December 16, 2015 - 22:38
The Day We Lost Control
For anyone who was a member of this 360 and especially of the Friday Group, it immediately becomes clear which week was the Turning Point. There were important, vivid moments of clarity in every visit, to be sure (barring the visit when we did not even get to have book group, though some insights can surely still be found there) but the week that everything changed, the Turning Point, was the week where we lost control. My own experience of that day was different mainly because I happened to be at a specific place at the right time. While everyone else was gathered in a group in the corner, discussing the book and struggling to field a class that was heading in several different directions, I happened to be in another corner having a one-on-one conversation with one of the women (ttong joined as well, later). My account:
Halfway through book group, one of our “regulars”, Liana* came in….She said that she was “depressed today” and preferred not to write, instead sitting quietly. I asked her if she wanted to go outside and talk, and she said that she was afraid that she would cry.
Then we looked at each other. And whatever was holding her back from speaking ceased to exist and the pain and anger and hurt gushed out of her like a faucet…. I tried to think of something, anything substantial to say...but what could possibly alleviate the pain? I settled for just squeezing her hand as tightly as I could. I told her that her feelings mattered, and she was important.
And then Christal* [another woman inside] joined us and held Liana’s other hand. But after she listened to what was making Liana hurt, her first reaction was the polar opposite of mine. “I get where you’re coming from, but crying isn’t helping you. Indulging isn’t helping you. When we’re here, we lose a little bit of ourselves every day. We can’t be whole. But giving into that is not the way to go. You have to do what you can to live while you’re here. You can’t give up. Crying won’t do anything for you right now.”
Class ended at that moment. Liana, still brimming with tears, had to get up. I let go of her hand, gave her a long hug.
Since that day so many weeks ago, I have struggled to examine that situation, to figure out whether I did the right thing, to understand why and how that day was the turning point. What I have realized is that day made everything more real for me, opened my eyes to what actually goes on in these spaces. I had read about it all, of course, read Foucault, read Fine & Ruglis, read others who describe the deep-seated psychological affects of being incarcerated. And believed it completely, but could hardly comprehend it with the privileged life that I myself lead. After the first class, I commented that it was amazing how much that space could feel like any other classroom, a place of learning where everyone is eager to share their interpretations of a text, even to contextualize things within their own framework by sharing personal narratives. The classroom is a comfortable space for me, a space that I have shared with others my whole life, so why would I not seek to compare it to my own experiences? And/but when Liana allowed the narrative of her suffering to break the surface, allowed despair to blatantly enter the room, it all came screaming back to me.
In an earlier session of book group, Christal had said, in a discussion about control in prison and in social situations, “we all decide where to draw the line, and it changes depending on where we are.” She meant that we all must make compromises with how much we decide to give of ourselves in a situation. When you are a marginalized being, these decisions become moments of life-or-death; the autonomy you have over your own voice becomes your only source of power, and sometimes even that cannot save you. In order to move forward in book group, to truly get down to the roots of our individual selves, we had to first establish a safe space and then, slowly and painfully, peel back the layers until we were exposed. The further we pushed the line that Christal talked about, the further we got as a group, and the more vulnerable we all became. After doing our best to establish book group as a safe space, we “leaned into discomfort” as a group, thus broadening our own learning edges. It certainly was leaning into discomfort for me, a person who tends to imbibe the vibrations of a room and those of the people that I become most comfortable with. In our vulnerability, we opened up the space for much more raw emotions, which I was not prepared for, no matter how much theory that I had read beforehand. Being in class that day required all of us to “indulge in our humanity” as joie rose so put it in their post from that book group; this is what led to us, as a whole, doing the work of “consciousness-raising” that Sara Evans describes.
