THE NARRATIVES WE GIVE AND TAKE by Alex Chertok
Derek, a student in the class I teach at a maximum security facility, once told me that before getting locked up, he was physically free but mentally imprisoned – gang banging, hustling, living a life that on some level he knew would land him, like the litany of names he could rattle off by heart, in prison. Yet now that he’s physically incarcerated, he said, he’s finally mentally free – thinking for himself, seeing his own potential, rising to meet it. This line sounded like he’d delivered it before. Still, how many of us get to claim such a rise from the ashes?
Writing this, I hear Paul’s voice. Formerly incarcerated for seven years, Paul has called this some Hallmark shit that wrangles symmetry into syntax and gives prison too much credit. Prison doesn’t free your mind, he’d say; in fact, prison tries to keep men from growing. Emerging from that environment intact, let alone with your thoughts heightened, is a small miracle. Prison is trauma and trauma can render one’s narrative unreliable. To him, Derek is living in a fictional passage of dramatic irony: we readers sense a brokenness about him that he himself can’t see. Or, he sees something in himself that we outside the hellhole know is wrong. Textbook institutionalization.
Paul may be right, but his cynicism makes me sad. He’s sharp as a tack, in all senses of the word: he’s analytical, but with no trace of softness. So absent is his softness that he tries to scrub it from others’ accounts, as well. Being housed for seven years in a prison can do this to one’s faith in another’s goodness. Prison is trauma, and trauma can callous.
Whose lived experience do we believe, then? Whose story do we call invalid? In Paul’s eyes, Derek’s narrative of growth is too much a people-pleaser. It placates both the fear-slinging law-and-order mongers who think that a “correctional facility” can do a (brown) body good, and the liberal-minded who insist on the intellectual and spiritual humanity of the throwaways locked inside. It’s an emotional call to inaction: why change what’s working? Derek’s ripening in this paltry world came more easily with the support of a wife and children, theater troupe members, classmates, and teachers – but what about the majority of incarcerated folks who don’t have this fertile community?
Paul’s critique, though harsh, is a necessary wake‑up call. It’s the kind of alarm most currently or formerly incarcerated people, most prison reformers and abolitionists, are trying to sound: that the feel-good prison narratives do more to harm policy positions than help. Activists like Ruth Wilson Gilmore spend their careers trying to wrest the easy storylines (e.g. that the majority of inmates are in for a nonviolent drug offense) from the popular imagination. I’ve tried accumulating their resistant voices in my head. The “redemption story”? This suggests that the once-criminal has been freed from sin, when what really needs saving often is the ecosystem in which the crime happened. An inmate who makes it on the outside is a “success story”? Finding work and housing after being released shouldn’t be rare enough to coin a happy-ending term for it. Also, in many ways, those who succeed on the outside are unsuccess stories, at least in the eyes of those prisons – usually private ones, which comprise about 8% of prisons nationwide – who take success to mean recidivism, thus keeping numbers high. A person “made a mistake” to land in prison? Sometimes a crime was intentional, or for good reason, or to protect a more vulnerable person. Guys “reenter” society upon release? That presupposes they were members of society, with all its civic opportunities, to start with. To someone like Paul, prison simply warehouses men, nothing more.
Who has copyrights on experiential knowledge? As a rule, I don’t believe in any narrative one has crafted for another out of reactive hostility: guards’ narratives of prisoners, for example. CO’s accuse me of naivete for teaching their men, most of whom they believe don’t deserve a free degree, some of whom they believe don’t deserve to breathe our air. They’d call the prison students’ scholarly effects a masterful covering up of scheming thoughts. CO’s are protecting their house, nightsticks and all, othering the enemy to make their brutal jobs more bearable. Prison is trauma, and trauma can turn one warlike.
I don’t for a second believe in the narratives crafted by people who’ve never met a single flesh and blood person from the group they’re depicting. “The fuck outta here with that,” Paul would say. I don’t believe Trumpian narratives of immigrants, or even anti-Trumpian narratives of gun owners. (I hate everything this administration stands for, but I force myself to remember that my father-in‑law is both a gun owner and humane.) I don’t believe theory has authority over lived experience. I don’t believe Jeff Sessions has ever looked a prisoner in the eye in a setting that allowed for an actual human exchange of thought. If we believe the Sessions versions of who prisoners are, we’ll never learn a true thing, and we’ll keep voting people into office who’ve never learned a true thing themselves, who believe themselves divinely impervious to wrongdoing and who take up the noble task of filling prison beds and lengthening sentences.
