree that is usually difficult to determine, influenced by this reader’s interests and regulations. Soledad Brother – an epistolary autobiography that is compiled almost entirely from letters that were read by prison censors, a collection that invariably must have been shaped with this institutional reader’s criteria in mind – suggests how the prison and its discursive powers are productive even as they restrict, especially in the manner they directly affect prison life writing, including the life writing of someone deeply opposed to the prison, like Jackson.

130  Simon Rolston The prison censor exerts pressure on Soledad Brother, sometimes shaping what is and what is not included in the letters compiled in the book, but it is the Adult Authority that sets limits on, establishes boundaries around, the kind of identity that Jackson can enter into discourse. As mentioned, Jackson was serving an indeterminate sentence for his part in a robbery, so he had to visit the Adult Authority on a yearly basis, a visit that he regularly discusses in his letters. Indeed, the Adult Authority is one of the most frequent topics of discussion in Jackson’s book, indicating the degree to which his life – and, by extension, his writing about his life – was constantly responding to this organisation and the observation system that informed it. Jackson’s early letters actually seem to suggest a desire on his part to conform, or rather to seem to conform, to the figure of the rehabilitated prisoner so that he would be released from prison, which shows the degree to which this system affects Jackson as an autobiographical subject. In a February 1965 letter to his mother, he writes, I should be out of here this year. I have complied with all of their demands: group counseling, school, clean conduct record. I go to the board next time they meet. You could start writing letters to the Adult Authority now [in support of his release], the more the better. You know what to say: that I was young then and you see a vast change in my character now. Also say that you can and will help me with a place to stay. (1971, 63) Obviously, Jackson would not be out of prison that year – or any year. But what is suggestive about this letter is his avowed interest in meeting the rehabilitative gaze with a presentation of himself that he hoped would be deemed acceptable by the Adult Authority. He knows that he is being watched; his every action is being interpreted and analysed; and so, he responds to that gaze by going to counselling and school, keeping a “clean conduct record”, and avoiding confrontations with prison staff: in other words, he organises his life in such a way that it will be interpreted as the story of a rehabilitated prisoner, a subjectivity that (at first) seems anathema to the revolutionary figure described in most accounts of him. Similarly, in a 1966 letter to his father, Jackson once again describes anticipating his meeting with the Adult Authority and explains how he positions himself so as to be read approvingly by the members of the board: “I’m getting ready for December [when he was to go before the Adult Authority]. I don’t want to stand out. I must fit in with the rest of the herd and look as ordinary as possible” (1971, 100). Again he cultivates a “look” that seeks to meet the approval of the Adult Authority; he participates in the forced dramaturgy of a prisoner’s life during the Treatment Era. Whether he genuinely tries to be rehabilitated is unimportant here. What is important is how the rehabilitative gaze, the indeterminate sentence and the Adult Authority affect Jackson as an

Prison Life Writing and George Jackson  131 autobiographical subject – how, like other prison life writings, Soledad Brother is invested with prison discourse rather than simply resistant to it. Jackson’s claim in Blood in My Eye that he has “always” said “just about what [he] want[s]” elides the degree to which Soledad Brother registers not only a hesitation to speak truth to power but a willingness to accept this institutional interpellation of him and respond accordingly – at least for a while (1972, 181). Jackson’s revolutionary identity is certainly a response to the inequalities of capitalism, white supremacy in America and the entrenched racism of the American prison system. But the way it appears in the book, the nature of its emergence, is also as a response to the prison’s Treatment Era methodologies and what I have been calling the rehabilitative gaze. At a certain point, Jackson realises that the Adult Authority had no intention of releasing him from prison. His letters record his numerous rejections, like this one, from January 1967: “They gave me no consideration at the board, the same people that gave me their promise last year [that he would receive a parole date]. I was not surprised, I was completely prepared for this” (1971, 104). After his January 1967 denial, though, Jackson seems to take a more belligerent posture in response to the board’s rejection of his parole appeal: Although I would very much like to get out of here […] although I would not like to leave my bones here on the hill, if it is a choice between that and surrendering the things that make me a man, the things that allow me to hold my head erect and unbowed, then the hill can have my bones. […] I don’t care how long I live. Over this I have no control, but I do care about what kind of life I live, and I can control this. I may not live but another five minutes, but it will be five minutes definitely on my terms. (1971, 106) Here, Jackson outlines a binary: self-expression and pride (“on my terms”), resistance to the authorities, death (leaving his “bones […] on the hill”) and imprisonment are on one side; acquiescing to the demands of the prison system (“surrendering”), the possibility of freedom (getting “out of here”), subservience and a lack of dignity are on the other. Although he may have entertained the possibility that he could preserve a sense of dignity and even revolutionary potential while also performing the role of the rehabilitated prisoner, the Adult Authority’s repeated rejections of him seem to convince him otherwise. Jackson clarifies this position in a 1970 letter to his lawyer, Stender, where he reflects on the relationship between parole and revolutionary action: Up until now, the prospect of parole has kept us [“black convicts”] from confronting our captors with any real determination. But now with the living conditions of these places deteriorating, and with

132  Simon Rolston the sure knowledge that we are slated for destruction, we have been transformed into an implacable army of liberation. (1971, 50) Jackson is discussing how he is liberated from the constraints of parole since he has been charged with murder and, he believes, will likely be executed. But he also provides a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between his life writing and the Adult Authority. Although Jackson is certainly articulating a position of resistance to the system, then, he is also acknowledging how, for a time, the rehabilitative gaze and the Adult Authority played a determining role in his discursive identity. And this is significant: by understanding how prison discourse is immanent to his work, setting limits on and shaping his identity, we can better see the conditions of his revolutionary identity’s emergence. Let me be clear: I am not in any way suggesting that Jackson is, or was at some point, subservient to the prison system or that his revolutionary identity is in any way inauthentic. Almost certainly, Jackson’s performance of the rehabilitated prisoner was a tactical decision since to do otherwise meant that he would never be released and would remain behind bars, a captive of the system that he sought to overthrow. But Jackson’s performance of the rehabilitated prisoner demonstrates how difficult, at times even impossible, it was for prisoners writing during this period to resist the pressures of prison discourse. It also illuminates the stakes of prison life writing; the costs of openly challenging the prison during the Treatment Era; and the necessity of either acquiescing to the pressures of prison discourse, fighting the system and forever living (or dying) within it, or making aesthetic innovations in prison life writing that accept the prison’s discursive modalities while evading or even challenging institutional power. In many ways, all of these different strategies appear in Soledad Brother at different times. But it is Jackson’s acceptance of the prison system’s discursive modalities, his innovative use of the prison’s central metanarrative, that enables him to articulate a revolutionary identity – a technique that I argue emerges organically out of prison culture, which I call corruption.

“A Vast Change in My Character”: Corruption and the Prison Conversion Narrative Jackson’s letters in Soledad Brother, when read together, create the impression of a revolutionary teleology that, as I have suggested, struggles with the pressures of prison discourse before seeking to take a more confrontational posture in relation to the prison, capitalism and white supremacist America (with the exception of the first two letters of the book, which frame the entire narrative, and are written out of chronological order). However, as Berger has argued in Captive Nation (2014), Stender,

Prison Life Writing and George Jackson  133 Jackson’s lawyer, and Gregory Armstrong, the book’s editor, helped shape Soledad Brother so that it would appeal to a wide audience interested in left-leaning causes. They hoped the book would elicit sympathy for Jackson and the other Soledad brothers. As Berger writes, “Armstrong and Stender sought to portray Jackson as the symbol for an individual and collective search for justice, even as Jackson himself seemed to prefer an image more heroic and less sentimental” (2014, 119). Moreover, as Berger suggests, Jackson was not altogether pleased with the finished work since their efforts to make it amenable to an outside audience, which surely involved making the book fit the genre expectations of a (mostly white) readership, softened the militancy of Jackson’s revolutionary vision (120). And so, it is important to keep in mind the degree to which the narrative that I identify in the book is not solely the product of Jackson’s thinking but emerges in tandem with a white editorial framework, what John Sekora might call a “white envelope”, that massages the work into a particular narrative framework (1987, 502). A product of this sometimes fraught writerly and editorial negotiation, Jackson’s story in Soledad Brother is one of revolutionary enlightenment, but it is less a departure from his performance of the rehabilitated prisoner than it is an amendment, a reshaping of it. In particular, he adapts the prison conversion narrative, a powerful metanarrative that underpins the American prison system. Like the conversion narrative, which maps someone’s fall, conversion and social integration, the prison conversion narrative conceptualises how the prison changes someone from a criminal to a citizen. The authors of an influential report on prisons, the 1971 Quaker-produced Struggle for Justice: A Report on Crime and Punishment in America, write that the concept of rehabilitation, with its focus on the total transformation of “the whole personality” and its rhetoric of “Remaking people”, “is akin to religious conversion” (1971, 44, 45, 46). During the Treatment Era, prison education, particularly the ostensibly normalising power of reading and writing, was supposed to produce in prisoners the psychological, emotional and social requirements needed to sustain a democratic society. Jackson’s revolutionary conversion is less a rejection than a modification of this narrative in a way that I think reflects a prison-specific technique of (mis)using found objects so that they serve alternative and even subversive purposes. In Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr (1975), Carr, a close friend of Jackson, describes how prisoners use sanctioned objects in the prison system in order to make new, often illicit cultural artefacts. For example, Carr describes how he and Jackson combine an inner tube, a rubber hose, matchboxes of yeast, vegetables, a five-gallon can and a prison toilet to make a “distillery”: George got to work: Made a furnace out of the can, then cut the air nozzle out of the inner tube, and stuck one end of the hose in the

134  Simon Rolston inner tube and one end in the toilet […] So he and his cellmate got it cooking and coming out with all this wine, and the fumes went right down the toilet […] With the sediment from the wine they boiled up white-lightnin’ moonshine and sold it by the Jergens Lotion bottle for five dollars a taste. (2002, 134) Here, Carr recounts how they modify and combine sanctioned materials in order to produce new, unsanctioned products that are then funnelled into the prison system’s sub rosa economy. This prison economy is burrowed into the licit systems of the prison: the prisoners who work as trash collectors, for instance, are the sellers and traders of these products, and they connect all the different, often segregated sections of the prison, enabling an underground trade in a wide variety of illegal goods (Carr, 2002, 71). This art of (mis)using is what Michel de Certeau calls an “ingenious wa[y] in which the weak make use of the strong” (1988, xvii). It is a transformation of the dominant cultural economy from within in order to “adapt it to [a prisoner’s] own interests and [a prisoner’s] own rules” (de Certeau, 1988, xiv). To some degree, the  prisoner’s process of modifying things is methodologically similar to the “regeneration through misuse” that Raymond Malewitz identifies in the practices of some postindustrial workers: “rugged consumers [who] find alternative ways of practicing their skills by creatively misusing, repairing, and repurposing the objects in their environments” (2012, 527). However, unlike postindustrial workers, who may choose to repurpose objects or not, prisoners have few options but to misuse their things: restrictions on material goods along with the hyper-constrained conditions of prison make such repurposing a virtual necessity. Prisoners are dependent on misusing the materials and systems of the prison, turning them to ends that are very different from their original purposes. This misuse of prison materials is also a literary aesthetic in prison life writing. In his introduction to Soledad Brother, Jean Genet, himself a former prisoner, describes prison life writing as functioning according to a similar methodology as prisoners’ repurposing of things. According to Genet, an African American prisoner like Jackson is forced to articulate his opposition to a dominant culture through that culture’s own language: the prisoner must use the very language, the words, the syntax of his enemy, whereas he craves a separate language belonging to his people. Once again, his situation is both hypocritical and wretched: he can express his sexual obsessions only in the polite dialect, according to a syntax which enables others to read him, and as for his hatred of the white man, he can utter it only in this language which belongs to black and white alike but over which

Prison Life Writing and George Jackson  135 the white man extends his grammarian’s jurisdiction. It is perhaps a new source of anguish for the black man to realize that if he writes a masterpiece, it is his enemy’s language, his enemy’s treasury which is enriched by the additional jewel he has so furiously and lovingly carved. (1971, 22) Genet describes how African American prison life writing’s dependence on the literary forms of the “white man” – his “language” or “syntax” – makes it susceptible to appropriation and domestication. This is certainly true of the prison conversion narrative: a prisoner who describes changing himself through reading and writing risks reproducing the rehabilitative logic of the system within which he is constrained. Genet suggests an alternative, explaining: [the African American prisoner] has then only one recourse: to accept this language but to corrupt it so skillfully that the white men are caught in his trap. To accept it in all its richness, to increase that richness still further, and to suffuse it with all his obsessions and all his hatred of the white man. (1971, 22) In other words, Genet introduces Jackson’s autobiography by explaining its literary method in a way that I read as reflecting, perhaps even emerging out of, the practice of misuse that governs prisoners’ illicit economies. Although many prisoners use the discourse of the prison in their life writings, then, there are ways to use that discourse so as to radically alter or “corrupt” it. Jackson’s use of the prison conversion narrative in his autobiography demonstrates how he turns “the syntax of his enemy” into expressions of subversion, defiance and resistance. Rather than outright reject the terms of rehabilitation that, at other times in his letters, he submits to, Jackson uses but misuses, accepts but corrupts them. Notably, Soledad Brother uses the trope of the prisoner transformed through reading and writing that is promoted by the Treatment Era prison system. Jackson writes: I know my mother likes to tell everyone that I was a good boy, but that isn’t true, I’ve been a brigand all my life. It was these years in prison with the time and opportunity available to me for research and thought that motivated a desire to remold my character. I think that if I had been on the street from age eighteen to twenty-four, I would probably be a dope fiend or a small-stakes gambler, or a hump in the ground. (1971, 203)

136  Simon Rolston As though articulating the rehabilitative mandate of the California Department of Corrections, Jackson describes how prison saves him from a life of crime or an early death and how his prison education – “research and thought” – motivates him to “remold [his] character”. Arguably, the bulk of Soledad Brother is dedicated to recording Jackson’s research process, including the specific books that he is reading and how he tries to obtain them, inasmuch as it chronicles his ideas that developed out of those readings. In his letters, Jackson is preoccupied with his studies, often discussing his readings with his interlocutors and frequently requesting books and educational materials from them. In a letter to Angela Davis, for example, Jackson asks Davis to coordinate with his parents in order to ensure that he has access to reading materials that he needs, from Frantz Fanon to “reference books”, noting in his letter that he needs “pocket editions of everything” because the guards “like to steal”, so if he loses “something it’s best if it’s only something small” (1971, 267). Although Jackson is violently opposed to the prison system, he is nonetheless compelled to “accept” the “language” of the institution: the prison conversion narrative, with its promise of conversion and redemption through education, is not rejected but employed in Soledad Brother. But, as Genet suggests, Jackson “accept[s] this language but […] corrupt[s] it […] skillfully”. Jackson reconstitutes the prison conversion narrative in revolutionary terms, beginning with the kind of reading that he is doing: “I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me”, he writes (1971, 39–40). Jackson’s reading might be redemptive, but his reading materials – comprised of Marxism but also postcolonial and revolutionary theory, philosophy, African history and African American history – help him recognise his criminality and imprisonment in different economic and racial terms. His reading teaches him to challenge the legitimacy of American society rather than inducting him into it. Instead of an individual criminal, he is a victim of widescale racialised violence: as an African American man trapped within a racist system that criminalises black masculinity and makes crime a predictable response to poverty, his petty crimes are effects of wider economic and racial determinates. This inversion of the criminal justice system’s classifications, which figures America as the criminal and the African American prisoner as a victim, is not new necessarily. In his autobiography, Malcolm X describes how Elijah Muhammed explained to him that the “black prisoner […] symbolized white society’s crime of keeping black men oppressed and deprived and ignorant, and unable to get decent jobs, turning them into criminals” (1966, 195). But Jackson goes further, defining the African American experience as a colonial experience, explaining “our problems are historically and strategically tied to the problems of all colonial people” (1971, 271). He calls for the establishment of “a

Prison Life Writing and George Jackson  137 true internationalism with other anti-colonial peoples”, many of whom were, at the time, mounting their own revolutions against colonial powers (1971, 234). Here, Jackson draws on theories developed within the broader Black Power movement, notably by Stokely Carmichael, whose Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1992), co-authored with George V. Hamilton, explains that African Americans “stand as colonial subjects in relation to the white society” (5). Moreover, reflecting the increasingly radical and confrontational turn within the movement, Jackson argues that, just as anti-colonial struggles used violence to overthrow their colonising forces, African Americans needed to use violence to incite their own revolution. Clearly, then, Jackson uses the prison conversion narrative, but he completely inverts its meaning, advocating violence against the very society within which the prison was supposed to indoctrinate him. Through examining Jackson’s use of the prison conversion narrative, the discursive effects of indeterminate sentence, and the supervisory role of the Adult Authority, I have shown how George Jackson’s Soledad Brother is militantly resistant to the prison system but also entangled in the prison’s surveillance and disciplinary functions. Because of Treatment Era policies and sentencing laws, Jackson’s epistolary autobiography exhibits a tension between acquiescence and militancy, between rehabilitation and revolution, that has been virtually unexamined because most studies of Soledad Brother take for granted that his book constitutes an unalloyed challenge to the prison system. Importantly, Jackson is not an exceptional case in this respect: life writing is always fraught territory for imprisoned people since it can be a disciplinary technology as well as a forum for self-expression. And most prison life writing exhibits similar struggles with prison discourse, which is important for what it says about the relationship between life writing and institutional power and for what it means for concepts like “resistance literature”. However, as I have demonstrated through my analysis of Soledad Brother, reconsidering the relationship between life writing and power not only reveals the disciplinary features of life writing; it also reveals the ingenuity, the often overlooked creative work, of imprisoned people telling stories about themselves in institutions seeking to produce stories about them too.

Works Cited Berger, D. 2014. Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Bernstein, L. 2016. America is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Braly, M. 1976. False Starts: A Memoir of San Quentin and Other Prisons. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company.

138  Simon Rolston Carmichael, S. and G.V. Hamilton. 1992. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. New York: Vintage. Carr, J. 2002 [1975]. Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr, edited by D. Hammer and I. Cronin. Edinburgh, London and Oakland, CA: AK Press/ Nabat. Certeau, de M. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by S. Rendall. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Duffy, C.T. and D. Jennings. 1950. The San Quentin Story. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. Foucault, M. 1995 [1977]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Genet, J. 1971. “Introduction”. In Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson by G. Jackson, 17–24. New York: Penguin Books. Guest, D. 1997. Sentenced to Death: The American Novel and Capital Punishment. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Jackson, G. 1971 [1970]. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. New York: Penguin Books. Jackson, G. 1972. Blood in My Eye. New York: Random House. Liberatore, P. 1996. The Road to Hell: The True Story of George Jackson, Stephen Bingham, and the San Quentin Massacre. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Malcolm, X. and A. Haley. 1966. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press. Malewitz, R. 2012. “Regeneration through Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture”. PMLA 127.3: 526–541. Peniel, J. 2007. Waiting ‘Till the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York: Holt Paperbacks. Rodríguez, D. 2004. Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minneapolis Press. Rolston, S. 2011. “Conversion and the Story of the American Prison”. Critical Survey 23.3: 103–118. Sekora, J. 1987. “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative”. Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters 10.3: 482–515. Struggle for Justice: A Report on Crime and Punishment in America, Prepared for the American Friends Service Committee. 1971. New York: Hill & Wang. Yee, S. M. 1973. “Death on the Yard: The Untold Killings at Soledad & San Quentin”. Ramparts April: 35–40.

8

PEN and the Writer as Prisoner Michelle Kelly

Introducing PEN and the Imprisoned Writer In her introduction to the 1996 volume This Prison Where I Live: The PEN Anthology of Imprisoned Writers (1996), editor Siobhan Dowd declares that “Nothing captures the international imagination as readily as a writer behind bars” (3). The anthology gathers together the work of twenty-five writers describing their experiences of incarceration and was published to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of PEN International. Dowd’s introduction celebrates the efforts of PEN, a writers’ organisation and NGO, to ameliorate the conditions of imprisoned writers as their “unifying mission” (3). “While PEN was not”, she acknowledges, “founded with this precise task in mind, it quickly embraced it and indeed became one of the world’s first human rights organisations” (3). That defence of the imprisoned writer is so closely identified with PEN suggests that the compelling figure Dowd alludes to has to an extent become the prevailing vision of the writer imagined by PEN. The writer, thus transformed into the hero of free expression under conditions of incarceration, becomes bound up with a model of literature as a cultural practice under constant threat from an antagonistic state. This essay is an effort to think through this particular framing of writers and literature: to consider the implications of the centrality of the imprisoned writer within PEN and its relationship to the organisation’s representation of writers and literature in general. By revisiting some key moments in PEN’s history, drawing on material from the PEN archives, and engaging with publications like Dowd’s anthology, the essay charts the growing visibility of the imprisoned writer within the organisation’s structures and activities, focusing especially on the foundation of the Writers in Prison Committee in 1960.1 This is inevitably a highly selective account of PEN’s history that brackets, for example, the evolving understanding of the right to free expression and the writer as uniquely the possessor of such rights, or the organisation’s more recent preoccupations with linguistic and digital rights. The purpose of such a partial history in the context of this collection is to consider what happens to the categories of “literature” and “writer” when refracted through the

140  Michelle Kelly lens of incarceration in the context in which PEN operated. By the same token, the varied nature of PEN’s advocacy activities allows us to also consider the significance of the visibility of the imprisoned writer for the representation of prisoners and the experience of incarceration more broadly. While I aim only to give some sense of the debate and contestation that has shaped PEN’s powerful defence of the imprisoned writer, it is fair to say that such contestations have characterised every step in PEN’s history, especially as experienced within and between national centres in more than one hundred countries. It is no accident that Dowd is concerned with the ability of the imprisoned writer to capture the “international imagination” (1996, 3; emphasis added). PEN’s history is defined by the international reach central to its founding vision, and which has played out with and against various forms of cultural and political internationalism. This, coupled with PEN’s avowed political neutrality, is the larger context in which the figure of the imprisoned writer has acquired moral authority and in which PEN evolved into a major actor in the literary world and on the international stage. In her short history of PEN, Dowd emphasises internationalism and political neutrality as qualities that have been integral to the organisation from its foundation in London in 1921, and suggests that these coalesce later in the century around a concern for human rights and specifically the human rights of imprisoned writers. Dowd’s description of PEN as a human rights organisation rings true, and she writes with considerable authority as a researcher for the Writers in Prison Committee since the mid-1980s and later Program Director for PEN America’s Freedom to Write committee. However, as she implicitly acknowledges, the convergence of writers’ organisation and human rights NGO that underpins her account of PEN was not an inevitable trajectory for the organisation. As I will show, the imprisoned writer acquired increasing prominence in PEN’s structures and activities in the context of both the Cold War and the decolonising movements of the post-war period. PEN’s evolution therefore needs to be understood alongside the emergence of other human rights organisations in this period, and the role of internationalism and political neutrality in a wider history. In this regard, the essay builds on recent scholarship on the emergence of human rights as a political ideology in the later twentieth century, drawing on Samuel Moyn’s (2010) description of human rights as “the last utopia” and Megan Doherty’s (2011) unpublished account of PEN’s place within this history. But in focusing on PEN’s advocacy on behalf of imprisoned writers, I am also building on Joseph Slaughter’s (2018) recent critical account of the international prominence of human rights at the expense of an anti-colonial politics of self-determination, and the enormous affective power of the prisoner of conscience in this history. PEN is unique in the history of twentieth-century human rights organisations in its singular focus on writers. That PEN is a human rights

PEN and the Writer as Prisoner  141 NGO that is first and foremost a writers’ organisation, and that these twin identities seem entirely compatible, suggest that PEN might be one place to look if we want to build on Slaughter’s work in thinking about the relationship between literature and human rights as more than a set of themes. An organisation like PEN allows us to consider the links between these different spheres – literature and human rights – as a set of practices and activities that are tied to a writer’s words, to their politics, to their body and to their role as advocate. These practices are played out time and again in relation to the imprisoned writer, and it is this figure above all that has been the catalyst for a convergence between literature and human rights. As I will attempt to show, this has been achieved through a definition of literature as removed from politics, and it is in the figure of the imprisoned writer that this vision of literature is most vulnerable.

A Short History of PEN According to Doherty (2011), PEN has an internationalist orientation that was solidified when it gained consultative status at UNESCO in the late 1940s and became a recognised voice in the creation and protection of internationally significant culture and heritage. From its beginnings, PEN has projected this kind of international vision. Emerging after the First World War, it was, according to its first president, novelist John Galsworthy, “a League of Nations for Men and Women of Letters” (quoted in “Our History”, PEN International website, 2020), offering writers a social space in which to exchange ideas and articulate their international vision. PEN International, as it is now known, began its days as the PEN Club, a London literary society for Poets, Essayists and Novelists founded by Catharine Amy Dawson Scott in 1921. PEN clubs quickly sprang up in other European countries, and by the outbreak of the Second World War there were PEN centres in North and South America, the Middle East and Asia. As a result, a simultaneous national and internationalist understanding of literature and writers has defined the structure of PEN, with national centres participating in an International Executive: writers organise themselves nationally (where the national is defined ethno-linguistically) into centres, which combine internationally through congresses, committees and various forms of activism. The “international” is therefore both the sphere of a broad literary culture and an escape from the domestic. It is also, for PEN and later human rights NGOs, the space in which influence can be exerted on specific nations. For most of the organisation’s history both the international executive and the national centres have been guided by a charter that was in development from the 1920s though not ratified until 1948, and which has been modified several times, most recently in 2017. The 1948 Charter

142  Michelle Kelly provides a fascinating definition of literature, which “national though it be in origin, knows no frontiers”, and claims that “works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion” (1948 PEN Charter, cited in Doherty, 2011, 386). Like many charters of the post-war period, including the contemporaneous Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it remained tied to the national while projecting the “ideal of one humanity living in peace in one world” (1948 PEN Charter, cited in Doherty, 2011, 386). While this nation-bound definition of literature has been erased from later versions, the charter’s internationalist ethos remains underpinned by the “unhampered transmission of thought within each nation and between all nations” (386), and nations, states and governments continue to be broadly conceived as the antagonists of writers and literature. PEN may be defined by an understanding of literature as “untouched” by politics, but with the charter compelling members to “pledge themselves to oppose any form of suppression and freedom of expression”, the organisation inevitably strayed into the domain of the political (1948 PEN Charter, cited in Doherty, 2011, 386). Rachel Potter has argued that PEN’s “survival in the 1930s and 1940s […] lay in its development of a clear sense of its political role as a writers’ organisation” (2013, 78). Faced with the rise of Nazism, book burning, writers fleeing Germany and, during the war, the problem of refugee writers, PEN’s activities evolved in a more overtly political direction. According to Potter, as part of their commitment to freedom of expression for exiled writers, “Literary texts, now tied to the fate of authors, required international protection from state suppression” (77). Therefore, PEN’s internationalism, she argues, had to reorganise its focus and purpose: “The idea of literary free speech as the international exchange of ideas changed to become an author’s human rights that needed to be defended against totalitarian states” (78). It is in this context that we might begin to understand the enormous symbolic significance of the imprisoned writer for PEN. As the Cold War intensified, the organisation’s structures and activities began to be oriented more towards the plight of incarcerated writers. In advance of the International PEN Congress in Rio de Janeiro in July 1960 a number of resolutions were circulated, among them a resolution submitted by the Swiss French Centre, subsequently ratified by the Congress, to formalise the reporting on writers imprisoned in all countries and to form a special committee empowered to act on behalf of PEN to support imprisoned writers – what became the Writers in Prison Committee. It is clear from the note in the resolution defining “writers in prison” – a category that would be a continual source of controversy – that this work was considered to be continuous with PEN’s advocacy for freedom of expression: “by ‘writers in prison’ we mean all writers imprisoned for their writings or their opinions, such imprisonment being in violation of the principles

PEN and the Writer as Prisoner  143 of the PEN Charter” (Swiss French Resolution, reproduced in PEN International, 1960a, 17 March). In keeping with the tendency that Potter identifies, this represents a further move away from texts and towards writers, and specifically towards the body of the imprisoned writer. To some extent, then, the Writers in Prison Committee that would emerge from the Rio Congress is the logical culmination of PEN’s advocacy on behalf of writers who had fallen foul of state authorities since at least the 1920s and 1930s, when the organisation made well-publicised interventions on behalf of writers during the Spanish Civil War. The context had changed, however, and the catalyst for the Swiss French resolution lay in the immediate events of the Cold War. As Doherty (2011) documents, a controversy erupted within PEN in the period following the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 which saw several “dissident” writers imprisoned by the Soviet-backed regime, including Tibor Déry and ­Julius Hay. PEN campaigned on behalf of such writers. Yet with echoes of the conflict between the International Executive and the German Centre in the 1930s, there were serious tensions between the International Executive and the Hungarian PEN Centre, whose autonomy was called into question by Paul Tabori, a prominent PEN figure and himself a Hungarian exile. The controversy resulted in the expulsion and then reinstatement of Hungarian PEN in the space of a few years, and exemplified debates within PEN about whether conditions in communist countries could ever allow those national centres to align with the organisation’s values. The effects of the Hungarian controversy were long-lasting, embedding the imprisoned writer within the structures of PEN through the Writers in Prison Committee, and, significantly, at the centre of the International Executive. Although the committee’s information would come from national centres, in reporting directly to the International Executive, and acting on its behalf between meetings of the executive, the committee would partially circumvent national centres, thus bringing about a subtle change in the mechanisms of PEN’s internationalism. While PEN maintained a policy of neutrality in the context of the Cold War, the organisation was at the same time strengthening its institutional structures to allow it to intervene more robustly in eastern block countries, and much of the energy of the committee was directed towards helping dissident writers. The shift to the body of the imprisoned writer, especially the dissident writer in the context of the Cold War, then, represents an intensification of the implied antagonism between the writer and the state already evident in the PEN Charter. Not only should the work of art, according to the charter, “be left untouched by national or political passion”, suggesting that art, in this case literature, inhabits a sphere distinct from national or political passions, but “free criticism of government, administrations

144  Michelle Kelly and institutions [is] imperative for the necessary advance of the world towards a more highly organized political and economic order” (1948 PEN Charter, cited in Doherty, 2011, 386). The case of the imprisoned writer brings to the fore the state’s power over the body of the writer, therefore necessitating criticism of government. Thus, in the heat of the Cold War, the imprisoned writer increasingly comes to stand symbolically for the writer in general threatened by totalitarian regimes, with PEN as their external and international champion. At the same time, the embedding of this figure in PEN’s structures through the Writers in Prison Committee also crystallises an alternative role for the writer as human rights advocate and defender. The result is that the version of the writer projected by PEN on the international stage, as Dowd’s anthology suggests, is either the heroic victim or the heroic saviour, depending on the writer’s national context.

Writers in Prison Committee and Decolonisation It became clear even in early debates about the Swiss French resolution that the Cold War was not the only context in which writers were being imprisoned and in which PEN would be compelled to act. At a meeting of the International Executive in London ahead of the Rio Congress delegates from various centres debated the resolution. There was broad support for it, but also some differences in understanding its scope. It is evident from the minutes of this meeting that David Carver, the hugely influential London-based International Secretary of PEN from 1951 to 1974, had a strategy for retaining control of the emerging Writers in Prison Committee in London, and therefore by English PEN, who then controlled the International Executive. According to Carver, the committee, which would include Carver in his role as International Secretary, should be comprised of three members who could meet in person to discuss their work; the members should therefore be based in London. Aziz Ahmad, Urdu poet, scholar and Pakistani delegate, saw things differently. According to the minutes, for Ahmad there were basically three different types of writers who were in danger of imprisonment: first, those in Communist countries, second, those in colonial countries, for which he offered the example of South Africa and possibly South America, and the third category were those writers living in, as he saw it, the so-called free countries where dictatorships were in power. After making this point, Ahmad proposed that the structure of the committee be extended, with committee members representing different regions: the west, which he imagined would have few cases, the Communist bloc, Africa, Asia and South America respectively (PEN International, 1960b, 4 April, 5–6).

PEN and the Writer as Prisoner  145 By articulating an understanding of the problems the Writers in Prison Committee was designed to address as historically and regionally specific, Ahmad was, in a sense, challenging the centralisation of power in London and “the west”, from where interventions might be made around the world, and arguing instead for a distribution of power across different regions. This might be thought of along the lines of the international influence increasingly exerted by formerly colonised countries at the rapidly expanding United Nations, or indeed the push and pull between the UK and current and former colonies within the Commonwealth. Ahmad was voted down, however. Controversy also arose when the resolution was formally passed at the Rio Congress, this time from tensions within the South African delegation, and between the South African delegation and the International Executive. The delegation was led by novelist Sarah Gertrude Millin, President of South African PEN since 1927 when, according to Peter McDonald (2009, 167), Galsworthy invited her to form a national centre. Her fellow delegates were Lewis and Dora Sowden who became involved in the centre in the 1940s, giving it a greater sense of purpose but also leading to frictions which would crystallise at the Rio Congress. In the archive we can see Millin’s letter to Carver explaining why she walked out of the Congress debate on the Swiss French resolution in response to Lewis Sowden’s contribution. Sowden had noted, as Ahmad had previously, that the Writers in Prison Committee might also focus on South Africa. According to a report on the Congress from Carver, Sowden “had mentioned with regret that there were signs his own country, South Africa, might join that unhappy band who had writers imprisoned for expressing their views” (PEN International, 1960a, 6 October, 4). This did not go down well with Millin, who according to Carver’s account had declared with passion that such action was entirely justified by a government during a state of emergency; she had consulted legal authorities in South Africa who had assured her of this, and she felt any government had every right to imprison its writers at such times. (PEN International, 1960a, 6 October, 4) In her letter to Carver, Millin takes umbrage at Sowden’s mention of South Africa in relation to the Writers in Prison Committee, associating South Africa’s conduct with that of the USSR, when the battle, as she saw it, had been against the USSR (Letter from Millin to Carver, undated July 1960). Millin’s objection, in other words, is not to the principle of PEN supporting imprisoned writers, but that PEN might support imprisoned South African writers. Millin, that is, sees PEN’s focus

146  Michelle Kelly as anti-communism rather than anti-authoritarianism. The debates of the Rio Congress took place in July 1960, in the immediate aftermath of the killing of sixty-nine people at Sharpeville on 21 March when South African police opened fire on a demonstration against apartheid legislation and thereby ushered in a period of mass detentions and police repression. Millin’s framing of the situation as bound up with Cold War ideologies sidesteps the official racism of the apartheid government, even if it signals how this often proceeded through anti-communist propaganda. Her objection to the idea of PEN intervening on behalf of writers imprisoned in these circumstances bears comparison with the examples of German PEN in the 1930s and Hungarian PEN in the 1950s, and suggests that national centres were sometimes the most reluctant to intervene locally, defending the right of their respective governments to imprison writers and journalists. And this is a constant theme in PEN’s history. The Algerian War, another anti-colonial struggle, also featured in PEN’s discussions in this period, particularly the detention of writers and journalists, including Henri Alleg, as well as the blacklisting of French writers and intellectuals who in 1960 signed the document known as the Manifesto of the 121, supporting the cause of Algerian independence and those who engaged in acts of military insubordination. There was a debate within the Executive of English PEN about whether or not to defend those who were persecuted for signing the manifesto. Carver and most others were in favour of public statements of support, but there were also strong voices against, arguing that the British would and should act the same way in an emergency. Another delegate drew an analogy with the actions of the forces known as the Black and Tans, former soldiers drafted into the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1920 to suppress the Irish War of Independence. Carver, whose position straddled English PEN and the International Executive, responded by highlighting a pattern of tensions between national centres reluctant to intervene locally and the International Executive, which he presumed to rise above such considerations. According to the minutes, Mr Carver said it was interesting to hear a member of the English Executive using the same argument which had been so unpopular when used by Mrs Sarah Gertrude Millin – namely, that in a time of internal strife a country’s government was quite justified in using unlawful methods. (PEN International, 1960a, 9 November, 3–4) The pattern Carver identifies sheds some light on the perceived role of the International Executive in mitigating the influence of local political considerations. The International Executive offered itself as a distant neutral broker, a counter-balance to the conflicts of interest that

PEN and the Writer as Prisoner  147 might arise closer to home, and therefore ultimate custodian of the PEN Charter’s commitment to protect literature from “national or political passion”. Notably, the argument in favour of supporting the signatories of the Manifesto of the 121 was not based on political sympathies with their position; this much was made explicit in the course of the discussion. Rather, the PEN Charter demanded that the organisation would defend the right to freedom of expression and due process for the signatories. In relation to the Writers in Prison Committee, Carver was especially sensitive to any suggestion that the activities of the committee were political. In a letter to The Bookseller (May 21, 1960) ahead of the Rio Congress, Carver contested their earlier description of PEN’s investment in imprisoned writers as a “political theme”: “PEN is, of course, a non-political organization and there will be no ‘main political theme’ discussed at the Brazil Congress” (PEN International, 1960a, 2 June, 4). Here we have an example of Carver assuming for PEN itself the “non-political” definition of literature that lies at the heart of the charter. Such a position, and claim to international neutrality, was critical to PEN during this period. Indeed, drawing on Samuel Moyn’s work on the emergence of human rights organisations in the 1970s, Doherty notes that “PEN’s humanitarian turn”, exemplified by the Writers in Prison Committee, offered “an appealingly neutral path through the worst days of the Cold War” (2011, 252). Even at the time, however, Millin’s interventions at the Rio Congress laid bare the fragility of this neutral path. It was under constant threat of being perceived as anti-communist rather than anti-authoritarian, and efforts to hold apart European Cold War politics and the politics of decolonisation were not tenable given the Cold War’s many global fronts.

