asian american studies

296

The Prison Abolitionist Imagination:

A Conversation

[An outstretched hand offers you a wisp of hair]

and yet, I cannot give you what outruns us both:

this text

which you will lose, as all are lost

This I know: what I cannot lay claim to

[the joy of a power

that rises and returns,

which no one owns,

because it cannot be appropriated]1

I will these words be with you

as a connective tissue

conjoining [us]:

unassailable creatures

endlessly in process

searching for the tiny miracle

of encountering each other here …

*

7

The Prison Abolitionist Imagination / 297

The late Mark Fisher once famously said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. The same could be said about prisons: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine a world without prisons. And yet the modern prison as it currently exists in the United States is a fairly recent inven- tion. Although penological debates about competing systems of punishment and rehabilitation raged in the North in the early nineteenth century, by the end of the Civil War, physical penitentiaries were uncommon in some frontier states. Florida— which now has one of the largest prison systems in the U.S.—had no physical penitentiaries at the end of the Civil War and had to create its penal system from scratch.

Yet at this historical juncture prisons have become thoroughly naturalized. Imagining and working toward a world without prisons—which is the project of prison abolition—would not only require us to fundamentally rethink the role of the state in society, but it would also require us to work toward the total transformation of all social rela- tions. A project as lofty and ambitious as this is easy to dismiss as unrealistic, utopian, impractical, naive—an unrealizable dream. But what if— instead of reacting to these charges with counter- arguments that persuasively demonstrate that the abolitionist position is the only sensible position—

298 / Carceral Capitalism

we instead strategically use these charges them- selves as a point of departure to show how the prison itself is a problem for thought that can only be unthought using a mode of thinking that does not capitulate to the realism of the Present? Can the re- enchantment of the world be an instrument that we use to shatter the realism of the prison?

What follows is a series of questions—conversa- tions with revolutionaries, dead and alive, on death, dreams, the struggle, and the phenomeno- logical experience of freedom.

There are moments I want to enter. Will you follow me there, to the place where the breathing walls quietly exhale a low freedom song?

* Inside a dark cell, the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg retreats into her mind. Outside, World War I is raging. “We’re in a tomb.” Outside, peo- ple are creating memories. Inside, she relives old ones. While everyone sleeps, she incubates a secret—journeys to the place where the mystery is audible. As a guard stands watch over the night, she sees beyond the walls into a flowering meadow she once knew, or only knew, in a dream. From where does this small song emanate? If only …

If only we knew how to listen properly, and to brandish our incandescence to the lie that is a lock.

The Prison Abolitionist Imagination / 299

A DOZEN ROSES VS. THE POLICE STATE

In the hours after [Mike] Brown’s body was finally moved, residents erected a makeshift memorial of teddy bears and memorabilia on the spot where police had left his body. When the police arrived with a canine unit, one officer let a dog urinate on the memorial. Later, when Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, laid out rose petals in the form of his initials, a police cruiser whizzed by, crushing the memorial and scattering the flowers. The next evening, McSpadden and other friends and family went back to the memorial site and laid down a dozen roses. Again, a police cruiser came through and destroyed the flowers. Later that night, the uprising began. —Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation 2

I think about how the people gathered after Mike Brown was killed—how they made a makeshift memorial on the bloodstained spot in the road where he had been murdered by the police state. What do I see in this encounter? The will of the people butting up against the police’s desire to destroy—to crush all public expressions of grief. The police’s show of force is unnecessary, compensatory. They want us to believe that police cars will always crush rose petals. They tell themselves that their uniform and the power that backs it makes them invulnerable—not like the rose petals arranged in

300 / Carceral Capitalism

the shape of MB. They tried to erase the name “Mike Brown,” but it will forever be seared into the minds of the people of Ferguson. Erase the memo- rials, erase the flowers—the people will still rise up.

That night, an uprising bloomed out of the ground where the memorial flowers had been crushed.

* I once read an article about the dreams of dying people. There was a former cop who couldn’t stop having nightmares about the people he had violated. He told a hospice nurse that on the job he had “done bad stuff.” Tormented by his dreams, he gets “stabbed, shot, or can’t breathe.”3

Eric Garner’s last “I can’t breathe” circles in time to haunt the officers who take the air out of the world. The cop died with so much regret.