Certainly, I have to question the narratives I craft myself. My privilege butting up against its opposite, the subsequent jolt awake and the frozen sea inside me breaking (what Kafka warned us about), has no doubt blurred my vision as well. Not only this, but there’s always the hunch that I’m not getting it right, with my point of view full of barbed wire fencing past which I know nothing. My prison students like and respect me, but I am not in their world, no matter how many years I’ve been teaching in that schoolhouse. A few times our teaching group got held up for an hour or so in the thickly hot prison auditorium and we couldn’t leave until they cleared the yard, but that’s it. Our job as teachers has nothing to do with being in the trenches.
I do, though, believe people who’ve engaged in a long staring contest with their pasts, people who may look with horror but at least maintain eye contact. This goes for the incarcerated and the free alike. The hard work of self-reflection is the inevitable occupation of people behind bars, though some find ways to divert their gaze. Prison is a years-long residency of the self. Those inmates who don’t look away must clink glasses with their demons. No screens to shift their focus onto. And before they know it – and oftentimes they’d rather not – they must reckon with who they were beforehand, who they are now, and who they want to be. Despite the anguish, ultimately one is made better by self-reflection. It is as taxing and sleep-depriving and humanizing a process as raising a child into its own autonomous person.
In this way, self-reflection may be the only privilege of being incarcerated. (Have “privilege” and “incarcerated” ever shared a sentence?) We on the outside feel awe at Derek’s tale of transformation from his old life. Longing, even, at this secret he seems in on, tied to his fluency in isolation and guilt. Some of us want to say we’ve seen the depths, but nobody wants to suffer. Derek has –
OK, I hear you, Paul. Their hardship has enlightened them. He’d scoff at this nonsense, the way I once did at a friend who thought he knew enough to say that all real art is borne from pain. I hear you. Paul’s imagined side-eye constantly cuts through my reveries. Don’t romanticize prison, he’d say, and don’t romanticize the guys inside. He’d have a point. Don’t glorify them for their every small achievement, and he’d have a point there, too. Doesn’t my shock and delight at them performing well in class, even competently, reveal how brutish and brainless I imagined them all to be? OK, Paul, I hear you. But it’s hard to deny that every day, people in prison must clamber out of despair. They often see themselves in Camus’ Sisyphus, as Sisyphus, banished to the underworld: they trek down their personal mountain to reclaim their rock, which they must push for the length of their sentence. Many of their mantras involve refusing to quit, controlling their own fate, reinventing themselves with every descent. I hear you, Paul, but still I insist there is knowledge in having gone down to the nadir of human existence to come back up for air – long enough, at least, to attend class. That’s some psychic brawn. (You’ve got that too.) It’s the coming back up that endows their tales about themselves with ethos.
Our work on ourselves never ends. It’s a constant practice for me to not fetishize their suffering, for me to fall out of love with a good redemption story. To remind myself that my instruction – despite the wishes I harbor and the blind spots I build – may not transform my students, may instead be my small body’s weight against the steel gate of some of these men’s long and largely turmoiled lives. We all need constant tending, like land that, if neglected, would fall to ruin. I believe in people who’ve been the diligent farmhands of their own interior lives. I believe people who’ve treated their inscrutable psyches as a discipline of study, who’ve been kept awake at night in an effort to get the details right. This is to say, I believe Derek’s narrative for himself about his inverse relationship between physical and mental freedom – why on earth wouldn’t we let him have this? – and I believe Paul’s narrative for his own self.
I believe Michael, another student in my class. This young man is difficult – bigoted, chronically angry, hated by every one of his peers, tantrums when he doesn’t get A’s, is so fully entrenched in the fixed mindset there may be no getting out – but his life philosophy is hard-earned. He believes that, through faith, he’s been forgiven for having taken a man’s life. Perhaps at one point in my life I would have leveled the argument against him that, if confession and its sidekick absolution act as a figurative get out of jail free card, what would stop him from killing again? But the religion he’s gotten his hands dirty to find would never let him. His act must have wrought such havoc on his victim’s family. His faith, devoid of self-pity, hurts no one; it brings him peace in an otherwise peaceless place. It brings him closer to solving the mystery of himself, which we all are. I believe people who’ve broken their own hearts in trying to come to terms with their crimes. This, too, goes for the incarcerated and the free alike.