Changes to the Writers in Prison Committee While its distance from national centres seemed to be the guarantee of political neutrality for the Writers in Prison Committee in its early years, the relationship between the committee and national centres was recalibrated when Michael Scammell, English biographer and Slavic specialist, took over as chair in 1976. Scammell transformed the committee into a robust information centre, producing regular reports on the status of imprisoned writers around the world. Organised by region, the committee’s reports, which over a ten-year period grew from 81 cases to 349, came to paint a grim picture of the vulnerable position of writers and journalists in various countries (Von Vegesack, 2011, 16). There was a strong concentration on Eastern Europe, but the reports also tracked varying flashpoints in the global Cold War and other sites of conflict and political upheaval. The information contained in the reports was gathered from national centres and supplemented by organisations like Amnesty International as well as the committee’s own investigations.

148  Michelle Kelly National centres took on the role of adopting imprisoned writers from other countries as honorary members and campaigning on their behalf. They attracted international attention through coordinated events like the Day of the Imprisoned Writer, which continues today. But the gradual institutional changes that took place suggest that national centres were not entirely united behind the work of the Writers in Prison Committee, and indeed that the committee continued to expose fault lines between different regions. Rules for membership of the committee were altered in 1987 at the Lugano Congress, ostensibly strengthening the power of national centres over the working of the committee though in effect narrowing the range of centres involved. In order to qualify for membership, national centres now had to commit to operating their own committee in the service of persecuted writers, and they had to commit to funding the Writers in Prison Committee at an internationally agreed rate, as well as to adopting at least two honorary members. What this meant in practice was that the Writers in Prison Committee was largely controlled by national centres in Western Europe and the USA, even as it still reported to the International Secretariat and to delegates at congress. So, while Scammell’s lengthy reports on persecuted writers were impressively international in their scope, those making decisions about the committee’s reporting and work were a shrinking group of Western European states plus the USA. This does not seem to have been a deliberate strategy, but we are, in effect, back to the problem identified by Ahmad, the Pakistani delegate, before the committee ever came into being – a problem of where values are determined and decisions are taken, and by whom. Across the trajectory of PEN’s development, which has intersected with major world historical events  – and notwithstanding its global reach – institutional structures have ensured that power has largely been retained in the economic centres of Western Europe and the USA. And these structures have helped to determine the roles available to writers within the organisation. At the same time, neither did the committee enjoy unanimous support from those same European and US centres, nor indeed was the International Executive itself always supportive. PEN President Francis King and International Secretary Alexandre Blokh were sceptical of the prominence afforded to the committee in PEN’s profile and activities and in 1987, as Scammell was stepping down as its chair and being replaced by Swedish publisher Thomas Von Vegesack, they saw an opportunity to dilute its power. According to Von Vegesack’s account in his memoir of his involvement with PEN, Dagarna med PEN (2011, 44), and reinforced by archival accounts of the Lugano Congress, Susan Sontag led resistance to King and Blokh’s efforts to downgrade the committee from her role as American PEN delegate, and the events would lead to

PEN and the Writer as Prisoner  149 further reflection on the committee’s operation at a special meeting at the Toronto Congress in 1989. One of the central items on the agenda of that 1989 meeting was the definition of a writer in prison, a pressing topic after a fractious congress debate in Lugano in 1987 about Nelson Mandela’s status as a writer. The East German PEN Centre had asked the Writers in Prison Committee to investigate the possibility of adopting Mandela as an imprisoned writer. Scammell, still chair of the committee, described his investigation as part of his report to the committee on South Africa. In his effort to determine whether or not Mandela should be adopted as an honorary member, Scammell had read The Struggle Is My Life (1978), a collection of Mandela’s articles, speeches and letters, honing in on the famous Rivonia trial speech. The Struggle Is My Life is not a conventional book, Scammell pointed out in his analysis, concluding therefore that Mandela is not a conventional writer. Whatever one may think of Mandela’s bravery, eloquence and political wisdom, Scammell suggested, it would be stretching the definition of “writer” to breaking point to include him in the work of the Writers in Prison Committee on the basis of a collection of speeches. Moreover, he argued, the admission within the book of a commitment to violence, however great the provocation and noble the aims, inevitably disqualified Mandela from the attentions of the committee (PEN International, 1987, 13–14). Scammell’s report on Mandela is a rare example of PEN reading a writer’s work as part of the operation of the Writers in Prison Committee. Equally notable, though, is the way it is read, in such a policing fashion, as grounds for excluding the author from the advocacy work of PEN. Significantly, Scammell falls back on the definition of the category of writer to justify this exclusion, though he is in effect redefining the category around Mandela even as he invokes a pre-existing definition. For Scammell, Mandela might be in prison, but he is not enough of a writer to warrant support by PEN. In McDonald’s account of South African PEN in The Literature Police (2009), it becomes clear that their definition of a writer as the author of two full length books was in fact discriminatory against black authors, to whom book publishing was not necessarily readily available but who published in pamphlets and periodicals and other forms (187). Scammell is therefore reproducing the logic of South African PEN, wittingly or otherwise, even as it seems that the national centre was more often than not at odds with the International Executive and the Writers in Prison Committee in particular. In a similar vein, his reading of Mandela’s Rivonia trial speech – focusing on its references to violence with little appreciation for Mandela’s careful deliberations on the relationship between law, violence and the legitimacy of the state – places him, again perhaps unintentionally, with the UK and US governments who viewed Mandela as a communist and a “terrorist”.

150  Michelle Kelly That this occurred as late as 1987, just five years before Mandela’s release, is rather surprising. No doubt the fractious nature of the discussion that ensued, and indeed Scammell’s conclusions, derived in part from the fact that the request to review Mandela’s inclusion had come from the East German Centre; in other words, the episode exposes once more, at this late stage, the global character of the Cold War and the fragility of PEN’s politically “neutral” stance. Tensions at the Congress were eventually eased by unanimous support for a resolution from the Cote d’Ivoire Centre calling for Mandela’s release, hence sidestepping the issues of whether or not he was a writer and his compliance with the PEN Charter. The events also stand in pointed contrast to English PEN’s Celebrating Nelson Mandela event in 2018, which marked the centenary of his birth and the publication of his prison letters. Mandela’s transformation into statesman, humanitarian and, of course, writer was by this point complete, allowing Director of English PEN, Antonia Byatt, to comment that “English PEN is delighted to be celebrating Nelson Mandela’s legacy of championing human rights” (Frecknall, 2018). That the discourses of humanitarianism and human rights present themselves as apolitical is frequently the subject of critique, but this was – and is – precisely their virtue for PEN, as they offered a kind of apolitical politics in the middle of the Cold War.

The Writer as Exemplary Prisoner If the Writers in Prison Committee is the catalyst for PEN’s evolution into a human rights organisation, it is typical of other human rights NGOs of the post-war period in which the prisoner of conscience and political dissident became the exemplary figure for humanitarian thinking and action. Slaughter (2012) points to this history in the emergence of Amnesty International, which began as a campaign for amnesty for prisoners. It was launched by founder Peter Benenson via an article in The Observer and a book which detailed the stories of several prisoners of conscience from across the globe, many of them writers. Both were titled Persecution 1961, illustrating how the foundation of Amnesty emerged on remarkably similar terms to PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee, which was established just a year earlier. Discussing this moment, Slaughter explains how “The modern amnesty campaign emerged, at least in part, as a defense of literature, or literary values, forms, and figures of free expression” (2012, xi), and how, in turn, it had an influence on literature: What we call the World Republic of Letters in the second half of the twentieth century was at least in part shaped by the human rights campaigns defending the lives and rights of individual writers, but

PEN and the Writer as Prisoner  151 the campaign methods themselves seem likely to have had an influence on the generic shape of later-twentieth-century literature, and vice versa. (xiv) Slaughter revisits the pivotal role of the political prisoner in his 2018 article “Hijacking Human Rights” to consider the relationship between human rights discourse and anti-colonial and postcolonial politics in particular. He describes political prisoners and dissidents as the main currency of human rights organisations from the 1970s on, as they, like Benenson, rely on individualised stories of dissidence and suffering, especially of intellectuals – stories that tend to individualise both the political prisoner or dissident, and the person sympathising with them. For Slaughter, this forms part of the context in which “supranational concern in the First World for the civil and political rights of individual prisoners in the Second and Third Worlds displaced collective struggles for self-determination as the quintessential human rights cause” (2018, 765). In essence, empathy overtakes action. To some extent the pattern Slaughter identifies is evident in Dowd’s PEN anthology, which brings together the work of writers who experienced imprisonment around the world, including in former colonies, and which, as I suggested in my introduction, frames PEN’s work in defence of imprisoned writers firmly within the logic of humanitarian and human rights discourse. To be clear, it is not that the book sets itself against any particular political struggle, but the effect of its framing is to draw attention to the individual experience of incarceration above any sense of collective identity or action. The book is structured to strip away biography, context and politics, all of which are relegated to the end matter, instead emphasising the universality of the experience of imprisonment in extracts that are arranged chronologically from detention to release, to reflect the “journey” of imprisonment (Dowd, 1996, 12). One of the blurbs on the back cover is a quotation from Joseph Brodsky’s Foreword, emphasising the individual nature of the writer’s struggle: “Read this book now”, the blurb instructs, “as a manual for asserting individualism under overwhelming odds”. This appears to endorse PEN’s vision of the writer as individual hero of free expression and antagonist of an oppressive state. However, Brodsky’s Foreword, written just weeks before his death in 1995, in fact offers a much more nuanced account of the imprisoned writer than the blurb suggests, and wrestles visibly with the idea that the writer is somehow exceptional and worth saving above other prisoners. In other words, Brodsky’s discussion hinges on the enormous value placed on the writer by PEN and the idea that this value is somehow crystallised in contexts of incarceration. “[A] writer is not a sacred cow”, he points out, and if prison is an extension of

152  Michelle Kelly society, “By finding himself behind bars he [the writer] just continues to share in his people’s predicament” (1996, xiii). He nonetheless does not suggest that writers should be left to languish in prison, and his efforts to rationalise why writers in particular should not be imprisoned go some way towards helping us understand the unique force of the figure of the imprisoned writer that has been harnessed so powerfully by PEN and other human rights NGOs. Brodsky draws attention to the value of a writers’ work, from the political interventions they might make on behalf of their people or fellow prisoners, to “the simple reason that he might produce yet another book” – any book – and books, he implies, have a civilising effect, creating societies of the developed world that he calls “the luxury liners” (in contrast to the “overcrowded boat sinking in the sea of injustice” from which an imprisoned writer sends out an SOS) (xiii). Ultimately, however, he finds a more generalised value in the figure of the writer as the quintessential individual, and as a result “a superb metaphor for the human condition” (xv). The work of a writer – as literature – is above all an expression of individualism, and the anthology should therefore be read as “a manual for asserting individualism under overwhelming odds, under extraordinary duress” (xiv). “What [the writer has] got to say about imprisonment”, he continues where the blurb cuts short, “should therefore be of great interest to those who fancy themselves free” (xv). So, while Brodsky shows some scepticism about the particular privilege granted to the writer, and no qualms about the idea that a writer’s work might be expressly political, the writer’s power is, in the end, a metaphorical one, standing for an idea of freedom conceived as individual. Like the tensions in Brodsky’s Foreword, the extracts themselves do not always align with the version of the writer projected by the anthology. This is best captured in the extract from Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s Detained (1981), in which he expresses ideas about writing and writers that seem to be diametrically opposed to the values of PEN: A writer needs people around him. He needs live struggles of active life. Contrary to popular mythology, a novel is not a product of the imaginative feats of a single individual but the work of many hands and tongues. A writer just takes down notes dictated to him by life among the people, which he then arranges in this or that form. (1996, 69) Ngũgĩ’s description of the creative life converges with Brodsky’s sense of the writer as someone who shares and amplifies his “people’s predicament” (Brodsky, 1996, xiii), but it explicitly rejects the idea of the writer as an exemplary individual. Similarly, in her reading of the prison memoirs of Ngũgĩ and others as “resistance literature”, Barbara Harlow argues that prison memoirs are “actively engaging in a re-definition of

PEN and the Writer as Prisoner  153 the self and the individual in terms of a collective enterprise and struggle” (1987, 120). If the plight of the imprisoned writer exemplifies the freedom and individualism of writers in general for PEN, it does quite the opposite for Harlow, for whom prison memoirs offer a critique “of the very institution of literature as an autonomous arena of activity” (1992, 4). Contrary to the principles of political neutrality that enable PEN to champion the cause of writers across the world, Harlow understands such a version of literature as part of the problem PEN strives to address: Literature, that is, when abstracted from the historical and institutional conditions that inform its production – and its distribution – can serve in the end to underwrite the same repressive bureaucratic structures designed to maintain national borders and to police dissent within those borders. The literature of prison, composed in prison and from out of the prison experience, is by contrast necessarily partisan, polemical, written as it is against those very structures of a dominant arbitration and a literary historical tradition that have served to legislate the political neutrality of the litterateur and the literary critic alike. (1992, 4) Harlow is often discussing writers who were supported and adopted by PEN, but reading them very much against the grain of PEN’s logic. Indeed, in reading their work at all she proceeds on a different path to PEN, whose attention solely to the question of whether or not someone is a writer creates a focal point for its campaigns that is simultaneously more abstract and more embodied. That This Prison Where I Live is presented in its subheading as an anthology of “imprisoned writers” rather than prison writing is telling in this regard. Dowd’s anthology is fascinating for its efforts to frame the accounts of imprisonment that it collects within PEN’s understanding of literature as somehow removed from politics, and it is entirely in keeping with its commitment to free expression that those extracts do not always align with this vision. Another, slightly later PEN anthology of prison writing, Doing Time (1999) edited by Bell Gale Chevigny, offers a snapshot of the immense variety in PEN’s advocacy work across different national centres, and in particular the evolving understanding of the relationship between writing and imprisonment. Doing Time collects prize-winning work from the PEN Prize awarded by American PEN since the 1970s for work published by a writer in prison in the USA. Dowd’s anthology, as I have shown, detaches history and politics from the extracts of prison memoirs by relegating biography to the end matter. But her introduction also opens by sidestepping the politics of incarceration itself: “This anthology […] is not about the locking up of criminals, whatever one thinks of this practice”, but about “the

154  Michelle Kelly misuse of prison” (Dowd, 1996, 1). In contrast, Chevigny’s introduction offers rigorous attention to the political and racial context of incarceration, and also to the conditions in which prison education and writing programmes take place and allow prisoners to become writers in the course of their incarceration. Chevigny is at pains to emphasise continuities between the prison and the outside world, and in linking prisoner rights to the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s she enables a broader understanding of the category of the political prisoner than human rights NGOs typically allow. In contrasting the “ordinary domestic sinners” of prison writing in her anthology with what she calls the “first amendment saints abroad” who are generally championed by PEN, Chevigny’s anthology and introduction seem to stand in implied opposition to the emphasis of PEN’s international advocacy work and the structures that delineate a distinction between “home” and “abroad” (xix). In fact, she charts the way in which American PEN bridged this gap through increasing advocacy for access to library facilities and writing programmes for US prisoners from the 1970s on, including through sponsorship of the PEN Prize (1999, xix). While her introduction confronts directly the political context of incarceration, the biographical notes penned by the anthology’s contributors – also relegated to the end matter – do not uniformly embrace writing as an explicitly political act, as Harlow’s emphasis on the “polemic” might lead us to expect. Rather they emphasise, time and again, the transformative experience of writing. PEN, of course, does not selectively defend heroes of free expression; rather, its advocacy work, informed by the scrupulous observation of a definition of literature as a sphere distinct from politics, transforms imprisoned writers into Chevigny’s “first amendment saints”. In the example of Mandela we have seen that this category is harder to sustain when the writing itself comes under scrutiny: perhaps no writer’s work can live up to the standards of political neutrality propounded by PEN, and certainly not the kind of writers they defend. It may be therefore that as PEN approaches its centenary in 2021, we might understand its enduring adherence to an idea of literature as distinct from “political passion”, not so much as a definition of literature – though this essay is an effort to chart PEN’s role in constructing or perpetuating such a definition of literature – as what J.M. Coetzee in another context calls a “foundational fiction” (1996, 14), a construct essential to an organisation that of necessity must operate to defend the interests of writers from oppressors of various ideological hues.

Note 1 Research in the PEN Archives at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin was supported by a British Academy Small Grant.

PEN and the Writer as Prisoner  155

Works Cited Benenson, P. 1961. Persecution 1961. London: Penguin Books. Brodsky, J. 1996. “Foreword”. In This Prison Where I Live: The PEN Anthology of Imprisoned Writers, edited by S. Dowd, xi–xv. London: Cassell. Chevigny, B.G., ed. 1999. Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing. A PEN American Centre Prize Anthology. New York: Arcade Publishing. Coetzee, J.M. 1996. Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Doherty, M. 2011. PEN International and its Republic of Letters 1921–1970. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis. New York: Columbia University. Dowd, S., ed. 1996. This Prison Where I Live: the PEN Anthology of Imprisoned Writers. London: Cassell. Frecknall, A. 2018. “Celebrating Nelson Mandela: His Letters, His Legacy”. Online. Accessed 10 May 2020. https://www.englishpen.org/press/ celebrating-nelson-mandela/. Harlow, B. 1987. Resistance Literature. New York and London: Methuen. Harlow, B. 1992. Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention. Hanover, NH and London: Wesleyan University Press. McDonald, P.D. 2009. The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Millin, S. 1960. “Letter from Sarah Gertrude Millin to David Carver”. ­Undated July 1960. Rio Congress, Box 163, PEN Archive, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. Moyn, S. 2010. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. 1996. “Writing on Toilet Paper”. In This Prison Where I Live: The PEN Anthology of Imprisoned Writers, edited by S. Dowd, 68–71. London: Cassell. PEN International. 1960a. “Minutes of English PEN Executive”. 17 March 1960, 2 June 1960, 6 October 1960, 9 November 1960. English PEN Executive Committee Minutes, Vol. 8. PEN Digital Collection. Austin: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas. MSS_PEN_237_3_059. PEN International. 1960b. “Minutes of International Executive Committee of International PEN”. 4 April 1960. Rio Congress, Box 163. PEN Archive. Austin: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas. PEN International. 1987. “Report of the Writers in Prison Committee”. 10–17 May 1987, Lugano Congress, Box 221. PEN Archive. Austin: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas. PEN International. 2020. “Our History”. Online. Accessed 10 May 2020. https://pen-international.org/who-we-are/history. Potter, R. 2013. “Modernist Rights: International PEN 1921–1936”. Critical Quarterly 55.2: 66–80. Slaughter, J.R. 2012. “Foreword: Rights on Paper”. In Theoretical Perspectives on Literature and Human Rights, edited by A. Schultheis Moore and E. Swanson Goldberg, xi–xiv. New York: Routledge. Slaughter, J.R. 2018. “Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New World Historiography, and the End of the Third World”. Human Rights Quarterly 40.4: 735–775. Von Vegesack, T. 2011. Dagarna med PEN: En pennfäktares minnen 1971– 2001. Svenska PEN.

9

Scribo Ergo Sum Creating and Publishing Guantánamo Diary Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Larry Siems

Mohamedou Every detainee I knew was dying to tell his story and break the wall of silence the government had built around him. He wanted to fight the official narrative that described a fictional character that he believed did not represent him. A person is a story that is best told by the person himself or herself. A person’s story is ugliest when it is told by one’s enemy. In the six and a half months that I spent in the Jordanian time capsule that is Mukhabarat prison, after I had been disappeared from Mauritania and before I was delivered to Guantánamo Bay (or GTMO), I would pore through the library books I was given page by page, not to read the books themselves, but to read what other detainees had written in secret places to avoid the watchful eyes of our captors. These texts had to be written in places visible only to detainees, because when the guards and prison librarians went through the books they would tear out any offending pages. American censors have a special liking for thick marker, but this was the preferred method of censorship in Jordan. The worst places for detainees to leave their notes were the top of the page and the outside margins; the best place was the inner margin, next to the binding, the deeper inside the better. These detainee stories could be summed up like this: My name is so-and-so and I come from so-and-so. I was captured on so-and-so I swear to Allah I am innocent and I am being wronged. I pray to Allah to avenge the wrongdoing. I loved reading these stories because I saw my essential self in every story I read. And the detainees were so inventive: often they would scatter their story across many random pages, increasing the suspense and making me long even more for the next episode. The guards would sometimes succeed in removing one or two of the episodes, but never all of them. I always knew when episodes were taken out because the pages were

Creating and Publishing Guantánamo Diary  157 torn away, and though I would always be disappointed to be left hanging in this way, these missing episodes would also give me the chance to shape and bend the story any way I pleased. Library books weren’t the only vessel for detainees’ stories in Jordan: the walls of the cells were a library in themselves. The detainees would choose secret places that only other detainees could see, a kind of code in itself, hidden corners that the detainees discovered and that the guards did not have time to check. I remember one story about a Saudi young man who recorded that he had arrived in the prison sometime before January 2001. He wrote his story in pencil and signed it with his name and date. When I read it I couldn’t help imagining a skinny and frightened young man writing these words, and wondering if that same young man was one of those whose cries and moans kept me awake at night, terrified and terrorised, for months. The noise was so bad I would crush my ears against the pillow like earmuffs, but that only made the cries clearer and more intense, the pillow acting as a filter, a medium, so to speak, for channelling the pain directly into my head. The guards, too, had stories, stories that they were more than happy to share with me. Sometimes in these stories they were the “good guys”, and they wanted me to know this, and sometimes it seemed to be because they were trying to unload traumatic things that they had seen, things they were forbidden, because of the censorship they were subject to, from sharing with anyone outside the prison. This happened after an attempt on the life of a high-level Jordanian security official. One of the guards told me about the assassination attempt, and how lucky his boss was to have escaped unharmed. He described how, when the authorities could not find and apprehend the perpetrator, they captured his brother instead, torturing him until he revealed the whereabouts of his brother. When the perpetrator was brought in at last, the innocent brother received medical treatment for the torture and remained in prison until he healed, sentenced by the injuries the lawmen had inflicted. His interrogators even apologised to him, calling the torture a necessary evil that they both had been forced to go through. I couldn’t stop the guard from telling me these terrible things because he was the boss; I was just happy that he spared me from sharing what really happened to the man who had actually attempted to kill the intelligence chief, though it may be that this guard did not have the clearance to witness and participate in the torture of a prisoner of that calibre. I generally loved to hear the guards’ stories as much as they wanted to hear mine, but I hated their torture stories, because I knew every one of them could potentially be about me. And the guards’ stories could get wild, indeed. A very new, young guard told that he witnessed the execution of a suspected “terrorist”. The young man was beheaded in cold blood. It was so traumatic to hear it that I forgot for a moment that I was a detainee and asked him how he could participate in killing someone

158  Slahi & Siems without a trial. He calmly replied that the interrogators had confirmed he was a killer and a judge had already sentenced him. In Jordan, I still thought of myself as a reader and a listener, and a storyteller only for whoever may have been in the room; I wasn’t thinking of myself as a writer. This is partly, I think, because of choices I had to make as a teenager growing up in the underprivileged Kebba neighbourhood of Bouhdida, outside of Nouakchott, in Mauritania. When I finished junior high school, I found myself at a crossroads. I had attended both a traditional nomadic school (mahdara), where I had studied Arabic literature, and a French school, where I studied mathematics, and now both the mathematics and Arabic literature teachers wanted me on their teams. Unfortunately, the French school system required that I pick one or the other. With a somewhat heavy heart, I picked mathematics, because it was easier and more precise. When I took a test, I knew exactly what to expect: cultural background or nationality didn’t matter; the answers were always the same. By contrast, although my Arabic teacher was often impressed with my essays, there was no guarantee my next teacher would be so impressed. And whereas many of my classmates wrote well, far fewer of them were drawn to maths and science, or found these things easy; I felt a bit special when I found myself in small classes among the “smart” students. But most importantly, growing up poor in a large family, I wasn’t going to waste the chance to make something of myself. No one was going to do it for me, and maths and science seemed to offer the most direct route to success. But as a child I had loved to read books, and I loved writing. When my father died, my oldest brother Hamoud took over the role of father figure; he and my other older brothers provided for us and reared us with love. Hamoud never laid his hands on any of us, which was unusual in the time and place in which I grew up. He was very firm, however, that we weren’t allowed to have a TV in the house. The only time I ever watched TV was when I would sneak off to one of my friends’ houses. The boredom that the absence of TV created forced me to find other ways to entertain myself. I filled this time in two ways: playing football, and reading whatever books and magazines I could get my hands on. When my mother’s uncle died, he left behind many books that I “inherited” with the help of my older sisters, who also loved books. In fact, the books were supposed to be given back to his brother, but my sisters and I kept some of the books, especially classic works like the early fifteenth-century story collection al-Mustatraf by Al Abshihi. Even as a child, I knew I was doing something wrong, but my love for my granduncle and namesake got the better of me. He was a handsome man who had dedicated his life to books and teaching the Quran and the basics of our literary tradition. He never married a woman: he married books. But as he fell sicker and sicker, the familiar, beautiful face I knew faded, and though my mother and the rest of the family tried everything they

Creating and Publishing Guantánamo Diary  159 could to help him, there was nothing we could do. It was the first time that I witnessed death, and it was awful to see. As the eighth-century Arab poet Abu Sakhr al-Huthali wrote, “The strength I feign is to show my enemies that I don’t bow to the betrayal of time / But when death plants its claws / No charm or medicine will be of use”.1 Even when I was most alone, I had this literary tradition with me in prison. One of the poems I had memorised as a child provided particular comfort, the contemporary Iraqi poet Ahmed Matar’s “Prison Guard”, a poem by a pessimist poet about a prisoner who somehow maintains a positive point of view: I stood in my cell Wondering about my situation Am I the prisoner, or is that guard standing nearby? Between me and him stood a wall In the wall, there was a hole Through which I see light, and he sees darkness Just like me he has a wife, kids, a house Just like me he came here on orders from above The wall between us is about to crumble The wall told me: the one you’re lamenting has come Of his own volition, but you’ve come against your will! And just before the wall came down, it told me The story of the donkey guarding the lion. 2

Larry I grew up a universe away from Mohamedou, near Minneapolis, Minnesota, but in one funny way our stories are similar: I, too, went to college to study math and science, science, and had a dream of being a dream of being an astrophysicist. This dream did not last long, though: within a year I could see I was approaching a wall in my aptitude for math. But as this knowledge was dawning, I was also discovering the world of literature. My fascination with the formal structures of the cosmos found a more comfortable analogue in the formal structures of poetry. I ended up majoring in Literature and Classical Greek, got a Master of Fine Arts in poetry, and spent half a dozen years writing poems, chasing fellowships, and teaching writing and literature to make ends meet. But something was missing. As a writer, I was drawn more and more to human rights reporting and journalism. As a reader I became interested in primary-source literature created by those who are generally the objects of human rights reporting and journalism. I tried to balance these. I worked for Human Rights Watch, investigating abuses by the Border Patrol along the US Mexico border; wrote magazine features about immigration and cross-cultural issues; and compiled the correspondence

160  Slahi & Siems of undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants to their families and friends, the first-hand literature of an experience that then, as now, was at the centre of wrenching political debates. In 1995, the then-director of the Freedom to Write Program of the PEN centre in Los Angeles called me to tell me he was retiring, and he suggested I might want to take his place. I had been trying to balance writing and human rights activism for some time, he pointed out, and this position – a position that included coordinating campaigns by American writers on behalf of what were at that time some 600 writers imprisoned around the world – offered a chance to do just that. I landed at PEN at a moment when PEN’s activism was facing one of its greatest tests in advocating for writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who would be executed with eight fellow activists about six months later. A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary (1995), Saro-Wiwa’s memoir of a previous stint in the prison cells of the military regime, was published in the UK as his execution neared, and in the USA a few months after. Two years later, The Courage to Stand Alone (1996), a collection of prison letters and other writings by Wei Jingsheng, another major focus of PEN activism for almost two decades, was released. They joined Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1994), Václav Havel’s Letters to Olga (1990), and Nawal El Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (1986) on the shelves of PEN offices around the world. Over the next sixteen years, like many PEN colleagues in other countries, I saw a steady stream of poems and stories that were smuggled out of prisons, letters to and from friends and family members, and a handful of drafts of prison memoirs. Even the most fortified walls proved porous. Some, like Saro-Wiwa, were professional writers before they were prisoners; many more found their public voices in the solitude of their cells. The texts were almost always traumatic and often traumatising; the most moving managed to be both immediate and transcendent. We did what we could to bring these manuscripts to print. By the mid-2000s, though, there was an obvious – and for an American, especially troubling – hole in this literature. Not a word had leaked from a secret gulag of CIA black sites, and until 2005 the US government had not even disclosed the names of the 775 men the USA had spirited away to the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It was finally forced to do so by Freedom of Information Act litigation, and over the next five years those lawsuits would produce more than 140,000 pages of official documents describing the abuse of prisoners in US custody in Guantánamo, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2007, the University of Iowa published Poems from Guantánamo, a slim collection of poems the lawyers for several prisoners had managed to guide through the government’s declassification process. But by and large, the fortress of censorship held: the voices of the men the USA was holding were effectively suppressed.

Creating and Publishing Guantánamo Diary  161 With one exception: in 2005, as a result of the same Freedom of Information lawsuit that produced the first official list of prisoners, the Pentagon released transcripts of the prisoners’ classified 2004 and 2005 review board hearings. This is where I first heard Mohamedou’s voice. In his 2004 hearing he was terse and reserved, and refused an invitation to discuss whether he had been mistreated. A year later, he testified about his torture in some detail, though much of what he said was lost: according to the transcript, as he began to recount the abuse, “the recording equipment began to malfunction”. The transcript instead provides a heavily redacted “recap” of Mohamedou’s account of the physical abuse and sexual harassment that he suffered at the hands of Guantanamo interrogators. I first read this review board transcript in 2009, and even with the convenient erasure, the 2005 transcript was arresting, with flashes of the wit and humour that suffuse Guantánamo Diary (2015; 2017). It was here that I first learned Guantánamo Diary existed. After venturing to describe these torments, in a wry aside, Mohamedou’s Administrative Review Board Hearing records him as stating: I just want to mention here that I wrote a book while in jail here recently about my whole story, okay? I sent it for release to the District [of] Columbia, and when it is released I advise you guys to read it. A little advertisement, it is a very interesting book, I think. (Slahi, cited in Siems, 2015, xv)

Mohamedou Guantánamo was not exactly my awakening as a writer, and the manuscript that became Guantánamo Diary was not my first attempt to tell this story. As I have written previously, as a child I developed a minor compulsion for writing. I would write on any surface, in notebooks and the margins of schoolbooks, sometimes inscribing my thoughts with my finger on my thigh or moving it through the air. This impulse so irritated my interrogators at Guantanamo that they shackled my hands, and even still my fingers kept working. As soon as I got a pen, I started to write my story in Arabic, in letters to my family and diary entries that were hidden in the pages of library books, I wrote down English phrases that I heard from fellow detainees, and Arabic poems that I remembered. But while in my mind I was addressing imagined readers outside of Guantanamo, I soon learned that anything I wrote would only reach my interrogators: as my interrogation got worse, everything I had written was discovered and taken from me. It would be many months after the worse torture ended before I tried again. As I wrote in the “Introduction” to the restored edition of Guantánamo Diary, “Even with my chains off, my hands remained shackled at my side”.