The conscious mind of the police officer may be

sure of its correctness,

but the unconscious mind knows it has done terrible

things.

The trampling of the memorial flowers is an act of

repression.

But whatever you try to blot out and refuse to

integrate

returns with greater vigor.

If I ever met the officers, I would tell them:

The Prison Abolitionist Imagination / 301

Before you die you will encounter

the lives you took and violated.

You, driving around in your

steel-enclosed fantasy of invincibility.

You who must desecrate memorials

to prove to yourself you are strong—

to hide this weakness of imagination:

a police cruiser scattering rose petals.

What was it you tried to crush there—

was it a way to blot out awareness

of your own death?

And yet every time you tried to destroy the memorial

the people returned, with objects that bore

the memory of Mike Brown.

You tried to force the people of Ferguson to forget.

The people returned

with a will to carry

the memory into the streets.

* Yesterday I saw a tweet that said: Remember: We lost in Ferguson. We lost in Standing Rock.

Over and over again, the ecstatic moment of revolt was met with repression even greater than what we had anticipated.

The fissure was not a place where we could live. We could not hold on to the new social forms we invented in the process of revolt. The establishment

302 / Carceral Capitalism

leaders were sent to neutralize the protesters. We were told to go home. We failed to make the revo- lution our permanent home.

But the spark is kept alive, underground, waiting for the right conditions.

The specter of Attica The specter of Wounded Knee The specter of Ferguson The specter of Harpers Ferry The specter of Haiti

THE PRISON IS OUR SHADOW

Neither a prisoner nor a free man, because prison is density. No one has spent a night in it without spending the whole night rubbing the muscles of freedom, sore from loitering so frequently on sidewalks, exposed, naked, and hungry. Here you are embracing it from every side, free and liberated from the burden of proof. How small it is, how simple, and so swift to respond to the agility of a mirage. It is in you, within reach of the hand with which you knock at the walls of the cell. It is in you, borrowing the bird’s example, in the falling of rain, the blowing of winds, the laughter of light upon a forgotten rock, in the pride of a beggar who reprimands his benefactors when they are stingy, in an unequal dialogue with your jailer when you say to him:

The Prison Abolitionist Imagination / 303

You, not I, are the loser. He who lives on depriving others of light drowns in the darkness of his own shadow. You will never be free of me unless my freedom is generous to a fault. Then it would teach you peace and guide you home. You, not I, are afraid of what the cell is doing to me. You who guard my sleep, dream, and a delirium mined with signs. I have the vision and you have the tower, the heavy key chain, and a gun trained on a ghost. I have sleepiness, with its silky touch and essence. You have to stay up watching over me lest sleepiness take the weapon from your hand before your eye can see it. Dreaming is my profession while yours is pointless eavesdropping on an unfriendly conversation between my freedom and me. —Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence4

Although the guard may gloat his psyche is harassed by the glut of ghosts who bark and moan beneath the light of the moon.

The poet-prisoner haunts the guard, who becomes a prisoner of his paranoia. The profession of the poet is dreaming. The profession of the jailer is to contain. The poet is the one who makes the light. The guard is the one who takes it. He who lives on depriving others of light drowns in the darkness of his own shadow. Will the ones who built the nightmare also drown in it?

304 / Carceral Capitalism

The prisoner knows the true meaning of freedom while the guard knows only how to police this freedom.

What does the jailer give up when he becomes an instrument of the state?

Does the jailer remember what it means to love, to grieve, to rub the muscles of freedom or borrow the bird’s example?

They cannot annihilate what we carry in our hearts and minds: This vision of an elsewhere, or the memory of a bird. How many poets and revolu- tionaries discovered freedom in a cell?

