Do You See Me?: Writing a World Without Cages
When I was studying in New York in 2019, I found a job interning for an interesting initiative. “A World Without Cages” was an editorial project under the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) in Manhattan, which brought together voices from jail, prison, and immigrant detention. This project published writing by incarcerated individuals across the U.S. and also organized workshops, talks, and book drives where formerly incarcerated individuals could share their experiences of engaging with literature during their time in prison. Guests of these events could pay for books to be sent to prison libraries across the country.
The most striking aspect of my role as an editorial intern for AAWW was handling letters that arrived from prisoners. These letters contained handwritten notes and pieces of poetry, fiction, or personal essays. I remember one cloudy afternoon at the workshop, gingerly holding a thick orange package with a state prison stamp, stroking the stamp and thinking about its journey. I remember thumbing through the papers, the careful scrawling, the flooding of feeling contained within the parcel. I was overwhelmed.
Prior to my position at AAWW, I had never thought deeply about the carceral system and what that experience could entail, in all its nuances, for different people throughout the world. Sitting across from my boss, with dozens of letters and packages splayed out in front of me, I was struck by the gravity of stories I had never accessed nor even thought about before. I realized the narratives within carceral systems were kept at such a distance from those on the “outside” that they were effectively othered from the rest of society. I had unconsciously assumed those stories just didn’t matter as much and didn’t deserve to get told because of the places they came from.
That afternoon, we read a letter from a male prisoner who had been convicted of child molestation. It was an apology. His personal essay was raw, gouging, simple, lyrical. It was honest. I turned to my boss and asked, “How do you think people will react to this? A man admitting to molesting a child and then apologizing. Do we put a disclaimer at the top? Will that make people stop reading?” I was asking whether our actions can strip us of the right to tell our stories.
I’ve never forgotten that letter, or the conversation it led to: a thick, difficult discussion that twisted like rope, in and out of numerous ethical and moral quagmires. My boss and I didn’t arrive at a firm conclusion, and I knew we wouldn’t be able to. These aren’t simple issues because they involve such complex, abstract notions of justice, ethics, morals, and redemption that have no easy rulebooks.
I left New York and my job at AAWW with new ways of thinking about the power of literature in tandem with marginalized communities and narratives. A few Foucault class readings later, I tried to focus in on how literature could intervene in the carceral continuum and possibly disrupt it. I thought more about the letters I had read, personal and smudged, and the people behind them. I began thinking about what writing and reading could mean for someone in such a constrictive situation: what could it offer them?
Many prisoners wrote about their lives in prison, and they talked about the arcs their lives had taken. It seemed to me that literature helped them hold up a mirror to their realities and anchor the overwhelming force of what they lived through within pages. But I realized that literature could offer the opposite. It could also serve as a pathway to escape through imagination: a way to fill other shoes, live other lives, and let the mind romp and travel from within one’s confines.
I decided to reach out to my former boss at AAWW, Daniel Gross, to revisit these ideas and continue our conversation. Gross is an experienced prison reporter and journalist. In 2016, while first working as a public radio journalist and writing freelance stories for The New Yorker’s website, he became “drawn to communities where words take on special significance and saw prison as one of those places.” It was one particular story that opened Gross up to a new space and perspective in which literature operates. He became acquainted with Robin Woods, a man who had taught himself to read while incarcerated in Maryland. “Robin went on to make corrections to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Encyclopedia from his prison cell,” Gross told me. The story of Woods’ subsequent friendship with an editor at Merriam-Webster became a podcast story for Criminal, as well as a New Yorker story called “The Encyclopedia Reader.”
This story led Gross to think about the plethora of stories that were hiding beneath the near-opacity of the US carceral system, “stories so varied that they could fit into any section of a newspaper.”
“Stories of incarceration are always stories about race, power, and inequity,” Gross tells me, and the statement reverberates back to the unwieldy state of politics and carceral systems around the world today. If we’re going to talk about literature and prison together, that conversation will inevitably lead to dilemmas surrounding laws, ethics, and abstract concepts and systems that dwarf us with big, ugly, misheld power–much like what occurred in the first conversation I had at work with Gross about the prisoner’s apology letter.
The U.S. imprisons more people than any other nation. It’s an uncomfortable fact, one that Gross wanted to probe further through his reporting. “I wanted to cover incarceration in part because I was baffled by it,” he tells me. “This system was set up by both political parties. I wanted to understand its contours and its inner workings.” It was this drive for knowledge and access to a new terrain of stories that led Gross to start the “A World Without Cages” project at AAWW. Gross discussed Keri Blakinger, a formerly incarcerated reporter for The Marshall Project. She pointed out to him that prison literature projects often tend to “elevate people who are exceptions: incarcerated writers with unusual access to books and educational programs, and financial support, for example.” A conversation about prison and literature is also, inevitably, a conversation about privilege and accessibility, not only for those on the outside, but also for the prisoners themselves.
