Aftermath, page 14
There were a few ex-soldiers of one kind or another in her class. As ex-military, trained in combat with high levels of self-control, self-motivation; a determination to succeed in public, and be seen as a perfect this or that, might just be high-pressure upbringing. It might be keeping a person alive, and then there is the new iteration
Iraq here, Iraq there. In terms of war in the Middle East and its long aftermath, she does not forget Gulf War Syndrome, a collection of symptoms suffered by returning war veterans in Britain and America from the Gulf in 1990–91. Fatigue, chronic pain, insomnia, muscle aches. Sounds like PTSD, though it apparently is not (which is equally concerning). 250,000 returning American troops were diagnosed with it; few were treated. Among the fascist insurgents who stormed the American Capitol in 2021 were Iraq and Afghanistan vets; now on the frontline of what they perceive as a civil war against radicals undermining borders, values, claim to resources – their targets Black Lives Matter, democrats; any others they call threat.168
In UK prisons, rates of PTSD are higher than in the general population, and that’s true of staff and of residents. Education offers a respite, and meaningful activity over time. Productivity for its own sake, not for sale. The place of art in this is something to think about. Respite, perhaps. A portal. A chance to build incremental moments of self-esteem against the state’s efficient machinery. It cannot be done alone. Art offers a different kind of holding position there.
But if the problem art poses is that it signifies little about the maker except the capacity to make art, and that can’t be read as a sign of goodness, then something else is needed overall. Now she starts dreaming of different possibilities and worlds; a way not to have the question of what ‘art’ is be consistently considered answered as a good, as a luxury, but instead consider it an essential part of human development; and of an equal society; in which it carries no burden but as one click among many interlocking systems that turn from violence, punishment, shame.
Think of this as Outline instead (where Aftermath is the feminist’s principle of autobiographical writing). A novelist teaching a course in creative writing over three years of winters in Cambridgeshire. Takes her College students in a minibus across the flat lands to the high-security prison. The young people are coming to the prison to practise creative writing alongside incarcerated men. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. They speak about themselves: carefully, sometimes directly, sometimes metaphorically, about their anxieties, pet theories, regrets and longings. They write, together. And through these disclosures, a portrait of a group is drawn by contrast holding trust against great loss, and there is more to come.169 We will all learn ourselves, the complexity of this world, practising our fictions there.
In the last days of December 2019, some of the men who were in her Whitemoor class wrote to her. They expressed their shock and disbelief at the attack at Fishmongers’ Hall. Their letters were full of care. Some had been placed on indefinite sentences for public protection, life without parole. Some were in under joint enterprise, and some for terrorism-related offences.
She remembers the incarcerated man who began to write to his estranged brother after having taken her course. Turns out the brother had dreams of becoming a writer too, and they began to swap life stories.
Those Who Leave, Those Who Stay
The writer Tayari Jones knows that the child of the incarcerated parent knows disenfranchised grief. That the parent of the incarcerated child knows disenfranchised grief. That the victim’s family knows violence, and grief. That the perpetrator’s family knows the void, their pain as unspeakable as the crime: as violation. She knows that to survive prison, there is an argument for writing. There is an argument for writing about that writing, not only about prison.
In her novel An American Marriage, a man, Roy, is wrongfully convicted of rape. We do not read the event or the trial. He is sent to prison, where he and his new wife Celestial write letters to each other throughout his long sentence. Roy and Celestial are Black, the embodiment of the American Dream and the New South. Roy is arrested just as they are becoming white rich. Police come for him: take him from their bed in a raid on their home in the night.
Roy learns to survive: he meets his estranged, long-absent father inside.
Roy is eventually released.
Celestial has become a successful artist by making dolls of him, highlighting his case. But on his return Roy finds she has not waited for him. She loves another living man: Roy’s former friend Andre. Love: an elastic band stretched almost to wire, reforms misshapen. Roy teeters on the edge of violence. A reckoning happens, laced with the threat and the longing to go back to prison. Celestial, disenfranchised so many times over, sacrifices her new life for Roy and what happens to her? A different kind of solitary looms
When Tayari Jones was a child a white serial killer targeted Black children in her hometown of Atlanta. 28 were killed. She knew two of them. She became a teacher and published two novels. Still, she struggled to maintain a writing career working against odds of all kinds. So many women writers of colour have a version of this story. The reading room shelf holds few like her. The numbers do not lie.