162  Slahi & Siems In fact, confiscating my writing did not kill the story that was seared in my memory; it just allowed it to brew some more. The more a story brews, the purer it becomes. The more a personal story is stifled, the more honest it becomes – unless it is choked to death. Make no mistake, many stories were choked to death in those years and can only be heard in the form of post-mortems, like the story of Gul Rahman, who was tortured to death in CIA secret prison. His story haunts me: I feel guilty because I had the chance to live to tell my story, and he did not. I cannot stop imagining how he died, surrounded by people who were blind to the atrocious pain and suffering they were visiting upon him. What kept my story from being choked to death was the 2004 decision of the US Supreme Court that Guantánamo prisoners had a right to file habeas corpus petitions in American courts – a decision that meant we would be able to meet and share our stories with American attorneys. When I learned in early 2005 that two attorneys, Nancy Hollander and Sylvia Royce, were coming to visit me, I sat down and prepared a summary of the facts of my case: about 160 pages of brief descriptions and notes that I wrote down in a rush. I handed these to Nancy at our first meeting. She read through the pages and asked me to write more. Over the course of the next four or five months, I committed the entire story of my kidnapping and torture to paper. We worked out a system to make sure these writings survived. In Guantánamo, all communications between detainees and their lawyers are classified. The notes and records of all conversations and meetings are protected by attorney-client privilege, but the attorneys are not allowed to keep them; instead, these materials remained classified and are stored in a facility near Washington, DC where the attorneys could see and read them. In order to avoid suspicion, I divided my writing into sections that looked like long letters to my attorney, keeping the writing small and keeping track of the page numbers, starting each new instalment with the next page in the sequence, so the manuscript could be assembled into a book that I dreamed would somehow escape the prison where all of these “privileged” materials lived. Of course I was not smarter than the American censors. The government soon figured out what was happening, and refused to declassify these “letters” the way they declassified poems and letters other detainees wrote. My writings were too detailed for the government’s taste, it seemed. Moreover, this correspondence with my lawyers was not as privileged as the government had promised: if there was to be any chance that this material could ever see the light of day, we had to agree to waive this privilege completely, which meant the government could read the manuscript and use the portions it wanted to use against me in my habeas corpus proceedings. I can only imagine how envious the authoritarian regimes in my part of the world must be of this whole situation. The balance of power entirely favoured the government’s lawyers against the

Creating and Publishing Guantánamo Diary  163 brave men and women who volunteered to represent us, believing in the rule of law and the right of an accused human being to be heard and defended against the violence of the state. I signed and dated the last instalment of the manuscript on 28 September 2005. My habeas corpus petition was heard in the fall of 2009, and on 22 March 2010 Judge James Robertson ordered my release – a release that would not come for another six and a half years. But even though we had waived privilege in the hope that the manuscript would be released, it, too, remained under lock and key for two more years. After the habeas corpus hearing, the government officially declassified the pages, but now called them “protected”, another class of secrecy that meant it still could not be publicly released. My lawyers had to threaten to go back to court again. Only then did the government agree not just to declassify but to “unprotect” the manuscript. Of course “unprotecting” the manuscript meant putting that fat, black marker to work to hide many of its most embarrassing details.

Larry In May 2012, one of Mohamedou’s lawyers handed me a CD-ROM labelled, in sharpie, “Slahi Manuscript – Unclassified Version”. I took it home, printed out what I soon realised was a 466-page manuscript that had been handwritten, in English, Mohamedou’s fourth language. The manuscript was defaced with redactions, to a point that suggested accessing the full story it told would be a challenge. I sat down on my couch, thinking I would flip through the first dozen or so pages to get a feel for what was in store. I read the whole thing straight through, with an accelerating sense of wonder, at the feat of memory and endurance and emotional resilience it represented; at the persistent, keen wit; and at the vivid and often generous depictions of Mohamedou’s guards and interrogators, whose experiences, too, were locked inside the cone of silence surrounding Guantánamo. I was rivetted. Seven years had passed since Mohamedou had written the manuscript, and I understood from his attorneys that he had largely given up hope that it would appear as a book. In any case there wasn’t time, in my view: it is often at least a two-year process to bring a book to print, and it was already two years since Mohamedou had won his habeas corpus. Every day he remained in Guantánamo was just compounding the injustices the manuscript described. At the same time, Mohamedou’s words  – their candor and immediacy, and the force of his narration of an experience the full weight of the US government was working to suppress – had the potential to catalyse a campaign to bring those injustices to an end. The sooner they appeared in print, the sooner they could begin to reshape the official narrative. So I concentrated on preparing excerpts from the manuscript to publish in a major newspaper or

164  Slahi & Siems magazine. It was a process I was comfortable with, something we did often at PEN when dissident writings made their way out of prison, and the material was extraordinary. I thought this would be easy. It was not. The New York Times was interested, but asked that I turn over a copy of the entire manuscript. They held onto it for months before declining to publish any part of it. Others passed outright. Ten years had passed since Guantánamo opened, eight years since the Senate Armed Services Committee published its report on prisoner abuse in GTMO, Iraq and Afghanistan that included pages describing Mohamedou’s torture, but editors were still spooked by innuendo and rumours about the men who were imprisoned there. The Obama administration was appealing the habeas corpus decision, some editors noted, suggesting there was more to Mohamedou’s story than he was saying. When his name came up in the press, he was still identified as an alleged 9/11 recruiter. The world owes a debt to Slate, the online magazine, for the courage to publish a five-part series of excerpts, and then to Geoff Shandler and Little Brown for stepping out from an interested but very apprehensive pack and committing to publishing this as a book. But now I faced an ethical dilemma. As a writers’ advocate, I believed that writers should have complete say over when and how their words appear in print; there can be no publication without the writer’s approval. I had Mohamedou’s permission in a general sense to edit the manuscript into a book, but I was absolutely prohibited from communicating with Mohamedou in any way about his vision and writerly decisions. A formal request to visit him with my proposed edit of the manuscript was denied, the US government citing a blanket prohibition on contact with the press (to this day, no journalist has been allowed to meet or converse with a prisoner in Guantánamo). This process would have to happen, from beginning to end, without Mohamedou’s participation – itself a perpetuation of his incommunicado incarceration. My first reaction was to push back as hard as I could against the censorship. I could not know what was beneath the longer redactions, which clearly described scenes and conversations, but I wanted to challenge as much as possible the erasure of the identities of Mohamedou’s guards and captors. My goal was not to expose their names, but to help the reader see, as Mohamedou had clearly wanted us to see, that these, too, were individuals; that, for example, Interrogator C, who participates in one part of his abuse, is the same interrogator who expresses remorse later. So my first draft made many of the black boxes grey, and identified as well as I could the guards and interrogators by letters, in this way. This was dangerous, however: although I clearly framed these decisions as my speculations, any attempt to see through the redactions left Mohamedou’s attorneys vulnerable to accusations they had shared classified information. And through time, I realised this was the wrong approach in any case: the redactions were themselves a character in the

Creating and Publishing Guantánamo Diary  165 story, a character that continued to control Mohamedou’s life and fate, and it was a mistake to try to mitigate that character’s impact and presence. Instead, Geoff and I settled on using footnotes as a way to counter the official censorship, which opened up a space to bring the official record – a record the US government had suppressed outright for years and continued to do its best to erase, and a record which provided devastating corroboration of the crimes Mohamedou described – onto the same page as the text. As for the text: I spent about six months working through the first rough edit, and another twelve months essentially undoing all my mistakes. The final manuscript, both line to line and its larger progressions, is much closer to the original manuscript than that first edit. This was a question of trust, and of coming to understand my own prejudices. I do not mean I distrusted Mohamedou or his story: I knew from the outset, both from the documentary record and from my experiences with PEN, which taught that the brutality and abuses of power Mohamedou describe are commonplace and not aberrant and exceptional, that his account was truthful, and true. But I did not altogether trust him as a writer. Professionally he had been an engineer, not a writer, and here he was composing a manuscript in his fourth language. He was bound, I thought, to get things wrong. And yet time and time again I learned that what he had written was truer than I could have imagined, and more subtly and powerfully structured than I had recognised. There was a time, about nine months or so into the editing process, that I suddenly had a string of hideously violent dreams. They were vivid and gruesome, and, more often than not, I was the agent of the violence. After three or four nights, honestly worried now about my mental health, I told my partner, who is a social worker, about the dreams. She looked at me, looked over at the desk where I sat every day working my way through the editing process, and looked at me again. “Really? You don’t know what’s happening?” she asked. The answer was clear: Mohamedou, the writer, had broken through. By then, I had begun to gather enough impressions of Mohamedou the man to know the kind of impact he had on others. I’d been to Düsseldorf and met Mohamedou’s youngest brother, Yahdih. From Yahdih I’d received dozens of family photos, precious glimmers of a life outside the confines of the Guantánamo narrative. I had also had a remarkable window open into Mohamedou’s life inside, not as a victim but as an agent of change. I had been to Portland, Oregon, to meet Steve Wood, whose National Guard unit had been assigned to GTMO in late 2004. We met, at Steve’s suggestion, in the café of Powell’s Books in downtown Portland. Steve told me he was not much of a reader growing up, but Powell’s was the place he had spent most of his free time since returning from Guantánamo. This was on account of Mohamedou, he explained, and one exchange he recounted in particular. One day, during their daily

166  Slahi & Siems bantering, Mohamedou had mentioned Nelson Mandela. Who? Steve recalled asking, cheerfully recreating the playful ridicule he endured from Mohamedou for not knowing. He had come to Powell’s immediately after his tour was completed to buy Madela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1994), and had been returning and buying books and reading ever since.

Mohamedou I learned my book had been published by sheer accident. On 20 January 2015, I was having my weekly Spanish class with a wary and untrusting Egyptian American Joint Task Force (JTF) contractor who called himself Ahmed – a random pseudonym, I knew, because contractors, just like the guards and interrogators, weren’t allowed to share their names with detainees. Ahmed’s Spanish, as he acknowledged to me, was extremely basic, but I welcomed any opportunity GTMO offered to learn languages, in casual conversations or classes. For many years JTF had denied me access to the classes they were offering to the other detainees; it was only about a year before my release that I was allowed to see and talk to any of these teachers. Since I was Ahmed’s only student, our class took place in my cell. I had a TV, and that morning I turned it on to make a little background noise and give some life to our awkward class. As soon as I did, we both froze: RT, the Russian channel I had tuned into, was running a long piece on my book, including a live interview with Nancy Hollander and Larry in RT’s London studio. At one point, my picture filled the screen. “You know this guy?” said Ahmed, joking. For the first time, I felt what it’s like to be free inside a prison, that moment of total freedom that comes when you take back some of your lost dignity. I thought of Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and the smile on his face when he offers his fellow prisoners drinks, the drinks he earned for doing his guards’ tax returns. Now my family and the whole world would know my side of the story. That was liberation. Rene Descartes’ cogito ergo sum became scribo ergo sum. About fourteen months after Guantánamo Diary was published, I finally learned that I was scheduled for a hearing before the Periodic Review Board (PRB), a very opaque process that was subjected to rules that neither I nor my lawyers understood. For instance, my lawyers couldn’t push for this hearing; only the military could decide when one would take place. No one wanted to touch my file, it seemed. Finally, in the summer of 2016, almost fourteen years after I was brought to GTMO and six months before President Obama’s second term would end, I would have my chance to be heard and petition the “king”, in the person of the US government, and beg for forgiveness and my release.

Creating and Publishing Guantánamo Diary  167 As with earlier versions of Guantánamo’s review boards, I was assigned personal representatives (PRs). This time, though, the PRs really seemed to have the interests of the men they represented at heart. I could not have wished for a more honest and open person than Navy Commander Jackson, who acted as my lead Personal Representative. Jackson was an African American officer who seemed comfortable in his body and his life. I knew well that part of his job included reporting if he did not believe I was ready to go home, but I genuinely believed he wanted me to be released. Commander Jackson told me that the greatest problem he faced with other detainees he had represented at the PRBs was that they wanted so badly to share their stories with the board members, when the board members were not interested in hearing their stories, nor their grievances, nor their sense of feeling wronged for so long. As they were preparing for their hearings, these detainees would write and write: “I’m so and so, and I went to so and so, I did this and this, and I’m a good man”. I understand this very well. It is the burning desire of an innocent man: I want to register an injustice, I want the world to know I did nothing wrong, I am not a bad person. I understood Commander Jackson’s explanation and concern. Telling your story to the very person who’s been stifling it for so long, the person who has woven another narrative about you that justifies that stifling, is a sure way to alienate him. All your captor wants to hear is that he was right all along, and that you were wrong. He wants to hear how broken-spirited you are. But imagine the anguish for one of these detainees: he can be released if he chooses to forego telling the truth, as he sees it, of his life story and simply go with the flow by declaring his remorse, or he can tell his truth and risk continued, indefinite detention. He can tell his truth, knowing he is telling it to a hostile audience that is neither ready nor willing to hear his story. He is telling it to a body that will see the detainee’s insistence on contradicting the official narrative as a clear sign that the detainee isn’t just an individual who shows no contrition, but also an individual who wants to have a voice. Knowing Guantánamo Diary was out there in the world saved me from this. Commander Jackson laughed when I adamantly told him he did not need to worry about me. I felt no need to tell the review board my story. Instead, I was going into the PRB with the mindset of Mr Red in The Shawshank Redemption. When the parole board member asks Mr Red if he feels he has been rehabilitated, Mr Red answers, “Absolutely, Sir. I mean, I learned my lesson. I can honestly say that I’m a changed man. I’m no longer a danger to society. That’s the God’s honest truth”. My Periodic Review Board hearing was on 2 June 2016. Just over four months later, and just three weeks before the presidential election, I was finally released.

168  Slahi & Siems

Larry On 17 October 2016, I was driving with a Norwegian journalist friend from Chicago to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to cover a Trump rally that evening. I had learned that morning that Mohamedou had been released and an American military transport plane had delivered him to Mauritania; now, as we rolled through a state that in a month would deliver its electoral votes to the candidate who was promising to “bring back waterboarding, and worse”, my phone was ringing and Mohamedou and I were video chatting, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world. Three weeks later I was in Nouakchott and Mohamedou was telling me he thought he owed it to his readers to publish an uncensored edition of Guantánamo Diary. The original manuscript remained locked away and Mohamedou’s attorneys were still barred from discussing what they knew of the manuscript’s censored passages or of his other writings. But nothing prevented Mohamedou from talking about any of this – or from trying to reconstruct what the censors had worked so hard to obliterate. How many years had his ordeal been prolonged just to delay this? It was Mohamedou who first understood that this process was not a replication or recreation of the original, but a restoration in the sense of restoring a damaged painting or building. In Mohamedou’s “Introduction” and my “Notes on the Text and Annotations of the New Edition”, we described this process, which unfolded in phases, with Mohamedou first filling in the short redactions that hid names and pronouns, then sketching in versions of shorter descriptive passages, and finally rewriting two scenes that had been censored in their entirety. We faced occasional challenges of memory, but as we worked through these larger scenes we more often encountered the opposite problem: the issue was not that details had disappeared, but that the scenes remained far richer and more detailed in Mohamedou’s memory than even the original rendering had captured; what he could not remember was which details he had depicted in which order in the original. This was, as Mohamedou says, an unusual consequence of the manuscript’s seizure and long delayed publication: he was effectively barred from retelling these experiences for ten years; this meant that the scenes had not been eroded through retelling the original description. The work of restoration meant that the most significant change from the version as originally published was in the footnotes. The footnotes had served two purpose: first, to refer readers to the extensive documentary record that paralleled and corroborated Mohamedou’s text, and, second, to offer my occasional speculations on what was being concealed or redacted. These latter notes, of course, were no longer needed, and so we eliminated them, but elected to leave the references to the documentary record – a record, it should be noted, that remains heavily redacted and incomplete.

Creating and Publishing Guantánamo Diary  169

Mohamedou I was very upset when I learned the US government took my intellectual property and systematically and deliberately distorted and sabotaged my message. It was the equivalent of allowing you to testify in a court of law, but then hiring a team of professional hecklers who keep raising their voices to bury your statements and prevent the court from hearing your testimony, and so depriving you of a meaningful chance to present a version of events that counters the official narrative. Anyone who grew up in a democracy should shudder at this scenario, but it is exactly what has been happening in the US secret prisons and Guantánamo Bay, and somehow that is not seen as contemptuous to the US Constitution or the rule of law. Restoring Guantánamo Diary was a personal thing. I took it upon myself to make sure the world hears what the government did not want the world to hear. It was a painstaking process. Since even after my release the US government refused to hand over my manuscript and other writings, I had to rely on my memory to depict events that happened well over a decade in the past. That was very hard: scientists tell us we only remember our last recollection of events, and not the events themselves. Some things like dates and times were seared in my memory and very hard to forget. But the larger redactions were much more challenging. Larry and I worked for many months to produce the restored edition, and I can only say that it was rewarding. The fact that I was getting back at the government gave me a good feeling, although I must admit I felt a little guilty about feeling good. As for the restored text, I cannot claim that I always accurately reproduced what the censors tried to obliterate, but I did my best – and honestly, I cannot say for sure that I did not in fact reproduce everything the way it was in the original. The only way to know is for the US government to follow the law and give me back what they confiscated illegally.

Notes 1 Here the quote is provided from memory by the author, who has also translated the quote into English. 2 Again, the quote is provided from memory by the author, who has also translated the quote into English.

Works Cited Siems, L. 2015. “Introduction”. In Guantánamo Diary, edited by L. Siems, xv–xlix. New York: Little Brown and Company. Slahi, M.O. 2015. Guantánamo Diary, edited by L. Siems. New York: Little Brown and Company. Slahi, M.O. 2017. Guantánamo Diary, restored edition, edited by L. Siems. New York: Back Bay Books.

From Life to Fiction

10 Writing Against the Regime Metafiction in the Arabic Prison Novel R. Shareah Taleghani

In 1969, just before the launch of Hafiz al-Asad’s “Corrective Revolution”, Syrian Ba‘thist Sami al-Jundi published My Friend Elias (Sadiqi Ilyas).1 A surreal and allegorical novella of three parts, the narrative begins with the story of the titular character who is born in prison to a mother detained as a hostage and a fugitive father who is being sought by the authorities for belonging to a vaguely designated secret organisation. Raped by an interrogator, Elias’ mother commits suicide by selfimmolation. Initially her son is taken up by another prisoner, but when they leave prison, she turns him over to an orphanage. Refusing to obey the orphanage’s rules, Elias departs and wanders around a “fair city” (seemingly Damascus) in search of his “true mother” (al-Jundi, 1969, 20). Eventually, in temporary exile in Paris, he meets and becomes obsessed with an enigmatic female character, Madonna. However, after returning to the “fair city”, he is falsely accused of murder and arrested. Once again imprisoned, Elias writes a series of letters to Madonna – letters that constitute the second section of the novella. Filled with heavyhanded symbolism as well as self-reflexive commentary, these letters depict his experiences of incarceration, including the daily trivialities of prison life and horrifying scenes of inmate torture. His interrogator is perplexed by Elias’ imprisonment and requests that he write a confession to a fabricated minor crime in order to be released. The third section of the novella includes portions of the written defence Elias composes for his trial. The trial reveals that from the day he was born, government authorities have accused Elias of an unspecified crime. Ordered to write a confession to this unnamed crime, he instead admits to worshipping idols and claims to be guilty of loving when his enemies are incapable of love. Lacking any conclusion, the novella provides a footnote indicating that the officers of the trial never read Elias’ defence. Moreover, Elias has disappeared or been disappeared, and the only traces of him that remain are his letters to Madonna and this written defence – a defence that readers are left to contemplate. Published a year after al-Jundi was himself imprisoned in Syria, My Friend Elias is a narrative that unfolds in a series of disjunctive scenes that, at times, are so opaquely allegorical that the reader may find them

174  R. Shareah Taleghani difficult, if not impossible, to decipher. These scenes stand in tension with al-Jundi’s personal, authorial first-person reflections that come at the end of the novella in the form of a belated introduction, through which the reader becomes aware of al-Jundi’s prison experience. Although it is fantastical and even dream-like in places, Elias’ fictional life story merges with autobiographical elements of the author’s own history, prompting the reader to question which parts of the protagonist’s narrative reference al-Jundi’s time in detention, and how their prison writings are connected. Indeed, the act of writing and the importance of interpretation appear throughout the text, including when Elias speaks to Madonna about prison narratives generally. He asks her: Don’t you love prison stories? They are thrilling, fascinating; in them, the tinges of life appear in another way – intense, focused, avid – as if they are a nail that we pound into the bones of a serpent, penetrating little by little. So we stop and stare at the bones and the blood and the pain, and then we hammer, and then stare at the pain. (al-Jundi, 1969, 67) Here, Elias marks the pain and suffering of detainees, but also ironically calls attention to the issue of “prison stories” being read as morbid spectacles by voyeuristic readers – offering such insights within his own prison story, one that intersects with the author’s experience of detention. Similar difficulties and dilemmas deriving from writing and reading stories about prison are repeated throughout the text. Elias questions why he continues to tell Madonna “the saddest of stories” about prison through his letters to her while at the same time insisting that he must tell her everything so that what he is witnessing “does not become a delusion” in his mind (49). In the last section – which presents Elias’ written defence for the reader despite it being unread by the court – the relationship between prison writing and questions of its utility remains, especially given Elias’ unexplained disappearance. Ultimately, though, the inclusion of his written defence documents both his confrontation with the injustices committed against him and the power of writing by prisoners to subvert the dominant narratives of authoritarian regimes. Akin to the disappearance of its protagonist, My Friend Elias is a text that has itself been disappeared from the chronicles of the Arabic literary establishment, perhaps because its author was better known as a political actor than as a creative writer. Al-Jundi was an early follower of Michel Aflaq and a prominent member of the Ba‘th party, serving as Minister of Culture, Information and National Guidance in 1964 and later as an ambassador to France (Moubayed, 1996). As a result of the intra-Ba’th conflicts, though, he was imprisoned in 1968 along with other members of his family who were also party members. Not surprisingly given his confrontations with Hafiz al-Asad’s faction of the

Metafiction in the Arabic Prison Novel  175 Ba‘th party, the novella was neither published nor widely circulated in Syria. Notably, the text is also absent from early major studies of contemporary or modern Arabic prison literature (adab al-sujūn or adab al-sijn) and from analyses of the emergence of Arabic experimental fiction since the 1960s, especially after 1967 (Abu Nidal, 1981; Abou Shariefeh, 1983; al-Faysal, 1994; Hafez, 1994). And yet My Friend Elias was published between two novels that are foundational both to this experimental shift in Arabic fiction and to the genre of prison literature in the Arabic literary field, namely, Sun‘allah Ibrahim’s That Smell (Tilka ra’iha, 1966) and ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif’s East of the Mediterranean (Sharq al-mutawassit, 1975). ­ Like these two landmark works, al-Jundi’s novella incorporates one of the most prominent and critical recurring tendencies in the Arabic prison novel and prison literature more widely: that of metafiction – the omnipresence of writing about writing or referencing, evoking and interrogating the act of inscription within a fictional narrative that is tied to the representation of the experience of imprisonment, especially political detention. A literary work which employs metafictional tendencies, according to Patricia Waugh, “self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (1995, 40). Repeated evocations and reflections on the act of writing by authors, whether through descriptions of and references to the tools, artefacts and products of writing or in the direct self-reflexive voice of the narrator, draw the attention of readers to the constructed nature, gaps, distortions and exclusions in prison narratives. Some works, such as Elias Khoury’s Yalo (Yalu, 2002), depict state agents forcing prisoners to write their life stories, confessions or disavowals as a unique form of torment. Other texts, such as Mustafa Khalifa’s The Shell (al-Qawqa‘a, 2008), privilege the detainee’s desire to compose and write (even if only mentally) while in prison as a form of self-expression, self-empowerment and escapism, or as an urgent obligation to record the prison experience as a form of witnessing and a challenge to the authority and authoritarianism of the state. The metafictional tendencies in the Arabic prison novel address the phenomenon of detention, especially as experienced by the prisoner of conscience, and, at the same time, bring into question the relationship between imprisonment and writing, asking about writing as self-expression and interrogating the power of writing to represent those imprisoned. Such forms of metafiction destabilise narrative closure and transparency, while sustaining and sometimes also sabotaging the idea of writing as a transgressive or subversive act, and as an act that may transcend the circumstances of prison. Through this essay, I will briefly trace the functions of metafiction in Ibrahim’s and Munif’s early works and then focus in more detail on the effects of the metafictional tendencies in Khoury’s Yalo and Sinan Antoon’s I‘jaam (I‘jaam, 2004).

176  R. Shareah Taleghani Metafiction in texts such as Antoon’s I‘jaam complicates and reconfigures the view of the Arabic prison novel as a simplistic or clear-cut form of “resistance” (al-muqāwama) or “oppositional” (al-mu‘āraḍa) literature (Harlow, 1987, 24). For Barbara Harlow, who draws on the early literary criticism of the same Khoury and the late Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani among other global writers, the term al-muqāwama suggests “popular, organized resistance to colonial occupation or imperialist oppression and gives a literary critical implication to the idea of resistance” whereas the term al-mu‘āraḍa implies “the literal meaning of confrontation, opposition, or resistance” (1987, 24). Yet, rather than emphasising a collective call to action against oppressive colonial and/ or authoritarian regimes, particular metafictional prison novels, such as Khoury’s Yalo, interrogate, challenge and rescript the capacity of language to represent macro- and micro-violences, not just of detention but also of the power and forms of official state narratives, especially as they shape the lives of the detained.

That Smell, East of the Mediterranean and the Self-begetting Prison Novel Despite the fact that the bulk of its narrative focuses on the protagonist’s experiences immediately after being released from prison, Ibrahim’s autobiographical novella That Smell is a foundational text in the emergence of Arabic literary experimentalism in the 1960s as well as literary representations of the experience of political detention in the Arab world (Hafez, 1994; Mehrez, 1994; Meyer, 2001). As a text that inaugurates the metafictional turn in the Arabic prison novel, the novella serves as a key example of how the genre of prison literature in Arabic has both been produced by and generated this experimental or avantgarde shift in Arabic literature more generally (Taleghani, 2020). Written during a period of severe political oppression for both leftists and Islamists in Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ibrahim published the book after being imprisoned from 1959 to 1964 for his affiliation with the Communist Party. Although there appears to be little in the text that is “explicitly subversive”, the first printing of That Smell was confiscated by Egyptian security authorities, and a complete edition would not be published in Cairo until 1986 (Cresswell, 2013, 1). Ibrahim’s unnamed narrator is a writer and journalist recently freed from prison and placed under routine, systematic surveillance. He subsists under a curfew and semi-house arrest. He must sign a policeman’s notebook every evening; if he fails to do so, he will be arrested again. Detained by the state-enforced need for his signature in a never- ending and alienating state of captivity outside of prison, he can no longer write. The recording of his name in the register of the authorities has supplanted all other forms of writing for him. Instead of writing, and in

Metafiction in the Arabic Prison Novel  177 an infamous scene that sparked criticism from Yahya Haqqi, and other Egyptian writers and critics, the narrator masturbates by his desk even though he was incapable of making love to his now former female lover. The narrator’s partial or selective sexual impotence in the scene with his then lover indicates his complete alienation and isolation as well as his inability to connect to and communicate with others. His impotency as a writer, however, is more entrenched and pervasive in the text; he has become completely estranged from written self-expression. The phrases “I tried to write”, “unable to write”, and “I couldn’t write” appear throughout the narrative, and when friends and relatives ask him about the progress of his writing, he lies, claiming he is making some progress (Ibrahim, 2013, 35, 44). The narrator also alludes to censorship preventing him from writing and publishing, when, for example, he mentions his colleague Sirri at the magazine where he previously worked, he notes: “he’d like to help me but under the circumstances there was nothing he could do” (46). However, the autobiographical slippage between the narrator of the novella and the position of Ibrahim as a writer suggests the possibility that eventually the narrator/Ibrahim did find a way to write, and That Smell itself is the end product of this fraught writing process. The novella’s terse, staccato and bare style reminds its readers of the quote from James Joyce that serves as the text’s epigraph: “this race and this country and this life produced me… I shall express myself as I am” (17). As a literary artefact, That Smell starkly reflects the social and political context in which Ibrahim produced it. Nearly a decade after the initial publication of Ibrahim’s first novella, Saudi-Iraqi writer Munif would publish the landmark work East of the Mediterranean, a novel that would be reprinted over a dozen times in subsequent decades. Munif’s political activities resulted in his being expelled from Iraq in 1955, and then, due to his criticism of the Saudi Arabian government, he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1963 (Jiad, 2004). The novel tells the story of Rajab Isma’il, a thirty-year-old intellectual, who became involved in a secret, leftist oppositional political party while at university and then, after graduation, was arrested, brutally tortured and detained for five years in an unnamed country somewhere “East of the Mediterranean”. Though some critics assume that Rajab’s imprisonment takes place in Iraq, Munif’s deliberate and conscious avoidance of naming a specific locale emphasises the common experience of political detention in the Arab world, particularly in the Levant, and serves as a far-reaching indictment of the political oppression of authoritarian regimes in the region. The narrative is constructed in six chapters: three of them are narrated in the first person by Rajab, sometimes in a stream of consciousness mode, and the other three are narrated in the first person by Rajab’s beloved sister ‘Anisa. Acts and artefacts of writing (letters, reports, declarations, postcards, references to composing poetry) appear throughout the narrative. At the beginning

178  R. Shareah Taleghani of East of the Mediterranean, security authorities successfully coerce Rajab into signing a confession, following years of resistance during his five years in prison. Emotionally and physically weakened, Rajab signs a formal declaration of guilt fully pre-scripted by security authorities so that he can seek medical treatment in France. In doing so, he must also agree to work as an informer, writing reports about compatriots he encounters while abroad. However, once in France he recovers, physically and psychologically, and refuses to inform on others. Forced to return to his unnamed homeland when his brother-in-law is detained as a hostage to lure him back, Rajab is once again arrested and dies as a result of injuries caused by the torture he endures. In the last chapter of the novel, ‘Anisa is left mourning the loss of her brother and wonders what to do with the remainders of Rajab’s papers. She reflects: “I haven’t found anything now to honor his memory except to release (tahrīb) the papers that he came back with from beyond the borders and publish them as they are” (Munif, 1975, 237). ‘Anisa recognises that Rajab would be angry about her decision to publish his writings, but she believes that “Some words may do something, despite the fact that he ordered me to burn them” (237). The scattered remnants of Rajab’s writing are seemingly compiled and generate, at least in part, the manuscript that would become the novel, East of the Mediterranean. Like That Smell, the novel seems to be a self-begetting one; it appears to be the published end result of the protagonist’s political and poetic struggles. The metafictional tendencies present in Ibrahim’s That Smell and Munif’s East of the Mediterranean are echoed in a variety of ways in numerous other Arabic novels. These and other texts of Arabic prison literature provide, as Waugh says of metafiction more generally, “a critique of their own methods of construction” (1995, 40). By intentionally meditating on the charged and fraught process of writing in and about prison, metafictional tendencies in the Arabic prison novel highlight the impossibility of producing a cohesive or complete narrative of detention. Although Waugh is concerned primarily with works of fiction in which the author appears to intrude on the text as a self-reflecting narrator, metafiction also includes non-reflexive references to writing such as the use of letters, journals and diaries either in the content of narrative or as structural frames. This can be seen in Jamal al-Ghitani’s use of historiographic writing in al-Zayni Barakat (1975) and the constant reference to characters, especially Tuhama, writing journal entries and letters in Hasiba ‘Abd al-Rahman’s landmark novel The Cocoon (al-Sharnaqa, 1999). Like Munif’s East of the Mediterranean, Rosa Yasin Hassan’s Guardians of Air (Huras al-hawa’, 2009) incorporates the act of writing letters as well as the text of the letters themselves between a wife and an imprisoned husband while her documentary novel on Syrian female political prisoners, Negative (Nighatif, 2008), integrates into a single

Metafiction in the Arabic Prison Novel  179 text the oral testimonies of former detainees in addition to their notes, letters and diary entries. In distinction to Waugh, Mark Currie argues that metafiction is a “borderline discourse” – one that “places itself between fiction and criticism” (1995, 2). As Currie explains, in raising the reader’s awareness of the fraught “conditions of meaning-construction” in narrative, metafiction produces its own trajectory of self-critique (15). It is this capacity for critically negotiating the dilemmas of representation and criticism that gives metafiction the unique power to expose the potential contradictions and erasures involved in written depictions of the lived experience of detention. Texts that employ such tendencies confront and foreclose the notion of simplistic narrative transparency in representing the lives and struggles of detainees.

Rewriting Detention and the Lebanese Civil War in Khoury’s Yalo Similar to the protagonist Musa at the end of Khalifa’s The Shell, the titular character of Khoury’s Yalo is repeatedly ordered by his interrogators to “write his life story” (2008, 28). But unlike Musa, who takes great pleasure in finally being granted access to paper and pen after the harsh deprivations of Tadmur Military Prison in Syria, Yalo, whose real name is revealed as Daniel Abed Abyad (or Daniel George al-Jal’u), is ambivalent about and, at times, tortured by the act of writing. The novel begins with Yalo’s arrest in 1992 for rape and robbery, though he is also repeatedly accused by the security authorities interrogating him of having knowledge of a cache of explosives and involvement in a bombing plot. During repeated interrogations and brutal torture, Yalo recalls and obsesses over various events (quotidian, national and geopolitical), encounters and people of his past, including: his birth in 1961 into the minority Syriac community in Lebanon; his childhood with his mother Gabrielle (Gaby) and grandfather Father Ephraim Abyad; his involvement with right-wing Christian militias, gangs and criminals during the Civil War (1975–1990); and his relationship with Shirin, the woman who spurns him and who he initially denies raping. Typical of Khoury’s complex style and indicative of Yalo’s sense of trauma and victimisation (despite being himself a “violent subject” and perpetrator of numerous crimes), the narrative is non-linear and repeatedly returns to varying descriptions of the same events in the character’s life (Mostafa, 2011, 34). While most of the novel’s chapters present Yalo reflecting on his past and imprisonment in the third person and his failure to comprehend just what, exactly, his torturers want from him, from the middle of the text onwards, the novel includes chapters that consist of the written versions of Yalo’s life story told in the first person. However, these versions are rejected by those with the power to detain him and he is forced to rewrite his life story again and again. In doing so, and

180  R. Shareah Taleghani as Yalo is being physically tortured and also tormented by the continual demand that he write, he goes through “a painful process of writing and remembrance” that serves as a journey of self-discovery (Mostafa, 2011, 35). At first, when ordered to write after being severely tortured, Yalo is resistant, fearful and hesitant: “Yalo wanted to say that he did not know the start from the finish, and that he could not write, but the blood prevented him” (Khoury, 2008, 104). Like Ibrahim’s unnamed narrator, he is “unable to write a single word” and feels “a void all around him” when faced with the prospect of putting pen to paper (105, 100). Ultimately, Yalo does come to write and even embrace the process of self-inscription. Writing, and with it the power of the imagination and memory, comes to represent a source of solace and momentary relief from the frequent “torture parties” he endures: “he wrote because he loved life and awaited the end of the long tunnel of torture when he would leave prison and get his revenge” (Khoury, 2008, 106, 105). Eventually, however, he becomes less concerned with revenge and more self-aware. His positive engagement with writing and the suffering he experiences force him to become more self-critical. In effect, through the process of rewriting his life story Yalo slowly comes to empathise with the victims of all the crimes he has perpetrated. For example, when describing an encounter with Shirin in which he sees “the fear forming concentric circles in the depths of her little eyes”, he notes that “he did not feel afraid before writing the word. He said it and felt it, then wrote it. Today […] he felt fear, and said that he was afraid of her eyes” (12). From this process, Yalo eventually experiences “feelings of regret” and comes to acknowledge the sources and impact of his own violence and the atrocities he has both witnessed and committed (87). At the same time, his writings and the elliptical, subjective, opaque and repetitive narrative of his story throughout the novel challenge official state narratives (and erasures) of the history of the Lebanese Civil War and state agents’ perpetration of human rights abuses. The versions of his story as refracted through constant metafictional references and as told in both first and third person by Yalo and finally by Daniel (his alter ego) stand in stark contrast to the official language of the written verdict of his indictment provided at the end of the novel. In the end, through the act of self-inscription, Yalo (now Daniel) has come to recognise his crimes, but the Lebanese state has yet to recognise the acts of violence, especially the infliction of torture, that it has committed against its own citizens. As a metafictional text, Khoury’s novel explicitly calls attention to the relationship between “fictional form and social reality”, and, in doing so, reminds readers that the “‘every day’ language” of state authority, as represented in official police and court documents, “endorses and sustains power structures through a continuous process of naturalization” that masks or effaces forms of oppression, including those forms

Metafiction in the Arabic Prison Novel  181 experienced by prisoners (Waugh, 1995, 47). Yet, in the end, and again typical of Khoury’s fictional works, the reader is left with a discomforting sense of irony; the act of writing is one, among many, painful forms of torture that produces a seemingly positive change in Yalo’s/Daniel’s worldview. While this can be read as a potential endorsement of the idea that torture can lead to something positive, alternatively, one can interpret Yalo’s embracement of writing as turning the means or tools of torture against the regime itself.

