"Bridges between the “inside” and the “outside” are important for any conception of prison and its effects. Prison writing is one such bridge" 💜

Piper Kerman

#onherbirthdaytoday 

Prison Writing & the Literary World

#disqualifiedknowledges #prosimetrum #M-Effect

28th September

Piper Kerman is an American author, memoirist and advocate, known for her best-selling memoir titled, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, published in the year 2010.

The book chronicles Piper’s experiences while serving a 13-month sentence at a federal prison, for a drug-related crime she had committed well over a decade ago.

Piper’s writing focuses on the personal stories of the women she meets inside the prison, throwing light on the hardships within the prison system.

Well, Prison Writing as a distinct literary genre, has had a very long and ancient history.

One of the earliest known prison writings dates back to the ancient Roman era, by the Roman statesman and philosopher Boethius in 524 AD. Boethius wrote this famous philosophical dialogue titled, The Consolation of Philosophy while imprisoned and facing execution by King Theodoric the Great, who suspected him of treason.

This Boethius’ book is a unique philosophical dialogue - a prosimetrum – wherein a literary work is composed of alternating segments of prose and verse, or poetry and prose! In this treatise, Boethius has a conversation with Lady Philosophy, where he argues that, true happiness comes from the internal life and virtue, not external circumstances like wealth or power.

One very interesting quirk that I came upon, while going through the history of prison writing is the number of prison writers whose names begin with ‘M’! 😊

A quaint literary quirk at that! 😊

Sample this –

Malory – Sir Thomas Malory - is believed to have written his classic collection of Arthurian tales, Le Morte d'Arthur, while in prison during the 15th century.

Marco Polo, the famous explorer, dictated his travels to a fellow inmate while imprisoned in Genoa in the late 13th century, resulting in The Travels of Marco Polo.

More – Sir Thomas More wrote on issues of faith and conscience while in prison. This was in the backdrop of the English Reformation of the 16th century that gave rise to a significant output in prison literature, as political and religious dissenters were mercilessly imprisoned.

Marquis de Sade wrote prolifically during his long imprisonments in the 18th and early 19th centuries, using his time to explore themes of depravity and philosophy in works like Justine

Miguel de Cervantes famously claimed that he begot his novel Don Quixote (1605) while in a debtor’s prison, highlighting the role of confinement in sparking creativity.

Mahatma Gandhi wrote extensively from prison, most notably his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth and Songs from Prison (a collection of ancient Indian religious lyrics) during his time in Yeravada Central Jail in Pune. His prison writings documented his philosophical evolution, addressed spiritual and political matters, and served to connect with and inspire his followers despite his incarceration.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) is a powerful defense of nonviolent resistance and a landmark document of the Civil Rights Movement.

Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, parts of which were secretly written in prison, became a global symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle.

Malcolm X’s Autobiography, co-written with Alex Haley, details his personal transformation in prison, where he educated himself and became a leader of the Nation of Islam.

Well, the M-Factor to Prison Writing apart - there have also been statesmen, celebrity politicians and literary giants right from John Bunyan, Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, Thoreau, Gramsci, Jawaharlal Nehru et al who have come up with some of their best writings while having been incarcerated in prison.

In this regard, I would like to recommend a lovely read on the subject, titled, Prison Writing and the Literary World: Imprisonment, Institutionality and Questions of Literary Practice, edited by Michelle Kelly and Claire Westall.

This collection of scholarly essays explores the multifaceted relationship between imprisonment and literature. The essays analyse how being imprisoned affects the writer’s craft. They consider how the unique constraints of confinement - such as censorship, limited access to materials, and the psychological impact of isolation - influence literary style, form, and subject matter. And most interestingly, a significant part of the book addresses the challenges of getting prison writing accessible to a wider audience.

And I quote from Prison Writing and the Literary World –

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.

Prison Writing and the Literary World examines underexplored examples of prison writing and writing about imprisonment from across the globe.

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 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.

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”.

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.

Writers in prison know they are largely invisible and inaudible in the world outside.

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”.

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”, the barely saleable fruits of the experience of human beings who lack human status.

For as Foucault hints, having one’s experience recognised as real, and mattering, is both the sign and condition for a life that “counts as human”.