“Consciousness-raising” is a concept that we discussed in depth, and is grounded in humanization. It led to the “creation of small groups within which women could share with mutual trust the intimate details of their lives…they provided a place, a “free space” in which women could examine the nature of their own oppression and share the growing knowledge that they were not alone” (215). The creation of a consciousness-raising space in prison that day required us all to recognize that the classroom is not a vacuum that is unaffected by the systems that bind and control us; in fact, it can serve as a concentrated space that can magnify these differences. Those differences were magnified in that conversation that I had with Liana and also throughout that class, where conversations were becoming unreserved and emotions were pouring out with abandon. At that moment, we were all deeply uncomfortable, and pushed beyond our usual boundaries, which is why it became such a turning point for the space as a consciousness-raising one. On so many levels this supports Rich and the idea that complete emotional honesty is what creates safe spaces, though it is yet to be said whether the book group could have ever been a completely safe space for the women inside.
In Reading is My Window, Sweeney discusses her own reading group and the incarcerated women’s’ “want [for] human connection, a recognition of their dignity and humanity in an environment that can feel…like “trying to live in a grave” (245). Though this moment felt like a loss of control to us, it was actually the moment that both parties began to recognize dignity and humanity in each other. Sweeney also goes on to discuss a moment between her and one of the women that mirrored my own moment with Liana quite strongly. As a response, Sweeney did something similar with Jacqueline (the woman she interacted with) to what Christal did for Liana, rather than what I did. She “talked about ways for her to hold onto her own sense of dignity and worth as a human being [during moments of violence and turmoil” (246). At that moment, perhaps that is what I should have done, instead of merely validating her pain as I do for my own peers, who share, on many levels, my privilege. I reacted naturally, but more as a friend than as an educator.
This again raises the vast and many-layered question of why we were there and how to run this book group so that everyone could benefit. It is a question that we have pondered endlessly but will never come to a concrete answer to. We have written meticulous lesson plans that suggest that we ought to have placed ourselves in the role of educator, but our major lack of educational training (especially at the beginning of the semester) negates that identity in many ways. There were so many unnerving moments in prison where we would begin to see conversation veer off into a stagnant arena (i.e religious values and strong opinions on self-harm) but we wondered how much we should truly claim control; how could we add restrictions to a this gloomy place that could take away your very will to live? And yet, from the beginning, I have been a person who thrives on having some amount of structure in my educational experience. That structure, I have found, gives me a base around which to formulate my thoughts and even something to break through once I reach the boundaries of it. And so, it seemed important that we try to keep to the lesson plan and allow people who have reflected so deeply on the text, have used it to understand and inform their own lives and decisions, have a chance to voice their complex thoughts, which come from such many-layered experiences. Not all anecdotes had their place in those conversations, so they had to be shut down. If a larger personal issue was born through these deep discussions, then they could be better approached through one-on-one conversations like the one that I had with Liana.
But I must consider even this assertion critically. Part of me is worried that I take this on too idealistically. In a way, when we enter the space that we claim to create as “safe” where we can all “humanize” each other, and ourselves are we creating a falsely idealistic place that does not prepare the women that we work with for the oppressive truth of this world. This is where education comes in, where as much as we can be human with the women inside, we must be better trained in the pedagogy and systems in order for them to truly benefit from working with us. By bringing our humanizing selves into the prison and not our educating selves, we do not reach them and meet them halfway. The way that I reacted to an anguished woman in prison compared to the way that Megan Sweeney, who is a trained educator, did clearly shows that.
The overall experience of prison book group, for me, showed to me the strides that I have made in my humanness but even more the vast strides I have yet to make. To fully immerse oneself in this work requires far more than reading theory (something I had suspected, which is why I took on this 360 with a Praxis component). I am grateful for the written and spoken reflection that we have been able to do as a group which lends to the nuanced and critical ways in which I approach this entire experience, and I recognize that this is only the very beginning of my work of this kind. Despite/because of the moments of anxiety, of the pain that came with understanding, I feel hugely privileged to have been a part of this educational space.
Works Cited
Evans, Sara M. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Knopf, 1979. Print.
/oneworld/arts-resistance/sunday-post-17
Sweeney, Megan. Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women's Prisons. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina, 2010. Print.
*Names have been changed, obviously