ENTOMBED FLOWERS

Yesterday I lay awake for a long time—these days I can’t fall asleep before 1 a.m., but I have to go to bed at 10, because the light goes out then, and then I dream to myself about various things in the dark. Last night this is what I was thinking: how odd it is that I’m constantly in a joyful state of exaltation—without any particular reason. For example, I’m lying here in a dark cell on a stone-hard mattress, the usual silence of a church ceme- tery prevails in the prison building, it seems as though we’re in a tomb; on the ceiling can be seen reflections

The Prison Abolitionist Imagination / 305

coming through the window from the lanterns that burn all night in front of the prison. From time to time one hears, but only in quite a muffled way, the distant rumbling of a train passing by or quite nearby under the windows the whispering of the guards on duty at night, who take a few steps slowly in their heavy boots to relieve their stiff legs. The sand crunches so hopelessly under their heels that the entire hopeless wasteland of existence can be heard in this damp, dark night. I lie there quietly, alone, wrapped in these many-layered black veils of darkness, boredom, lack of freedom, and winter—and at the same time my heart is racing with an incomprehensible, unfamiliar inner joy as though I were walking across a flowering meadow in radiant sunshine. And in the dark I smile at life, as if I knew some sort of magical secret that gives the lie to every- thing evil and sad and changes it into pure light and happiness. And all the while I’m searching within myself for some reason for this joy, I find nothing and must smile to myself again—and laugh at myself. I believe that the secret is nothing other than life itself; the deep darkness of night is so beautiful and as soft as velvet, if one only looks at it the right way; and in the crunching of the damp sand beneath the slow, heavy steps of the sentries a beautiful small song of life is being sung—if one only knows how to listen properly. At such moments I think of you and I would like so much to pass on this magical key to you, so that always and in all situations you would be aware of the beautiful and

306 / Carceral Capitalism

the joyful, so that you too would live in a joyful euphoria as though you were walking across a multi-colored meadow. I am certainly not thinking of foisting off on you some sort of asceticism or made-up joys. I don’t begrudge you all the real joys of the senses that you might wish for yourself. In addition, I would only like to pass on to you my inexhaustible inner cheerfulness, so that I could be at peace about you and not worry, so that you could go through life wearing a cloak covered with stars, which would protect you against everything petty and trivial and everything that might cause alarm. —Rosa Luxemburg (To Sophie Liebknecht, Breslau, before December 24, 1917)5

In the dark of the night you traveled to a colorful meadow, and with your powerful imagination wove that meadow into a cloak of stars that you imparted to your comrade Sophie—to wear as a shield against everything terrible. What bloomed in your mind that night as you lay quietly listening to the boots of the sentries crunch the sand? You were sharpening your perceptive faculties so you could tune in to the exalted frequency. You were sensitized by your cell, by the boredom weighing you down, until the pres- sure of the darkness gave way to an understanding of the deepest mysteries of what it means to be alive— of the connection between desire and politics.

I think of your fate, of George Jackson’s fate, of Fred Hampton’s fate—the state must know when

The Prison Abolitionist Imagination / 307

the universe gives birth to a true revolutionary—it must see in them a light it must extinguish, lest their spark find and set alight the divine spark in us all, which would spread until the world as we know it has been upended.

Alone in your cell, your body became pure nerve. You were perceiving everything. It made you giddy, the inner joy you felt against the bleak back- drop of the Breslau prison.

I imagine how you passed the time there— studying political economy and botany, writing letters to your comrades, assembling your herbaria, preparing for the revolution, getting lost in the flowers of your imagination.

You were the secret. You were the principle of life itself. You were a tree they had to cut down.

to unspeakable wonder to freedom that blooms on stumps

—Édouard Glissant 6

THE STARS SEEN FROM PRISON

In September 1971 the prisoners of Attica rose up, took the prison, and carved out a small space of freedom: a temporary liberated zone from which they could observe the stars.

