Incarceration Nations

by Baz Dreisinger

  Chairman volunteers to go next. His story paints a picture of a Sunday outing to Lake Victoria with his family. The boda-boda ride is behind “clouds of dust that stretch from a fleet of luxury vehicles going to eat money at the beach.” The fishing boats come alive; so do the sun’s rays on the water, the dangling of dusty feet in the sea, and the “beautiful girls trained to trap money, very busy asking for orders of drinks and well-roasted tilapia fish.”

  Here he abruptly halts and slams his paper down on the desk.

  “That is all I wrote,” Chairman says. “The memory grew too painful.”

  “Painful?” asks Wilson. “You have just taken away our pain by transporting us to the beach today. This is beautiful!”

  “I would love to eat that fish now,” Mohammed sighs.

  “And a Nile Special with it,” Hassan adds. Chairman, looking pleased with himself, absorbs the compliments and says he will write the rest tonight.

  “The writing has taken us out of this place, if for a moment,” affirms Wilson. “With words, we are winged.”

  ———

  Later that week, Al arrives with a friend to take me for dinner along Acacia Avenue in Kololo, Kampala’s tony expat district. We’ve fast become close; Al has proven himself a patient, inquisitive sounding board for my struggle with local customs, and a wingman ever in the know about where good reggae can be found. He’s the one person I can count on to treat me like a friend, not a mzungu novelty item, though I do remain something of a curiosity to him, this woman who’s come all this way to spend every day in prison.

  “You are truly working in the prison?” Al’s friend in the passenger seat asks, turning to face me. He speaks with an American accent, acquired at college in California, he explains. And then, “You must meet my father.”

  We promptly take a U-turn and land in an alternate Kampala universe, where the streets are lined with trees, the roads are devoid of potholes, and the mansions are American-style. Our car pulls up to an iron gate manned by two armed guards; inside, a velvet rope is lifted and we’re ushered into a gleaming indoor-outdoor dining area where half a dozen people are seated on mahogany chairs.

  Al greets his friend’s father, a stately man wearing a crisp striped shirt, seated beside a woman in a sumptuous headwrap. He looks me up and down.

  “Who is this American?”

  “I am a professor in New York, and—”

  “Sit,” he commands, pulling out a plastic-covered chair. A plate of chicken and coleslaw is set down before me.

  “Eat!” he decrees, brandishing a pinky ring and depositing a bone on his plate.

  “We are celebrating his release,” his wife explains.

  I discover I am having dinner with Captain Mike Mukula, former state health minister, onetime fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government—sentenced to four years at Luzira for embezzling some $84,000 of donor funds earmarked for immunization campaigns. He’s home tonight from two and a half months in prison, having won an appeal. Plate clean, he looks up.

  “So you are working in Luzira?”

  I nod.

  “That place is terrible. It must be fixed. We must fix it.” He slams a fist on the table. “The men in there, they are smart. They can be made to learn a trade. Chicken farmers! Something! Learn a trade. They can serve community service instead of prison. It is a disgrace.”

  As he cracks open a Coke, I think of Bernard Kerik, former New York City police commissioner who spent three years behind bars for tax evasion and came out railing against the system, writing a book and telling every press outlet that mandatory minimum sentencing sets prisoners up for failure.

  “I have never heard him so passionate about something like this before,” Mukula’s son marvels after dinner, after I’ve given the minister my card and told him I’d connect him with colleagues who might collaborate with him in large-scale prison-reform work. “He never thought about prisons before he went to one. Now it is all he talks about.” I wonder if it still will be, after the shock has worn off.

  ———

  It’s a good thing it’s my final day at Luzira, because I never did get official permission to enter, and today’s confrontation with an aggressive guard means I can no longer fly under the radar at the side gate. Narrowly negotiating my way past the Uzis, I enter the library. Wilson raises his head from Great Expectations.

  “Professor Baz, what is your religion?” he asks.

