Published April 2003 in “Jutarnji List”
and in “Kolo”, Croatian literary journal, fall 2003
“Living Cells”
Let us pose the following question: what do Hitler, Jean Genet, and Malcolm X have in
common? The average citizen, even an intellectual, would find it difficult to identify a
common denominator, for it is not nationality, language, or political ideology. Nor is it
culture, religion, sexual orientation, or what they liked to eat for breakfast.
To this list could also be added Dostojevsky, Wole Soyinka, Anne Frank, and Jack
London. And Eldridge Cleaver, Solzhenitsyn, de Sade, and Ezra Pound. Many others
who belong on this list are obscure, unknown to the general public: folk historians,
Caribbean slaves, and those who languished around the world in anonymity. The
renowned and the obscure, the criminal, the intellectual, the rebels, the outcasts - the
common denominator is that they all wrote under conditions of involuntary exile,
banishment, or imprisonment.
Exile and prison have always provided a fertile ground for artists, musicians, and writers,
and, in fact, the majority of Judeo-Christian literature of influence was written under such
conditions. The Bible is a prime example, as are Boethius’ “The Consolation of
Philosophy, Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”, and the Platonic dialogues, specifically
“Crito” and the “Apology”, which addressed the trial, imprisonment, and execution of
Socrates.
While all these writers have the experience of captivity in common, they operated within
diverse discourses. Those who considered themselves not criminals but political
prisoners, revolutionaries, or intellectuals, punished solely for their beliefs or opposition
to an unjust system, wrote to expose their oppressors and the philosophy of oppression
and to provoke reform, even if unintentionally. They generally saw themselves as
“prisoners of conscience” and made sense of their incarceration by appealing to a higher
order. Imprisonment represented the ultimate test of resistance and rebellion. While the
goal of the state was to punish and rehabilitate, they needed neither, and their literature
reflected this refusal to be broken or reprogrammed. Breyten Breytenbach, the South
African novelist and poet, falls into this category. Breytenbach was sentenced to seven
years prison in 1975 for attempts to negotiate contracts for black trade union movements,
and two of his books, “The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist” and “Mouroir” are
direct products of this experience. Another is Arthur Koestler, who was imprisoned by
the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, and later, based on his reflections on the
Stalinist purges, produced his classic exposure of totalitarian thought control in
“Darkness at Noon.” Solzenitsyn settled scores with the system that gave him eight years
in prison camps for referring to Stalin as “the boss” by writing, for example, “One Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and “The Gulag Archipelago.” And the list goes on:
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Vaclav Havel (“The Power of the Powerless” and “Letters to Olga”); Victor Serge,
(“Men in Prison”); Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Leon Trotsky; and Rosa Luxemburg.
Prison, for others, represented salvation, an opportunity to reflect, repent, and atone for
their transgressions; it also served as a validation and strengthening of their religious or
spiritual values. This is not surprising, since the condition of confinement, involuntary
abstinence, and surrender to external powers have always been conducive to clear
thinking and internal control. Eli Mandel, in “On Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet”, argues
that Wilde and Genet “needed” prison in order to write and that they gained through
imprisonment a spiritual regeneration which would have been unobtainable in “freedom.”
In Wilde’s searing “De Profundis”, he writes: “the silence, the solitude, the shame - each
and all of these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single
degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.”
John Bunyan, the English writer and preacher who refused to obey royal fiats
condemning noncomformist preaching, saw prison not as a state to be described in
concrete terms, but as a testing ground in the long journey to heaven, a part of a larger
allegory. Incarceration was a challenge to his overall spiritual commitment. Horst
Bienek, a colleague of Brecht, sought not only to test his beliefs but to persuade his cellmate to adopt them as well: “Perhaps I should even try to persuade him to convert to
Catholicism...let’s see if the force of conviction still lives within me…” (“The Cell”). In
more recent times, convicted Watergate conspirator, Charles Colson, who was sentenced
to prison for his part in the break-in during the Nixon administration, experienced a total
religious conversion. In one of his books on his prison experiences, “Life Sentences”, he
writes: “As the weeks passed, my conviction deepened that God had indeed given me a
vision for a new work in the prisons.” Upon his release, he organized prison ministries
and lobbied for prison reform.
In the 1960s, with the increase in arrests of rebels and activists, the United States in
particular began to produce another category of prison writer: the criminal reborn as
social activist and revolutionary. Prison was tranformed into school, and the prison
generated political leadership and an explosion of prison literature. This transformation is
especially evident within the black prisoner population, as it discovered it had access to a
voice the outside world was willing to hear.
Malcolm Braly’s “On the Yard” was praised by Kurt Vonnegut as the “great American
prison novel.” “Soul on Ice”, Black Panther activist Eldridge Cleaver’s prison memoirs,
“shocked, outraged, and ultimately changed the way America looked at the Black
experience…" (New York Times Book Review). The best known example is the black
separatist Malcolm X, who spent his life in and out of prison for robbery, pimping, and
countless other crimes. In his book, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, he recounts his
transformation from a bitter, self-destructive petty criminal into a Muslim and an
articulate political activist. His militant analysis of white racism has continued relevance,
as well as his emphasis on self-respect and self-help for African Americans. George
Jackson, a robber who spent eleven years in prison, eight of them in solitary confinement,
was considered one of the most eloquent writers to have emerged from the Black Panther
Party, and eventually became one of the most politically radicalized. He wrote in
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“Soledad Brother” that “up until now, the prospect of parole has kept us from confronting
our captors with any real determination. But now with the living conditions
deteriorating, and with the sure knowledge that we are slated for destruction, we have
been transformed into an implacable arm of liberation.” Jackson appears to disagree with
Jean Genet, who wrote of the common ground among prison writers in his introduction to
“Soledad Brother.” For Jackson, the racial construct was controlling, and in his view, this
discourse was unavailable to Genet or any other non-black.
The discourse of activism was not, however, and other career criminals such as Dannie
Martin claimed their place in the genre. Martin wrote a series of merciless exposes from
his cell of the U.S. prison system for the “San Francisco Chronicle”. This landed him
and his publishers in court, fighting a lengthy battle over the prisoner’s right to freedom
of expression. His book, “Committing Journalism: the Prison Writings of Red Hog,”
won numerous journalism awards and is now a staple for criminologists, sociologists,
prison reformers, and even the common reader. Writer, poet, boxer, and former prisoner
Floyd Salas’ first book about his experiences in a sadistic juvenile prison camp, “Tattoo
the Wicked Cross” (1967) was hailed by “The Saturday Review of Literature” as the best
first novel published in ten years. Other books received similar accolades. Prison writer
Edward Bunker’s “No Beast So Fierce” was made into a movie, “Straight Time”, starring
Dustin Hoffman, as was “Animal Factory”, with Willem Dafoe and Edward Furlong.
Bunker has co-authored books by the likes of William Styron (“Sophie’s Choice”) as
well, and currently works in the film industry in Hollywood.
Prison literature continues to fluorish today, especially in the United States, where more
Americans than ever before are incarcerated. Stories of dark heroism, apologist tracts,
the criminal as anti-hero, revolutionary, or self-serving con man – all form the corpus of
prison literature today in its myriad forms. Bunker describes the frenzied activity best in
his “Autobiography of a Felon”:
“The loudest sound is of scattered typewriters, each with a different speed and rhythm,
from stilted uncertainty to an unbroken pulse, from court appeals to the Great American
Novel, for I am not the only convict who dreams of redemption via the literary life, of
making a lotus grow from the mud.”
Julienne Eden Busic
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