308 / Carceral Capitalism

Despite the sense of foreboding, there were moments of levity and, for some, even a feeling of unexpected joy as men who hadn’t felt the fresh air of night for years reveled in this strange freedom. Out in the dark, music could be heard—“drums, a guitar, vibes, flute, sax, [that] the brothers were playing.” This was the lightest many of the men had felt since being processed into the maximum security facility. That night was in fact a deeply emotional time for all of them. Richard Clark watched in amazement as men embraced each other, and he saw one man break down into tears because it had been so long since he had been “allowed to get close to someone.” Carlos Roche watched as tears of elation ran down the withered face of his friend “Owl,” an old man who had been locked up for decades. “You know,” Owl said in wonderment, “I haven’t seen the stars in twenty-two years.” As Clark later described this first night of the rebellion, while there was much trepidation about what might occur next, the men in D Yard also felt wonderful, because “no matter what happened later on, they couldn’t take this night away from us.” —Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy7

In the cracks of the prison, something bloomed. A field of wildflowers imposed on a night sky. Blood was coming. Joy and dread mingled there, infusing the air with a powerful sense of rapture and uncertainty.

The Prison Abolitionist Imagination / 309

What exalted frequency was discovered that night, then lost, when Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the police to put down the uprising?

Blood was coming. The new world never arrived. How terrible it must have been for W. E. B. Du Bois to realize he had mistaken dusk for dawn, that darkness would follow and not the radiance of a new day—his people’s strivings rendered crepus- cular. The dream of liberation collapsed in a heap of bloodstained rubble.

Blood was coming. The drumming would not last. The prisoners would be punished for daring to glimpse the stars.

Will those who have constructed this Hell ever wonder—What was it all for? The subordination of all life to these systems that hem us in. Why cover the sky?

*

The Atacama Desert in Chile is so dry that dead bodies are preserved for posterity, and traces of ancient human communities remain unscathed, as though immortalized in amber. Because of its high elevation and lack of moisture, the skies above the Atacama Desert are completely clear, allowing for an unobstructed view of the stars. Over the years, scien- tists and astronomers have converged on this region to build powerful telescopes to observe the cosmos.

Years after Attica, on another continent, politi- cal prisoners banished to the Atacama Desert by

310 / Carceral Capitalism

the U.S.-sponsored dictator Augusto Pinochet were observing the same stars from the confines of a prison camp.

Patricio Guzmán [documentary director]: What did you feel watching the stars whilst in prison?

Luís Henríquez [Chacabuco concentration camp survivor]: We all had a feeling ... … of great freedom. Observing the sky and the stars, marveling at the constellations, ... we felt completely free.

The military banned the astronomy lessons. They were convinced that the prisoners could escape ... ... guided by the constellations.

Guzmán: Luis’s dignity lies in his memory. He wasn’t able to escape, but, by communicating with the stars, he managed to preserve his inner freedom. —Nostalgia for the Light, 20108

The Prison Abolitionist Imagination / 311

I return to the stars—

to the question of why people feel free when

looking up at the stars.

Is it because, when we are communing with the

stars, we become

part of the Whole?

The whole of Life—

we feel ourselves as recycled matter and energy

congealed in a temporary form

a form that will not hold

that will one day fall apart.

What did they feel when they looked up at the

night sky?

Did the vastness produce a feeling of freedom?

Did they remember—there is a world beyond the

walls of this prison.

Were they transported to their childhoods, to the

mystery,

to the first time they contemplated their

place in the Whole?

In his autobiography Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois wrote about race as a prison—one that could only be abolished through a material and spiritual revo- lution. Anticipating the arc of my book, he wrote that the immediate problem of his people was “the question of securing existence, of labor and income, of food and home, of spiritual independence and

312 / Carceral Capitalism

democratic control of the industrial process” but that it would not do to “concenter all effort on eco- nomic well-being”—that his people “must live and eat and strive, and still hold unfaltering commerce with the stars.”9

THE DEATH THAT IS NOT DEATH, BUT THE BIRTH OF EVERYTHING POSSIBLE

What is prison? It is immobility. “Free man, you will always cherish the sea!” (Baudelaire). It is becoming more and more obvious that mobility is one of the signs of our times. To restrict a man for eleven years to sur- veying the same four or five square meters—which in the end become several thousand meters within the same four walls opened up by the imagination—would justify a young man if he wanted to go … where, for example? To China perhaps, and perhaps on foot. Jackson was this man and this imagination, and the space he tra- versed was quite real, a space from which he brought back observations and conclusions that strike a death blow to white America (by “America” I mean Europe too, and the world that strips all the rest, reduces it to the status of a disrespected labor force—yesterday’s colonies, today’s neocolonies). Jackson said this. He said it several thousand times and throughout the entire world. It still remained for him to say truths unbearable for our consciences. The better to silence him, the

The Prison Abolitionist Imagination / 313

California police …. But what am I saying? Jackson’s book goes far beyond the reach of this police. —Jean Genet on George Jackson10

I can only be executed once. —George Jackson, Blood in My Eye11

Language has no body. The message is a virus.