  “I don’t have one.”

  Jean, shocked, looks up. “What do they call it in New York, to have no religion?”

  “My religion is to do good and seek justice,” I say. It’s a too-pat answer, I know, but it’s the best I can do without broaching a thorny subject. Wilson smiles knowingly and grips me on the shoulder.

  “Even without Jesus, you are on the righteous path, Baz.” This show of tolerance, in a country steeped in conservatism and tradition, is just the sort of gracious move I’ve come to expect from Wilson.

  We delve right into their argument essays. The topic is the Marriage Bill, and Roderick is insistent about its horror.

  “It devalues marriage, sure? The Bible does not speak of cohabiting—it speaks of marriage!”

  “But cohabiting and partnership for many years, this can be just like marriage,” Tom insists. “After all, as they say, if it walks like a duck it is a duck!”

  “No!” cries Wilson. “Marriage is a sacred act and we cannot tamper with it.”

  “I am aware of the cultural rigidities,” Tom declares, his voice rising. “But as we are mutating as a nation, we cannot stick only with the old. We need to graduate from cultures holding us hostage.”

  Tom carries on evenly and imperiously, as if Parliament is in session.

  “We cannot hold our women hostage to old customs,” he states. “What Uganda needs are peaceful households. The use of bride-price is turning our girls into assets. We cannot resort back to the 1920s.”

  “But to do away with bride-price,” Wilson objects, “this adds up to a man enjoying free goods. You will care for your wife more knowing you paid good money for her!”

  I’m forced to pause the discussion because the clock is ticking and the game plan is to end our day, and my time in Luzira, with African-American poetry.

  “Poetry,” declares Wilson, as if burnishing the word. “It means, ideas married to meter and rhythm.”

  Nicholas reads from Maya Angelou:

  The caged bird sings

  with a fearful trill

  of things unknown

  but longed for still

  and his tune is heard

  on the distant hill

  for the caged bird

  sings of freedom.

  Wilson hangs his head so close to the page of the poem, it’s as if he wants to collapse into its pauses.

  “And we at Luzira, we are also caged birds,” he sighs.

  Our remaining hour becomes a quiet meditation, a serene space between words.

  Wilson reads Maya Angelou with heady enunciation and a broad smile across his wizened, youthful face.

  It’s the fire in my eyes,

  And the flash of my teeth,

  The swing in my waist,

  And the joy in my feet.

  I’m a woman

  Phenomenally.

  “This is the power, beauty, of strong womanhood. Of personhood,” Wilson beams.

  The whole class is enraptured. So am I. In all my years of teaching, I have never felt language carry me up and out of a place as dramatically as it has during today’s poetry reading. I suspect it’s because our longing runs so deep; if I am hungry to be out of this place, my students are ravenous to be out of here. Such intense longing leaves one’s heart open to the transformative power of literature and art in profound, even desperate, ways.

  I instruct the class to turn poets themselves. Without an ounce of hesitation, they rise to the occasion, proudly reading their creations. Mohammed’s poem is titled “Poverty” and it’s full of
force:

  Do it! Push it! Bring it!

  Put it down! Lift it up!

  Shuck it! Take it there!

  Poverty, Poverty, Poverty!

  Why don’t you go back where you came from?

  Jimmy’s poem concludes with a moving command:

  People, When shall we wake

  Up and try to avoid our

  Selves from being culprits

  Of prison? Get concerned.

  Time lost

  Is never regained.

  Finally, Peter’s verse:

  Oh AIDS, AIDS, AIDS,

  Oh what a strong killer disease.

  You stole my parents and my brother and sister

  AIDS how can you leave me alone

  In this world?

  I wish you knew how difficult it is

  To stay alone on this earth.

  AIDS I wish if you could hear me

  You would come for me too.

  Silence.

  There is no adequate response to such words. And I’m bowled over by how quickly, how expertly, these students took to a genre that was essentially foreign to them before today.