Natasha Saje tells us, in writing about the lives of others, “We do not have to admire the people we write about . . . but we should think about why we are using them to make poems,” or essays like this. So it looks like I, too, like the most inspiring of my prison students, need to look inward for answers. And this may be among the reasons I continue to teach in that space, for how it prompts my own self-reflection, a practice – like writing itself – that feels too bracing to give up. It makes me an architect of my own life philosophies. It poses the challenge: Is it possible to teach a man with dignity who has done awful, undignified things? I watch myself accept them – this always feels more like a natural unfolding than a rational call on my part – and them accept me. I don’t necessarily admire who they were but I admire who the guys in my class are trying to become. And who knows, giving them the respect they may not “deserve” can make them, in the end, live up to it.
Entering third grade, I feared the villainy that Ms. Deer had been mythologized with before I’d ever met her. Human contact with the woman herself quieted the din of those grapevine war stories perpetrated by the vengeful and the ignorant. Her own voice drowned them out. That’s how it works. Getting to know a person, or a population, that I once feared and misunderstood feels to me like an awakening. I see my prison students as neither victims nor monsters. Perhaps it goes both ways. My own presence in the prison classroom may be redefining to some of my students what a teacher is, or a Jew, or a white man.
How’s this for another analogy: For about a year, I didn’t clean up after my dog when she’d shit on my neighbor’s lawn. I’d never laid eyes on him. Then, one day, for the very first time, there he was, older and taller than I’d imagined. He waved to me outside his house, sweat on his shirt from mowing his big lawn, which I’d assumed was landscaped by some company paid to make intricate patterns in the grass. But that was all his doing. Something clicked after that sighting. From then on, I picked my dog’s shit off his lawn every time. It pained me to imagine him having to stoop to pick it up himself; I remembered the sweat and the wave, the cargo shorts and this old house that he kept up, and him bending down to his garden as if speaking to it.
Postscript for the above paragraph: Months after not seeing my neighbor, I checked my surroundings, then decided to keep the poop bag in my jacket pocket and leave my dog’s droppings behind. I still cheat on days when no one’s watching, when the snow can hide it from sight. My kindness lasted for as long as I held his image in my mind. What does this say about me, or about human nature, or about the shelf life of empathy? What does this mean for our concern for a population that most of us never see in the flesh? The snow can only cover up the damage for so long before the warm weather reveals the mess we’ve made. It does take a glimpse, yes, but that’s not all. Then we must nurture that image before it vanishes.
In the case of teaching on the inside, it took me a few weeks to see them not as cons but as students. This is not a saintly perspective; this is an inevitable one. Compassion is a natural byproduct of laying eyes on, then sharing words or gestures with, the other. Sustained words or gestures. After such contact – even when we uncover unsavory things about them – we’re more likely to believe their stories, less likely to shit on them or watch others do so. Paul is not alone in doubting his fellow prisoner’s story, but it proves how contagious and trickle-down oppression can be. He must’ve heard Derek’s narrative a thousand times on the inside from scumbags out to win favors from a listener they knew would be smitten with their tough life’s turnaround. He must think wisdom is not wisdom if it’s been generated in a place that can distort thinking. Chalk one’s “mental freedom” up to the simple act of them aging, he says, and he may be right.
But Derek did the real work to get there, and he can’t be alone. Paul’s distrust is the product of a system of mass incarceration that has more stake in silencing and punishing its citizens than it does in healing them. We are all products of that system, though we can chip away at its frozen sea. The Jeff Sessions-es of the world, groping blindly in the dark, preach the beauty of a carceral state. It feels like taking a small stand against them to say this: Derek, I believe you. Yes, Paul, it’s the stuff of rom-coms and tear-jerkers, but we all need a taste of that. Without it, we’d hate and fear the world. We’d eat only bitterness, and we’d starve.
Alex Chertok has published an essay in Ploughshares. His poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, Third Coast, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review Online, and Best New Poets 2016.