Gross himself is a white male who was privileged enough to attend a good school, study English, and start out as a culture journalist. These experiences afforded him opportunities to access and distribute prison stories with relative ease. They also gave him the space and resources to start thinking critically about concepts of race, justice, and power; in our world, this kind of education is a privilege near luxury: the ability to learn about such concepts from the stolid comfort of theory and hypotheticals, rather than direct experience. But Gross admits that this privilege also left him with biases and gaps that he continues to spend time and effort overcoming. During my time working with him at AAWW, for example, Gross pushed for “crafting a call for stories that were easy to read and easy to share on the inside.” It was a simple, one-page PDF that included all of the relevant instructions and a mailing address. Hundreds of copies were sent out.
Accessibility is important because the greater it is on the “inside,” the more rich and varied the body of stories accessed on the “outside” can be. It’s important for books, calls for stories, drives, and workshops to be offered in as many languages, settings, and areas as possible. The carceral system is not a monolith, something the absence of nuanced stories can easily make us forget.
Gross spoke about how gratifying it was to receive such a rich variety of submissions. He mentioned reading a story by Hoàng Vu Tran: “He submitted one of the most moving essays I’ve ever gotten to work on, explaining that he had come to the U.S. as a refugee and dropped out of school in ninth grade. He had never considered himself a writer. But he was one. I was devastated to learn that Vu passed away from cancer this month, and I keep thinking about the stories he never got to tell.”
The name of the project “A World Without Cages” serves as “an allusion to prison abolition and as a reminder that the literature of incarceration is not only descriptive, but also imaginative.” Stories coming out of the carceral system are important not only because they reflect a reality too often submerged beneath mainstream claptrap and power, but also because they serve as portals and bridges between the unfortunate binary of “inside” and “outside.” Both sides are able to look at each other, meet, empathize, and merge–all qualities unique to the functions of literature.
Of course, there is far more at stake for those in prison. While the outside may view prison literature as a tokenization or even trauma porn, those stories are a lived reality for those incarcerated. In one of Gross’s early reported stories about incarceration, he recalls speaking to Kenneth Foster Jr., an incarcerated poet and activist, about what writing meant to him. “Under something called the law of parties, Kenneth was sentenced to death for a murder he didn’t commit. His death sentence was commuted, but he still carries an extremely long prison term. Kenneth told me that writing wasn’t about escapism for him. He has been challenging his conviction for many years, and he told me that writing helps him feel that he has a fighting chance. In cases like his, what’s at stake is freedom itself,” Gross wrote.
I am reminded of the first time I read Memoirs from a Women’s Prison by the Egyptian feminist writer Nawal el Saadawi (a formidable women with two white braids and a guttural voice), whom I once met in a college class. El Saadawi was imprisoned in the 1980s at Qanatir Women’s Prison for her feminist journalistic activities and criticism of democracy and Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat. Her memoirs described her experience in the women’s prison where she first formed the Arab Women's Solidarity Association: the first legal and independent feminist group of Egypt. What struck me most about her story was that when she was denied a pen and paper while incarcerated, she used a stubby black eyebrow pencil and reams of toilet paper to record her thoughts, which became what she eventually published.
One of my college professors used to talk about how “to write is to exercise a vote.” He stressed the importance of literature and writing as political weapons: democratic tools. El Saadawi’s is not the only prison memoir; there have been countless others across hundreds of years from around the world. They alert us to the fact that for prisoners, writing is a tool of personal agency, empowerment, and political participation or rebellion. It is a way of asserting the self within a carceral system that is designed to strip you of your selfhood, your citizenship, and your body—it believes you do not matter or belong.
Gross often calls mass incarceration a “vector of disease.” “The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers. These places have become some of the worst coronavirus clusters in the U.S.,” he explains. Apart from the serious physical threat of a virus wreaking havoc in close confined spaces, it also slows down the exchange of prison literature. Several organizations that facilitate workshops or work with prisoners in creative capacities have faced struggles in the midst of this pandemic, such as the LA-based Liberated Arts collective.
The pandemic has also led to the emergence of a new mainstream vocabulary: the language of prisons has spread to the “outside.” We talk of “lockdown”, “confinement”, “quarantine,” and feeling “solitary” every day. I wonder what these words might mean for those who have been formerly incarcerated. Triggers? Marks of familiarity? Irritating flashbacks? I also wonder how the distribution and sharing of stories of those currently or formerly incarcerated may help to spread coping skills and strategies for dealing with the realities of isolation to those on the “outside” who may be completely unfamiliar with this kind of constriction.
The idea of mutual exchange, of a respectful, equal collaboration facilitated by literature between those incarcerated and those not, seems to me a vital and necessary act of seeing the other. For ex-prisoners, if they can come out and re-enter spaces or conversations where their stories are free to be told, they’re offered the gift of being able to look at their audience and think, You see me. I see you. It is what any human asks for: to be seen, and thus respected, to be met with dignity.
I see you. You see me.
Illustration by Simone Hadebe