| Monday, May 14, 2007 3:18PM | | | | Writing in Prison | Posted By: Anne Landsman
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I came to the Prison Writing panel at the Instituto Cervantes in part because I had recently interviewed Breyten Breytenbach for the November issue of The Believer and he was going to be one of the panelists. Like Breytenbach, I was born in South Africa and have always been intrigued by the circumstances surrounding his imprisonment, and the writing that arose from it. Much of my conversation with him for The Believer focused on exactly that and I was looking forward to seeing Breytenbach in a larger context, discussing writing in prison with other former prisoners.
Jackson Taylor, director of the Prison Writing program at PEN, opened the event by describing his program’s three-pronged mission – to publish a writers’ handbook for writers in prison, to hold an annual writing contest and to run a mentorship program. He mentioned that program begins with the premise that there is no difference between the prisoners and ourselves. Judgment is suspended and a blind eye is turned to their crimes. The program also seeks to protect the privacy of the prisoners, and screen and guard where their work should appear.
All the panelists – Breyten Breytenbach, Kathleen Cleaver (Eldridge Cleaver’s widow), Massimo Carlotto and Susan Rosenberg - had either been behind bars, or had been close to someone behind bars. All were political activists, or had become politically active in prison. Drake Stutesman opened the discussion directly addressing the relationship between activism and writing, wanting to know if writing in prison “declares the experience it’s writing about.”
Kathleen Cleaver spoke about the different impulses behind the two activities – writing comes from a place of quiet whereas activism is a going out. She mentioned that the confinement of prison imposes a certain discipline, and that she believed that some of Eldridge Cleaver’s best pages were written in prison.
Breytenbach said that writing tends to be true to demands that are not necessarily the demands of the activist, that it is as much about doubt as it is about certainty. Susan Rosenberg – who had been imprisoned for sixteen years – saw writing in prison as a form of resistance, a way to bear witness.
Massimo Carlotto responded in Italian, a very nimble translator simultaneously translating what he had to say. He addressed the fact that prisoners were not allowed to write in Italian prisons when he was incarcerated. There was one pen for every sixty prisoners. He began to write after his time in prison. For him it was natural that his work be a form of activism. (He writes detective novels in a genre known as “Mediterranean Noir”, where he uses criminal circumstances to describe a particular social milieu.)
Kathleen Cleaver led the conversation back into a fascinating exploration of the therapeutic aspect of writing and spoke about how Eldridge Cleaver used writing to save himself, and to resolve internal conflicts. Things came up in his writing that wouldn’t have necessarily have come up in the throes of activism. Breyten Breytenbach had this to say, “If I could not write, if I were not able to write, I think I would have gone mad entirely.” He described how writing became a sense-organ in the grey world of the prison. Susan Rosenberg echoed what he had to say, speculating that she would also have gone mad if she had not been able to write. Writing in prison was the most liberating time, it was “in your head but took you out of your head.”
Massimo Carlotto spoke about how different it was in an Italian prison – and how difficult. There were no novels written in prison. All were written after the experience, and they tended to justify a political position rather than engage in an internal dialogue. Although he did not write in prison, he did a lot of reading, discovering the world of detective novels.
What became more and more clear during the discussion was that prison was the defining moment in the lives of these four people, and the people they were close to. Breytenbach mentioned that he could always sense whether people had been in prison or not and Susan Rosenberg described it as “prison radar.” She said she thought she’d never get out and that the people still inside were very prominent in her life and in her work. Kathleen Cleaver spoke about the many years she spent visiting people in prison, including her husband, and the work she did to release people who had been imprisoned for political purposes.
Drake Stutesman asked the panelists how the prison experience affected the development of their writing, their writing styles, the words they used, the genres they worked in. Breytenbach said, “To write you go into a place of isolation.” Coupled with the isolation of prison and its careful measuring out of time, there was a kind of purification, a greater concentration on the act of writing and the material that goes into it. He became more aware of the materiality of words, and intensely aware of the words he chose. He was also brought into contact with the everyday language used by the other prisoners and there was a richness that came from that.
Susan Rosenberg said she realized she was losing her memory of the real world, and all its attendant colors, smells, sounds. One day she smelled the cologne a guard was wearing and it came as a wake-up call. She knew she had to remember those things in order to keep them alive.
Breyten Breytenbach was the only one of the panelists who had been a writer for quite a while before he went to prison. Many of his responses reflected that writerly consciousness. He spoke about the paradox of trying to communicate an experience that’s impossible to fully communicate, how one writes so as not to lose the self. Writing eventually takes the place of the actual experience, “in the telling of yourself, you also shape yourself.”
Susan Rosenberg became a writer in prison. She started by writing letters as a way to keep people involved in her experience. When she spoke about what she was going through, her lawyer would say, “Write it down.” She didn’t consider herself to be a real writer until she started writing fiction. The PEN Prison Writing Program was a lifeline for her, and a huge source of encouragement.
What was also discussed was the fantasy in many prisoners’ minds that they would come out of prison with books based on their experiences and then become bestselling authors. Rosenberg and Breytenbach described how other prisoners came to them and wanted them to write the stories of their lives. Kathleen Cleaver spoke of the prevailing myth among the prisoners in these terms – “you get a book, you get a lawyer, you get money, you get out.” She first became aware of Eldridge Cleaver’s writing by reading letters he had published from prison in a magazine. These would later become part of Soul on Ice. For Massimo Carlotto, the fantasy of becoming a bestselling author was actually realized. Although he didn’t write in prison, he spent so much time immersed in detective novels that he was able to write very successfully in that genre once he had been released.
Jackson Taylor ended the conversation saying that he’d welcome anyone who would like to correspond with prisoners through the PEN program. People in prison need to tell their stories and maintain their ties to the outside world. | | | |
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