The year An American Marriage is published in the UK, I am invited to sit on the jury for a national literary prize. It’s the first time I have done this work. I’m in the revolving chair: there are also two prize jury veterans. We are having a conversation about the suspension of disbelief. There’s another ‘prison novel’ under consideration by a voice more tuned to their ears. The story includes a high-stakes escape from maximum-security. One of the judges sees this plot twist as more convincing than a Black American man meeting his long-estranged father inside.
The day before this discussion, I had been teaching in Whitemoor. My mind folds as lives touch each other, meet each other, and I hear my voice trying to insist, to explain to this jury – the doctrine of joint enterprise, how dispersal works, how the system might well produce such a moment of relation. That Black men who know each other might meet inside more regularly than a woman prisoner makes an escape. I think about how Black women’s authority is regarded in my country, and all that is never said. I make the point: the revolving chair begins to turn. I am allowed to win the battle, not the war. The long, not the shortlist.
Tayari Jones asks before the fact, and years before the far-right Capitol insurgency in 2021, Let’s say Trump is not re-elected. Let’s say all over the world, these far-right regimes are put down. How will we live with our neighbours, knowing what we now know of them?
Racial grief: the heartsickening trauma of a long history of policy-driven shame and human counternarrative, is Jones’s core subject. The grief of knowing neighbours who cannot step up for each other, all the way through to wider culture, which now seeks to legally silence protest, demand voter registration ID, arrest or refer to Prevent those who publicly express solidarity for the Palestinian people. As I write, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill seeks to expand the Home Secretary’s powers, via police to contain and punish, to extend sentences170 the grief is so heavy, it is meant to imprison us, if not even stop us dead. The literary has a responsibility in this, as a joint enterprise, as culture is made and protected by many.
An American Marriage gives its readers the gift of an intimate voice and specific portrait of two lives to think about this grief. It is not the insider view of the system or prison but about the damage that conviction, the shame that silence, that the culture of it does to families of those convicted. From the core to the widest sense. It’s risky. It’s a subject rarely spoken of. The horror of crime usually elides all deserving of story. Jones says, This is the story about a family affected by wrongful conviction, about what they owe each other and the ways that they will move forward. I think that when we forget that part of stories, we are actually dismantling community.171
And yet though the novel makes the strong suggestion, it never definitively answers the question of whether Roy is guilty or not. Jones trades in narrative as radical doubt. She as writer believes Roy is innocent: she presents us with the choice of whether we can believe this ourselves. Roy says he is innocent. His mother believes him. He pleads with Celestine to try. It has to be enough.
In this way Jones welcomes us to trust her, and her characters and to grieve with them, and with her. She invites us to sit, as a visitor to a prison, with our own flawed selves: our radical doubt and our potential for trust, let’s go so far as to say hope
A voice says, will always say – there is still the question of violence. There will always be some who should be locked away. The storyteller, to avoid that violation will not go there without backstory – to help us understand. There is still the question of real life
When Tayari Jones comes to Britain, she says her concern spreads beyond clear miscarriages of justice to encompass the vast numbers of those in jail for non-violent drug offences, or who are mentally ill. I’m not only interested in the ‘innocent people’ she says. When we make that distinction between innocent and not innocent, we miss the major issues about prison reform.172 I wonder about those two statements – the non-violent and the mentally ill – locked uneasily together. There’s no space to consider what is lost in the juxtaposition (or prison reform versus abolition). Mentally ill requires state money, requires commitment to racial justice. Requires a whole, honest education, to drill down to that belief in basic equality of potential. Meanwhile, though her fiction gives us a wrongfully convicted man, Jones’s statement encompasses violent offenders. I even wonder if she said those words, but they did not survive the editor’s cut.
