by Emile DeWeaver
Last month, I performed at a public poetry reading and won over the audience with humorous, invective poetry. I love poetry readings because I always end my pieces breathless and light, certain that I can make a living talking—which I happily do to excess.
As wonderful as it feels to fly standing still, what I love most about readings is what I see in the audience. People arrive burdened by the prison stereotypes they’ve absorbed from television—volatile cutthroats to be feared. They leave transformed. I always spot this look, this connection between their humanity and mine that begins in their gazes. Their eyes and cheeks take off on opposite tracks: eyelids tensing as they rise, faces slackening as jaws drop. Then smiles burst like fireworks. At every event, I feel reborn in the audience’s eyes while they’re reborn before mine.
My current prison, San Quentin, is an anomaly among California prisons because it hosts a lot of events related to a hundred rehabilitative programs. The state doesn’t sponsor these programs, but nonprofit organizations like Patton’s Prison University Project and the William James’ Prison Arts Project are rescuing California’s failed attempts at rehabilitation.
William James, an arts organization, arranged this particular reading. Their mission is to promote rehabilitation through artistic process, so they shocked me a couple days after the reading when they sent Steve, a volunteer, to deliver a message.
To censor me.
On stage, I had quoted a line of a poem insulting an unidentified enemy, “You have the personality of a limp penis pickling in a douche bag.” Steve brought the news that the performance had offended a woman—we’ll call her Kathy—who speaks for the organization inside San Quentin.
I’m an articulate man, so I asked the obvious question, “Huh?”
“I don’t know, bro.” Steve shrugged, head toppling toward his shoulder as he shook his head. “She said it’s not the image William James wants to reflect.” Steve’s a poet, too, and neither of us quite knew where to carry this conversation. The idea of a poet treading lightly around “penis” in a room full of adults sounded ludicrous. It also wounded me.
Poetry, expression that moves listeners, that proves I’m here treading earth and displacing air, is survival for me: my truest expression of self, my opposite and equal reaction to a system that would reduce me to a number on a probation report.
Part of maintaining humanity in prison is resisting de-sexualization. Fearmongers cast prisoners as sexual predators who must be de-sexualized lest they go on raping rampages. Think Jim Crow propaganda: the sex-mad Negro stereotype promulgated by Klansmen to justify hanging African Americans for staring at white women. A clearer picture of sexual violence in prison is that sexual predators inevitably wind up in prison as a small demographic where they continue to be sexual predators. Administrators respond to the sex-crazed stereotype and ban R-rated movies, sexually explicit photographs sent by consenting wives, Maxim magazines, and prolonged eye contact—I’m serious; it’s called “reckless eyeballing.”
I’ve come to expect that I have to fight for my place in the human sphere when it comes to prison officials, but I didn’t expect to face that same challenge with an organization I’d assumed would champion my humanity. After talking to Steve, I couldn’t stop thinking about censorship and my art. Poetry, expression that moves listeners, that proves I’m here treading earth and displacing air, is survival for me: my truest expression of self, my opposite and equal reaction to a system that would reduce me to a number on a probation report.
I’d assumed the William James Association (WJA) shared my beliefs about self-expression, but I’d never taken the time to inform myself about their organization. So I asked a friend to look up their web site. The About page states William James is dedicated to providing arts instruction because the artistic process positively effects self-esteem and satisfies fundamental human needs like “creativity, recognition, respect, and pride.” So far so good: that aligned with my assumptions. Then I read this testimonial from WJA on the website of one of their grantors:
“It is a profound experience to watch someone move from someone who has nothing to lose to someone who has something to give. I continue to be inspired by the experience of walking into a grey and dreary prison, through the clanging gates, past the racially segregated groupings on the yard, and into the art studio where there is color and life, camaraderie, creativity, and hope.”
Hmm. Nothing to lose.
Part of prison’s dehumanizing atmosphere results from a fundamental disconnect in many of the minds that legislate and regulate prison conditions and the prisoners that regulators are tasked to rehabilitate. This disconnect is a blindness that makes stereotypes the medium by which regulators interact with people they can’t see. Judging by their own description to those that fund them, this well-intentioned organization is as disconnected from the men and women it aims to serve as most prison administrators. What, then, can they see in me but the stereotypes I thought they were helping me to break? From their disconnected perspective, WJA isn’t so much breaking stereotypes as much as transforming hardened convicts into sensitive artists who don’t rock boats with their penises. In their eyes, I had nothing to lose, nothing to give, and my life lacked meaning and friendship before their organization opened up a classroom for two hours a week. I wasn’t a father; I hadn’t been pursuing my AA Degree; I wasn’t dreaming of a PhD in Art History. I wasn’t an artist.
To this I say:
Dear Kathy at WJA:
I do not apologize for offending you. Art is an extension of self: I had my first near death experience when I was three. Men shot and hospitalized two of my brothers. Trauma so spiritually devastated me that by the time I was 18, I earned a life sentence in prison. Some men cope with these traumas by continuing the cycles of violence that destroyed them. I write poetry—sometimes I say “penis,” “fuck,” “shit.”
I do not respect the image you’re trying to project. Every day you walk past buildings wherein the state packs humans, two at a time, into 4×9 cells. Every day you pass dungeons where men suffer sleep deprivation in solitary confinement—solitary confinement which doesn’t exist because the state promulgated the term “Administrative Segregation” to erase it—and I see nothing about you that expresses indignation for these atrocities. Perhaps you’ve reserved all of our outrage for my poem.
To be fair, you’re paid to focus on a specific job. I imagine that can be like looking at your toes while human rights violations fly over your head. But kudos for perking up to catch “penis.”