  “God bless you,” Mohammed whispers. Our time is up and the sadness is palpable.

  “You must greet your prisoners in New York for us,” says Tom, with flat resignation.

  “Why don’t you stay another week?” Wilson asks. “You have shown us something wonderful, but now you are taking it away.”

  Guilt and grief wash over me. It’s the same sadness I feel every time I leave class in a prison, as I get to escape to freedom and my students must trek back to their cells, but it’s more intense now because I’m not only leaving students I’ve come to care about behind, I’m leaving them for good—and I’m leaving them here, in this living nightmare of a place. As for the guilt, it’s because Wilson is right. I foster a spirit of humanity, creativity, and intellectual freedom, open up emotional scars, then parachute right out, back to business as usual. I hope but doubt that our creative writing program will indeed live on. What good is a week of transcendence if it can’t be sustained?

  “Let us just go,” says Tom glumly. He takes Wilson’s arm and they, along with the other students, exit the library and turn prisoners once more.

  I look down at the seminar table, empty save for one syllabus with a Ray Bradbury quote on top: “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

  Our class has indeed imbibed all week long. It’s been more than just escapism, though—real emotional gains were made here. A 2013 study revealed that subjects assigned to read literature scored higher on an exam asking them to look at photographs of actors’ eyes and read their emotions; researchers concluded that reading literary fiction enhances the skills and thought processes critical to intricate social relationships and functional societies. A 1990 study of so-called bibliotherapy argued that among the outcomes of behind-bars writing programs was an increased ability to tolerate frustration and disclose feelings of pain, guilt, and sadness. The writing process itself, with its stages of revision and peer review and self-criticism, was found to promote an ability to explore value systems, bolster self-esteem, and foster empathy.

  All week I’ve watched these men critique, debate, and dialogue with one another in generous, thoughtful ways. I’ve watched them excavate their emotional pasts and presents, and refine their ability to listen to and feel empathy for another man’s struggle—even when one man’s horror story always seemed to outdo the one that came before.

  “Reading taught me to deal with my anger problems,” Carl, my incarcerated student back home, once told me. “Because I have to finish any book I start. And sometimes I get frustrated with a book, I don’t understand it—I get mad. Frustrated. But because I know I have to finish I stay patient. And patience is the antidote to anger.” In California, I heard an incarcerated student in a writing class sum up the experience this way: “I not only learned that I could write, but that I can be my own therapist.”

  Indeed, people in prison can also, while engaged in beauty and the arts and intellectual discourse, be their noblest selves—“born again,” as my incarcerated student Korey once put it, deeming our classroom a place in which he could finally manifest the higher self that the rest of the world, forever labeling him a convict, won’t allow for. He felt that as his professor, I glimpse his princely humanity in a way few others could.

  “Human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action—reflection,” writes Brazilian philosopher Paolo Frere. Dialogue, he continues, is “an act of creation” that requires love and faith “in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake … faith in their vocation to be more fully human.” This is the essence of what it is to read and speak and write from behind the barbed wire, however extreme the conditions: to resurrect a sense of humanity. To become winged through words. To return oneself to language and thus to the very identity that prison powers seek to annihilate, to reclaim the mind even as the body is contained, to exist again not only as an “I” but, in a classroom brimming with pooled words, a mighty “we.”

  The day before I fly home, Al and I take a day trip to Jinja, which claims to be the source of the Nile. We’re extracted from Kampala’s jams and land in rural villages, pine forests and fields of pineapple. A rowboat carries us to a lodge, built tree house–style on a rocky island in the river. Nestled amid aloe plants, marveling at how the sound of rapids can be so soothing, I wrestle with the overall value of my stay, weighing the gains against the guilt of having ignited something likely to die with my departure. Is reform valuable if its impact is a mere drop in the bucket?