Writing (T)here in Antoon’s I‘jaam In 2004, two years after the publication of Khoury’s Yalo, Antoon published his debut novel I‘jaam. The novel takes the self-conscious interrogation of the act of writing and the potential meaning and resonance of language and individual words to a new and satirical level. The title of the novel, as the author tells us in his note to the English language translation, is the word for “dotting” – applying dots and diacritical markers to Arabic script – to clarify and elucidate meaning and avoid ambiguity in interpretation. “I‘jaam” comes from the trilateral root ‘ayn-jim-mim which also means foreign, non-Arab (especially Persian) and barbarian. The novel is presented as the “unrelated thoughts and illogical recordings” of a prisoner, eventually revealed to be named Furat, as found in a manuscript during the rule of Saddam Hussein towards the end of the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War (Antoon, 2007, 97). This manuscript is handwritten and undotted, and an official in the Ministry of the Interior, Talal Ahmad, is charged with adding the necessary dots to the manuscript and submitting a report on its contents to his department. The first epigraph of the novel is a quote that ironically reads: “Write without any concern or hesitation that the government may or may not be satisfied with what you write. The Father-Leader” (5). Nevertheless, in the text it is implied that Furat intentionally wrote the manuscript without dots in order to evade censorship and prohibit the prison authorities from easily reading and understanding his writings. Like the official written verdict in Yalo’s trial that comes at the end of Khoury’s novel, I‘jaam is bookended by two official reports from state authorities regarding the manuscript, and the rest of the novella consists of the pages of this manuscript, once it has been edited by Ahmad. But because of the lack of diacritical marks and dots and the difficulty of deciphering the handwriting, in the process of editing the official has either discovered ambiguous words or unintentionally altered meanings to the words of the manuscript, to the detriment of the regime he represents. Furat’s attempts to evade the state’s scrutiny of his writings and these particularly difficult-to-decipher terms present a hilarious, sardonic and scorching indictment of the corruption and oppression of Saddam

182  R. Shareah Taleghani Hussein’s regime. In the original Arabic version of the novel, for example, the term “al-qa’id” or “leader” is replaced by “al-qa‘id” or “one who is inactive or idle” (Antoon, 2004, 11). In addition, the word “Ba‘th” is replaced by “‘abth” or “foolishness”, and the phrase “Ministry of Culture and Information” becomes “the Ministry of Folly and Fraud” (14). These questionable renderings of given words are highlighted via footnotes that serve as paratextual markers, inserted by the manuscript’s official state editor, Ahmad, who appears to have been uncertain as to how to interpret them. In effect, using puns and plays on words, often through assonance and consonance, the novel reveals how the state’s authorities can inadvertently turn their own official language against the regime they claim to support. In addition, the word play shows that a political prisoner can mock and satirise the Iraqi regime even while being held in detention. Though edited by an authority of the state and thus potentially tampered with and modified from the author’s original offering, the manuscript-as-novel reveals, in disjointed, non-linear form, the story of Furat, a young writer and student of English literature at the University of Baghdad at the time of his arrest. In different fragments, descriptions of the present of his imprisonment intertwine and vacillate with the past of his memory. Throughout the text, the line “I awake to find myself (t)here” reflects that the protagonist is physically in the prison and yet often psychologically and emotionally outside of it; he is simultaneously living in both the present of detention and reflections on his past. Through the presentation of his memories as inscribed in the manuscript, the reader learns that Furat has a close relationship with his grandmother who he has lived with since the age of six, after his parents were killed in a car accident. He relates his first encounters with his girlfriend, Areej, a fellow student, as well as various episodes of their relationship, including those cemented by writing, literature and poetry. He recalls childhood memories as well as his struggles as a writer and poet, and his attempts to continue his studies of English literature in the face of rampant corruption and censorship. At times, Furat appears to welcome his recollections as moments of refuge and reflection, but memory serves as both a connection to the world outside the prison and to his past, and a form of torment: “my memory attacks me and uproots the barbed wire separating here from there […] the past advances quickly towards the present. They collide, their shards scatter” (Antoon, 2007, 53). Throughout the text of the manuscript and splicing into the protagonist’s various memories, Antoon deploys a variety of metafictional elements in revealing Furat’s story, but in I‘jaam these elements are uniquely reflected through images of the smallest denominators of language, especially in written form – in the representation of individual letters, the

Metafiction in the Arabic Prison Novel  183 alphabet and specific words. For Furat, like memory and imagination, letters, words and acts of inscription serve as a sanctuary and a source of anguish. While listening to the screams of other prisoners and trying to “dig in the silence, search for a yet deeper silence to burrow into”, he imagines a door in front of his prison cell (Antoon, 2007, 19). He steps out onto a path lined with trees whose branches “rustle with the letters of the alphabet” (20). This idyllic image is disrupted by a storm as he steps out onto the path: I hear a murmuring in the branches. The letters fall too, each pronouncing its own sound as it strikes the ground. The wind calms, and silence once again unfolds itself. The letters are changing color, from black to dark green, to light green. They begin to stir, spinning in spirals on the path. They are grasshoppers, turning and jumping. They spring into the trees. They are locusts. They bite hungrily into the branches. They swallow trees whole. The wind howls again, pushing me back inside. The door closes and fades away, but I can still hear the locusts ruining the silence. (Antoon, 2007, 20) Furat’s imagined path to his freedom from the sounds of torture and from prison becomes impassable as the letters themselves become plague-like in destroying everything in their path. Here, the status of writing as an artefact is reduced to the individual units, the letters, of words that he could potentially write. The metamorphosis of letters into locusts is not just an indication of his fears of prison destroying his existence or of never being released. The image of this transformation also indicates his anxiety and self-conscious awareness that his own writing could result in his self-destruction or consume his sense of self. However, it also shows his acute understanding of the state’s awareness of the dangers of language, particularly when meaning, including the meaning of some of the words in the manuscript, is ambiguous. Furat is well aware of the Ba‘th regime’s attempted co-option of language and writing, including his own manuscript, as a potentially destructive force. Referencing state censorship and co-option of language and writing, towards the end of the novel, as the narrator recalls (or imagines) the end of the Iran-Iraq War being officially announced, the state’s – as opposed to the protagonist’s – anxiety over its citizens’ forms of expression and freedom of thought becomes more pronounced. Absurdly, the “Leader” issues “a decree calling for the confiscation of those lexicons and dictionaries distributed by the enemy in an attempt to sow the seeds of discord among our people” (Antoon, 2007, 74). Citizens are invited to destroy such texts in public book burnings. The Ministry of the Interior will

184  R. Shareah Taleghani distribute “a list of essential words and their meanings” in order for their clarity to be maintained and any ambiguity in connotation eliminated (75). Anyone who commits “the crime of individual interpretation” will be put on trial and punished (75). A few sections later, Furat hears a door opening from his prison cell and imagines the entire alphabet dancing before him, essentially mocking the policing of language, writing and interpretation by Saddam Hussein’s regime and alluding to the subversive possibilities of what Furat could fabricate letter by letter through his writing: An alif fell through it [the door], prancing and letting off a purple light. It stood in front of me and plucked the hamza from on top of its head, tipping it to me like a cap. He threw it behind him and plunged into the wall that had become a mirror […] Each of the letters of the alphabet followed […] the laughter rose and the dots fell, one after the other. (Antoon, 2007, 80–81) The delight infused in this description of the dance of letters is abruptly undermined when suddenly the mirror breaks “and soldiers raided the party, felling the letters with a spray of gunfire” (81). However, despite this gesture at subverting the dictates of the state, the image of the soldiers’ massacre of the dancing letters is a recognition of the vulnerability of Furat’s writing to censorship and of his body at the hands of agents of the state. In addition to his imaginative renderings of the letters of the alphabet, through his recollections of his life outside of the prison, Furat reflects on moments of pride when his writing was published as well as his frustrations at being censored by state-sponsored publications and his fears that his past writings are what led to his arrest. In detention, though, the act of writing becomes a locus of struggle for the narrator. The guards throw sheets of paper at him and order him to write, stating, “Go on, our young poet! Write! Maybe they’ll give you the Nobel in prison, and Iraq can finally take pride in you” (Antoon, 2007, 38). Neither moving nor touching the papers, he notes that “I had learned lessons here I could never comprehend outside. To be silent, to act slowly, deliberately” (38). Unsure if the guards’ gesture was a trick to gather more evidence or humiliate him, his initial refusal to write can be interpreted as an act of resistance or a moment of self-censorship for self-preservation. He recalls being approached by a guard, Ahmad, who claims to be the son of a writer and to have requested a transfer to this particular division due to Furat’s presence. This guard constantly urges the narrator to write, but because he no longer trusts his senses or his intuition, Furat is unsure if he can take him at his word. His anguished internal debate over whether he should and will write while in prison

Metafiction in the Arabic Prison Novel  185 becomes its own form of captivity in the text where the image of lines on paper merges into that of the bars of cell: Unraveling from the whiteness of the page, suns emerge tearing through the darkness of this night, recalling another galaxy. But they are captive suns, these others, trapped behind bar after bar. As if these lines were cords or barbed wire upon which the words perch like frightened birds stalked by hunters or an approaching warden. Will they leave me to nest in others’ branches, and fly in others’ skies? Or will they be devoured by predators? I see them alight, one after the other, on this line. But they flee whenever I extend my trembling fingers. Every line bears the trace of the bar. (Antoon, 2007, 50) Even his nightmares of being pursued by soldiers and dogs end with him waking up with the question: “Do I write?” Eventually, though, he succumbs to the temptation to put pen to paper, stating, “the white of the page seduces me with the freedom to wander in my isolation. I will shatter the surface of my silence with delirium” (72). Words, for Furat, transform into “legendary beings, digging a tunnel to the outside, or prisms I hang all around me to look through” (72), as he writes his pain out. Momentarily, then, Furat engages in writing as a form of therapy that can be equated with an imaginary or mental release – a temporary moment of freedom from or liberation from imprisonment. If metafictional writing can be seen as a response to “a sense that reality or history are provisional” and as a rejection of the “forms that correspond to the ordered reality” of realist texts, then Antoon fashions a narrative in which the protagonist’s precarious state is mirrored in the constantly shifting status of the act of writing itself (Waugh, 1995, 44). The ambiguous ending of the novella eclipses this nearly giddy moment when Furat, as narrator, appears to have embraced writing in prison as a way of reaching the outside world and thereby a form of liberation. He hears the sounds of airplanes and gunfire mixing with his nightmares and is unsure if a war is actually happening. Ahmad suddenly appears at his cell and informs him that a coup has occurred, and that the Leader has fled to Libya; all political prisoners will be freed. Furat describes himself preparing for his release and walking out into the streets thinking of all the things he will do first now that he is free. Tired from the elation and the walking, he sits on a bench “thinking of what I would do (t)here. This is my last sheet of paper. When will Ahmad come again? I’ll ask him for more. Yes, I want to write more” (Antoon, 2007, 96). He thinks of asking Ahmad to call his grandmother and Areej to inform them that he’s “(t)here” as he wonders how soon “they’ll shut the lights off” (96). In the end, Furat appears to have remained in prison. The later sections of the text, particularly the coup and his release, are not

186  R. Shareah Taleghani reality but his imagination at work as inscribed on the sheets of paper given to him by Ahmad and the other guards. It is those papers that form the manuscript edited by Talal Ahmad and constitute the body of the novel. Like Ibrahim’s That Smell and Munif’s East of the Mediterranean, Antoon’s I‘jaam appears to be a self-begetting novel, but much like Ibrahim’s text it forecloses the possibility of a clear-cut conclusion of the narrator/detainee’s eventual freedom from his material prison. The fate of Furat, like that of Elias in al-Jundi’s novel, remains unknown. Like Furat in his constant deliberations about whether he should write, al-Jundi, in his concluding introduction to My Friend Elias, describes the act of writing a text that touches on his own prison experience as a painfully fraught process. For al-Jundi, this process is reflected in the language and the structure of his text itself: What can one write about in a prison cell when things are hazy in his mind and the world is a memory? […] Reality mixes with imagination and events take on a legendary form; ideas tremble, sentences are disconnected, and one finds himself prevented from focusing […] I wanted to call what I wrote a story, but it is conditional that in a story events are coordinated and that it has a plot as well as a beginning and an end. In the prison cell, the plots of stories disintegrate, and the world becomes rippled with no logical connection in it. The beginning approaches the end until they become one thing – intervening in one another. (1969, 90) Coming at the very end of an introduction that concludes a symbolic and fragmented text, the author’s belated disclosures, including the fact that he himself had been imprisoned, provides a series of revelations for the reader. For al-Jundi, writing approaches self-annihilation: “I don’t know how, suddenly, planted in my mind, was the idea that writing a book is a preferable [form of] suicide” (90). Though he equates the act of writing with the taking of one’s own life, the process of writing is, in the end, life-preserving. Yet, such a process is never cohesive, chronological or readily transparent. Prison is an environment in which a linear plot cannot be sustained, and the dividing line between the imaginary/ the fictional and the real becomes blurred. Al-Jundi’s novella has been generated out of an experience of incarceration in which writing may be seen as a form of rebellion in which the detainee steals time in order to write and “life appeared… beautiful despite the torture and prisons” (90). But much like the ambiguous and alternative meanings suggested by the editing of various words in the narrative of I‘jaam, Sami al-Jundi reminds us of the potential multiple, sometimes contradictory connotations of not just individual words, but of the act and process of writing about and from prison.

Metafiction in the Arabic Prison Novel  187

Note 1 Except for quotations, names and titles drawn directly from published English translations, I’m using the IJMES system of transliteration in this essay. My thanks to Beth Baron, Jeremy Randall and the participants for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this essay and receive feedback at the Dissections Research Workshop at the CUNY Graduate Center in December 2018. Thanks also to Nader Uthman for his insights on Sun‘allah Ibrahim’s That Smell. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

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188  R. Shareah Taleghani Mostafa, D. 2011. “Journeying through a Discourse of Violence: Elias Khoury’s Yalo and Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game”. Middle East Critique 20.1: 21–45. Moubayed, S. 1996. Steel and Silk: Men and Women who Shaped Syria 1900 –2000. Sydney: Cune Press. Taleghani, R. 2020. Readings in Syrian Prison Literature: the Poetics of ­Human Rights. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Waugh, P. 1995. “What is Metafiction and Why are They Saying Such Awful Things About It”. In Metafiction, edited by M. Currie, 39–54. New York: Longman.

11 Anarcha-Feminism, Prison and Utopia The Abolitionist Politics of Alison Spedding’s De cuando en cuando Saturnina and La segunda vez como farsa Joey Whitfield

In 1998, Dr Alison Spedding, an English lecturer in Anthropology at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, La Paz, Bolivia, began a tenyear prison sentence for possession of a large quantity of marijuana.1 Spedding, a graduate of King’s College, Cambridge and the London School of Economics, is an expert on the Aymara – an ethno-linguistic group of over a million people who live mainly in Bolivia. She has written on coca growing, religion, gender and sexuality (Spedding, 1994; Spedding and Vichevich, 2016), and is a prominent advocate of the decriminalisation of controlled substances, especially coca (Spedding, 2003). At the time of her arrest, there was speculation that this may have been one of the reasons she was targeted. Certainly, she was a political radical, who had supported the (then) future vice president of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera, during his imprisonment for his role in the bombing campaign of the Túpac Katari Guerrilla Army (Spedding and Whitfield, 2011). Spedding is a prolific novelist, and over the two and a half years that she served in the central La Paz prison, the Miraflores Centre of Female Orientation, she worked on two books. The first to be published, De cuando en cuando Saturnina/Saturnina from Time to Time: una historia oral del futuro (2004), carries a title written in English and Spanish with a subtitle that translates into English as “an oral history of the future”. This novel is an experimental cyber punk fantasy set between 2022 and 2086 whose eponymous heroine is a space-faring Aymara anarcha-feminist pilot. In many ways the text is an example of what Tom Moylan calls a “critical utopia” (1986, 10). It anticipates elements of the political victories of Evo Morales (and the election of a black president in the USA) by imagining a future post-revolutionary Aymaradominated society in the “Ex-Bolivia”, or Qullasuyo Marka, as a revival of the ancient pre-Inca (and arguably pre-state) society of Tiwanaku.

190  Joey Whitfield Significantly, in Spedding’s future Ex-Bolivia, prisons have largely been abolished. The second book Spedding wrote in confinement, and published four years after Saturnina, is La segunda vez como farsa: etnografía de una cárcel de mujeres en Bolivia (2008), which translates as The Second Time as Farce: Ethnography of a Women’s Prison in Bolivia. La segunda vez is an unusually personal ethnography, combining Spedding’s own experience with chapters on different elements of life in prison at the Miraflores Centre of Female Orientation. It is, as far as I know, the only ethnography of a prison by a professional anthropologist who entered prison not in order to study it, but entirely against her will. On the back cover of Saturnina, a text attributed to “Los Luchos de La Villa” claims that publication was delayed because it was too politically radical: Saturnina from Time to Time is the first originary science fiction novel to be written in Andean Castilian, Aymara and Spanglish. Because of its radical feminist-Indianist and religious content, it was not to the taste of the anointed literati or their editors in Lima and La Paz and was not published. But all the other readers […] have always demanded its publication and… well, we will see if it turns out to be as prophetic as people say. 2 Given the rise of Evo Morales and the “indigenous popular hegemony” in Bolivia (Postero, 2010, 31), Saturnina did indeed prove prophetic and has received considerable critical attention. Domenico Branca and Paola Mancosu (2017) focus on the use of anthropological theory in the novel, Mauricio Murillo Aliaga (2017) analyses its transgressive, cyberpunk aesthetic, Rosario Rodríguez Márquez (2014) looks at its implications for feminism and the role of women, while Hannah Burdette (2011) considers the novel’s speculations on how Indianist decolonialisation would be able to break with the coloniality of power. Despite the fact that Saturnina was largely written in prison, and prisons and a critique of imprisonment feature heavily in the narrative, it has not been read as a prison novel, while La segunda vez has been critically ignored altogether. In a different way, La segunda vez is even more iconoclastic than Saturnina, not only attacking the Bolivian criminal justice system from a position of intimate knowledge, but breaking many of the conventions of ethnographic writing in the process. Together, then, Spedding’s texts offer an opportunity to examine the relationship between the apparently oppositional genres of utopian and prison writing. They also offer very different approaches to penal abolitionism – the growing movement which opposes the use of prison to deal with social harm out of an ethical objection to punishment and because of the prison’s invariably

Anarcha-Feminism, Prison and Utopia  191 racist application and demonstrable ineffectiveness on its own terms (Davis, 2003). As a genre, prison writing, when defined as writing by imprisoned people, is often received as more closely connected to the material circumstances of its creation, and consequently more politically engaged than other forms of literary writing (Whitfield, 2018, 35). But a similar point is often made about speculative and utopian fiction – genres which aim to escape their circumstances of composition but also, as Fredric Jameson puts it, typically “reflect a specific class-historical standpoint or perspective” even in their most imaginative forms (2005, 47). Vincent Geoghegan goes so far as to suggest that harsh circumstances relate directly to people’s tendency to imagine positive alternatives, “the more unsatisfying reality is and the more marginal and disadvantaged one is, the more likely it is that one will dream of better times” (1987, 3). We might say that something equivalent to the feminist idea of “epistemic privilege” would seem to come into play in situations of severe unfreedom, making utopian mediations written in prisons all the more compelling. Certainly prisons – seemingly isolated micro-societies – are themselves often envisaged as paradoxically utopian spaces. Michel Foucault described Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as a “bizarre little utopia; a perverse dream rather as though Bentham had been the Fourier of a police society” (1995, 225). While Bentham’s was a fantasy of control by penal authorities, there are cases in which political prisoners have subverted prison spaces by turning them into model societies (Whitfield, 2018, 130). And penal logic can have a way of influencing the political thinking of imprisoned writers. Daniel Roux postulates, for example, that “Mandela’s version of a free South Africa in Long Walk to Freedom looks suspiciously like a benign Enlightenment penitentiary” (2012, 550). Spedding’s anarchism guards against an ideal model of imprisonment seeping into the political project described in Saturnina. Nevertheless, her experience of imprisonment shaped elements of the novel – as I shall argue. Saturnina and La segunda vez also present a chance to consider the sometimes overlooked relationship between anarchism and penal abolitionism. Perhaps because of negative characterisations of the former as a force of meaningless destruction and chaos, prominent contemporary penal abolitionists such as Angela Davis have tended not to emphasise the fact that a sustained critique of prison has come from anarchists. Indeed, anarchist criminology has tended to regard “crime” and its punishment as a wholly political issue – in which imprisonment is conceived as a further means by which the state and the powerful can maintain domination and protect private property. Petr Kropotkin (1887) honed his critique from within prisons, while Emma Goldman, writing in 1910, called prisons “a social crime and a failure” (61). The critical distance

192  Joey Whitfield abolitionism maintains from anarchism could also be due to the fact that both are often dismissed as unrealistic and utopian. Certainly, anarchism can be utopian, often answering the question of how a stateless society would address crime with what the anarchist theorist (A)legal calls the “trite refrain”: that most crimes would not be seen as such in anarchist terms (e.g. in a society without property, fraud, theft and so on would no longer exist), while other crimes (e.g. rape and intimate partner violence) would be rare due to the strong and supportive social bonds and the radically different values that anarchism entails; i.e. a robust critique of gender, sexual norms and hierarchy in general. All this is true, but it is delusional to think that this implies a world without transgressions or oppressive behaviour. (2014, 4) In fact, contemporary anarchism often combines a critique of “crime” with a serious commitment to alternative, non-state based accountability processes such as restorative or transformative justice (RuthHeffelbower, 2011; McKinney, 2012). Where anarchism can still be destructive, is in its principled opposition to so many elements of society. As Jesse Cohn puts it: To be an anarchist, in […] the twentieth century, is to deny the legitimacy of almost every feature of that world: […] there is almost no end to the things one is “against”, to the point that one continually risks slipping into an entirely negative and reactive self-definition (anti-capitalist, anti-statist, anti-clerical, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-authoritarian, anti-sexist… ). (2014, 14) To Cohn’s list we might, of course, add “anti-prison” and acknowledge that prison is only one of many intersecting oppressive institutions that is also expressive of the others. Utopian fiction, by contrast, would seem to offer a creative counter-discourse that can act as an antidote to the negative reactivity against which he warns. Prisons, anarchism and utopias all speak to what is arguably the central question in politics: how the individual relates to the collective. David Schalkwyk points out for example, that prison writing is often concerned with the fact that “prison both depersonalises the individual and renders communality indispensible” (2000, 280). Spedding’s writing might be assumed to be “epistemically privileged” on this question although she occupied an insider/outsider position, divided from most of the other women in terms of her class, ethnicity and educational background but held, like them, in prison. In this chapter, then, I ask, how do

Anarcha-Feminism, Prison and Utopia  193 the hopeful political imaginings of Saturnina relate to the pessimism and bitterness of La segunda vez? To what extent are the formal innovations of the former a product of the restrictive conditions described in the latter? How do both texts go about advancing the anarcho-abolitionism that Spedding propounds? In part one I look at how the novel Saturnina expresses Spedding’s anarcha-feminist and penal abolitionist politics through a conflictive, critical utopianism, plot elements which imagine alternatives to prison, and formal and aesthetic choices. In part two I explore comparable themes in the ethnography La segunda vez, looking at how Spedding’s opposition to prison is expressed via the idea of all prisoners as political prisoners, a critique of prison as a space of gendered control, and the emotional impact of the language. Ultimately, I suggest that the texts are complements, the utopian elements of the novel acting as positive negations of the experiences described in the ethnography.

Saturnina’s Forms of Escape Lorna Finlayson (2016) points out that many anarchists are explicitly anti-utopian. This is not, Finlayson explains, “out of a rejection of ambitious proposals for radical change; rather it is the principled reluctance to specify in detail a ‘correct’ or acceptable form of society” (181; original emphasis). Saturnina’s most significant antecedent in combining prison abolitionism and anarchism is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) – one of Moylan’s paradigmatic examples of a “critical utopia”. Such critically utopian novels are defined by Moylan as: (i) being self-conscious of the limitations of utopias; (ii) including conflicts between originary and utopian societies; and (iii) focusing therefore on the social change necessary to achieve a new society, albeit one that may still include imperfections (1986, 10–11). All these elements are strongly present in Saturnina de cuando en cuando. The novel recounts events from 2022  – when the liberation of the Ex-Bolivia began – although its present is around 2086, by which time the Bolivian state has been replaced in the Aymara regions by the Qulluasuyu Marka. By the time of the present of Saturnina, societal shifts on an interplanetary level have been in the direction of decolonisation. The United Nations has, for example, given Mars to the “Black Panafricanist Peoples” in compensation for slavery and colonialism (Spedding, 2010, 23). The changes in Ex-Bolivia are even more profound: in the Qullasuyu Marka both capitalism and the colonial nation state have completely dissolved and the racial order they created has been reversed. In Spedding’s Saturnina the Qullasuyu Marka is an isolated society, its anti-capitalism, empowerment of previously marginalised ethnic groups, and its return to pre-Columbian or pre-modern attitudes to narcotics have led the “Estados Jodidos” (the Fucked Up States – as the

194  Joey Whitfield USA is known throughout, its citizens called jodidenses – fuckedupians) to impose an economic blockade (2010, 69, 22). The isolation is increased by the construction of a large fence, the “Iron Curtain of the Andes” (10), built by Qullasuyu Marka’s neighbours after the country annexed the Peruvian city of Puno (107). This externally imposed physical and social isolation (a common trope in both utopian and prison writing) is exacerbated by the fact that most of the Qullasuyu Marka’s inhabitants eschew many forms of modern communications technology and avoid contact with outsiders. The opening note, “From the Andes to the Asteroids”, attributed to an envoy of the “Universal Free Feminist Press Network”, states that this seclusion has led some outsiders to believe it to be a bucolic utopia, while others consider that its privileging of the indigenous peoples means it is an “archaic, racist and bloody” ethno-state (10). The novel is structured after its subtitle’s claim, that it is an “oral history of the future”, and its chapters are a collection of thirty-four interviews or transcriptions of stories told by different “informants” recalling historical events. It is presented in the opening note as “the first time the Iron Curtain of the Andes opens to give a look at these mysterious and legendary people” (10). Spedding’s principle vector for exploring the shortcomings of the Qullasuyu is her protagonist, Saturnina, a hard-drinking, queer rebel, whose position as a pilot for Bolivia-based space contractor El Sindicato (Space Engineering and Applied Astronomy Corporation “Qullasuyu” plc) means she can travel the solar system (Spedding, 2010, 9). Saturnina’s uncompromising, anarcha-feminist politics is expressed through her secret membership of the all-women revolutionary cell, the Brigada Flora Tristan (named after the French Peruvian socialist communist credited with coming up with the slogan “workers of the world unite”), whose aim is to destroy the remaining elements of patriarchal and imperialist domination (111–112). The feminism of the brigade is not unlike the political lesbianism and separatism of some branches of second-wave feminism as the brigade promotes a “double separatism of ‘Out with q’aras [a slur for white people meaning literally “peeled”, “skinless” or “raw”] and out with men’” (112). The enemies of Saturnina and the Brigada Flora Tristan are the amawt’as (the terms are Aymara), a powerful caste of male religious elders who have institutionalised the pre-Colombian religious practice of wak’as, or ancestor worship, and even send some people for “reeducation” (Spedding, 2010, 61). The Brigada Flora Tristan also deplores essentialist notions of indigeneity such as the fact that privileges in the Qullasuyu are granted according to ethnic purity. The “Ministry of Tourism and Folksylore” holds a DNA database which is used to distribute begging rights: people with pure enough indigenous blood are allowed to beg and have access to tourist dollars for dressing in traditional dress and parading with llamas (31). The Brigada Flora Tristan is also opposed

Anarcha-Feminism, Prison and Utopia  195 to the patriarchal misuse of the traditional Aymara concept of chachawarmi, a composite term meaning “man and woman”. The concept is part of the Andean cosmovision which organises life around principles of complementary duality. The duality of chachawarmi is described by the philosopher Mireya Sánchez Echevarría as something “which not only encompasses parental relations but also territorial, spatial and emotional […] both halves, while being opposed, integrate or include each other for the ‘growth of harmony’ and ‘reciprocity’” (2013, 50). Chachawarmi is still used as an organising principle in contemporary Aymara and Quechua communities. Leaders are always elected in male and female pairs, for example, in a practice which is popularly understood to evidence a kind of equality between men and women. A chapter narrated by the animated skull of Saturnina’s grandmother describes, however, how the male leaders of the brigades who overthrew the old regime dismissed the women fighters. Despite being “prone to babble about equality between men and women – chachawarmi” they ultimately only appoint male leaders (Spedding, 2010, 74). Sánchez Echevarría argues that chachawarmi has also been used to mask or excuse the patriarchal practices of pre- Columbian society and inequality in the present (2013, 52). Certainly this is how the members of the Brigada Flora Tristan see it. As Saturnina asks, “where is the complementarity if the men end up taking all the positions of leadership?” (Spedding, 2010, 122). The Brigada Flora Tristan’s social ideals are reminiscent of the radical feminist separatists of the 1970s and 1980s. They exhort their followers to, First, abandon your husband if you are unlucky enough to have one. Then, give away your male children, you can keep the female ones. Finally, exercise freedom of sexual expression which means let yourself be seduced by the sisters or seduce one of them, according to your inclinations. (Spedding, 2010, 113) In line with the goals of their struggle, one of the brigade’s actions is to secretly produce and distribute pornography (228). On an interplanetary scale, Saturnina takes aim at more concrete enemies. She single-handedly blows up the Martian moon of Phobos, which is now home to the “phobics”, a racist society descended from the Ku Klux Klan (22). In the Qullasuyu Marka, the Brigada Flora Tristan take violent direct action to destroy the DNA database of the Ministry of Tourism and Folksylore, and in Cusco, Peru, they bomb the Inca temple at Coricancha because, as Saturnina puts it, “The Inca were a bunch of fucking imperialists too” (209). However, Spedding’s critical utopianism goes beyond imagining the violent destruction of undesirable elements of the future society. When Saturnina is arrested and transferred to the single prison that remains in

196  Joey Whitfield the Qullasuyu Marka, readers learn that after the revolution all prisons were initially abolished. Chonchocoro (in reality a high-security prison famous for holding political prisoners, including Álvaro García Linera) has been reinstated, however, at the request of the families of people who have caused harm, “it was actually the families of some thieves who begged them to reopen the prison and put them inside it to put an end to the cycles of vengeance” (Spedding, 2010, 139). When Fortunata, Saturnina’s friend, comrade and sometime lover visits her in the prison, Chonchocoro is full, not with prisoners, who number less than 150, but with family members who may come and go (225). Some features of Spedding’s version of Chonchocoro that may seem surprising to European readers are in fact real features of contemporary Bolivian prisons, such as the need for prisoners to work in order to supplement their meagre rations and the very open visiting policies in place. But unlike in the real Bolivia, the future Chonchocoro is not segregated by gender, and sentences are not fixed. Instead time served is determined by a form of decentralised, restorative justice that requires perpetrators to make peace with their victims – understood as their “opposites” or “counterparts” – to compensate them or by whatever means “get them to forgive you” (232). In Aymara, Saturnina explains that “If your counterpart does not desist, you will never leave” (232). This means that a serial killer called Hilda is unlikely to ever get out as the family of her final victim refuses to forgive her. If the “counterpart” of any prisoner dies without leaving someone else responsible for their case, Saturnina explains, they could remain incarcerated forever (232). The idea of giving victims control over cases recalls the classic 1977 essay “Conflicts as Property” – one of the foundational texts of the Restorative Justice movement – in which pioneering prison abolitionist Nils Christie attacks European legal systems for allowing the state to “steal” conflict (including “crime”) from those it affects. As Christie writes: The victim is a particularly heavy loser in this situation. Not only has he suffered, lost materially or become hurt, physically or otherwise. And not only does the state take the compensation. But above all he has lost participation in his own case. It is the Crown that comes into the spotlight, not the victim. (1977, 7) The use of prison in the Qullasuyu reverses this dilemma, giving victims vastly more power and making perpetrators responsible for accountability and reparation. It gives, however, victims or families of victims far more power than was suggested by even the most radical proponents of restorative justice and rests on violence or the threat of violence, albeit not from the state. In considering victims and perpetrators as counterparts, Spedding plays with another type of complementarity

Anarcha-Feminism, Prison and Utopia  197 or connectedness between opposites, although the principle of balance here seems skewed in favour of the victimised. The way crime is dealt with in the Qullasuyu expresses the critical nature of Spedding’s utopian thought – a commitment to imagining radical change as a provocation to the present, combined with an ethical reluctance to prescribe. Finally, Saturnina can be read as an anti-prison novel because of the formal and aesthetic ways in which it pushes against constriction and restraint. A “User’s Manual” at the beginning explains that it can be read in any order but suggests several options (Spedding, 2010, 11). The thirty-four chapters are arranged in an order “‘imposed’ by the editors” but are coded by letters which indicate other ways of reading them (11). Readers who might want to follow the historical chronology can look at chapter numbers preceded by “P”, while “T” indicates the events from the moment when Satuka and Fortunata first meet and “Q” demonstrates who is narrating, allowing readers to track different perspectives. Following the recommendation of the “editors”, readers can enter into “a game of hopscotch” (12) (in reference to Julio Cortázar’s 1963 novel). As Amy Michelle Kennemore points out, the structure seems inspired by Aymara thinking about time, specifically the phrase “to walk ahead while looking back” (2014, 52). Famously, the Aymara language is unusual in that it uses vocabulary to do with what is behind, unseen, and movement backwards to describe the future, and what is in front of, seen, and movement forwards to describe the past (Núñez and Sweetser, 2006). The individual is thus imagined moving through time like Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” as interpreted by Walter Benjamin (1940), progressing backwards into an unseen future, while contemplating the past. Time in Saturnina can be considered backwards, the concluding events of the earlier timeline (which land Saturnina in prison) are revealed, spoiler-like, in the introduction. Readers are, in a sense, moving backwards in much the same way as in the Aymara conception of time, meaning that they can “see” forwards into the past. The “manual” also suggests, however, that readers might read the novel in any order they desire, which is more akin to something like the rhizomatic structure of Giles Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987). The experimentation of the novel’s structure could just as compellingly be read as an anarchic reaction to prison time. In La segunda vez Spedding writes of how prison stifles memory and motivation, with the repetitious routines and banality of monotonous days meaning that many prisoners, despite notionally having a lot of time on their hands, find it difficult to commit to and complete specific tasks. They live, Spedding says in a “grey zone” which “annuls memory” (2008, 158–159). It seems significant, then, that every chapter of Saturnina consists of the recuperation of memory of personal involvement in historical actions. The structure and form of the novel stand as expressions of Aymara temporality and as part of a struggle against the stifling of memory.

