Finding Hope in Prison

When asked by the editors of The Argus to contribute to the “Letters on Pragmatic Hope,” I was at first reluctant. To be sure, I am lucky that I can still teach courses which often deal with themes which the Trump administration would prefer to silence, from sexual and racial othering, to the importance of the lives of other animals and the threat of environmental devastation. I often don’t know whether I should feel grateful or guilty that the classroom at Wesleyan can be a space of hope and release from the fears produced by the larger world with its growing authoritarianism, its turn to war and aggression rather than to compassion or concern for the suffering of others. Of course, there are times when certain texts that I teach take on new relevance for understanding aspects of the contemporary world, such as how Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the aura or cult value of certain art works might inform reception of Trump’s hopes for his new White House ballroom or Arch of Triumph.   

That said, I don’t want to politicize the classroom or to impose my views on students. Rather I want each of the texts we read to be taken seriously on their own terms and in their historical context, before understanding how they might support or challenge contemporary views on who we are or want to be as humans. This often means trying to imagine a world from the point of view of another we can never fully know—a problem that comes up especially in my courses in animal studies, but is also relevant to my classes dealing with other humans. Indeed, the need to examine our language, to ask what a particular sentence or word actually means in its context is essential to each of my classes given that translation—whether from French or German or from Dog or Horse is always, as the philosopher Jacques Derrida says, is both necessary and impossible. And that is why close reading of texts is essential, allowing students to come up with different and often surprising paths to locating meaning and where to take it. Argument should be part of this, especially when such argument grows from differing interpretations of the text.

While I mostly find classroom discussions to be deeply engaged and insightful, there are also times when I find students come to class with pre-conceived and fixed ideas about an author. Some students believe that because the texts of the College of Letters are largely European, they must be racist and/or colonialist and all they seem to look for is evidence to support their belief. Some are, of course, but sometimes evidence for that belief does need discussion—is the author exposing such wrongs or complicit with them and how do we know? Unfortunately, these are also moments when other students are often hesitant to speak up, perhaps so as not to be regarded as complicit themselves.

These questions remind me how much I appreciate my students in our prison education program.  I remember one moment in a course I taught some years ago, on 19th Century Literature and Philosophy, when we read a poem of Charles Baudelaire called “Let’s Beat Up the Poor.” It’s a prose-poem in which the philosophically minded narrator/poet leaves his bedroom and books to head to a bar, when a beggar holds out a hat and asks for money. The narrator hesitates, thinking of what Socrates would do, and then his own internal “demon” advises him saying, “a man is the equal of the another only if he can prove it.” With that, instead of alms, he gives the beggar a number of violent blows, with the result that (oh bliss of the philosopher), he sees the truth of his theory as the beggar then beats him back. As the beggar thus proves his equality, the philosopher says he is honored to share his purse. The poem raised an intense and often humorous discussion around the significance of Socrates, putting theory into practice, and especially around the adverse effects of condescension. There was also, however, one student who could only see the poem as a show of the depravity and immorality of the rich and powerful over the poor and powerless. Some days later I received a letter from that one student, admitting that he had never understood irony, nor the importance of historical context, and thanking me and the class for both understanding his perspective, and helping him see a different one. Violence, he now understood, was not really the point of the poem.

It’s interesting how my Center For Prison Education (CPE) students have often returned to this poem in the successive classes they have taken with me (I’m now teaching my 5th), how they still find the relevance of its message, and the complexities of its narration which demand discussion about finding one’s agency if through vocal contestation, but not violence. That is not to say that our readings do not often inspire excited and loudly expressed differences of opinion. Some weeks ago, our readings of Sartre and existentialism led to an intense argument between two students, one atheist, the other Christian, about whether the absence of God would remove all checks on our behavior leaving us with nothing to stop criminal activity. As each firmly put forth his beliefs their assertions were often punctuated with laughs as they recognized the difficulty of convincing the other, but also of convincing themselves—as if their own words were not sufficient. 

The following week, I told the class how much I appreciated their arguments and their willingness to share their personal views, something, I admitted, I find less and less to be the case on campus. One of the students offered that that was probably because the potential cost of speaking out on campus is much greater than in prison, given how negative accusations and labels can quickly spread outside class to other students and to social media. True. But I also get the sense that my incarcerated students (who are mostly men of color) are more inspired to seek meaning and discovery in each of the readings, regardless of the class or sex or race of the writer, perhaps because this is their connection to the world. It’s what brings them to sympathize with the pressures of conformity that weigh on women “of privilege” as represented in the writings of Virginia Woolf or how Woolf, like Proust, brings us to recognize the difficulties of knowing and writing about the past. Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish” is unsurprisingly (it is a maximum security prison, of course), of deep interest as the students think through the ways they too are under constant surveillance. And they took Foucault back to Freud, whom we read at the beginning of the semester, comparing the permanent visibility created by panoptic tower to the workings of the super-ego which internalizes the workings of power. This also brought comparisons and contrasts of how being the object of a gaze comes up in Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Fanon, and how this gaze often sees you through categories of sex or race or even those deduced from clothing such as prison uniforms, coverings that cannot be taken off. It brought us back to a reading from one of my animal studies classes, where we read Ursula Le Guin’s “She Unnames Them,” about how the narrator (whom we eventually learn to be Eve) decides to give the names back to the animals and discovers how much closer they feel to each other, how alike they find each other without the interference of labels of species or breed (we might think poodle vs pit bull), even if they were happy with Rover or Frou Frou.  In our discussion one of the students thoughtfully said, “I get it, I’m fine with Jack (name changed), but felon, no thank you.”

How words can stand in the way of truly knowing another is a theme which comes up often in my research and classes, not to suggest that silence is the answer, but rather to understand how meanings and persons can change, why it is important to speak with another to find one’s words, and which ones no longer fit. We are always in relation with others, as Donna Haraway writes, and our relations change us. This is a theme which is central to the senior thesis for which I am the tutor at the prison, a thesis which reads novels of Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley and Mehdi Charef along with a range of theories, to question what stands in the way of sympathy or compassion in our relations with others; what makes us believe there are only two positions to choose from, victim or victimizer. As the culmination of his deep engagement in his classes, I see so clearly the importance of the CPE program, of an education that brings students to examine a wide range of works in which they may find elements of their own lives and pasts, and to think through these moments with others. In a recent paper one of the students turned to Primo Levi’s autobiographical, Survival in “Auschwitz,” and where Levi writes of how he struggled to remember some lines from Dante’s “Inferno” to share with his fellow prisoner. Intellectual engagement was Levi’s lifeline, a means to retain his humanity and his dignity in the midst of dehumanizing internment. It seems to be for the student as well.

This reminds me how the classroom can and should be a space of freedom from authoritarianism, one, moreover, in which students see themselves for what they can do and not for what they (or their supposed ancestors) have done. This gives me and the students hope.

Kari Weil

P.S.  I want to add that I have also been given hope by the fact that one student who took my very first class for the CPE in 2018, a class called “Thinking Animals,” is now home, planning to complete his BLS on campus and also, finally able to pet his dog, something the class brought him to say that he  greatly missed.

Kari Weil is a Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Environmental Studies, and Letters. She can be reached at kweil@wesleyan.edu.