  I return to the question that struck me after the first day of class at Luzira: What are words in the face of sheer devastation? Arts-in-prison programs are potent agents of individual change, yes. But are they also in some way a distraction from the whole social order itself, from the powerful forces at play in the criminal justice system as a whole?

  ———

  In search of a resolution to this quagmire, I set off to Jamaica a few weeks after I return from Uganda. That Caribbean country might offer me a fresh angle on the arts behind bars, this time involving a different genre, music. Touted as rehabilitative in prisons from the United Kingdom to India, music behind bars also has a storied American legacy that includes slave songs, prison blues, and the iconic Angola Prison, where folk legend Lead Belly honed his art.

  “It’s become quite official now—there’s European money behind it,” Jamaican activist and educator Kevin Wallen says of the Rehabilitation Through Music program. We’re having lunch on the sand at Hellshire Beach just outside Kingston, and he’s filling me in on the history of the program I’ve come to witness.

  In 1997, he and Harvard professor Charles Nesson began building programs inside a Jamaican prison. They established a library, computer lab, radio station, and music studio. This last one generated international headlines, as it produced Jah Cure, the reggae artist I’d never gotten permission to interview in prison, years ago. Now I’d finally been cleared to visit the prison where he’d recorded some of my favorite love songs, to learn about the program that made him a star. Organizing my access is Carla, an effervescent Italian, who took over the program from Kevin several years ago.

  The next day a taxi carries me from New Kingston, where skyscrapers and strip mall–like boulevards evoke Anycity, USA, to the less tourist-friendly face of Jamaica’s capital, ramshackle downtown. Kingston is divided into uptown and downtown, a demarcation that refers as much to class as to geography. In this car-friendly sprawl, the wealth gap is baldly visible, and gang-related violence, which has plagued Kingston’s “garrison” communities, or politically aligned ghettos, since the 1970s, means that for the past decade Jamaica has had one of the world’s highest murder rates. The island of 2.7 million people has seen a thousand-plus killings every year since 2004, and the conviction rate for homicides is 5 percent. Unsurprisingly, nearly half of all prisone
rs here are serving time for nonviolent offenses. According to a study conducted in 2012 by the Jamaica Constabulary Force, the “typical inmate” is under age thirty-four and faces his first arrest before age twenty-four for breaches of the firearms act, which generally adds up to not paying the registration fee for a gun.

  “To GP,” I tell the driver. General Penitentiary. “Ever been there?”

  “Yuh mad or wha?” he replies in Patois.

  From across the street, I ogle the fortresslike prison, Jamaica’s largest: some 1,700 men live in a facility designed for 650. Bloodred brick and concrete, with a graceful sentry box and twenty-foot-high walls, it’s touted by a government Web site as an example of “exquisite Jamaican Georgian architecture.” The structure dates back to 1845, seven years after the full abolition of slavery in Jamaica, but it was not the only form of punishment used here. The 1865 Corporal Punishment Act, better known as the whipping bill, made larceny punishable by up to fifty lashes, while the Penal Servitude Act, a precursor to America’s convict lease system, rented out predominantly black, formerly enslaved prisoners to employers at a price per head. John Daughtry, Jamaica’s general inspector of prisons between 1841 and 1861, modeled GP after Philadelphia’s Eastern Penitentiary. In 1985, when the Rehabilitation Offenders Bill and the Corrections Acts revised “prisoner” to “inmate” and “prison officer” to “corrections officer,” the place was rechristened the Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre. GP, though, stuck.

  “Me like your eyes,” a young man with scattered yellow teeth tells me as I wait for Carla in the parking lot. He’s here to collect his brother, who will be coming home after seventeen years. Because he hasn’t been notified about his brother’s time of release, he’s been here since sunrise. He tells me prisoners are permitted two face-to-face visits a month, but relatives can drop off food and supplies every Wednesday. Today their first stop will be a doctor’s office, where his brother will be thoroughly examined and fed cleansing tea.