The message cannot be killed.

A REMIX OF A STATEMENT BY HUEY P. NEWTON, SERVANT OF THE PEOPLE, BLACK PANTHER PARTY AT THE REVO- LUTIONARY MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR GEORGE JACKSON:

A revolutionary example cannot be killed

The soldier and his spirit a living thing

His spirit says, George’s body goes

Although fallen

See

His ideas live

In young bodies

Our children are saying

It’s true

There will be revolution

And on he will go to the next legacy

We believe George’s immortality

As generation upon generation advance

314 / Carceral Capitalism

We know the people

We believe the people

Into immortality we win

Go on

No matter how still

How wrongly done

The love no matter how wrongly

This is pain giving up

No pain in giving up

And why he felt his life

For his people

Violence sorts spurs and contracts

Every alive state costs someone the death course

If it could give itself the semblance of executioners

—We don’t

We don’t have the kind of violence the police have

We deliver to them the struggle of everything possible

The audacity to accept the right to do everything

To preserve George

I see George growing in our suffering

In thirty seconds there will be pain

The prison order killing our stories won’t make our

suffering die

We say there will be pain

But in all of us a strength growing

For us

An incredible will living in the pain we know

I see two kinds of death

One death is not death

The Prison Abolitionist Imagination / 315

The other is death

George died in a way not-death

For in all of us there is George

In our suffering there is George

I see us die the not-death

The day George fell is not his death

The future will now know the way we will die

Revolutionary death

The way his mind determined the people’s name

To change them wholly or else be a feather

We’ll name people THE PEOPLE

We’ll support the name

In the name of the people, ALL POWER

TO THE PEOPLE ALL POWER

IMAGINATIONS HELD CAPTIVE

First of all, I would say that prison is an accurate name for our contemporary culture, and prison as culture presumes a certain set of problems and reinforces a dominant reaction in our imaginations. Sylvia Wynter talks about reservation—which is also an accurate name for our contemporary culture—meaning that at the same moment indigenous people are confined to reservations by the state, our imaginations are also con- fined. All of us. And, I would also say that the moments in which prisons became a dominant feature of the U.S., our imaginations (for all, not just those of us

316 / Carceral Capitalism

disproportionately imprisoned) also became imprisoned. The way we imagine work, our relationships, the future, family, everything, is locked down. —Alexis Pauline Gumbs12

Everywhere I look I see sleepwalkers under the spell of the prison.

What counter-spell is powerful enough to break the prison’s stranglehold on our imaginations?

But the spell is never total. The intensification of the desire for life undermines the prison’s capacity to structure our mental lives.

Imagination is excess, is that which could never be contained by the prison, that which will always exceed it.

What night endeavors must we embrace to enter that hidden frequency—that special vibration, the one Sun Ra believed would set us free.

THE DIALECTIC OF DREAMING

The imagination is constitutive ... It’s not just unworldly, detached from the world spinning off the refusal of things, rather it’s constitutive in the sense that

The Prison Abolitionist Imagination / 317

the imagination becomes so intense and embedded that it becomes real through its intensification and articu- lation. That puts theory in the realm of prophecy, but not prophecy in the realm of saying what’s going to happen. Instead, it’s the fostering of the imagination, the encouraging of that power to recognize that life can be, and in some ways already is, different. —Michael Hardt13

Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them. —Assata Shakur14

Before Assata Shakur was liberated from prison, her grandmother and family came to visit her, bearing a dream: “You’re coming home soon,” her grandmother said. “I don’t know when it will be, but you’re coming home. You’re getting out of here. It won’t be too long, though.” She went on: “I dreamed we were in our old house in Jamaica … i was dressing you … putting your clothes on.” Assata’s grandmother was known for her prophetic dreams—they came when they were needed, but it was ultimately the responsibility of the recipients of the visions to make them real, not only by believing in the veracity of the prophecies, but by acting so as to give them flesh.