198  Joey Whitfield In Archeologies of the Future (2005) Jameson proposes that ordinary temporality bifurcates into two paths: (i) “existential experience” (the time of the individual); and (ii) “historical time with its urgent interrogations of the future” (7). For Jameson, utopia is “a space in which the two dimensions are seamlessly reunited [in a] conflation of individual and collective time” (7) – a process that allows individuals to struggle for the kinds of changes that can lead towards better, more utopian societies. It is no accident that in Saturnina, Spedding conceived a character who inhabits utopian time in Jameson’s sense while she herself was suspended from the collective time of history at risk of the amnesia of the “grey zone” which threatens individual memory. In the final chapter of the novel, Saturnina is released from prison and re-enters the Andean landscape of Qullasuyu with an ecstatic delight. Spedding stated in a personal communication that she wrote this passage without knowing that she herself would also soon be released. She remembers the moment she finished the manuscript very well, “I smoked a pipe […] with my hippie cellmate and went outside into the yard and felt the sky lifting off and I thought ‘I hope it’s magic, like the book will come true… ’ And it did” (Spedding, 2019). Saturnina can, I suggest, in the purity of Spedding’s ideological convictions and her wild and uncompromising take on life, be read as offering a fantasy alter-ego for the author – something which will become clearer in the following section. According to Jameson’s definition of utopia as the space in which individual and historical time blend, Saturnina emerges as the ideal utopian subject: the individual whose actions are historical in scope and who acted as a compensatory counterpart to her imprisoned creator.

The Second Time as Farce and the Dystopia of a Women’s Prison Thanks to La segunda vez como farsa, we have a detailed account of the context which gave rise to Saturnina, with the ethnographic text acting as the dystopian, real-world subtext to the speculative fantasy. The introductory chapters are concerned with the absurdities and incompetence surrounding Spedding’s arrest and trial. Further chapters focus on different aspects of the experience, including an overview of Bolivia’s notoriously unjust anti-drug legislation, the social organisation of the imprisoned women, the psychological impacts of imprisonment and criminalisation, the workings of legal cases, the cultural impact of television and religion, and the history of imprisonment. Certain themes emerge which recall aspects of the novel, especially the relationship between an individual and a collective, obligatory forms of relation and connectivity, and an anarcha-feminist perspective on crime and punishment. Spedding was released after two and a half years of her sentence because of a “delay of justice”, meaning that the incompetence of the

Anarcha-Feminism, Prison and Utopia  199 Bolivian legal system ensured her case failed to make its way through the various appeals courts in the allotted time (Spedding, 2008, 43). La segunda vez is characterised by fury at her situation, which she blames on the USA (referred to throughout the ethnography, as in the novel, as the “Fucked Up States”). The majority of the women in Miraflores (70–80%) are there because of Ley 1008 (Law of Coca and Controlled Substances) (Spedding, 2008, 59). 1008, as it is known, was passed in 1988 by Jaime Paz Zamora’s government, under intense pressure from the Reagan administration which froze half of US aid until the Bolivian congress assented to the law (Santos, 2002, 134). It made US aid payments to Bolivia dependent on a “certification procedure” which requires the president of the USA to certify, by the 1st March every year, that the countries involved are “fully cooperating with US anti-narcotic policy”, including fulfilling annual quotas for the number of drugs arrests and amount of coca eradicated (Santos, 2002, 132). These quotas dictate that anyone accused of offences relating to drugs is immediately arrested and incarcerated (Spedding, 2008, 59). Even the most minor drug-related charges carry mandatory prison sentences and suspects are incarcerated throughout a judicial process that takes years to even reach a sentence. If a suspect is acquitted at the first trial, the prosecution is obliged to make an appeal against the acquittal and the suspect is not released from prison until the outcome of the appeal is determined (Santos, 2002, 137). In 2009, 75% of the prison population in Bolivia were reported to be awaiting sentence (Metaal, 2010, n.p.). That is to say, suspects are not held because they have been convicted of drug-related crimes, but rather to satisfy the demands of the quotas (Santos, 202, 137). The need to easily fulfil quotas means that the majority of those arrested are minor players in the drug trade, small-time dealers or consumers who are invariably from racially and economically marginalised groups. 1008 is one of the clearest examples of how anti-drug legislation and practices of incarceration express the coloniality of power, supporting the argument that those imprisoned for drugs offences are political prisoners. Although Bolivia is a particularly egregious case, the situation is replicated throughout Latin America. Writing on women imprisoned for drug offences in Mexico, Aída Hernández states that, “Although they are not on any Amnesty International list and there is no political organization to march for them […] they are prisoners of statistics within an anti-drug policy that needs numbers to prove it is doing something” (2013, 58). Spedding’s justification for her “offence” is political. Reflecting on a moment when guards ask her about why a well-salaried academic would need to be in possession of so much marijuana, she muses that “the honest answer would have been: ‘Because I’m an anarchist’” (2008, 25). Anarchists have long seen the legalisation of drugs as a potentially winnable battle in the struggle for the rolling back of the state. As early as

200  Joey Whitfield 1922 Errico Malatesta articulated an argument more or less identical to those of contemporary mainstream proponents of decriminalisation (Ward, 2004, 42). Spedding’s analysis of the prison goes beyond drug decriminalisation, however. In the final chapter of La segunda vez, she gives an account of the dual development of penal justice and the state, and explains, in a Weberian fashion, that “it is no coincidence that the archetypal crime, murder, is precisely the act that strikes at the roots of state power” (Spedding, 2008, 253). In situations where there is no state, she points out, even murder is a civil crime, dealt with by families (252) – and this is just as she imagines it to be in Saturnina. But, she finds her viewpoints are not shared by the other women in Miraflores. Even on the question of drug legalisation, for example, she told me of her frustration that the other women in Miraflores would not articulate a position despite being victims of criminalisation (Spedding and Whitfield, 2011). As it comes across in La segunda vez, the divide between Spedding and the other women in Miraflores starts to look like the one which tends to exist between “political” and “common” or “criminal” prisoners. In his work on South African prison writing, Roux wrote that “the ‘we’ of the political activist […] is born out of the exclusion of the common law prisoners, who are incessantly placed outside the ambit of solidarity and the political” (2012, 559). I have similarly found that even writing by political prisoners who criticise penal regimes frequently includes “condemnation of criminalized groups as part of its protest against the prison” (Whitfield, 2018, 184). Such a divide between political and “common” prisoners comes through the kind of thinking that Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called “abyssal” (2007, 45). For de Sousa Santos, this separation acts to divide the world into two, the divide between the colonial and colonised world, the former being the realm of knowledge, the latter the realm of subjects of knowledge: “on the other side of the line there is no real knowledge; there are beliefs, opinions, intuitive or subjective understandings which, at the most, may become objects or raw materials for scientific enquiry” (2007, 47). By writing about the other women in terms that they do not recognise, Spedding risks doing precisely this. The abyssal quality of the ethnography is also exacerbated by the ways in which Spedding breaks a major taboo in anthropological writing: namely that researchers do not express open dislike for their subjects. Most annoying to Spedding is the fact that the other people imprisoned in Miraflores uncritically identify as “woman”. As she puts it, the “identity of prisoner is something which no one takes on except by force, but apart from that, the dominant identity there […] and the principal means of control is ‘being a woman’” (Spedding, 2008, 11). Spedding explains how she has always hated and rejected hegemonic feminine identity: “dressing attractively, using make up, having a heterosexual partner to whom one should be, or appear to be, faithful, being a mother, doing

Anarcha-Feminism, Prison and Utopia  201 painstaking domestic work” (11). She is conscious that her approach is provocative, warning readers that they may find her project “deficient” as fieldwork (11). Unlike her previous research work on coca growers during which she was able to identify as a “peasant”, she is unable to “pretend to be a woman in order to relate to my work companions” (11). Her disdain for those who collaborate in enforcing the prison system as a gendered space is expressed in very strong terms: “I scorn them for being snitches, submissive, passive, gossipy, obedient, dishonest, for not trying to understand the law or the system under which they are tried […] and for ultimately collaborating with the very system that oppresses them” (13). The tone here is reminiscent of Goldman’s scorn of the “mass” who she saw accused of being responsible for its own “horrible state of affairs” because “it clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!” (1910, 41). Spedding’s refusal to conform to gender norms or social mores means her time in Miraflores is characterised by feuding and conflict with the other imprisoned women. She finds them to be obsessed with activities that are associated with a certain ideal of femininity – cleanliness, organisation of the cells, hair and beautification, compulsory knitting and, most importantly, motherhood (Spedding, 2008, 95–96). Criminologists have described the experience of criminalised women as “double deviance” – to be shamed for failing both as citizens and as “women”, that is as wives, as family members and as mothers (Carlen and Worral, 1987). A compensatory reaction to the stigma of this double deviance offers a sympathetic explanation of why motherhood is the most important thing to the women in Miraflores. It is legal for infants to live with their imprisoned mothers until the age of six (although in practice many also live in men’s prisons until much older (Corz, 2018)) so there are many babies and children in Miraflores. In an episode that Spedding finds highly significant there is a fire and the prison is evacuated. Amidst media reports that this was an escape attempt, the other women protest that they would never attempt to escape because they are mothers (Spedding, 2008, 114). Motherhood is thus figured as a condition antithetical to criminality and rebellion. To Spedding’s mind, community or solidarity based on gendered determiners of worth such as whether or not one has ever given birth or developed affection for young children (she has done neither) is intensely irritating. For her, motherhood – as a form of forced relationality with the child – is figured as a serious threat to personal autonomy. Her failure to conform in Miraflores by showing interest in the children who live inside leads to her occupying a position as “cucu” or “bogeyman” within the prison, a monstrous figure used by mothers to frighten their children into good behaviour (120). The animosity that develops is such that Spedding titles a chapter of La segunda vez “Panoptic society, or hell is other prisoners” and details

202  Joey Whitfield how the major part of the policing she experiences comes not from the guards but from the other women (Spedding, 2008, 91). This consists partly of minor criticisms of her gender non-conformism and her disregard for what she views as excessive obsessions with cleaning. It also, however, involves her literal surveillance by other imprisoned women on behalf of the authorities. Her rule breaking is regularly reported by “buzos” or “snitches” who at one point even falsely accuse her of attempting to smother a child to death (120). It is poignant that in a situation in which it seemed that all of those around her were likely to betray her, Spedding imagined the solidarity and sisterhood of the Brigada Flora Tristan in Saturnina. Spedding’s frustrations and personal disagreements with her companions preclude the development of such solidarity. She is particularly perturbed by how commonplace it is for the women in Miraflores to threaten to make “denouncements”, to inform on other imprisoned women or on people they think might be involved in illegal activities on the outside (Spedding, 2008, 160–161). She speculates that this might be due to another kind of thinking on the complementary connectedness of different subjects, specifically through a logic similar to George Foster’s controversial work on the “image of limited good” (Foster, 1965, 296). Foster’s theory sought to explain envy in peasant societies by arguing that scarcity and a finite amount of social “goods” meant that the good fortune of one person would inevitably mean a decline in fortune for someone else (Spedding, 2008, 159). Although she finds Foster’s work questionable, Spedding formulates a theory of “limited misfortune” to explain the culture of denouncements. This theory postulates a logic of negative complementarity: I am suffering misfortune, firstly because I am in prison […] therefore if I see someone else who is not suffering such misfortune or who is managing to enjoy something behind the bars I will attempt to make them lose this enjoyment or suffer misfortune […] My personal misfortune represents a percentage of a total and in this way will therefore be reduced proportionally because of the overall increase. (Spedding, 2008, 159) Spedding has no better explanation as to why some of the women of Miraflores are so likely to betray one another and to express a desire to cause each other the same or greater suffering than they experience. This “evil without motivation”, explained through the suggestion that there is a balanced amount of misfortune, is like a negative version of the notion of restoration proposed in Saturnina. While in Spedding’s future justice system of the Qullasuyu balance can be restored by reparations to victims of crime, in her present reality in Miraflores, she understands

Anarcha-Feminism, Prison and Utopia  203 those around her to be seeking to restore their position by increasing harm for others. La segunda vez concludes with a rallying cry that is even stronger than the language used by the Brigada Flora Tristan: Therefore, my sisters, I invite you to abort your children (if you haven’t managed to avoid conceiving them in the first place), to cheat on, or better, abandon your husbands, throw away your cleaning cloths and go eat in the canteens where at least the chef gets a salary, miserable as it might be. And who knows, if we manage to leave the prison of gender, with all the massive changes that would imply, maybe even the prisons of bricks and mortar will cease to exist. (Spedding, 2008, 259) It is interesting that here, in contrast to the future imagined in Saturnina, Spedding sees the abolition of gender as something prior to the abolition of prisons. But the exhortation for women of a community which holds motherhood in the highest regard to abort their children demonstrates just how uninterested she is in generating the kind of solidarity that might be able to bring about such a shift. It is telling that the first person plural “we” only makes an appearance in the closing paragraphs of the ethnography, emphasising its absence from earlier sections. As an intersectional analysis demonstrating the complicity of gender and imprisonment, La segunda vez is powerful: as a piece of writing that might elicit sympathy or action by or on behalf of the other imprisoned women, it is the ethnographic equivalent of lobbing a grenade at the very people abolitionism seeks to protect.

Conclusion Jameson calls utopian novels “maps and plans to be read negatively” (2005, 12). Reading La segunda vez and Saturnina together demonstrates how the experience of imprisonment might be transformed through writing into a map or plan to be read positively. In other words, in addition to reading prison texts for evidence of the deep-rooted problems, hierarchies, prejudices and injustices that they invariably detail, we might insist, like Spedding, on their positive reconfiguration by imagining their opposites. Spedding’s two texts operate as complementary negatives of each other: the toxic gendered space of La segunda vez was transformed into the solidarity and sisterhood of the Brigada Flora Tristan, and the stifling environment of Miraflores into the interplanetary flights of Saturnina. Running through both novel and ethnography, however, are critiques of different notions of complementarity, balance and duality. In some areas this is ambiguously positive, as in the restorative system of dealing with social harms in the Qullasuyu. This is based on a recognition of

204  Joey Whitfield connection between victims and perpetrators, and the capacity of the latter to make amends or compensate for the former. In other moments, Spedding scorns notions of complementarity or harmonious dualism for creating a false sense of equality (chachawarmi), restricting individual autonomy or leading people to betray and snitch on each other (as in the “denouncements” in Miraflores). We might speculate that it is not only Spedding’s anarchic ideological beliefs but also her experience of confinement that led her to react so strongly against restrictions to autonomy or connection based on forced relationality or imposed identities. It is significant that in the future Qullasuyu, she imagines not a perfected society, but a situation in which further conflict is a revolutionary obligation. It is hardly surprising, then, that La segunda vez is written not to generate harmony, balance or solidarity, but outrage, provocation and rebellion – a combination that Spedding, and Saturnina, would have wanted.

Notes 1 Thanks to Alison Spedding, Grace Whitfield, Natasha Tanna, Tilmann Altenberg and Danny Evans for their help with this chapter. Most especially I am grateful to the editors for their patience, flexibility and their extensive editorial input. 2 Translations from Spanish are my own. Aymara words are glossed using Spedding’s own translations.

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Women, Theatre and Clean Break

12 Something About Us Clean Break’s Theatre of Necessity Caoimhe McAvinchey

I am a theatre. Sometimes I turn myself inside out. I am a very flexible theatre… a world within a building within a world. I turn myself inside out. I do not begin or end. […] I am an audience watching itself. (Andrea, 1987) Clean Break is a women-only theatre company that grew out of a prisonerled drama workshop that took place between 1977 and 1979 at HMP Askham Grange, an open prison in the north east of England. Over the past four decades, it has evolved from a cooperative of women exprisoners into an internationally recognised theatre, education and advocacy organisation that places stories of women, crime and punishment centre stage. Since 1979, Clean Break has commissioned and produced over sixty original plays, exposing women’s experiences of structural inequality and violence through criminalisation and incarceration. All of Clean Break’s plays have been written either by women who have experience of prison or by professional writers, mentored by the company, who have undertaken research through residencies in prisons or as part of Clean Break’s education programme in its women-only centre in Kentish Town. The panoply of plays offers a sustained and nuanced engagement with the personal, social, cultural and political implications of the incarceration of women in the UK across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In or Out? (1980), written and performed by Eva Mottley and Jenny Hicks, staged the relationship between a prison officer and a prisoner on the eve of her release from HMP Holloway, raising questions about the socio-economic and cultural contexts which impact on women who live and work in prison. Paulette Randall’s 24% (1991) examines the systemic racism that shapes the lives of young black women, within and beyond the criminal justice system. In Sounds Like an Insult (2014), Vivienne Franzmann’s characters navigate complex mental health needs in a system that fails to address them. While many of the earlier plays were naturalistically framed, often with a cast of two or three characters inside a prison, later work revelled in the distinctive aesthetic

210  Caoimhe McAvinchey possibilities offered by the medium of theatre. Chloë Moss’ Sweatbox (2015), a site-specific performance staged in a decommissioned prison van, is an intimate immersive experience for audiences of no more than twelve people who accompany three women in transit from court to prison, attending to their individual concerns and the ways in which the criminal justice system processes bodies within it. Lucy Kirkwood’s exploration of the implications of sex-trafficking, it felt empty when the heart went at first but it’s alright now (2009), was a promenade performance in the basement of the Arcola Theatre (London), in which audiences witnessed Dijana, a young Croatian woman, trapped by debt, grief and, despite all the evidence to the contrary, hope for an alternative life. A commitment to the interdependent possibilities of aesthetic and political engagement is also made explicit in [BLANK] (2019), Alice Birch’s provocation to audiences about narrative and causality, offering a series of one hundred scenes about the impact of the criminal justice system on the lives of children and adults, selected, curated and performed in an order decided by the performing theatre company. In its early years, Clean Break developed tours to theatres, prisons, schools and community centres, making ends meet with a combination of box-office splits, small grants and sponsorship and dole money. In the mid-1980s, Clean Break successfully applied for Arts Council England and Greater London Council funding and the processes of collective labour were superseded by more traditional, hierarchical management structures required by such funding bodies. While there was a stable core of Clean Break members, there was also fluidity to the group. Some members left, having developed personal interests and professional skills (theatre and television writing, acting, teaching, therapy), others returned to prison and some died, the result of drugs or suicide. By the late 1980s, the cooperative had dispersed and increasingly Clean Break employed women who were sympathetic to the mission of the company rather than women who had personal experience of incarceration. This shift culminated in Clean Break commissioning, for the first time, a professional writer who had no personal experience of prison. Bryony Lavery’s Wicked (1991) is, in both form and content, a sophisticated critique of how societal notions of femininity restrict women and how institutional sexism plays out across the criminal justice system’s treatment of them. This satire marks both a pragmatic and ideological shift which would characterise the company’s public-facing artistic programme for the next three decades – the commissioning of plays by professional writers, staged by professional actors. Concurrently, off-stage, an education programme supported individual women with experience of the criminal justice system or those considered to be at risk of entering it to develop skills through training, including writing, performing and film-making, connecting them to a network of social and voluntary sector services.

Clean Break’s Theatre of Necessity  211 Many of the plays commissioned and performed since 1990 have been published and there has been some academic engagement with them, often in the context of the work of one specific writer rather than as a body of literature produced by a particular company (Aston, 2003; Goddard, 2007; Farlan and Ferris, 2013). Additionally, there has been some evaluation of Clean Break’s extensive education programme with women who have experience of the criminal justice system from economic, criminological and policy perspectives (NCP, 2011; Abraham and Busby, 2015). However, the work of the company during its first and foundational decade has had no critical consideration to date. Moreover, as with many of the companies identified with the alternative theatre movement from the late 1960s through to the early 1980s, none of the plays staged by Clean Break during this period have been published. This chapter, therefore, aims to recover the distinctive work developed by the company in its formative years by drawing upon the personal archival materials of Clean Break’s founder members – annotated typescripts, programmes, reviews and production photographs – as well as interviews with members of the company during this first decade of practice.1 I focus on work produced by Clean Break between 1979 and 1989 when it was primarily a cooperative of women with experience of incarceration in prison or special hospitals, who workshopped, wrote and performed plays that explicitly drew upon their experiences. This work had, as founder Hicks says, “an authentic voice” (2018). Interviews with company members from this time offer unprecedented insight into the socio-cultural and political contexts which shaped the work, reaffirming a sense of the collective imperative which fuelled Clean Break’s theatre practice. I propose that Clean Break has developed a distinctive body of prison theatre. This work addresses the material conditions of incarceration, the criminalisation of women who do not conform to legal or social norms, and theatre-making as an act of resistance to institutionalisation, dependent on self-organisation, self-representation and a commitment to directly intervening in the public imagination. Reflecting on her gradual realisation of the systems of oppression that shaped her experience, Hicks explained her rage and refusal to accept the way things were, and her recognition that, through collaborating with other women in Clean Break, alternatives could be realised: I did not want what was on offer. I didn’t want to be a wife, I didn’t want to be a mother, I didn’t want to work in a subservient job. So where do I go? I’m an unacceptable outlaw woman. You find your own. I found my own […] Women only spaces are really vital because if you are separated enough, if you take yourself out of this insidious patriarchy which you don’t recognise when you are in it, you see it. It took me a long while to recognise what that word meant, and it was prison that did that for me […] I looked up

212  Caoimhe McAvinchey “feminist entrepreneur” – feminist entrepreneurs promote feminist values through the process of creating ventures to improve the position of women in society. That is what Clean Break is […] excited about being together, making a life of our own making, not what is offered to us. (2019a)

Clean Break’s Beginnings There is substantial documentation of theatre in prisons detailing a spectrum of practice over the past century (Brewster, 1983; Thompson, 1998; Balfour, 2004; Hughes, 2005; McAvinchey, 2011; 2017). While particular socio-cultural and political conditions led to the formation of Clean Break in HMP Askham Grange in the late 1970s, the prison  – an open prison which prepared women for resettlement and rehabilitation – had some history of theatrical events: nativity plays, talent contests “with tap dancing and singing” (Holborough, 2019a), the occasional touring theatre show and a tradition of prisoners performing a Christmas pantomime for audiences from nearby villages. In 1978 a local newspaper detailed the “Panto in Prison” as containing “a forty strong cast plus Horace the Horse, lent by the York Theatre Royal property department”, with the Vicar of the Askhams and prison chaplain “donning drag costume for a cabaret interlude with the deputy governor […] and the foreman gardener” (Yorkshire Evening Post, 1978). However, there was no sustained drama activity in Askham until the arrival of Hicks and Jacqueline Holborough in 1977. Prior to her sentence, Holborough had trained and worked as an actor in theatre and television and, although Hicks had no theatre training or experience before incarceration, she trained on the Community Theatre programme at Rose Bruford College after her release. Holborough and Hicks met while serving time in HMP Durham’s notorious maximum-security H-wing in 1977 where they attempted to stage both Trojan Women and Jesus Christ Superstar in the exercise yard during, what Hicks referred to as, “those tiny little gaps of not being overlooked” (2019a). However, as Holborough suggested, institutional intervention ensured these ideas were never realised: We had nothing to do because of security. […] We wanted to do something other than just rot in our cells and come out for an hour a day so Jenny and I thought, let’s get some theatre going. So we did. About half a dozen or more women joined us, then a few more. We started improvising, having fun, being defiant against this ridiculous system in the yard […] And there’d be men with guns walking the perimeter, with walkie talkies. We were told that we couldn’t continue as it was a security risk. But I said, it’s theatre and theatre

Clean Break’s Theatre of Necessity  213 is something that we should all be able to do. The wing governor said, yes, I know, but it’s not my decision. So it was stopped. About a week later I was told to pack my bags, that I was going to Askham. Soon after, Jenny’s bags were packed and she went to Askham too. (2019a) Reunited at Askham Grange, Hicks and Holborough established a prison drama workshop with support from Susan McCormick, the governor, and Ros Davies, a musician and teacher in the prison who was very involved in York’s women’s community. Around twenty of Askham’s population of one hundred and twenty women joined the workshop. They were, as Hicks and Holborough explain, women from all parts of the prison, of all classes (Hicks, 2019b). Initially the drama workshop staged published plays by established authors – Joe Orton’s Funeral Games (1970), Spike Milligan and John Antrobus’ The Bedsitting Room (1970), and Agatha Christie’s Black Coffee (1934). But “what started off as a bit of fun and defiance of the system”, as Holborough noted, became something much more radical and personal when the women decided to write their own material: material that was “something about us” (2018). Hicks identified this as a moment of recognition: when you’ve got women only spaces you realise, as we did in the very beginning, ok, so we didn’t have to do prison pantomime, pandering to all the institutional rubbish […] we realised, this is not our voice. You get the freedom to actually throw that away and say there is another voice, something else and that is much more exciting. (2019b) The group set about writing pieces individually and feedback was collective, though Hicks says “there wasn’t a heavy hand” with feedback and “all of us were at different places in our ability and in our experience of writing” (2019b). Some of the work produced was autobiographical, some was imaginative. One piece posed the question, “do plants think?” Another was a lesbian disaster scenario with a couple on an aeroplane about to crash swearing their undying love to each other. Another featured an aggressive girl on a leash (Holborough, 2019b). The group had access to a typewriter to type up their work until staff confiscated it. Despite the governor’s support for the drama workshop, there was resistance from some staff. At times McCormick actively protected the drama workshop, sitting in on rehearsals to ensure that prison staff opposed to the project didn’t obstruct it. Remarkably, McCormick negotiated Home Office permission for the group to perform their work at York Arts Centre and at Goodricke College, University of York in 1978, before an audience unaware of the group’s origins. Publicity for both events refers to the group as ASK’EM OUT, “an ad hoc group of

214  Caoimhe McAvinchey women from a wide variety of social backgrounds, never to be together again, and local only for a short time” (Efemera, 1978). The group performed a collection of scenes and short plays titled Efemera, a play on the words “feminism” and “ephemera”, and a bold declaration of the group’s feminist commitment to say something of lasting significance. HMP Askham Grange was much less oppressive than HMP Durham, but there were still certain rules and regulations that the drama workshop had to adhere to at Askham, including that the women’s writing could not directly refer to their experiences of prison. Despite this censorship, some of the work was explicitly political in critiquing patriarchy and capitalism, and in staging a range of characters that included terrorists and prostitutes. Home Office intervention prevented further public performances by ASK’EM OUT but it could not prevent the women from continuing this work on release. Once again, the Askham Grange governor, McCormick, supported this collective endeavour by ensuring that women were put in contact with each other when their sentence had been served. The now formally named Clean Break Women Prisoners Theatre made its first public performance at the Women’s Arts Alliance, a six-day “celebration of women’s culture and politics” in London in June 1979 (WAA, 1979). The company performed two short plays – A Question of Habit and Under Eros, developed from scenes originally staged in Efemera – amidst a programme which included a workshop on pornography “with some Revolutionary Feminists”, a Matriarchy Study Group and performances by Cunning Stunts (WAA, 1979). This positioning of Clean Break within a wider context of feminist cultural activity and activism is key to understanding the critical work undertaken across its creative practice.

Clean Break’s Activist Project of Culture-Making We hope the plays will give people a better idea about what happens in prison and break down some of the misunderstandings that exist. (Holborough, cited in Palmer and Forlong, 1980) Clean Break’s early work was part of the British alternative theatre movement. In 1968, when theatre was no longer under the censoring eye of the Lord Chamberlain, companies were free to make work about anything they wanted, in any way that they wanted (Craig, 1980). An abundance of companies emerged – frequently collectives and ­cooperatives  – galvanised around a shared political ambition or identity politics, often declared in its name: Gay Sweatshop, Black Theatre Co-operative and Monstrous Regiment, for example. This anti-establishment movement was formed in opposition to mainstream theatre practices. It demanded a radical reconsideration of the form, content and modes of production:

Clean Break’s Theatre of Necessity  215 what stories are staged? By whom? Where? And for what audiences? (Kershaw, 1999). Collective processes of writing and ensemble staging challenged traditional hierarchical modes of production based on the authority of the writer and director. Clean Break’s collective theatremaking practices, while in prison and when released, are therefore informed by wider cultural practices around self-organisation and activism core to the feminist movement. Their early work resonates with theatre companies such as Beryl and Perils and Sphinx, which used theatre as a vehicle for social and political change (Wandor, 1986; Goodman, 1993; Griffin, 2015). When reflecting on the early years of the company, of making and touring theatre with little experience and even less financial resource, Hicks makes clear, “We just did it”, “You’d find a way” but “you can’t do it alone” (2019a). Clean Break’s collective endeavour, of doing what needed to be done, together, is infused in their working practices and reflected in the work of feminist companies that they admired, particularly the American troupes Spiderwoman and Split Britches, who shared an approach built on the tactics of necessity. However, while all the feminist theatre companies echoed the rallying call of “the personal is political”, Clean Break’s work was distinctive: the personal experience of women in prison was highly political but utterly hidden. In The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist Criticism for the Stage and Screen (2013), Jill Dolan demands a call to action for those who make, consume and critique cultural work to attend to the choices we make in our practices. Dolan reminds us: Culture is not an innocent preoccupation. […] Theatre and film show us ourselves in relation to others, or more damagingly, they persuade us of our social invisibility by not representing us at all […] [Feminist criticism] participates in an activist project of culturemaking in which we’re collectively called to see what and who is stunningly, repeatedly evident and what and who is devastatingly, obviously invisible in the art and popular culture we regularly consume for edification and entertainment. (2013, 1–3) For Clean Break, theatre-making was a collective political commitment to representing women in prison, who are “devastatingly, obviously invisible” or too often masked by lazy cultural stereotypes of monstrous or hyper-sexualised women prevalent in tabloid headlines and womenin-prison sexploitation films such as Women in Cages (1971), The Big Bird Cage (1972) and Caged Heat (1974) (Whitley, 2012; Foss, 2018). Theatre-making was a commitment to self-representation, a commitment to give testimony not only through writing but through an embodied, relational encounter with audiences who witnessed the work and heard their voices.

216  Caoimhe McAvinchey Psychologist and feminist Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1990) offers productive frameworks for thinking about voice in relation to Clean Break. Gilligan identified the ways in which women moderated their voice in different social contexts, including what they said, the tone and register in which they spoke, and the personal and political implications of this. She distinguished two modes of speaking. One where women feared that others would condemn or hurt them if they spoke, that others would not listen or understand, that speaking would only lead to further confusion, that it was better to appear “selfless”, to give up their voices and keep the peace. (Gilligan, 2013, x) The other was a “choice to speak”, “a relational voice: a voice that insists on staying in connection and most centrally staying in connections with women” (Gilligan, 2013, x, xiii). For Clean Break, the choice to speak out about women’s experience of penal policy and practice was an insistence on the credibility of these voices, an inversion of structures of authority that had too often ignored, dismissed or discredited this experience (Kennedy, 1993; 2018). In prison, women were expected “to give up their voices and keep the peace” and, as the public staging of Efemera confirms, the content of their work was often censored. Once released, Clean Break was compelled to speak – to campaign, agitate and engage publics through theatre as a relational act that insisted on connecting the publics inside the prison walls with those beyond them. Holborough’s comments in a 1984 interview offer insight into the clarity of Clean Break’s commitment to theatre as a radical, relational practice: “We’re not trying to push a message […] We’re trying to communicate, to share our experiences. We’re trying to make people remember that while they’re actually watching us on stage there are women locked away” (Holborough, 1984b). Consequently, in the remainder of the chapter, through close attention to two plays written by Holborough, Killers (1980) and Decade (1984a), I examine the ways in which Clean Break members drew upon their personal and collective experiences to write and perform plays that exposed the structures of oppression which delivered additional, state-sanctioned punishments beyond the removal of liberty.

Killers and Decade How absurd it seems that we should be kept here like this. In separate little compartments, filed away. For three years. Or thirty. A matter of numbers. (Holborough, 1980, 10)

Clean Break’s Theatre of Necessity  217 When the members of Clean Break were released, no longer restricted by regulations which censored any direct reference to prison and people’s experience of it, the collective immediately addressed the personal and political implications of imprisonment. Both Killers and Decade are explicitly located in HMP Durham’s maximum-security wing for women, H-wing, referred to in the press as “She-Wing”. H-wing was notorious for its oppressive environment and Hicks and Holborough spent a number of months there. Both plays offer testimony to the embodied and affective experience of their incarceration, fuelled by their activist commitment to campaign for wider public awareness of prison conditions and state-sanctioned neglect of women within a system designed and built for the vast majority of inmates – men. Killers is set in a cell in H-wing on Jubilee Day, 1977. The original production was written and performed by Holborough, with live songs written and performed by Cat Coull. In Killers we meet a young, middle-class woman, who has recently arrived in prison: “To find yourself suddenly behind bars, in prison, comes as a surprise. For most of us it’s not something we ever expect to happen in our lives” (Holborough, 1980, 1). This unnamed woman addresses the audience directly, bringing us on a guided tour of prison life from the confines of her cell. The passage of time is marked by Coull’s songs, many of which lament the life that continues beyond the prison walls. Like many of Clean Break’s earlier plays, Killers uses humour to expose details of institutional life. For example, when the woman reflects on her day she suddenly catches herself saying something that would be met with institutional disapproval, and imagines how Mrs Thomas, a prison officer, would respond: All this rain. So depressing. On and off all day. Nearly wrecked the sports event in the yard. Not that it would have mattered. I didn’t win the Jubilee mug with the Queen’s picture on it. But who would want a mug with a picture of your landlady on it? Could have used it to pee in I suppose. Oooooh! How can you think thoughts like that? After all the time and effort that’s gone into making this a meaningful day for you women. Union Jacks hanging from the suicide nettings. Edible food – very nearly coming up to Daily Mirror description. Streamers, paper hats – no expense spared. And didn’t we invite the Irish contingent to organise a special Jubilee tea with cucumber sandwiches and green jelly as colourful as any street party said an official. Is this how you thank us? There are people starving in Manchester. Crude comments about the gracious Landlady. And you a one time girl-guide patrol leader. You should be ashamed! (Holborough, 1980, 1–2)

218  Caoimhe McAvinchey This short monologue reveals aspects about prison architecture, the prison population, the socio-economic conditions of life beyond the institution as well as information about her leadership role in the girl guides. This extract is characteristic of the rest of the play, where rather than raging against the injustices of the conditions, the woman dissects and exposes the everyday extremities of the system with a humour that becomes increasingly scathing. A humour that, as one critic noted, is “more eloquent than a score of White Papers” (Foot, 1981, n.p.). Written by Holborough, four years after Killers, Decade is much more explicitly angry about the social and political implications of incarceration. There are two characters, Mo, a prison maintenance worker, and Jane Wood, a prisoner sentenced to 298 years imprisonment for multiple murders. Jane is based on Judith Ward, a woman who was convicted in 1974 for IRA terrorism acts, including the M62 bombing, which killed twelve off-duty British soldiers and their families. Ward was held in H-wing, during and after Holborough and Hicks’ time there and she was released in 1992 when her conviction was judged wrongful. Ward had a history of mental illness. The combination of her fantastical and inconsistent statements along with public and political outrage and fear in the aftermath of the bombing ensured a swift rather than just outcome in her trial, “Rushed through […] like a dose of Epsoms to keep the public confident,” as Jane comments: “Without us this wing would have no reason to exist, it would be seen for what it is, a control unit with nothing to control” (Holborough, 1984a, 13). In Decade major public events mark the passage of time. Like Killers, it frames the Queen’s Jubilee in 1977 as the background to the opening scene but the action extends across years, marked by the murder of Lord Mountbatten in 1979, and, in 1984, “A long, disruptive miners’ strike, dockers striking, a bomb at Harrods just before Christmas, new plans for a Channel Tunnel, nearly 4 million out of work” (36). Through conversations between the two women we see how both lives – one with liberty and one without – are shaped by political factors beyond their control. The scapegoating of particular women as public enemies for the sake of political expediency, to appease a swelling public unrest, fuels Jane’s comment: Which is greater punishment, death or endless rot in this vile box? […] I’m like a sin eater. Forced to swallow all the filth in society so it can sleep peaceful in its cosy bed. That’s what we all are here, sin eaters. (Holborough, 1984a, 13–14) Jane’s assertion here recalls discredited nineteenth-century criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s representation of criminalised women in The Female Offender (1895) as “doubly exceptional, as a woman and as a

Clean Break’s Theatre of Necessity  219 criminal”, and therefore “a monster” (151–152). Forty years since the genesis of Clean Break, the vilification of women in prison as doubly deviant persists, particularly in the media (Barnet, 2006). They are considered to be women who have exceeded the legal frameworks which protect society and the law of the social which advocates gendered, “feminine” values of gentleness, humility, familial commitment, obedience and selflessness.

“We’re Only Women” The history of HMP Durham’s H-wing reveals much about how prisons have been constructed as physical manifestations of penal philosophies and political reaction to socio-cultural anxieties (Stern, Garland, Moran, 2018). This unit was once E-wing, built in 1965 in response to social and political paranoia about the containment of high-profile and violent criminals, including “The Great Train Robbers” and the Kray twins. During the six years of its existence as a men’s maximum-security unit, inmates staged a series of protests, riots and hunger strikes over wing conditions. Mountbatten reported in 1966 that “The conditions in these blocks are such as no country with a record of civilised behaviour would tolerate any longer than is absolutely essential as a stopgap measure” (para 202). Condemned by two government enquiries as inhumane, Durham was closed in 1971 (Mountbatten, 1966; Radzinowiez Committee, ACPS, 1968). However, in 1974, the wing was re-opened, this time as a women’s prison for Category A prisoners, those considered a threat to the public, police or national security. When E-wing was operational it held twenty men convicted for serious and violent offences. When H-wing was opened, it held thirty-five women. Only three of the women held in this maximum security complex were Category A prisoners, women convicted for acts of terrorism and murder. The remainder had committed non-violent crime, mainly theft and fraud, and were serving short sentences – the “day trippers” (Holborough, 1984a, 11). Both Killers and Decade give direct access to the architectural and material conditions of H-wing as “a tomb”, “a concrete submarine”, “a prison within a prison: buried in the middle of larger building housing 1000 men” (Holborough, 1980, 1). In Killers, the woman reflects on her immediate experience of living in a high-security unit: One key, two bolts and a few thousand volts to keep my door locked. […] Is there some subtle message here? Some expectation of greatness yet to come. Should I prepare myself? Must I be ready to live up to all of this? Will the day arrive when I shall be required to smash through tons of concrete and steel. Rip down gates. Tear up tarmac. In my desperate desire to devastate. (Holborough, 1980, 15)

220  Caoimhe McAvinchey The use of Durham’s high-security H-wing to hold women regardless of categorisation or sentence duration reveals much about the historical lack of consideration given to the needs of women in the criminal justice system (Kennedy, 1993; McIvor, 2004). Women prisoners constitute a small minority in prison systems in the UK and across the world; historically over 90% of the global criminal justice system’s defendants have been men (Walmsley, 2016). Until the 1970s, criminological research largely ignored women in prison, focusing its concerns on the male majority (Stern, 1998; McIvor, 2004). Jane’s reflections on her position as a pawn within the prison system speak of the experiential impact of the historical gendering of the criminological subject as male. As she says: If I were a man there’d be a dozen dispersal units to shunt me around but as a woman I’m just a token. A freak. Caged up in this tiny space in the middle of a man’s prison because I’m all there is. (Holborough, 1984a, 13) The lack of consideration of the female criminal subject reveals social and political neglect and dismissal: women are marginalised three times over – because they are women, because they are criminals and because they are too few in number to be given real consideration. The particularity of H-wing as a women-only unit within the compound of a male prison is not unknown; the relatively low numbers of women in prison have meant that, rather than build new units with women’s particular needs in mind, governments have portioned off and adapted sections of men’s prisons (Moore and Scranton, 2014). Although segregated, the omnipresence of the male prisoners becomes part of the prison environment – an additional level of surveillance that impacts on the women’s self-regulation. In Killers this produces an aural soundscape that relentlessly objectifies the women: “Do you hear those guys shouting out the window again? Every night. On and on about their appetites. Drive you mad. It’s tempting to shout back but nobody ever does – not from this wing” (Holborough, 1980, 2). The proximity of the men meant that additional unwritten regulations were enforced which restricted the women’s already very limited freedoms. In Decade this is reported in terms of vision and the need for the women to cover their bodies (rather than for the men to change their behaviour): “The men, faces pressed against window, staring in here […] They won’t even let us tuck our shirts up on exercise, do you know that? No shorts, there’ve been complaints from the men. Got to keep everything covered” (Holborough, 1984a, 10). This litany of senseless, ad hoc rules was, as Hicks recounts, part of a culture of “suppression […] that was pretty much unconscious. There weren’t necessarily any rules that actually said, you cannot do this, it was instinctive where they’d say, ‘No, no you can’t do that!’” (2019b). However, by retelling the events within the context of a play, as told by a female narrator – a reliable witness to

Clean Break’s Theatre of Necessity  221 events – Clean Break regains control of the narrative through a dialogue with audiences and thereby rejects the absurdity of such “instinctive” restrictions of women. Over the last three decades, there has been significant research into the experience of women in the British criminal justice system which both acknowledges and addresses this social and political negligence (Ramsbotham, 1997; Women in Prison, 2017). While women make up typically 4–6% of the overall British prison population, the vast majority of women serve short sentences for non-violent crimes. Baroness Corston’s “Review of Women with Particular Vulnerabilities in the Criminal Justice System” (2007) exposed the intersectional injustices that shape the lives of many women who offend, including poverty, racism, abuse, addiction, poor mental and physical health, and homelessness. Corston argued that many criminalised women are “troubled” rather than “troublesome” (16) and that incarceration has long-term and devastating consequences not only for the women but also for their families. Even with a short sentence, a woman’s life will be utterly upended. She is likely to lose her home, her children will be taken into care, and, longer term, her criminal record will mean that she will have permanently reduced opportunities for employment and social mobility. Corston’s anger at the state’s complicity in this social rupture is explicit: “I have been dismayed at the high prevalence of institutional misunderstanding within the criminal justice system of the things that matter to women and at the shocking level of unmet need” (16). For Clean Break, the proposition was clear: if politicians and those who work within the criminal justice system cannot – and will not – attend to the material conditions of prisons, nor to the criminalisation of women, then they would intervene, doing so with theatre-making practices that model new alternatives, offer resistance to institutionalisation, and establish a collective commitment to directly intervene in the public imagination. The ways in which penal policy and practice reinforce the oppression of women in prison through language, structures and treatment (Kennedy, 1993; 2018) are directly marked in Killers: When the men were here there were protests. Demonstrations every day. Hunger strikes, mutinies, escape attempts. Questions in the house. The media waited eagerly for news of fresh disturbance from Durham’s E-wing. Committees of experts came and went filing reports about psychological damage and conditions intolerable to civilised society. So they moved the men out. And after a decent lapse of time and a change of title, they moved the women in. Since which time the wing has hardly been known to exist. There are only women here now. Tension is all pre-menstrual. Give ‘em enough Valium and they’ll fade from view. (Holborough, 1980, 11)

222  Caoimhe McAvinchey This differentiated response of prison staff, the general public and government to women in prison is piercingly distilled by Jane in Decade, “Christ, men go on hunger strike or in solitary, women diet and stay in their rooms” (Holborough, 1984a, 34). Written nearly thirty years before Corston’s report, Decade exposes the political disregard of the specific needs of women and how, for women, speaking out against the additional punishments administered through incarceration can lead to increased medication or the threat of the loss of parole. Gilligan’s identification of women “choosing” not to speak for fear of condemnation and hurt (2013, x) takes on genuine significance in Decade: In Russia a political prisoner is considered insane and kept drugged in a hospital. […] And in Britain a woman criminal is considered insane and kept drugged in a prison. […] The whole thing is designed to keep us gagged and in our place. We’re all like that here, statutory rights don’t matter. We’re only women. We don’t riot because then they’d set the men on us – and the dogs. […] I could start a revolution in the bog but mention solidarity and the subject is changed to parole dates. They’ve got too much to lose. (Holborough, 1984a, 11) Jane echoes Corston’s tone of exasperated ire at a penal system that refuses to recognise its maltreatment of women as a political choice in a patriarchal society that threatens and forecloses any articulation of this injustice with additional, unsanctioned punishment. Despite the fact that H-wing was a maximum-security prison, equipped with the most advanced surveillance and detainment technologies, medication and docile behaviour, self-regulated through fear, were – and still are – the most powerful regulatory techniques of the state (Foucault, 1977). For the next thirty years, HMP Durham’s H-wing continued to operate despite ongoing concerns about conditions, provision of care for vulnerable inmates and the number of women who committed suicide in custody. In 2004, Anne Owers, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, published a damning report and, in language echoing the words of Mountbatten nearly forty years before, stated that H-wing was a “forbidding physical environment”, “restrictive, oppressive and claustrophobic” and ultimately an unsuitable environment to hold women (1, 15). H-wing is now closed.

Conclusion When Clean Break was founded its intention was to highlight women’s experience within the criminal justice system as the manifestation of a patriarchal capitalist society’s neglect and dismissal of women who break legal and social laws. Four decades later, while the organisational

Clean Break’s Theatre of Necessity  223 processes of the company have changed, the original imperative for its work remains. The feminisation of poverty (Bradshaw, 2002) and the elision between welfare policy and penal policy (Wacquant, 2011) mean that women are particularly vulnerable to political forces of regulation and punishment. Despite successive governments’ rhetoric about tackling and reducing crime, the prison population has more than doubled since 1979. In the face of government enquiries which evidence how and why incarceration is the least effective punishment for the reduction of women’s recidivism and is, in fact, the most damaging – to individual women and society – political engagement with penal reform has been glacial and negligible (Ramsbotham, 1997; Corston, 2007; Women in Prison, 2017). Clean Break, through its education programme working directly with women who have experience of the criminal justice system, and its extensive canon of plays which decimate stereotypes and engage in a relational encounter with audiences, addresses this political negligence. Andrea’s words which open the chapter, “I am a theatre. Sometimes I turn myself inside out […] I am an audience watching itself”, are a profound acknowledgement of the relational, reflexive act of theatremaking which implicitly has faith in an audience that will listen, that will engage, that will be part of the dialogic act of communication. Clean Break takes care and responsibility to expose and address the specific gendered inequalities that shape both cultural discourse and penal practice. It is still a theatre of necessity.

Note 1 Sincerest thanks to Anna Herrmann, Jennifer Hicks, Jacqueline Holborough, Lucy Perman and Róisín McBrinn for facilitating access to Clean Break’s work, for permission to quote from unpublished works, and for very many conversations which have informed this chapter.

Works Cited Abraham, N. and S. Busby. 2015. “Celebrating Success: How has Participation in Clean Break’s Theatre Education Programme Contributed to Individual’s Involvement in Professional or Community Arts Practices?”. London: Central School of Speech and Drama. Advisory Council on the Penal System. 1968. The Regime for Long-Term Prisoners in Conditions of Maximum Security (Radzinowicz Report). London: HMSO. Andrea. 1987. Voices from Prison. Unpublished Text. London: Clean Break Archive. Aston, E. 2003. Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights 1990–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Balfour, M., ed. 2004. Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice. Bristol: Intellect.

224  Caoimhe McAvinchey Barnet, B. 2006. “Medea in the Media: Narrative and Myth in Newspaper Coverage of Women Who Kill Their Children”. Journalism 7.4: 411–432. Birch, A. 2019. [BLANK]. London: Oberon. Bradshaw, S. 2002. Gendered Poverties and Power Relations: Looking Inside Communities and Households. Managua: ICD, Embajada de Holanda, Puntos de Encuentro. Brewster, L. 1983. “An Evaluation of the Arts-in-Corrections Program of the California Department of Corrections California”. Sacramento: California Department of Corrections. Christie, A. 1934. Black Coffee. London: A. Ashley & Son. Corston, J. 2007. “The Corston Report: A Report by Baroness Jean Corston of a Review of Women with Particular Vulnerabilities in the Criminal Justice System”. London: Crown Copyright. Craig, S. 1980. Dreams and Deconstructions: Alternative Theatre in Britain. London: Amber Lane Press. Dolan, J. 2013. The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist Criticism for the Stage and Screen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Efemera. 1978. Original Programme for ASK’EM OUT. Personal Archive of J. Holborough. Farfan, P. and L. Ferris. 2013. Contemporary Women Playwrights: Into the Twenty-First Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foot, D. 1981. “Clean Break, Killers and In or Out?” Guardian. 19 January 1981. Personal Archive of J. Holborough [no page known]. Foss, K., ed. 2018. Demystifying the Big House: Exploring Prison Experience and Media Representations. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish, translated by A. Sheridan. London: Penguin Books. Franzmann, V. 2014. Sounds Like an Insult. Unpublished Play Text. London: Clean Break Archive. Gilligan, C. 2013 [1990]. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Goddard, L. 2007. Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Goodman, L. 1993. Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own. London and New York: Routledge. Griffin, G. 2015. “Mrs Worthington’s Daughters: Drama”. In The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970-Present, Vol. 10, edited by M. Eagleton and E. Parker, 51–64. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hicks, J. 2018. Interview with Chapter Author. London, 18 December 2018. Hicks, J. 2019a. Speech to Clean Break Members. London, 17 July 2019. Hicks, J. 2019b. Interview with Chapter Author. London, 17 July 2019. Holborough, J. 1980. Killers. Unpublished Play Text. Personal Archive of J. Holborough. Holborough, J. 1984a. Decade. Unpublished Play Text. Personal Archive of J. Holborough. Holborough, J. 1984b. In “Whether You Agree or Not, This is an Experience That Should Not Be Missed”. Unknown Newspaper Cutting. Personal Archive of J. Holborough.

Clean Break’s Theatre of Necessity  225 Holborough, J. 2018. Interview with Chapter Author. London, 18 December 2018. Holborough, J. 2019a. Interview with Chapter Author. London, 17 July 2019. Holborough, J. 2019b. Speech to Clean Break Members. London, 17 July 2019. HM Chief Inspector of Prisons. 2004. “Report on an Unannounced Inspection of HMP Durham 5–9 January 2004”. London: Home Office. Hughes, J. 2005. Doing the Arts Justice: A Review of Research Literature, Practice and Theory. Canterbury: The Unit for the Arts and Offenders. Kennedy, H. 1993. Eve Was Framed: Women and British Justice. London: Vintage. Kennedy, H. 2018. Eve was Shamed: How British Justice is Failing Women. London: Chatto and Windus. Kirkwood, L. 2009. It Felt Empty When the Heart Went at First But It’s Alright Now. London: Nick Hern Books. Kershaw, B. 1999. The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard. London: Routledge. Lavery, B. 1991. Wicked. London: Methuen. Lombroso, C. and W. Ferrero. 1895. The Female Offender. London: T. Fisher Unwin. NCP. 2011. Unlocking Value: The Economic Benefit of the Arts in Criminal Justice. London: New Philanthropy Capital. McAvinchey, C. 2011. Theatre & Prison. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McAvinchey, C. 2017. “The Performance of Prison Theatre Practices: Questions of Evidence’. In Evidence and Impact in Theatre, Music and Art, edited by M. Reason and N. Rowe, 139–154. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McIvor, G., ed. 2004. Women Who Offend. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Millingan, S. and J. Antrobus. 1970. The Bedsitting Room. Walton-on-theNaze: Hobbs. Moore, L. and P. Scranton. 2014. The Incarceration of Women: Punishing Bodies, Breaking Spirits. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Moran, D. 2018. Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration. London and New York: Routledge. Moss, C. 2015. Sweatbox. Unpublished Text. London: Clean Break Archive. Mottley, E. and J. Hicks. 1980. In or Out? Unpublished Play Text. London: Clean Break Archive. Mountbatten, Lord of Burma. 1966. Report of the Inquiry into Prison Escapes and Security. London: HMSO. Orton, Joe. 1970. Funeral Games; and the Good and Faithful Servant. London: Methuen. “Panto in a Prison”. 1978. Yorkshire Evening Post. 1 February 1978. n.p. Personal Archive of J. Holborough. Palmer, M. and J. Forlong. 1980. “Inside Look at Arts Behind Bars”. Newspaper Unknown. Exact Date Unknown. Personal Archive of J. Holborough. Ramsbotham, D. 1997. Women in Prison: A Thematic Review by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons. London: Home Office. Randall, P. 1991. 24%. Unpublished Play Text. London: Clean Break Archive. Stern, V. 1998. A Sin Against the Future: Imprisonment in the World. Boston, MA: Northeastern University. Thompson, J., ed. 1998. Prison Theatre: Perspectives and Practices. London: Jessica Kingsley Publications.

226  Caoimhe McAvinchey WAA. 1979. Women’s Arts Alliance Festival Programme. 8–17th June 1979. Personal Archive of J. Holborough. Wacquant, L. 2011. Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State. Cambridge: Polity. Walmsley, R. 2016. World Prison Population List, 11th edition. London: Institute for Criminal Policy Research, Birkbeck College. Wandor, M. 1986. Carry On, Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Whitley, K. 2012. “Monstrous, Demonic and Evil: Media Constructs of Women Who Kill”. In The Harms of Crime Media: Essays on Racism, Sexism and Class Stereotype, edited by D. Bissler and J.L. Conners, 91–110. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Women in Prison. 2017. The Corston Report 10 Years On: How Far Have We Come on the Road to Reform for Women Affected by the Criminal Justice System? London: Women in Prison.

13 Unlocking Potential The Role of Theatre Writing in Prisons in the Work of Clean Break Anna Herrmann, Deborah Bruce and Clare Barstow Clean Break is a theatre company founded by two women, Jacqueline Holborough and Jenny Hicks, while serving prison sentences at HMP Askham Grange in Yorkshire in 1979. Now celebrating our fortieth birthday, we have dedicated the past four decades to creating groundbreaking theatre which shines a light on the experiences of women in the criminal justice system, deepening understanding and exposing the injustices many women face, especially in a damaging criminal justice system and within a society that judges women differently from men. We have retained a strong women-only identity, and at the heart of the theatre we make is the participation of women themselves, from our projects in theatre writing and theatre making in women’s prisons across the country through to our Members Programme at our studios in Kentish Town, north London. For over twenty years, in this women-only trauma-informed space, we have been running theatre education courses and providing holistic support for women with experience of the criminal justice system and women on its fringes because of drug/alcohol use and/or mental health needs. Hundreds of women have come through our wooden doors, referred by drug and alcohol or mental health services, via prison/probation or through word of mouth, unsure and anxious of what lies inside but emboldened by the tiny shard of belief that change is possible. Clean Break’s studios have become a lifeline for many women – a place where women feel cared for, listened to and free to let their imaginations take over, a place where the possibilities inherent in their futures can be tentatively reached for and sometimes joyfully fulfilled. Our contribution to this book focuses on our theatre-writing workshops in prisons. Over the next few pages, the reader will be offered an overview of the aims and challenges of working in a prison setting from three different Clean Break women. Contributions come from myself, as Joint Artistic Director; from Deborah Bruce, one of our commissioned writers; and from Clare Barstow, a former prisoner, who, during her long sentence, participated in many of our theatre-writing workshops and now, post-release, is a Member of Clean Break. We hope that these

228  Herrmann, Bruce & Barstow different voices will heighten understanding of the transformative power of writing in prison settings. Clean Break has delivered its theatrewriting workshops for a number of years in women’s prisons across England, through a contract with the education provider NOVUS. In the shape of a three-day workshop we offer, however briefly, the experience of a healthy and nurturing culture – where women are valued for what they bring, where they are inspired with hope and creativity, and are treated with respect. We always work with a minimum of two artists in these settings, a core member of Clean Break and one other, often our writer under commission. The days are long, from 8am to 5pm, and the environment is challenging. Prison staff may or may not be in attendance and the women participating typically have a lot going on in their lives. In recent years, there have frequently been two or more women in a group of twelve on observation (meaning they are considered at risk of suicide or self-harm) and their orange folders will be handed over to us to update with comments on their well-being throughout the day. This is a stark reminder of the vulnerability of women in the criminal justice system and the high levels of self-harm, particularly in women’s prisons. In these spaces, where we work regularly, we have resisted the request to become prison key-holders. This would be helpful to the staff who have to escort us everywhere, but we are keen not to become part of the prison industry, and to remain a healthy step removed. We believe this is an important boundary for the women we engage with and look to creatively support. Our residency starts with a half-day taster session, held a couple of weeks in advance of the three-day project itself. We have found this to be a useful way of making sure women know what they have signed up to, and also, if the numbers are low, to engage the women in recruiting others to the project. When we return for the full three-day workshop we bring a toolbox of writing, drama and group work exercises. This provides a scaffolding for women to build and develop their own creativity and to spark their imaginations. On day one, many women who choose to participate are unsure, hesitant and trying to work out whether we are genuine or trustworthy. Others have taken part before and bring confidence and an eagerness to start writing. A vital part of the process is to establish and then maintain a non-judgemental, safe, fun and creative space. Building on this foundation, we bring in images or security cleared props to help steer women away from their own, directly autobiographical, stories and into their imaginations. Creating a character different from herself, each woman will produce her own piece of writing which will be performed either by herself or by one of a team of two actors that we bring to the prison on the final day. It really honours the work the women produce to see it performed skilfully by professional actors. As Bruce suggests below, it can even lead the women to question whether we have made improvements to the work without their knowledge.

Unlocking Potential with Clean Break  229 For the women who participate, these three days result in skills development, increased confidence and a new sense of self-belief. For those who join as the audience at the sharing on the final afternoon, it also opens a door of possibility and they may take part next time. In the stark dehumanising environment of prison, it is vital that prisoners are reminded that we are all human, that we all have ideas and potential, and that everyone has a voice and deserves to be heard. Clean Break artists are changed too. The insights this unique experience can offer to our commissioned playwrights and theatre artists means that they can find themselves changed forever by the experience. They often feel compelled to honour the complexity and multifaceted realities of the lives they encounter through the work they create. When we work in prisons with a writer who is under commission, we are clear and transparent with the participants that she is writing a play about women in the criminal justice system. We are also clear that the purpose of the workshop is not for the writer’s research. Outside of the workshop, women are invited to talk to the writer if they would like her to know anything about their particular situation. Importantly, though, a formal agreement between Clean Break and the women sharing their stories states that nothing they share will be taken and used directly as material for a play. Many women choose to talk – being listened to non-judgementally is sadly lacking in our prison system. Regardless of whether or not individuals share their experiences, the whole group is credited anonymously for contributing to the development of the play. The ethics of this exchange of personal history are not straightforward so it is important not to be complacent and not to think that good intentions are enough. Clean Break began as a company exclusively made up of women exprisoners who both wrote and performed their own work. This changed after the first decade as the founding members moved on and the need for sustainable and professional structures became evident. Now, as we look back over the past forty years we have an amazing canon of plays from many of the best British female playwrights. This would not have been possible without this change of structure and practice. However, our roots are strong, and we continuously reflect on where the voices and experiences of women prisoners live in our work. Our vision is to harness the synergy between artists and our Members to produce groundbreaking theatre which both lives up to the 1990s disability activist saying, “nothing about us without us”, and also has the power to engage audiences, change hearts and minds, and influence prison reform. We are uniquely placed to ensure that the strong voices and stories of women prisoners transcend the prison walls, and are heard outside. This responsibility is one the company takes seriously, and delivering theatre-writing workshops in prisons will continue to be central to us achieving this.

Anna Herrmann, Joint Artistic Director, July 2019

230  Herrmann, Bruce & Barstow Experiences of a Commissioned Writer The morning session starts at 8.15am so in the winter you’re leaving home in the dark. You may have woken a few times before the alarm, worried you’re going to sleep through it. You’ve emptied your bag the night before, checked and removed the long list of things you’re not allowed to take in – memory sticks, blue tack, scissors, ibuprofen. You’ve got your passport and you’ve switched off your phone, ready to hand over. Prisons are tricky places to get to, but here you are. It’s a big step from the outside world through the gate, and a long walk from the gate, through security, through more gates – gates seemingly separated by nothing but long walks and gates – to the Education block. You’re nervous because you’re just about to meet a load of people you’ve never met before and you’re going to ask them to write. And writing is a vulnerable thing. Leading a writing workshop in a women’s prison – a place where being vulnerable is walking a tightrope of risk – is complex and particular. But you’re prepared. As a Writer in Residence at Clean Break, at their Kentish Town base, you’ve lead writing sessions with women who have been in prison or had experience of the criminal justice system, and the thing you noticed, then, was that outside of this one specific area of common ground, these women were all entirely different. Their backgrounds, their writing experience, their confidence in a group, why they’re there, why one week they’re not there, what they bring, what they take away. What they need. And it’s the same now, inside this classroom in this HMP Education block, the women trickling into the room each carry stones of different weights in their pockets. You are prepared, over-prepared probably. You’ve planned a class for everyone. A class for people who write, for people who have never written but want to write, for people who want to write but don’t want to look as if they want to write, and for people who don’t want to write at all. You’ve planned the class, up to and including the possibility that you will dump the plan and follow what you’re given in the moment. You are sitting in a circle watching each other. You are waiting a few moments in case there are more people to arrive. There’s thirteen on the list but only eleven women in the room, and actually two of the women in the room aren’t on the list. Someone comes in and goes out again, that’s Afra, she’s on the list, her friend tells you. Is she coming back? Her friend doesn’t know. The prison officer’s radio is turned up quite high, you wonder if he’ll turn it down. You think of titles that you might offer for a ninety second stream of consciousness writing exercise. All you can think of is Gate, and Key. You notice one woman is sitting outside of the circle, you invite her to move her chair in, she doesn’t want to. That’s fine.

Unlocking Potential with Clean Break  231 You might as well start. You start with the exercise where you can write anything you like but you can only use twenty one words. The second time you do it four people volunteer to read theirs out, one is very funny which is a good icebreaker. Someone points out that it was twenty two words, but all agree it does not matter because it was really good. Now The one, Two, three, four, Three, two, one exercise distracting your brain while you write. During this exercise the woman on the outside of the circle moves her chair in surreptitiously. Afra reappears as you are explaining the alphabet one where you put A, B, C etc Down the margin of your paper, Empowering you to Free your mind from the burden of writing something “Good enough”, and instead releasing a Hopeful, uncensored, soaring Imagination that no one, not even you, can Judge you for. Kerry reads hers out. It’s a story about a Little boy who Mends broken dreams. She has No idea where that came from. Over a three-day writing residency in a prison, women in the group will often be amazed at what they have written. You will never change a word of their work, but they may still accuse you of rewriting it and making it “good”. Creating a character encourages you to consider what it’s like to be someone else, to vicariously process events and relationships in your own life, to see things from another point of view, to access empathy, to unpick why people might do what they do and become who they are.

232  Herrmann, Bruce & Barstow It’s transformative. It illuminates your own narrative journey. It is a lit match in a dark tunnel, an escape from the situation you are in. And if your situation happens to be that you are in prison, that’s valuable. Many, many times, women will say that writing makes them forget they’re in prison. Writing and sharing writing builds strength and self-worth, and gives access to an articulate language through which we might begin to trust and rely upon each other in a way that may previously have made us feel vulnerable. When you leave at the end of the day you will notice two things. First, that the very act of leaving is a euphoria; your head will sing  – I am leaving! I am leaving! – all the way out as you follow the key holder back through all those gates. The sense of your freedom in the pores of your skin is vivid and literal. Second, you will think of these women and imagine them still there in the prison for hours and days and weeks afterwards. The thought of them may come to you long after that. You will think of the words that they spoke and the words that they wrote, and the words that they couldn’t speak or write. You will wonder if they are writing. You will hope they are. You will wish for them to experience the lifting off moment when some characters you have made up in your head start speaking to each other without you telling them what to say. What part of the brain breaks off and does the work for you? It’s an exhilarating feeling, you will want them to experience it. You will wonder how you would fare in prison. You will ask yourself, who am I without all the circumstances of my life? You will imagine dismantling the scaffolding of your identity; what if you were no longer free to actively fulfil the daily functions of “mother”, “playwright”, “neighbour”, “customer”, “daughter”, “colleague”? Stripped back. Rudderless. You will think about how quickly everything can unravel in a life, how no-one is immune. You will think about cuts to mental health services, cuts to social care, family support systems, education, the chaos caused by the rigidity of universal credit, the jaw-dropping lack of governmental joined-up thinking, how almost half of women in prison are victims of domestic violence and a third spent time in local authority care as a child. You will think about the 17,000 children in the UK separated from their mothers by imprisonment. You will be blindsided by the overwhelming injustice of it all. You will think about how experience is deeply buried in language. You will remember that the Greeks told stories to make some sense of the things they could not understand and how myths were “designed to tap into the vein of heroism within ourselves” (Armstrong, 2006, 141). You will think about how everyone has an imagination. It is a key.

Unlocking Potential with Clean Break  233 It unlocks ideas that would otherwise remain unexamined and out of reach. It opens up the gate into the unconscious mind. You will try, very hard, to write from this place from now on.

Deborah Bruce, a Clean Break commissioned writer Writing in Prison When I was first arrested and put on remand in Holloway prison in 1992, I didn’t know how I would cope. Being locked up in a prison cell for hours on end was scary and tedious. The monotony was mind-numbing. The many trips to court only added to the tension and stress. I had entered a cold, dark, grey prison world and the only possibility of finding some light was through creativity. As I was maintaining my innocence, I knew that if I was found guilty I could face a long time inside as the chance of getting parole was pretty slim. Fortunately, the education department was fantastic, and the creative writing teacher was supportive and encouraging. He motivated me to enter the Koestler Awards, an annual scheme in memory of Arthur Koestler which rewards achievement in the arts. The year before I had completed a drama writing course at the City Lit and started a play about the suffragist Ruth St Maur called The Lady and the Gypsy. I was to win over a hundred awards for writing and painting throughout my time inside. I used to enter the Koestler Award most years just to get the judges’ feedback on pieces I was working on. Hackney Drama Group came into Holloway and when I showed them the Ruth St Maur play they agreed to stage it. We performed it in June that year in the Chapel. So, writing became my saviour and confidence booster. I then wrote a play called Biting Back about women who had been maligned in history. Being creative and using my imagination in prison was so vital as I needed an everyday escape from the harshness and brutality of the prison regime. I would not have survived without a pen and paper as writing became cathartic and healing and really allowed my personal well-being to stay intact. It provided a much-needed outlet for my emotions as my feelings often burned into the page. I also founded a Holloway magazine called Bang Up to encourage other women to write. I had been a freelance journalist prior to coming to prison so it was a natural progression to do this in every establishment I stayed in. I was introduced to the editor of Inside Time, the national prison newspaper. They encouraged me to write regular pieces for them and I did throughout my prison sentence and upon release. There are so many different noises and emotions running riot inside prison, but instead of it proving to be a distraction, I was determined to use it to add colour to my work. The violence and bullying weren’t always easy to cope with, and the suicides and deaths meant the place

234  Herrmann, Bruce & Barstow and experience were often draining. However, my most powerful work was often written as a response to such dramas and tragedies. Regularly stories that seemed to be set in a different world were somehow subconsciously about my environment. It was hard to move on from this experience and it was to inform my work for over twenty-five years. I was transferred to HMP Bullwood Hall in Essex and there I wrote another play about women’s roles in religion called Goddesses Are Not Made in Heaven, and this was performed in the gym there. I found out about a national publication called Prison Writing founded by a Probation Officer. He liked my work and published my short story about a young girl’s experience in prison called “Looking Towards a New Horizon”. I became a regular contributor to Prison Writing over the years. There were, though, drawbacks to writing too. A piece I wrote about the new volumetric control rules, where you had to fit all your possessions in two boxes, led to me being transferred to HMP Durham, miles from my family. Volumetric Control made writing in prison tough as you had to throw much of it away or hand out the better pieces for your family and friends to look after. It’s also difficult when your work gets censored before it goes out or gets published in the prison magazines, but sometimes this gives you more determination to succeed. I have had stuff refused. I have also had room searches and even did a spell in the segregation unit because of my writing. Letters to The Guardian seemed to cause me the most trouble. I have had to deal with the fact that some of my best writing has been lost, but hopefully it has proven to be the foundation of better writing still to come. I was stuck in a very negative environment and had to find some positivity there; otherwise, my life and personality would be sucked away from me. I was given a soul-destroying job in the workshop and somehow I turned it into comedy with my pen. Writing was my main form of escapism. A friend introduced me to a playwright. I sent him a new play version of Looking Towards a New Horizon and he took it to the Edinburgh Festival in 1997 with the support of the National Coal Board, alongside two of his own works. It was performed that year and I even designed the poster for the show. When I was transferred back to Holloway from Durham I was lucky enough to be invited to do a writing workshop with a Clean Break Writer in Residence. This amazing opportunity allowed me to fully develop my writing style. She used different writing exercises and tools to open us up to different forms and ways of writing, which I really needed. It was such a privilege working with such a talented writer and it only inspired me and encouraged me to develop my own abilities. After I was transferred to Cookham Wood prison in Kent, I was asked to write the yearly pantomime for the prison by the officer who ran activities. While there I also had the privilege of working with two

Unlocking Potential with Clean Break  235 other Clean Break Writers in Residence, which offered golden opportunities to improve my writing. The structure of each day was varied and really allowed my creative juices to flow. Having the chance to work with professional playwrights is invaluable. Writing can be a lonely experience, so getting vital feedback is essential. It is also confidenceboosting and gives you the belief you can succeed. I really gained so much from the whole experience as I found that it gave me much-needed focus and I was able to experiment with different styles. Without these experiences my work would have stagnated, and I probably would have given up. Another opportunity to work with Clean Break later at HMP Send was fantastic as I felt really inspired to produce a piece of work knowing that it was to be performed with professional actors in front of invited guests. Then the Education Manager at Cookham Wood invited the London Shakespeare Workout Prison Project to run a drama workshop that was to change my life forever. I spoke with them about my writing and sent them some of my plays, which they loved. They took a section of Goddesses Are Not Made in Heaven and joined it with other pieces to form a play called Voices with amazing performers acting in my piece. It toured in Britain and abroad. I finally believed that my work was good enough to be seen internationally. I was to write several plays for them in the coming years. I continued throughout my prison sentence to work in prison libraries, on magazines and I ran creative writing groups. I also helped to teach others to read and write as it opened up a door to so many possibilities. Without the gift of words there is no doubt I would have struggled in prison. My only lifeline in those long dark days of chaotic structure was to write poetry, prose, articles, pantomimes and plays, many of which were performed in prison. When I went to an open prison, I was able to come to the Clean Break office on temporary release to attend a writing course. Coming up every week and taking part in the group really helped me with my rehabilitation and the long steady process of adjusting back into society. Being invited to come to Clean Break on release meant that I had something to aim towards. The parole board was impressed with the number of creative contacts I had made and now saw me as being suitable for release. I don’t know how I would have coped with my life sentence if it hadn’t been for a pen and paper. Those long lonely hours became a hive of creativity. The tools and knowledge I have gained have enabled me to now live a full and rewarding life again. Since being released, I am a regular member of three different theatrewriting groups. In some ways it is easier to work now as I have access to a laptop and the internet and can enter different competitions. Two of the groups are mixed and having male input can be valuable. However,

236  Herrmann, Bruce & Barstow I don’t get as much time to write anymore as I am busy volunteering for different charities. My work is less urgent and raw but maybe more refined as a result. I know that I will continue to write every week until my osteoarthritis stops me. Words flow through my veins as fluidly as blood.