When Assata returned to her prison cell, she could not help but dance and sing. She writes, “No amount of scientific, rational thinking could

318 / Carceral Capitalism

diminish the high that i felt. A tingly, giddy excite- ment had caught hold of me. I had gotten drunk on my family’s arrogant, carefree optimism. I literally danced in my cell, singing, ‘Feet, don’t fail me now.’ I sang the ‘feet’ part real low, so i guess the guards must have thought i was bugging out, stomping around my cage singing ‘feet,’ ‘feet.’”

When we act in accordance with the prophetic dream, the dream comes to directly constitute reality.

THE POLITICS OF DREAMING

We are building a reality that we have never seen before. We are asking people to flex their visioning and dreaming skills, something that is not readily supported in our society. —Mia Mingus15

I think there is an inherent danger in conflating mili- tant reform and human rights strategies with the underlying logic of anti-prison radicalism, which con- ceives of the ultimate eradication of the prison as a site of state violence and social repression. What is required, at least in part, is a new vernacular that enables this kind of political dream. How does prison abolition necessitate new political language, teachings, and organizing strategies? —Dylan Rodriguez16

The Prison Abolitionist Imagination / 319

Sometimes I don’t know what to tell you, or how to end.

For some time I have been thinking about how to convey the message of police and prison abolition to you, but I know that as a poet, it is not my job to win you over with a persuasive argument, but to impart to you a vibrational experience that is capable of awakening your desire for another world.

A couple of years ago I saw the Black Arts Movement poet and activist Sonia Sanchez speak. I was moved by the way she paused whenever she experienced vertigo and spontaneously started singing as a way to find her rhythm after nearly passing out.

In a haiku Sonia writes:

without your residential breath i lose my timing.17

Our bodies are not closed loops. We hold each other and keep each other in time by marching, singing, embracing, breathing.

We synchronize our tempos so we can find a rhythm through which the urge to live can be expressed, collectively.

And in this way, we set the world into motion. In this way, poets become the timekeepers of

the revolution.

320 / Carceral Capitalism

PLANTING THE DREAM

What shall we build on the ashes of a nightmare? —Robin D. G. Kelley18

I won’t propose much more since the design and reali- zation of such a space ought to be the product of a collective imagination shaped and reshaped by the very process of turning rubble and memory into the seeds of a new society. —Robin D. G. Kelley19

I see

I see our shadow in the trees

Watching the wheel unfold

I see our one shadow on the wall

I see your restless hand in the spider’s thread

I am the ice cave and there is water,

deep blue and white, a light at the bottom

I am equal to my love for you

Let down your hair, willow

in the moonlight: the river

lulls us into the dream. Nightmares

jostle branches in our eyes. I long

for the world that is before you,

the plate you set on the slate

of tomorrow. Your fingers flutter

to feel for the grass

The Prison Abolitionist Imagination / 321

between the valley,

where one foot follows the other

into the flaming creek.

We don’t know what name to give

the throbbing stone

perched atop the hill.

From here, I see for you

Look at what I lost

when you were lost

and I could only hear

the call of the stones

A body, returned

floats down the river

dressed in candles

I send you the secret

while you are asleep

The nights you carried in the length of a strand of hair—

The unforgiving flash of his teeth—

I stroke your cheek to unlock your jaw

and release the rose you carry in your mouth

Your tongue is raw

and your mouth

is filling with blood

Dear

Dear,

322 / Carceral Capitalism

Forgive us for having fallen so far

from where you planted the seed:

At the bottom of the sea, waiting

for the body to ride the stream

back to where the rubble

gave birth to the first

dream

The egg cracks, night

wanders seaward

barefoot in her evening

slip

And by this sadness you are shown

the path to the holding sea, a trail

burned by a herd of somnambulant turtles

who folded, one by one, in their grief

until a single remained

to carry the breath of time

back

to the seed.