Clare Barstow, former prisoner Work Cited Armstrong, K. 2006. A Short History of Myth. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.

Literary Workshops

14 Literary Studies and the Teaching of Prison Texts Claire Westall

As far as I can ascertain, the process of teaching prison writing within a higher education literature department has not received any critical attention to date. This is partly explained by the relative rarity of teaching focused exclusively on prison writing and the small publishing space granted to pedagogical reflection. However, given this book’s investment in scholarly research on prison writing, and its inclusion of reflexive pieces by prison-linked practitioners, it seems purposeful to include an exploration of the relationship between prison writing, teaching and literary studies at university, and one that maintains a research interest in the texts themselves. This, then, is what is attempted here, and it is, of course, shaped by my own work environment. I teach talented, engaged and high-achieving students in an English department at a Russell Group university in England. As part of a short summer term module called “Fictions of Human Rights”, I introduce approximately sixty to ninety first-year undergraduates to prison writing and prison-based fiction and film, and this material features heavily in the fifteen-minute team presentations that constitute their assessment. Each year I offer this content, though, I am troubled by a set of ethical and pedagogical dilemmas. My primary concerns can be listed briefly as: the juxtaposition of prison experience and university life; the voyeuristic allure of prison stories; student reluctance to critically engage with “authentic” voices and accounts of personal experience; the personal gains to be had from studying marginal authors, texts and genres, especially under the rubric of human rights; student assumptions derived from the idea of literature underpinning literary studies; and student investment in narrated individuality and apparent lack of concern with group identification. I am also acutely aware of my compromised position as an academic who didn’t mean to wander into this intellectual domain, who hasn’t put in the hard yards of teaching or volunteering in prison, and who asks students to examine prison works that are new to them but well known to me. It is in this context that this chapter examines some of the pedagogical issues arising from teaching such prison-linked material in a literature department. It does so by presenting some of the common student responses

240  Claire Westall to set prison texts, especially reoccurring analytical blind spots or difficulties, and pinpoints how and where different reactions might be possible. In this process, I will be drawing on three works I have repeatedly taught – namely, Alan Sillitoe’s “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” (1959), Erwin James’ A Life Inside: A Prisoner’s Notebook (2003) and Nicholas Winding Refn’s film Bronson (2008). These examples – social realist short story, first-hand journalistic “notebook” and cinematic biopic – all depict criminal incarceration but do so very differently. In my teaching I have sometimes combined texts that depict criminal and political prisoners, and I have also included theatrical and cinematic examples for students to consider – including, Guantánamo: “Honour Bound to Defend Freedom” (2004) by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, and Steve McQueen’s 2008 film Hunger, about the 1981 IRA hunger strikes at the Maze prison led by Bobby Sands. More recently, I have set texts, including those by Sillitoe, James and Winding Refn, that concentrate on criminal incarceration and it has repeatedly struck me that students are less comfortable with texts describing the experience of this category of prisoner than with political prisoners whose causes they can typically read in ethical terms more easily. What stands out after almost a decade of teaching these and other examples of prison writing is how readily students accept what they “don’t know” or “can’t know” about prison life, how quickly they rely on textual claims for freedom coming via self-narration, and how often they minimise issues of group experience and allegiance, regardless of how important these issues are to the texts or even their own team assessment.

The Classroom “Can’t Know/Must Know” Dialectic “Fictions of Human Rights” works out from the eighteenth-century emergence of rights discourse, and offers students a range of twentiethcentury human rights case studies to explore, with examples including the Bhopal disaster (1984) and the Rwandan genocide (1994). The prompt to teach prison writing came from a desire to bring to the module something academically different but still familiar to me, and a need to link the module’s content back to contemporary life in the UK. Later, I realised that I also wanted to help students move past the kind of intellectual paralysis I had experienced when I first encountered Breyten Breytenbach’s prison memoir The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984) and its awe-inspiring aestheticisation of apartheid incarceration, torture and self-knowledge. My module lecture briefly charts the development of the modern prison, and uses key theoretical and critical sources to help students think about mass incarceration in relation to human rights. It then provides a post-war survey of UK prison writing, theatre and film, identifying common and divergent thematic and aesthetic issues. In the follow-up workshops we analyse two or three texts.

The Teaching of Prison Texts  241 The content offered is broad because the students have four weeks without classes to develop their unique team research presentation and can consult with staff as they progress. In class, students understand that, as David Wilson and Sean Williams explain in Images of Incarceration: Representations of Prison in Film and Television Drama (2004), what comes to the non-prison public via the news, the wider media, literary culture and popular television and film shapes views of “life inside”. In fact, students appreciate that tracking and interrogating such influence is part of what can make literary and cultural studies important. More specifically, though, they promptly concede that they don’t and can’t know “what prison is like” (and the only student to ever claim a link to prison cited a family friend’s political detention in southern Africa1). Consequently, discussions in class are underpinned by a kind of “can’t know/must know” dialectic. A ready recognition of the special knowledge of prisoners and the inability of others to “know” incarceration are bound to the imperative to “know” particular prison texts and feel ethically “in the know” about prison’s connection to literature in order to gain marks. In sharing this “can’t know/must know” predicament, I feel compelled to suggest that students note how different state institutions work similarly while claiming very different populations, and how prisons and prison-based cultural texts might provide experimental spaces or limit case testing for the rights permitted by democratic states. In this way, “knowing” is not just about seeing into new issues and masked experiences (so often the “awareness raising” mantle used by human rights discourse), but rather about acting differently based on a view of all citizens as pegged to the patterns of protection and exploitation that shape imprisonment and come to us through prison writing. Like the wider public, literary students are interested in prison writing. They value highly first-hand accounts and feel problematically attracted to depictions of threat and violence. In addition, students present stories of imprisonment as allowing them an opportunity to do what they often describe literature as doing – granting a reader access to A.N. Other and their very different life journey. Generally, the students are also keen to tackle works beyond the established literary canon, with the frisson this brings reinforced by the appeal of glimpsing inside a “hidden institution”, and doing so in a manner that seems praiseworthy. As suggested by their work and feedback, students enjoy and intellectually advance through their encounters with prison writing. Nonetheless, I remain concerned that as the tutor, I am, to borrow from Dylan Rodríguez (2002), domesticating prison writing and thereby making it safe, by making it “literature” in an institutional fashion and by analytically breaking texts down for student consumption. In many ways, this is always what teaching involves, but with prison writing there is often an in-built textual challenge to, and disruption of, the very institutions

242  Claire Westall of literary privilege (universities among them) from which such writing is typically excluded and from which prison-linked writers would typically be excluded were it not for their special status as “authors”. So, it seems to me I may be dulling the critique of literary privilege and the associated class critique that such writing frequently carries, and that I hold to be important. With this in mind, I ask students to consider themselves in terms of age, gender, class, race and institutional privilege, and to think about their differences – as individuals and as a demographic group – both to the general prison population of the UK (which is predominantly male and relatively working-class while my student group is predominantly female and middle-class), and to the types of narrator used in the prison texts studied. I point out to my students the proximity of the university to our local prisons (HMP & YOI Askham Grange and HMP Full Sutton) and our marked separation from these spaces. I also, though, encourage them to consider potential points of connection between university life and life in prison. In making this request I am not facetiously minimising the differences between students and prisoners, or the stark difference in the life chances of each group. Rather, I want students to consider their institutional situation, and the regimes of governmentality that, in a Foucauldian fashion, shape their subjectivities, so that they are more sensitive to these issues when coming to depictions of imprisonment.

Loneliness in Embodied Class Terms Alan Sillitoe’s “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” is a staple text in my teaching. First published in 1959 and seen as an angry young man work, it became a Tony Richardson kitchen sink-type film in 1962, having been revised by Sillitoe himself. Set in a 1950s Essex borstal, the story’s protagonist and first-person narrator is Smith, a seventeenyear-old working-class delinquent from Nottingham, serving time for robbing a bakery and gifting the reader the thoughts of class “war” that come to him while running (Sillitoe, 2007, 16). The story is simply structured – with its three parts depicting first the borstal and running, then earlier life in Nottingham with the bakery job and, finally, the race or “Borstal Blue Ribbon Prize Cup for Long Distance Cross Country Running” (39) and its fallout – but is internally complicated by flashbacks and metafictional manoeuvres. Smith’s account is compelling and disrupts literary expectations derived from the “rogue’s tale or thief’s autobiography” with its unsentimental rebellion and resistance to institutional demands for reform (Penner, 1969, 254). Indeed, Smith thinks of his life and story as organised around a battle between “Outlaw blokes” like him and their enemies, the “In-law blokes” bound to authority and personified by the Governor (Sillitoe, 2007, 10). To this my students always react by identifying with Smith and against the

The Teaching of Prison Texts  243 Governor. At the same time, they recognise that they are fundamentally unlike Smith, and that Smith rejects any such attempted connection, positioning his readers as part of an “In-law” middle-class ready to snitch on “Out-law blokes”, and perpetually using “we” in their speech to “feel braver and righter” than their socio-economic inferiors (7, 10, 32). This class antagonism, especially as it develops in relation to Smith’s exceptionalism – as prison runner and writer – is one of the key reasons the story is so pedagogically useful. Repeatedly, my students minimise the class dimensions of the text, concentrating almost exclusively on the emerging struggle with individuality Sillitoe provides. They also miss or minimise Smith’s class-based ability to surpass a Cartesian mind-body distinction; Smith’s repeated efforts to remain connected to a class collective; Sillitoe’s cultivation of the problem of individuality, especially as loneliness, in order to examine the pulling away of a singular body from a class group; and, finally, how all this is linked to writing and the institutionalisation of literature. Indeed, my students find it difficult to develop a reading of Sillitoe’s critique of the middle-class institutionalisation of literature despite seeing this as an important aspect of the story. Like its predecessor Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), “Loneliness” has gained a small place within “Britain’s […] literary canon” (Cooper, 2014, 333), especially as a text describing working-class masculinity and establishing an authentic regional voice, achieved via Sillitoe’s signature Nottingham idiom. The narrative voice is appealing – humorous, buoyant, self-deprecating and insistent – but with Smith providing no clear rationale for theft, and no self-pitying story of poverty, students seem to find his motivations hard to judge and his class war destabilising. Smith’s young, boisterous masculinity also sits awkwardly within their thinking because he is fun but trouble, a talented writer, it seems, but one repeatedly committing crime and being imprisoned. If my students turned to Brodie’s relevant study guide – a particular kind of institutional vision of Sillitoe’s fiction – they would be told that Smith is “selfish” and only pursues “self-indulgent […] pleasures” (Coping, 1991, 6). The evidence offered for this is primarily the way in which Smith’s mother spends, and Smith enjoys, the £500 insurance payment received from the factory following the death of Smith’s father from cancer – with shopping sprees, a new TV, food and lemonade. However, a more class-aware reading would situate Smith and his family within the working- class rebellion of the 1950s and the decade’s late turn to affluence, as Sillitoe depicts the working-class as looking to offset immediate physical discomfort whenever the opportunity arises, well aware that their minimally improved fortunes won’t last. That the family replace the carpet saturated with the father’s blood is a clue to the gothic nature of their brief upturn in spending power. Sillitoe also points up the lack of long-term protection that comes with small bursts of cash in the failure

244  Claire Westall of the family to buy Smith a winter coat. Additionally, the way Smith’s small, physical desires remain bound to the comforts cash injections bring after the money has run out asks readers to consider the lasting consequences of both inequality and income fluctuation or uncertainty. As my students would tell you, in the story it isn’t money that brings Smith a sense of freedom but rather physical movement – that is, his running. And as they regularly explain in their presentations, Smith uses running to reclaim his body and to assert a degree of autonomy while in borstal, doing so most explicitly by refusing to win the prestigious race for the Governor. What my students find more difficult to unpack, though, is how Smith’s body is linked to and framed by his father’s. Students may note that father and son are bound by blood, including its symbolic power when Smith discovers his father’s body. They also tend to understand that Smith’s refusal of the Governor’s claim to his body is a refusal of the Governor as a surrogate father, and is akin to Smith’s father’s refusal to cede control of his body to medical professionals when dying of throat cancer. The students rightly see these stand offs as class determined, but they don’t push out into reading these male bodies as part of a collective. They have not yet noticed that Mike’s smallness in stature and hidden strength is cast alongside Smith being “made […] a long-distance cross-country runner” when he arrives at borstal because he was “long and skinny” (Sillitoe, 2007, 7). With these descriptions Sillitoe suggests that such male bodies have grown into a particular form of sinewy strength despite the obvious underdevelopment caused by their childhoods under rationing and wider forms of familial and intergenerational poverty. Moreover, their very smallness/thinness implies that what they can claim of themselves will always be slight, even if full of strength and stamina. A specific interpretive point that is difficult to make stick in class is about the way in which Smith (like his father) resists state paternalism and what seems like welfare intervention. Clearly, Smith links running to crime, and jokes that running, as “running away from the police”, was always important to his family (Sillitoe, 2007, 7). However, what Smith does in refusing to win the race for the Governor and in risking his body by “sliding down the bank” (19) during a practice run, is establish a specifically experiential understanding of his body as his. Hence, as Michael Gardiner writes, he “recover[s] physical determination from the connected consensus institutions of state – school, leisure, prison, army – to recover the ability to take risks with a body otherwise taken as an institutional asset” (2015, 43). This point is reinforced by Smith’s insistence, at the end of the narrative, that he “went down with pleurisy” following the punishments imposed for not winning and that, thankfully, this stopped the army laying claim to him later (Sillitoe, 2007, 53). For Smith being a career criminal/prisoner is part of an unavoidable class war he was “born into”, while being a solider is fighting

The Teaching of Prison Texts  245 “wars” that are never his because they are always in the interests of the governing class (17). Another useful pedagogical aspect of Sillitoe’s text is how well the prose carries the pace and rhythm of Smith’s running and so establishes the fluency of the thinking running enables. Regular, muscular and mobile, Sillitoe’s style is well suited to this task and my students can typically feel how effective this is, even if they find it hard to break down and explain. They do, though, quickly take up ideas of the text’s ongoing tension between self-controlled forward momentum – the physical act of running – and the cyclical pattern of repeat and return evident in Smith’s return to borstal after each practice run as well as after forfeiting the race, but also in his return to prison as an adult which is signalled at the end of the story. However, Sillitoe’s related binding of physical exertion and being able to think “deeply” (Sillitoe, 2007, 19) is not often taken up in student presentations, despite this being critical to an embodied version of knowledge and honesty that Smith explains as separating him from middle-class institutional figures like the Governor. Moreover, when Smith explains that he is “honest” in his way and the Governor in his, what he suggests is not an individualising, relative view of truth and honesty, but a class-based distinction between a middle- class honesty that follows institutional rules, acting as a conduit for institutional violence while claiming the neutrality of discipline, and the embodied and experiential honesty of the working class that rejects gaining the “whip-hand” over other men (14–15). While there may be something dangerously appealing in Smith’s natural intelligence and physical ability, especially as set against modernity’s institutional intellectualism, Sillitoe’s point is about running as a metaphor for working-class life and writing, intriguingly tying writing itself to Smith’s effort to convey embodied knowledge, in contrast to the established bourgeois values of high literary achievement. Typically, my students are keen to concentrate on Smith’s individuality and first-person narration, and rarely do they situate his “I” persona in relation to his attempts to retain a sense of group and class loyalty. Yet the Nottingham section shows that Smith is locally embedded and affectionately attached to those around him and their working-class sense of allegiance – as with his father’s links to a union of workers and the loyalty his mother shows when the policeman arrives to question him. In borstal, Smith repeatedly looks to identify with his fellow convicts and thereby offset the loneliness of having to run. Thus, he copes with his enforced early morning separation from his dormitory group in order to run by holding onto the idea that he is the “first” rather than “last man in the world”, so that he can imagine his peers awakening to join him later rather than thinking of them as already dead (Sillitoe, 2007, 8–9; original emphasis). When, in the race, he experiences the “loneliness of the long distance runner” (43) – its physical strain and its sense  of

246  Claire Westall isolating freedom – he overcomes this with a return to his collective and their class war. He sees his fellow borstal “Out-laws” as knowingly standing together and with him as they clap and cheer, and reports that later “the boys caught on to [him] losing the race on purpose and never had enough good words to say about [him]” (53). Here Sillitoe is clearly negotiating with the mid-century emergence of a rising individualism and the residual claims of class-based collectives that shape people’s lives and their encounters with institutional power. In his efforts to stay close to his class peers while also standing separately and developing a distinctly working-class authorial voice, Smith’s writerly position echoes Sillitoe’s. Further, Smith’s self-reflexive textual strategies carry Sillitoe’s challenge to the category of literature. As Peter Hitchcock writes, the status and context of its protagonist, its vernacular, and its working-class morality “undermines predominant notions of the literary” (1989, 196). Taking up Hitchcock’s point, Nick Bentley argues that Sillitoe questions “the range and scope of writing designated as ‘literature’ produced in Britain in the 1950s” (2007, 195–196). Bentley explains that the story’s close – when Smith reveals his authorship and desire to be read – ends on a reflexive note that “foregrounds the institution of literature […] as an essentially bourgeois art form […] that fails to represent the moral, ethical and behavioural preoccupations of (white, male) English working-class youth” and even envisages “a specific reader” in the form of the Governor (197). The text is expected to function “as a repetition of the act of rebellion represented by the events of the story”, and its readers are – again – all governors (Bentley, 2007, 197). While it is Smith’s friend (possibly Mike) who will make his writing available to the world, Smith’s writing is still working to announce itself as an unexpected and unusual act, “an operation that contradicts the stereotypical construction” of both the writer and traditional literature (Bentley, 2007, 198). However, where Bentley sees this as demonstrating the importance of Smith’s “subcultural identity” (199), I want to emphasise that Smith is representative of a particular norm – of white working-class boys who are smarter than they appear, even, or especially, when they’ve been in trouble with the state’s institutional powers. In addition, Sillitoe’s reflexive gesture presents a class-bound challenge to literary expectations and a literary readership. As Eugene Quirk suggests when detailing the differences between the audiences of the story and the later film, Sillitoe’s writing anticipates an audience who is “necessarily elite and limited”, “educated and upper-middle class” (1981, 168). In contrast, Quirk argues, Sillitoe’s changes for the film reshape Smith so that he appeals to the more working-class cinema-going audience. These changes mean, as William Cooper (2014) suggests, that Smith’s radical discontent and creative anti-literary dissent is lost in the film, and hence the short story remains the more radical and disruptive of the two works.

The Teaching of Prison Texts  247 To date, my students have not offered a sustained engagement with Sillitoe’s explicit critique of literature despite recognising the importance of this to the story. Instead, they tend to stay close to Smith’s status as an individual, and his individual claim to freedom and free expression, achieved through running and writing even while inside borstal/prison. They appreciate Smith’s pointed attacks on “the establishment”, but find their own class and literary positioning difficult to assess in relation to Smith’s vision of the middle-class exclusivity of institutionalised literature. Students realise that Smith’s war with the Governor is a representative battle, and a battle over the politics of representation – in literary and everyday terms – but this rarely tempers their dualistic explanation of Smith as a problematic male body looking to reclaim himself by establishing his own voice. Students find Smith’s youthful masculinity appealing, and often take up the issue of masculinity in relation to prison writing for their own research. But they typically do so with the idea of young white working-class men as an obviously problematic group. They also seem to feel Smith’s rejection of the idea of meritocratic rise through disciplining institutions as somehow cast against them, as readers and especially as students of literature. Although they will discuss such issues in class, they have avoided further exploration in their research presentations.

Narrating A Life Inside As this book’s collection of essays demonstrates, prison memoirs raise difficult questions about the relationship between experience and literary skill, and between what the reader wants to know and how much an author wants to, or can, reveal. I had such tensions in mind when, in my first few years of teaching prison writing, I used to twin extracts from two contemporary works on life inside English prisons. I set extracts from Erwin James’ A Life Inside and Ronnie Thompson’s Screwed: The Truth About Life as a Prison Officer (2008). Between 2000 and 2004 Erwin James – born Erwin James Monahan but “Big Jim” to fellow prisoners – wrote 113 Guardian columns (Katz, 2009). His writing proved popular within and far beyond prison. He also provided the newspaper with twenty-two further pieces about “adjusting to life outside” (Katz, 2009), and continues to write freelance for the Guardian and other outlets. Any biography of James explains that having received a life sentence for murder, he served almost twenty years in prison, from 1984 to 2004, and began writing professionally while inside. His writing, however, does not detail his crimes, nor does he give much away about his new life on the outside. It concentrates instead on his time in prison and his fellow inmates, with only more recent writing offering information about his early life, family experience, and time in care, in a detention centre and in borstal (James, 2006; 2016). To date he has

248  Claire Westall released three books: A Life Inside, depicting his journey from closed to open conditions and derived largely from his newspaper column; its sequel, The Home Stretch: From Prison to Parole, published in 2005, which portrays his final year before release; and, more recently, Redeemable: A Memoir of Darkness and Hope (2016), offering a fuller life story. Where James offers readers a voice of the (once) incarcerated, Ronnie Thompson is the pseudonym of a former prison officer who worked in the prison system from 2000 for around seven years, and Screwed is his account of his professional experience via a fictional institution, HMP Romwell. Thompson’s immediate follow-up publications were Banged Up (2010) and Knifer (2011), and he has written other pieces since. By juxtaposing James and Thompson in my teaching students encountered prisoner and prison officer accounts that overlapped, chronologically, geographically and in terms of some of their key themes – most obviously, the naivety of people outside the walls, the omnipresent threat of violence inside, the difficulty of prisoner-officer relations, the systemic strains placed on everyone in such an environment, and the common histories and struggles of those incarcerated (poor childhoods, mental health conditions, substance misuse, self-harming, etc.). They also, though, reported seeing a greater sense of human connection, for fellow prisoners and for prison officers, in James’ writing than in Thompson’s, where there was a more obvious mask of self-protection as well as more insistence on the dangers faced by officers. And where Thompson’s authorial mask has held, James’ identity is known and so his self-narration is open to critique. In fact, James and the Guardian received much criticism when it was revealed that passages he’d written about his time in the French Foreign Legion were fabricated, with the Daily Mail in particular insisting that a convict lying should be no surprise to anyone (Katz, 2009). Nevertheless, what became clear to me as students engaged with James and Thompson was the extent to which they trusted these first-hand accounts to report “truths” that they could not have otherwise known, how keen they were to “see inside” the places and people presented, and how much they appreciated the stylistic and emotional force of James’ writing in particular. By contrast, Thompson’s more blunt and sensational style gained less traction with the students and as a consequence I’ve sometimes omitted this text from recent classes. James’ writing warrants attention and interpretive unpacking, but it is also stylistically instructive for students (and academics) who can fall foul of verbosity when they would benefit from a more meatand-potatoes idea of precision and graft. James’ prose is tight, even cellular in its constricted column-like intensity – with 800 words a column proving disciplining – and it is always efficiently forward-moving. It is also affecting, even touching, without sentimentality or melodrama. It focuses on small details and character intricacies. Ian Katz, of the Guardian, describes A Life Inside as providing “crisp, elegant little vignettes” (2009),

The Teaching of Prison Texts  249 and this is certainly right, but as readers quickly notice, the management of concise detail is exactly what carries the emotional poignancy of the writing. Having framed his former columns with an introduction laying out his criminal guilt and transition into a long-term prison sentence, James offers relatively little self-narration across the first two thirds of his text, writing that “A Life Inside is not, and has never been, about me” (2003, xvi). Instead, from the outset, he gives accounts of institutional practices, character revelation and larger socio-political difficulties as they impact the organisation of prisons and effect those inside. He is also explicit about the need to perform a survival-based version of selfhood. He details the spatial organisation of the landings via the ways in which a single day’s newspaper is shared between cells across an evening. He is able to both relay and recreate the kind of surprise caused by a game of eye spy between prisoner and guard on Christmas Day. He depicts the code that denies and punishes grassing as “the worse crime” while knowing that inmate informing occurs frequently and in ways that are useful for all inside (2003, 80). And he even mentions the complex predicaments of prisoners arising from sexual desire. Throughout, he is always sensitive to the gap between what happens in prison and what those inside – incarcerated and at work – want or expect; and he repeatedly marks the disastrous consequences of underinvestment in prison, especially in prison education and work programmes. James’ entries in A Life Inside, written between February 2000 and January 2003, remember important public events and commemorations via his prison routine. So, for example, he recalls how his memory of Princess Diana’s death is tied to his memory of always trying to be first for the morning shower. He describes prison visits from Lord Woolf and a serving Home Secretary, whose £5 donation to a prisoner running for charity is an unexpected boost for the “chronic self-harmer […] who rarely spoke to anyone” (James, 2003, 95). More significantly, though, his writing works hard to capture character, to grab the reader with the humour, turmoil and strife of those around him, whether that is the transformation of Toby Turner following police interest in the abuse he suffered in a children’s home, the unclenching of Nathan Jones’ fists after his first rehabilitative day out, the prison recall of Big Rinty, the exoneration of Ricky Vance and eventually of Cody, the rape of Martin Greight, or the “graciousness” of Stephen, “the long-serving listener” and survivor of wrongful conviction (133–135). According to Katz, James’ “gift” is the ability to write “little, human stories” that “powerfully” convey the “reality of prison life” (2003, vii). But these “little” stories are microcosmic visions and they hold to the advice James says was given to a young prison officer by his senior and mentor, “to see the person first, not the crime” (James, 2003, 123). That said, when teaching I want students to focus on the text first and foremost – not the man, as author, and not his crime. This cannot

250  Claire Westall mean biographical anonymity or a refusal to engage in ethical debates about criminal activity leading to professional opportunity, but it should mean that students have to read James’ prose closely to benefit from class discussions. Nevertheless, when one of my students contacted James directly during her project research, she was pleasantly surprised by his quick and helpful response, and she used their exchange in her work. On the back of this initial contact I invited James to come to campus, first for a student-led interview and guest lecture, and then the following year to speak as part of a larger conference event. I mention this here because a number of small but interesting pedagogical matters arose from these events. When some of my students interviewed James, they had composed their own questions and prepared an interview arc for topic coverage during the limited time available. Afterwards, James reported to me that he had kept talking, trying to explore the questions asked in a useful way, but wasn’t sure when to stop. Amusingly, the students later reported that he was so eloquent and interesting that they hadn’t wanted to cut short any of his answers and so had only managed to ask a few of their planned questions. I suspected that the students were slightly intimidated by James – perhaps by his large, masculine presence, but mostly by his ability to manage himself, to speak clearly and cleanly, and to keep going, to keep telling his story. His thoughtful and practised fluency offered a particularly good example to the students – showing them how to hold an audience and speak with commitment and clarity while also providing a concise style of explanation. When James spoke to our wider audience – of staff, students and university visitors – it was obvious that his ability to command a room and his own story work well for him. With the assessment for their module a spoken presentation, students had much to learn from James’ style of public speaking as well as from his content. James is regularly described as someone whose modest self-presentation makes it hard to imagine his earlier self, or to link the man back to the crimes he committed (Katz, 2003, ix). This was certainly the view of the students who met him. A sense of his modesty, and a mix of pride and “embarrassment” – as he writes – about the gains he has achieved is suggested in his writing and also in his public demeanour (James, 2003, 76, 127). Nevertheless, it is clear that to survive and change himself while in prison James must have been strong, physically, mentally and, we might say, intellectually, too. And his hard-won sense of personal development comes through in his writing and mode of public address. Unsurprisingly, the years in which James came onto campus were the ones in which discussion of his work was most sustained, animated and detailed in class. Students were keen to demonstrate that they had seen and heard James, and that they could use such author contact when reading his prose. Students were sensitive to the ways in which James’

The Teaching of Prison Texts  251 authorial voice matched what they saw of him speaking – as an imposing, strong and sincere figure, humble even, who praised education and especially literature for helping him establish a new version of himself. Interestingly, while they typically wanted to rely on James, the man/ author, and identified his as a voice of authenticity and experience, their new sense of proximity to the author also helped them to question his text – its omissions, its occlusion of any necessary violence on his part, the distance from his own story achieved through a focus on other inmates. They were also beginning to think critically about links between imprisonment and claims for the rehabilitative potential of literature. They wanted to consider what it was that literature could do beyond offering cultural capital, and they recognised that there is a self-protective gesture built into James’ position as “a writer in prison” rather than “a prisoner writing” (James, 2006, x). Some students even noted that in studying James’ writing they were participating in a legitimising process, one that sanctified James’ work as worthy of study and consolidated his reputation. These lines of thought were pedagogically important because the overriding student response to first-hand accounts of prison was to follow and repeat the insights of the text/author almost unthinkingly. That some students were starting to consider the compositional practice of a writer with prison experience and the relationship between prison writing and literary studies was a sign of their growing maturity and the critical respect they granted James’ work. While introducing James’ writing to undergraduate students, it struck me that when, in A Life Inside, he retells the parole experience of Red from Shawshank Redemption (1994) in relation to his own anticipation of the parole board’s decision about “the question of a move to open conditions” (2003, 118), James touches upon the required institutional performance of self-narration and self-improvement that might be said to link prisoners and students. Both prisoners and students pass out from their institutional positions when they have graduated into a new self – one improved and ready to contribute to the world – and in my teaching context these student-turned-graduate selves are linked by a cultural vocabulary and confidence derived from the study of literature which James also seems to share.

Cinematic Bronson and the Aestheticisation of Violence Nicholas Winding Refn’s 2008 film Bronson confronts the challenges of representing criminal incarceration in a particularly acute way, and allows me to teach a cinematic representation of prison while avoiding well-known, social realist or mainstream Hollywood films about prison students are likely to know. Bronson is a biopic starring Tom Hardy as Charles Bronson, the prisoner born Michael Gordon Peterson who was first sentenced for armed robbery in 1974 and who, since then, has been

252  Claire Westall held for decades, mostly in solitary confinement, in various Category A prisons and high-security psychiatric hospitals. After changing his name to Charles Bronson in 1987, this prisoner became famous, especially in the tabloid press, as Britain’s “most violent” and “most dangerous” inmate, attracting publicity for rooftop protests, hostage-taking incidents and repeated tariff (i.e. prison sentence) extensions because of violence and damage. He has since changed his name (more than once) and is currently still in prison. However, I do not want to talk about the real man behind the story and I ask students similarly to think of themselves as tackling the film as a cultural text and not making judgements about any “real life” person based on a creative, cinematic work. This seems the most cautious and respectful way in which we can talk about Bronson, the protagonist of the film, and Bronson, the film, while recognising that neither the students nor I are appropriately placed to speak about a current prisoner with whom we have no professional connection. Despite these difficulties, which the film itself engages with, the rationale for setting the film as part of the course centres on the aestheticisation of violence, often comedic as well as beautiful. Winding Refn provides an unusual prison film, full of aesthetically appealing and challenging sequences, with a surreal understanding of the prisonerturned-tabloid-performer who stands on stage speaking to a theatre audience about his skills and journey as a violent prisoner renamed after a film actor. The film is often the focus of student presentations, many of which concentrate on the aesthetics of the violence used in the film and the manner in which a vision of hyper-masculinity helps convey Bronson’s unique dominance. Students want to describe how the film’s Bronson performs himself and constructs his own narrative frame. Indeed, they see the performative, theatrical Bronson as evidence that the film is driven by a kind of self-narration that is working to construct a mythical, iconic prison figure. They are less likely to see this filmic strategy as the expression of the tabloid media’s construction of Bronson, despite the film’s montage sequences using tabloid headlines and images of newspapers enabling such a reading. Where my students want to see Bronson as speaking for himself, I think of the film as updating what Jamie Bennett (2006) sees as the important role of the media within prison films: Bronson establishes a prison-persona largely formed by tabloid rhetoric that is then reanimated via the human body in the film’s prison setting. Some of the strongest student work on Bronson has been in response to the film’s rendering of creative violence or violence as creative expression. Student presentations have examined how Bronson’s body becomes the body of an artist, via his paintings and within stylised fight sequences, and how it is itself a work of art – enlarged by the camera angles used, and held in muscular and striking poses. They have also analysed the ways in which the film draws on the style and colour palette of

The Teaching of Prison Texts  253 Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 classic A Clockwork Orange, with its red and orange lighting, staging and encoding of violence, and in its use of music to help build and manage assault scenarios. Students analyse how the film colour-codes its action, how it uses music with bodily movement, how it concentrates on bodily display, and how it makes comedy and beauty essential to the viewing process, keeping the viewer engaged and just at the edge of discomfort so that they can watch yet still feel the force of eruptive physical attacks. The students can detail how the important setpiece sequences work, including the famed hostage-taking incidents with the prison guard and with the art teacher – where, in the film, Bronson decorates the teacher with paint and an apple so that he becomes a living vision of René Magritte’s 1964 painting “Son of Man”. I cannot here provide a developed reading of these important aspects of the film. What I want to note, though, is how this film has been pedagogically useful in two particular ways. First, it highlights a battle with power that might be said to support Hannah Arendt’s description of violence as appearing “where power is in jeopardy”, and how violence “can destroy power” but is “utterly incapable of creating it” (1970, 56). This is Bronson’s situation as conveyed by the film and recognised by my students. Second, Bronson renders extremes of violence and states of detention in ways that are imaginatively challenging and, simultaneously, expose many of the strategies prison texts need, and use, to manage their reader/audience in relation to their difficult-to-witness ­ content. In fact, one of the most difficult aspects of dealing with prison writing and film is how these texts aestheticise threat, distress, trauma and violence, while holding onto their reader/audience. Bronson has enabled students to confront these issues and to use the insights they gain from watching the film to unpick other examples of prison writing and film. What remains largely absent from their work, though, is an acknowledgement of their own rush to deal with the more spectacular dimensions of prison writing and film, and, correspondingly, their general omission of the banality of routine that underpins incarceration. My students always look to the disruptive violence in prison works and to the efforts of prisoners to find a voice. They see these two key areas as where human rights are most hotly contested. This means that they are interested in tackling masculinity as a problem category bound to violence, but repeatedly peg this concern to singular male bodies and modes of self-narration. In addition, they tend not to situate debates about human rights as bound to the institutional routine, bureaucracy and boredom that is central to experiences of incarceration. This is interesting, because it indicates a resistance to, or a difficulty in taking up, the ways in which institutional discipline and violence is made ordinary in a class-coded fashion despite this being very much part of the teaching materials and approach they receive.

254  Claire Westall

Note 1 Of course, it could be that any student/s with a prison connection have chosen to stay quiet in class, but the nature of their presentations and reactions to information about incarceration has never suggested any of those in class have previous or outside exposure to imprisonment.

Works Cited Arendt, H. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt Publishers. Bennett, J. 2006. “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: The Media in Prison Films”. Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 45.2: 97–115. Bentley, N. 2007. Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s. Oxford: Peter Lang. Breytenbach, B. 1984. The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. London: Faber. Cooper, W. 2014. “A Rhetorical Reading of Smith’s Book in ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’”. The Explicator 72.4: 333–336. Coping, A. 1991. Brodie’s Notes on Alan Sillitoe’s Selected Fiction: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner”, and a Sillitoe Selection. London: Pan Books. Gardiner, M. 2015. Time and Action in the Scottish Independence Referendum. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hitchcock, P. 1989. Working Class Fiction in Theory and Practice: A Reading of Alan Sillitoe. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. James, E. 2003. A Life Inside: A Prisoner’s Notebook. London: Atlantic Books. James, E. 2005. The Home Stretch: From Prison to Parole. London: Atlantic Books. James, E. 2006. “Life Inside”. In Humane Prisons, edited by D. Jones, 19–27. Boca Ranton, FL: CSC Press. James, E. 2016. Redeemable: A Memoir of Darkness and Hope. London: Bloomsbury. Katz, I. 2003. “Foreword”. In A Life Inside: A Prisoner’s Notebook, by E. James, vii–x. London: Atlantic Books. Katz, I. 2009. “The Guardian and Erwin James”. Guardian. 24 April 2009. Online. Access 15th July 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2009/ apr/24/erwin-james-monahan-guardian Penner, A. 1969. “Human Dignity and Social Anarchy: Sillitoe’s ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’”. Social Literature 10.2: 253–265. Quirk, E. 1981. “Social Class as Audience: Sillitoe’s Story and Screenplay ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’”. Literature/Film Quarterly 9.3: 161–171. Richardson, T. 1962. Dir. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Woodfall Film Productions. Rodríguez, D. 2002. “Against the Discipline of ‘Prison Writing’: Toward a Theoretical Conception of Contemporary Radical Prison Praxis”. Genre 35: 407–428. Sillitoe, A. 1958. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London: W. H. Allen.

The Teaching of Prison Texts  255 Sillitoe, A. 2007 [1959]. “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner”. In The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner by A. Sillitoe, 7–54. London: Harper Perennial. Thompson, R. 2008. Screwed: The Truth About Life as a Prison Officer. London: Headline Review. Thompson, R. 2010. Banged Up. London: Headline Review. Thompson, R. 2011. Knifer. London: Headline Review. Wilson, D. and S. O’Sullivan. 2004. Images of Incarceration: Representations of Prison in Film and Television Drama. Winchester: Waterside Press. Winding-Refn, N. 2008. Dir. Bronson. Vertigo Films.

15 Folsom Prison Writing Workshop Roger Robinson

I hand my wallet, phone and keys in my lanyard marks me as a guest; these bolted gates make me uneasy. He says he’s Indian Nepalese, this prisoner who looks so young and I’m faced with all my guilty freedom. His forearm tattoos all hold meaning snow capped peaks they speak of home; these bolted gates make me uneasy. Poems can make minds move freely, books are a portable paradise; and I’m faced with all my guilty freedom. In seventy years he won’t be leaving he’ll never again smell Monsoon rain. I leave these bolted gates uneasy and I’m faced with all my guilty freedom.1

Note 1 Folsom State Prison is just outside Sacremento, California, USA.

Index

abolition, penal 190–192; literary representation 193–198, 203 aesthetics: bodily 71, 82, 215, 217, 243–244, 252–253; experimental 173–179, 181–186, 193–197; free indirect style 25, 32; as inflected by the material space of the prison 25, 96–106, 127–132, 248; realist 5, 101, 185, 240, 242–247; selfreflexivity 175–185, 223, 246, 252–253; subversive 58–59, 69–74, 132–137, 180, 197, 215, 246; violence 71, 82, 195, 252–253; see also genre; narrative; prison writing; voice African National Congress (ANC) 94–97, 99–100, 111, 117; see also Mandela, Nelson Ahmad, Aziz 144–145 Algeria: Barberousse-Serkadji Prison (see Barberousse); detention during War of Independence (1954–1962) 77–83, 85; National Liberation Front (FLN) 77–78, 80–81, 90; prisons and nationalism 77–80, 87–91; prison writing 81–91 Alleg, Henri: impact of writing 79, 86–90; La Question (The Question, 1958) 86–88; Prisonniers de Guerre (Prisoners of War, 1961) 79, 83–90 anarchism: in Alison Spedding’s work (see Spedding, Alison); and penal abolition 191–192 anti-colonial politics: African National Congress (ANC) 94–97, 99–100, 111, 117; Ba‘thism 173–175, 181–183; Black Panther Party 126–127; of George Jackson (see Jackson, George); Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) 94, 97–100, 117;

Nasserism 176–179; National Liberation Front (FLN), Algeria 77–78, 80–81, 90; and South African gangs 117–119; see also Mandela, Nelson Antoon, Sinan: I‘jaam (2004) 175–176, 181–186 architecture of prison 108, 217–220, 249; as enabling resistance 105– 107, 134; as panoptic 191; reuse (see memorialisation); segregation 84, 97, 103, 107 Arendt, Hannah 22; On Violence (1970) 253 audience/reader 25, 86, 174–175, 197, 210–217, 221–223, 229, 243–247, 252–253; considerations of 32, 43, 45, 99–102, 129, 133, 161, 164, 167–168, 201, 243–247; privilege of 2, 22–23; reception 6, 29, 110, 127, 248; see also publishing autobiography see life-writing/life writing Barberousse 79–80; and communism 80, 82, 84; National Liberation Front (FLN) 77–78, 80, 81–82, 84, 87, 89, 90; poetry from 81–82; racial hierarchies 83–84, 90; solidarity 77–78, 82, 98; as symbol of resistance 80–81, 82–83; women’s accounts of 81–82; writing 81–91; see also Alleg, Henri; Charby, Jacques; Khemisti, Mohamed; Timsit, Daniel Black liberation: African National Congress (ANC) 94–97, 99–100, 111, 117 (see also Mandela, Nelson); Black Consciousness Movement 96–97; Black Panther

258 Index Party 126–127; Black Power Movement (see Jackson, George); Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) 94, 97–100, 117 Bolivia: anti-drug policy 198–199; legal system 198–199; Miraflores Centre of Female Orientation 198–203; prisons 196, 199 (see also prison films); prison writing (see Spedding, Alison) Bouhazer, Hocine [Bouzaher]: Serkaji (dans l’ombre de Barberousse) (Serkaji (in the Shadow of Barberousse), 1960) 81 Bould, Geoffrey 5, 7 Breytenbach, Breyten 104; The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984) 1–2, 8, 240 Brodsky, Joseph 151–152 Bronson, Charles 251–252; see also prison films Bruce, Deborah 227, 230–233; see also Clean Break Bukharin, Nikolai: How It All Began (1998) 58, 69–74; imprisonment and execution 58–59, 74; Philosophical Arabesques (2008) 58, 64, 67–69, 71; Socialism and National Culture (2006) 58–59, 62, 68; Spinozism of 62, 68–69; and Stalin 58–59, 61, 64, 68–69, 73; Transformation of the World (Verse about the Ages, and about People) (2009) 58, 60–66 Butler, Judith: Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) 30; Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning (2004) 21, 25 capital punishment 58–59, 69–74, 78, 80–82, 84, 88, 90, 117, 132, 157–158 carceral logic: of gender 201–203; and literature and literary studies 10, 23, 95, 152–153; of universities 10–11, 242, 251 Carr, James: Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr (1975) 133–134 Carver, David 144–147; see also PEN International censorship 157, 183; and the Adult Authority 125–132; advocacy against (see PEN International); bans 100, 176; classification

160–164; of Guantánamo Diary (2015) 160–165, 168–169; literary representations of 177, 181–185; of prison letters 103–104, 127–130; of prison writing (excluding letters) 45–46, 81, 86–87, 156–157, 160–165, 168–169, 176, 213, 214, 216–217, 234; self-censorship 45–46, 103–104, 129–130, 222; of testimony 161–163; see also publishing; silencing Charby, Jacques: L’Algérie en prison (Algeria in Prison, 1960) 86, 89–90 Chevigny, Bell Gale: Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing (1999) 5, 23, 153–154; “‘All I Have, A Lament and A Boast’: Why Prisoners Write” (2005) 22; work for PEN America 22, 153–154; see also PEN International Christie, Nils: “Conflicts as Property” (1977) 196 class: and criminalisation 29, 112–113, 117–118, 136, 248; critique in prison writing and film 63–65, 191, 242–247, 253; and prisons 78–79; and readers of prison writing 242, 244–247, 253 Clean Break: commissioned works 209–211; feminist politics 211–212, 214–216, 22; formation 209–211, 227; theatre-writing workshops in prisons 227–233, 234–236; writers in residence 230, 234–235; writers under commission 228–229, 230–233 Coetzee, Jan: Plain Tales from Robben Island (2000) 101–102 collaborative writing models 9, 87, 101, 133, 211; see also publishing; Stobsiade (1916–1919) colonialism 118; in Bolivia 190; and ethnography 200–201; French (see Algeria); and PEN International 144–150, 151–154; and the prison system 83–84, 90, 136–137; and South Africa 94, 113, 118–119; USA as colonial power 136–137, 199; see also anti-colonial politics; decolonisation; nationalism communism 61–64, 194, 176; in Algeria 80, 82, 84; and PEN International 142–147; Soviet 58; see also Alleg, Henri; Bukharin, Nikolai

Index  259 criminalisation 30–31, 248; of African American men 29, 136–137; of Black British men 29; of drugs 198–200; effects on women 201–202, 221–223, 232; of mental illness 94, 218, 222, 232, 248; South African proletariat 112–113, 117–118; of “terrorism” (see “terrorism”); of women 209–210, 218–219, 232 Cuba see Guantánamo Bay Davies, Ioan 2, 8 Davis, Angela: on prisons and penal abolition 24, 191; relationship with George Jackson 127, 136 decolonisation 147, 190–193; and Africa 118; and Algeria (see Algeria); and PEN International 144–147, 151 Deleuze, Gilles: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987) 197 Dingake, Michael: My Fight Against Apartheid (1987) 103–107; see also Robben Island Dittrich, Peter: “Alibi” (1982) 24–26, 32 Djabali, Leila: “Lieutenant D…” (2002) 8 Dlamini, Moses: Hell Hole, Robben Island (1984) 98–100; see also Mandela, Nelson; Robben Island Dowd, Siobhan 139–140, 144, 151–154 drama see theatre embodiment 71, 82, 215, 217, 243–244, 252–253 feminism: Alison Spedding (see Spedding, Alison); Clean Break (see Clean Break) Foucault, Michel: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977) 21, 104, 128 France: detention during Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) 77, 81, 86–87, 89–90; see also Algeria Franklin, Bruce: “The Inside Stories of the Global American Prison” (2008) 21; Prison Writing in 20th-Century America ( 1998) 3, 6, 23; The Victim as Criminal and Artist:

Literature from the American Prison (1978) 23 freedom: evocations of in prison writing 68, 90, 95, 100–101, 104–105, 107–108, 176, 183, 185–186, 191, 193–198, 244– 247; fighters (see nationalism); from incarceration 150, 163, 166–168, 198, 217–218, 253; PEN International (see PEN International); prison writing as liberating 6, 22, 28, 68, 123–124, 166, 185, 213–214, 227, 232, 240, 247; of speech 10, 22, 142–147, 150–154; see also censorship Fricker, Miranda 24, 26, 27 Galsworthy, John 141, 145; see also PEN International Galtung, Johan: on direct, structural and cultural violence 26, 28, 30 gangs: the Ninevites 113; the Number 111–119; 26s 111, 115; 27s 111, 115–117; 28s 111, 115; and role in anti-apartheid struggle 117–119; in Soweto 118 gender: as carceral concept 201–203; femininity 49–51, 200–202, 210, 218–219; feminism (see feminism); masculinity 42, 47–49, 51–52, 116–117, 136, 243–245, 247, 250, 252–253; roles in prison 48–52, 116–117; see also sexuality; women Genet, Jean: “Introduction” to Soledad Brother (1971) 124, 134–136; see also Jackson, George genre: autobiography (see lifewriting/life writing); confession 58–60, 69–74; diary 5, 44–45, 52, 86–87, 161–169, 178–179; drama (see theatre); ethnography 198–204; film 16, 82–83, 119, 215, 246, 251–253; letters (see letters); life-writing (see lifewriting/life writing); metafiction 175–186, 242, 246; poetry (see poetry); prison literature versus prison writing 3–7, 21–24, 32, 153; resistance literature 137, 152–153; speculative 190, 193–198; testimony 29–32, 59–60, 78–90, 169, 215, 217; utopian 62, 189, 191, 193–198; see also aesthetics; narrative; prison writing

260 Index Germany: Auschwitz 26–27, 30; German PoWs in WWI (see Stobs Military Camp, UK); German Democratic Republic (GDR) 27–28; PEN Centre East Germany 149; prisons in contemporary Germany 25–26; prisons in East Germany (GDR, 1945–1989) 24, 27–29, 31; prisons in West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1989) 24–25, 26, 27–28; prison writing 24–31, 41–54 Girard, René 166 Goffman, Erving: on the “total institution” 22, 53 Gréki, Anna 82 Guantánamo Bay: prisoner abuse 160–164; Slahi, Mohamedou Ould, Guantánamo Diary (2015) 161–169 guards and governors 83, 86, 97, 105, 113, 156–157, 212–214, 230, 234; physical violence 25–26, 83–84, 115, 126–127; in prison writing and film 25, 27, 32, 49, 87–88, 129, 136, 159, 163–164, 184, 199, 217, 242–247, 249, 253; prison writing by 105, 229–233, 247–248; storytelling 157–158; see also police Harlow, Barbara: Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (1992) 8–9, 152–154; Resistance Literature (1987) 8, 152–153, 176 Hicks, Jenny: In or Out? (1980) 209; on Clean Break 211–213, 215, 220, 227 Holborough, Jacqueline: and Clean Break 212–213, 227; Killers (1980) and Decade (1984) 216–222 human rights: abuses (see human rights abuses); Amnesty International 150–151; and anti-colonial politics 140–141, 148–154; freedom of speech 10, 247; PEN International (see PEN International); relationship with literature 8, 140–141, 150–154, 253; as studied in Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York 9–11, 239–242, 253

human rights abuses: extraordinary rendition 157; torture (see torture); see also “War on Terror” humour 45–52, 161, 217–218, 252–253; irony 81, 47–49, 53–54, 174, 181; parody 58; satire 45, 47–48, 181–183, 210 Hussein, Saddam 181–182, 184 Ibrahim, Sun‘allah: That Smell & Notes from Prison (Tilka ra’iha, 1966) 175–178, 186 interrogation 27, 79, 85, 157–158, 161–164; forced confessions 28, 58–60, 69–74, 173, 179; writing as torture 179–181; see also torture Iraq: prisoner abuse 160, 164; prison writing 159, 177, 181–186 Jackson, George: censorship of 127–132; revolutionary politics of 123–127, 131–132, 136–137; Blood in My Eye (1980) 127, 131; Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970) 123–124, 126–132, 135–137; use of prison conversion narrative 132–137; see also Black liberation James, Erwin: The Home Stretch: From Prison to Parole (2005) 248; A Life Inside: A Prisoner’s Notebook (2003) 240, 247–249; Redeemable: A Memoir of Darkness and Hope (2016) 248; at the University of York 250–251; see also teaching prison writing Jameson, Fredric: Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005) 191, 198, 203 Jordan 156–158 al-Jundi, Sami: My Friend Elias (Sadiqi Ilyas, 1969) 173–175, 186 justice, restorative 192, 196; literary representations of 196–197 Khalifa, Mustafa: The Shell (al-Qawqa‘a, 2008) 175, 179 Khemisti, Mohamed: Barberousse (1960) 78, 83–84, 88–89, 90 Khoury, Elias: Yalo (Yalu, 2002) 175–176, 179–181 Koestler, Arthur: Darkness at Noon (1940) 60, 74; Koestler Awards 233

Index  261 Lahsen, Malika 82 lawyers 82, 129, 162–163, 166; assistance in publishing prison writing 86, 126–127, 160, 163; influence on prison writing 132–133 Lebanon: prison writing see Khoury, Elias legal system 25, 93, 124, 162, 192, 196, 198–200, 211, 219; hearings 161, 163, 166–167; representatives (see lawyers); trials and sentencing 58–60, 69–74, 86, 125–130, 149–150, 173–174, 181, 199; see also criminalisation; human rights abuses; parole letters 25, 59, 77, 82, 85, 150, 160–162; censorship of 103–104, 127–130; of George Jackson (see Jackson, George); use of in Arabic prison novels 173–174, 178–179, 182–183 Levi, Primo: The Drowned and the Saved (1989) 26, 30 Levi, Robin 4 life-writing/life writing 2, 5, 42–43, 123–129, 132–135, 137; antiautobiography 25, 69–74, 228; autobiographical elements in prison fiction 174, 176–179; autobiography 27, 29, 94–103, 108, 123–137, 247–251; communal life writing 42–44, 54; confession 58–60, 69–74; diary 5, 44–45, 52, 86–87, 161–169, 178–179; letters (see letters); see also genre literary studies: academic institutionalisation of prison writing/literature 3–11, 22–24, 29, 32, 176, 211, 239–242; canonicity and literary value 4–6, 21–24, 32, 149–153, 241, 243; ethics of in relation to prison writing 6, 21–24, 239–242; postcolonial studies 8; students 9–10, 16, 239–245, 247, 248–251, 252–254; teaching prison writing 9–10, 16, 239–253; worldliterature 7–9 MacKinnon, Catherine 25, 31–32 Mandela, Nelson: PEN International’s stance towards 149–150; and Robben Island 93–98, 102–104, 107; The Long Walk to Freedom

(1994) 95–96, 98–101, 103–104, 107–108; see also South Africa Mapanje, Jack: Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (2002) 12, 82 Matar, Ahmed 159 Mathebula, Mzuzephi see Nongoloza McDonald, Peter D. 145, 149 media representations of prisons 1, 21–22, 24, 32, 127, 219, 241, 252 memorialisation: of BarberousseSerkadji into national museum 80; of Johannesburg Fort into Constitution Hill 93; publishing prison writing as a form of 43, 45, 233; of Robben Island 93–98, 102, 107–108 memory: challenges of in relation to prison writing 168–169, 197–198, 249; national and political memory 29, 80, 85–87, 93–95, 197; in prison writing 51, 65–66, 69–73, 80–81, 86–87, 178, 180, 182–186, 197, 249; see also memorialisation Miller, Quentin: Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States (2005) 22, 27 Munif, ‘Abd al-Rahman: East of the Mediterranean (Sharq al-mutawassit, 1975) 175–178, 186 Naidoo, Indres: Island in Chains: Ten Years on Robben Island (2000) 97, 100–101 narrative: authority/credibility 21–26, 29–31, 43, 216, 252; framing 27, 29, 32, 96, 132, 178–179, 218, 249, 252; gaps and occlusions 27, 45, 173–175, 180–186; implied reader/ viewer 100–102, 129, 161, 217, 221, 243, 246; of rehabilitation (see Jackson, George); storytelling (see storytelling); temporality 62–65, 71, 179, 182, 186, 197–198, 242, 245; voice (see voice); see also aesthetics; censorship; genre; White, Hayden national identity: prisons and 29, 41, 80, 85–87, 93–95, 197, 106; prison writing and 42, 47–48, 52–54, 104–108 nationalism: African National Congress (ANC) 94–97, 99–100, 111, 117; Ba‘thism 173–175, 181–183; Black Panther Party

262 Index 126–127; of George Jackson (see Jackson, George); Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) 94, 97–100, 117; Nasserism 176–179; National Liberation Front (FLN), Algeria 77–78, 80, 81–82, 84, 87, 89, 90; South African gangs’ significance to nationalist struggle 117–119; see also anti-colonial politics; Mandela, Nelson; national identity Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo: Detained (1981) 152 Nongoloza: and the Number gangs 111, 113, 115, 117; story of 111–118; see also Steinberg, Jonny Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) 94, 97–100, 117 parole 235, 251; Adult Authority (USA) 125–132 pedagogy see teaching prison writing and film PEN International: emphasis on human rights 140–141, 148–154; English PEN 9, 144–147, 150; Freedom to Write Program 22, 160; history and constitution 141–144, 148; and the imprisoned writer 139–141, 142–144; members (see PEN members); PEN America 22, 140, 153, 154, 160; PEN Centre East Germany 149; PEN Hungary 143; PEN South Africa 149; political neutrality 140, 142–143, 146–147, 149–150; publishing 139, 144, 151–154; stance towards Nelson Mandela 149–150; Writers in Prison Committee 142–150; York PEN 9–10 PEN members: Ahmad, Aziz 144–145; Blokh, Alexandre 148; Carver, David 144–147; Chevigny, Bell Gale (see Chevigny, Bell Gale); Dowd, Siobhan 139–140, 144, 151–154; Galsworthy, John 141, 145; King, Francis 148; Millin, Getrude Sarah 145–146; Scammell, Michael 147–150; Siems, Larry (see Siems, Larry); Sontag, Susan 148; Sowden, Doris and Lewis 145; Tabori, Paul 143; Von Vegesack, Thomas 148 poetry: Bukharin, Nikolai, Transformation of the World

(Verse about the Ages, and about People) (2009) 60–67; Dittrich, Peter, “Alibi” (1982) 2; Djabali, Leila, “Lieutenant D…” (2002) 82; Gréki, Anna 82; Lahsen, Malika 82; Matar, Ahmed, “Prison Guard” 159; Robinson, Roger, “Folsom Prison Writing Workshop” (2020) 256; in Stobsiade (1916–1919) 50–55 police 112, 113, 125; in prison writing 84–85, 100, 244–245, 176; violence 94, 117, 146; see also parole political prisoners: apartheid regime 93–108, 149–150; French Algeria (see Barberousse); Hussein’s Iraq 181–186; issues with the category 6, 29, 117–119, 151–154, 199–200, 240; prisoners of war (see prisoners of war); Stalinist Russia 58–60; USA (see “War on Terror”); see also PEN International postcolonialism: postcolonial and world-literature 7–9; decolonisation (see decolonisation); prisoners of conscience 8–9, 150–154; subjectivity 3; see also political prisoners Potter, Rachel 142–143 Preczang, Ernst 50–51; see also Stobsiade (1916–1919) prison films 16, 82–83, 119, 215; Bronson (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn, 2009) 240, 251–253; The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (dir. Tony Richardson, 1962) 242, 246; teaching of 246, 251–253 prison life: boredom and routine 43–45, 158, 197, 249, 253; class conflict 192, 200–203, 244–246; community and solidarity 77–78, 82, 98, 103–108; dehumanising effects 24, 30–31, 53–54, 77, 98–99, 105; economy 133–134; education and reading 42–43, 52, 78, 88–89, 124, 133, 136, 154, 156–157, 209–211, 223, 227–235, 251; gangs (see gangs); informants 201–202, 249; letter writing (see letters); libraries 52, 88, 156–157, 161; psychological effects 44, 46, 83–84, 221–222, 228, 233–234; racial hierarchies 83–84, 90,

Index  263 104–105; resistance (see prisons as sites of resistance); religion 156; sex 114–117, 249; singing 48–49, 80, 84–85; surveillance 85, 88, 127–137, 156, 202, 220, 228, 234; violence (see violence); writing (see prison writing); see also prisons prison literature see prison writing prisoners of war: of Algerian War of Independence (see Barberousse); of First World War (see Stobs Military Camp, UK); of Lebanese Civil War 179–181; see also political prisoners prisons: Barberousse-Serkadji, Algeria (see Barberousse); Fresnes, France 79, 89; Folsom State Prison (California State Prison, Sacramento), USA 256; General Intelligence Department (Mukhabarat) prison, Jordan 156–158; Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (see Guantánamo Bay); HMP & YOI Askham Grange, UK 9, 209, 212–214; HMP Durham, UK 212, 214, 217, 219–222, 234; HMP Holloway, UK 209, 233–234; Johannesburg Fort, South Africa 93, 106–107, 119; Lubyanka, Russia 58–59; Maison-Carrée (El-Harrach), Algeria 83, 86–88; Miraflores Centre of Female Orientation, Bolivia 198–203; Pollsmoor Prison, South Africa 110–111, 113; Robben Island, South Africa (see Robben Island); Soledad Prison, USA (see Soledad Prison (Monterey County’s Salinas Valley State Prison), USA); Stobs Military Camp, UK (see Stobs Military Camp, UK) prisons as sites of resistance 124–125, 133–134, 211–216; collective 77–78, 82, 98, 103–108; as depicted in prison writing 176, 243–246; individual 21–22, 26, 104, 132–137, 152–153 prison writing: aesthetics (see aesthetics); difficulties of publishing 161–169; difficulties of writing while incarcerated 22, 86–87, 156–157, 161–162, 179–186, 213; as empowerment 22, 43, 54, 97–98, 124, 163, 175, 227–229,

231–235; genre (see genre); by guards/wardens 105, 229–233, 247–248; politics of reading 110, 174, 239–242; publishing (see publishing); reception (see audience/ reader); as resistance 21–22, 26, 60, 81–82, 104, 124–125, 132–137, 152–153, 161–169, 175–176, 180, 211–221, 243–246; teaching of (see teaching prison writing); as torture/ interrogation tool 28, 58–60, 69–74, 173, 179–183; versus “prison literature” 3–7, 21–24, 32, 153; world-literary significance 2–3, 7–9, 12 prison writing by women: drama (see Clean Break); poetry 81–82; speculative fiction and ethnography see Spedding, Alison publishing: censorship (see censorship); difficulties of 4, 21, 27–31, 149, 161–169; editorial interventions 101, 132–133, 164–165; see also prison writing race and incarceration: criminalisation 29, 112–113, 136–137; racial hierarchies in prison 83–84, 104–105 rape: in prison fiction 173, 179; in prisons 25–26, 161; see also violence readership see audience/reader rehabilitation 105, 124–136; and prison education 235, 251 representation see voice revolution: Algerian (1954–1962) 78–91, 146; counter-revolution 58–61, 69; evocations of in prison writing 61–64, 193–198; and feminism 214; revolutionary politics of George Jackson 124, 127–128, 131–133, 136–137; Russian Revolution (1917–1923) 61–62 Richardson, Tony: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (dir., 1962) 242, 246 Robben Island: history and symbolic significance 93–96; writing 96–108; see also Mandela, Nelson Rodríguez, Dylan: “Against the Discipline of “Prison Writing” (2002) 6, 22–24, 241; Forced

264 Index Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (2005) 32, 124 Roux, Daniel 191 Russia: prison writing (see Bukharin, Nikolai); Stalin’s repression of writers 58–60 Rymhs, Deena 4, 21, 24 Sachs, Albie 104, 119 sex and sexuality: expression of 134, 195; homoeroticism in prison writing 48–51; rape (see rape); sex in prison 114–117; sexual harassment in prisons 161; see also gender Siems, Larry: on joining and working for PEN 159–160; on publishing Guantánamo Diary (2015; 2017) 161, 163–166, 168; see also PEN International; Slahi, Mohamedou Ould silencing: censorship (see censorship); direct, structural and cultural 26–31; epistemic violence 23–26, 32; see also voice Sillitoe, Alan: “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” (1959) 240, 242–247 Slahi, Mohamedou Ould: early life and imprisonment 156–159; Guantánamo Diary (2015), censorship of 160–165, 168–169; on the restoration of Guantánamo Diary (2017) 169; release 167; on writing Guantánamo Diary (2015) 161–163, 166–167; see also Siems, Larry Slaughter, Joseph 150–151 Soledad Prison (Monterray County’s Salinas Valley State Prison), USA: Adult Authority and rehabilitation 124–133, 135–136; George Jackson (see Jackson, George); James Carr 133–134; prison censor 128–130; prison life and economy 133–134 Sontag, Susan 148 South Africa: African National Congress (ANC) 94, 96–97, 99–100, 111, 117; apartheidera prison writing 93–108; contemporary prison writing 110–112; gangs 111–119; Mandela, Nelson (see Mandela, Nelson); Pan

African Congress (PAC) 94, 97, 99–100, 117; PEN South Africa 149; Robben Island see Robben Island Spedding, Alison: arrest and imprisonment 189; De cuando en cuando Saturnina: una historia oral del future (Saturnina from time to time: an oral history of the future, 2004) 189–191, 193–198, 200, 202–204; La segunda vez como farsa: etnografía de una cárcel de mujeres en Bolivia (The Second Time as Farce: Ethnography of a Women’s Prison in Bolivia, 2008) 190–193, 197–204 Spinoza, Baruch 62, 68–69 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) 22–23, 26 Stalin, Joseph 58–59, 68–69, 73 Steinberg, Jonny: The Number (2004) 110, 112, 116, 120; see also Nongoloza Stobs Military Camp, UK 41; camp newspaper (see Stobsiade (1916– 1919)); drama 50; infrastructure 41–43, 53 Stobsiade (1916–1919): censorship of 45–46; as communal life writing 42–44, 54; gender and sexual politics of 48–52; humour 45–48, 49, 53–54; masculinity 42, 47–49, 51–52; national identity 41, 47–48, 52–54; poems 50–52; production and circulation 43, 45; psychological wellbeing and 43–44, 46 storytelling: collective storytelling 42–44, 54; importance of prisoners’ stories 32, 137, 167, 209, 215, 229, 232; in prisons 111–118, 156–158; reflections on in prison fiction 174–175, 184–186 surveillance 85, 88, 127–137, 156, 202, 220, 228, 234; see also censorship; Foucault, Michel Syria: prison writing 173–175, 186; Syriac community in Lebanon 179 teaching prison writing and film 16, 239–242; case studies 247–253 “terrorism”: African National Congress (ANC) 94–97, 99–100,

Index  265 111, 117; Black Panther Party 126–127; Islamic (see “War on Terror”); National Liberation Front (FLN) 77–78, 80–81, 90; Nelson Mandela (see Mandela, Nelson); Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) 94, 97–100, 117; in prison writing 218; see also Breytenbach, Breyten theatre: performances in prisons 50–51, 212–214, 228, 233–235; prison theatre (see Clean Break) Thompson, Ronnie: Screwed (2000) 247–248 Timsit, Daniel: Récits de la longue patience: journal de prison 1956–1962 (Tales of Enduring Patience: Prison Journals 1956– 1962, 2002) 77, 83, 85 torture 59–60, 79, 81–88, 115, 157, 161–164; novelistic depictions of 177–178, 179–181, 183; writing as torture 179–183 tourism see memorialisation UK: criminalisation 29, 31, 220, 232; HMP & YOI Askham Grange 9, 209, 212–214 (see also Clean Break); HMP Durham 212, 214, 217, 219–222, 234; HMP Holloway 209, 233–234; prison films 240– 241, 242, 246, 251–253; prison writing 240–251; prison theatre (see Clean Break); Stobs Military Camp (see Stobs Military Camp, UK); teaching prison writing in (see teaching prison writing and film) University of York: connections with HMP & YOI Askham Grange 213; teaching prison writing at 9–10, 239–253 USA: academic study of prison writing 23; Adult Authority 125–132; criminalisation of African American men 29, 136–137; Folsom State Prison (California State Prison, Sacramento) 256; global drug policy 199; PEN America 22, 140, 153, 154, 160; prison writing (see Jackson, George); Treatment Era 124–133; “War on Terror” (see “War on Terror”); Soledad Prison (see Soledad Prison (Monterey County’s Salinas Valley State Prison), USA)

utopia 140, 189, 191–194: explorations of in prison writing 62, 189, 191, 193–195, 198, 203; prisons as utopian spaces 191–192 violence 25–26, 83–84, 115, 126–127; aestheticisation of 251–253; epistemic violence 23–26, 32; sexual violence 25–26, 161, 249; silencing (see silencing) voice: authenticity 94, 101–102, 211, 216, 239, 243, 250–251; collective 44–45, 96–98, 101–108, 245; conflict between individual and free indirect style 25, 32; polyvocality 27, 44–45, 62, 90, 101–102, 197 “War on Terror”: extraordinary rendition 157; prisoner abuse at detention camps 160–164; suppression of evidence of abuse 160–165; see also Siems, Larry; Slahi, Mohamedou Ould wars: Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) 78–91, 146; Cold War 140, 142–150; First World War 41–54; Iran-Iraq (1980–1988) 181–186; Lebanese Civil War 179–181; Russian Revolution and Civil War (1917–1922) 58–63, 68–74; Second World War 26, 30, 142; “War on Terror” (see “War on Terror”) Waugh, Patricia: “What is Metafiction and Why are They Saying Such Awful Things About It” (1995) 175, 178–179, 181, 185 White, Hayden: “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” (1981) 29–30 Winding Refn, Nicolas: Bronson (dir., 2009) 240, 251–253 women: accounts of incarceration (see prison writing by women); effects of incarceration 201–202, 221–223, 232; trans women’s experiences of incarceration 25–26; see also gender world-literature and prison writing 7–9 Wu, Yenna: Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Writing (2011) 5, 8–9 Zwelonke, D.M.: Robben Island (1989) 100