There is nothing to move forward with but doubt; and that might mean listening to the subtext, listening harder to lived reality as well as our own hopes. The novel almost ends with this sentence (that pun, again) in recognition of life
But neither of us closed our eyes against the immeasurable dark of that silent night173
What keeps me awake after reading An American Marriage is Jones’ clarity on the price that everyone harmed by structural violence pays and continues to pay. Which is all of us. And the incredulity of having to sit on a literary jury and answer the question with a killjoy’s experience, when what they hungered for was people as numbers as facts as if that would make them feel
How likely is it that a Black man might meet a relative in prison?
Reality Hunger as Joint Enterprise (a Killjoy Manifesto)174
A killjoy manifesto thus begins by recognising inequalities as existing.175
Where are their mothers? (Tut tut.) She reads in the newspaper, and it as if she has always known that Black women are four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women in the UK.176 That British Pakistani (read working-class) women are more likely to have a premature baby or neonatal death in the UK compared to their country of origin.177 That Asian women are twice as likely to die in childbirth than white women in the UK.178 That mental health never falters in South Asian communities that black African, black Caribbean, Bangladeshi and Pakistani women were nearly twice as likely as white women to have died with Covid-19. The fact is not linked to health.179
She learns from her students that joint enterprise is a common law doctrine where an individual can be jointly convicted of the crime of another, if the court decides they foresaw that the other party was likely to commit that crime. It is guilty by knowing someone’s mind guilty by association sometimes just standing there
Young men from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups have been disproportionately affected or explicitly targeted by joint enterprise convictions in cases of presumed gang-related violence180
She confronts this truth each time she enters the prison. She asks the class to write a piece in response to a NASA image of a spaceman, floating in zero gravity, in the starry void. One comes back – Is he on his own or is he with a friend?181
She has to keep making the same claim because she keeps countering the claim that what she says exists does not exist.182
As thrusters boost away from space,
And being lost forever.183
She is being bombarded with splintering statistics that feed the curation of the homegrown student, lecturer, professor demographic in elite universities184
No dream, just stuck in my own thoughts, but I am lonely.185
Her friends joke and she begins to repeat the joke that she is the darkness. She remembers that if a killjoy manifesto shows how the denial of inequality under the assumption of equality is a technique of power, then the principles articulated in that manifesto cannot be abstracted from statements about what exists.186
She reads of the cells, and how they change your eyesight, make you see differently – 20/20 vision oops, yeah there’s a lizard187
She discovers that at least one man in her class was convicted on joint enterprise. For murder, though he was not holding the knife and did not know it was there. At twenty, he got a minimum sentence of nineteen years. He has autism. She is told only that he has difficulty concentrating. All she knows of him is in her classroom. Where he works with deep concentration through every class, and supports others, more than many do.188
Despite having dyslexia, he continues, there was no help… you were left to your own devices… there was no interest.189 He lives to make the story widely known
She wants to say, In our society, for a whole lot of people, getting sent to jail is not something out of the ordinary or unexpected, rather it is a part of their lives.190
In a 2016 ruling, R v Jogee, the Supreme Court ruled that joint enterprise had been misinterpreted for the past 30 years. Hundreds convicted before that date remain incarcerated
A killjoy manifesto is thus about making manifest what exists.191
She thinks about Antigone, the power of canonical metaphor, and of myth. The devising of an EPIC scale to be used to evaluate students’ experience of learning.192
59 per cent of prisoners stated that they had regularly played truant from school, 63 per cent had been suspended or temporarily excluded, and 42 per cent stated that they had been permanently excluded or expelled. Prisoners with these issues were more likely to be reconvicted on release than those without.193
In prison she hears the lament as refrain:
I have been a stranger here in my own land
All my life194
She is aware of the issues. Radicalisation, release, recidivism. And then remembers that the number of Muslims in prison has increased by almost 50 per cent over the last decade from 8,900 to 13,200. Muslims now make up 15 per cent of the prison population, but just 5 per cent of the general population… It must be stated and stated that this dramatic rise in the number of prisoners is not linked to terrorism offences, as on average, very few people are convicted of these offences each year.195
I’m so far but yet so near wishing on a star wishing you were here.196
It is argued that in many such cases (of joint enterprise) the level of participation in the offence was so slight, or the evidential threshold of conviction so low, that the conviction amounts to a substantial injustice.
He has no control. He has no power over destiny. He can only let go and allow fate to take him.197
Prosecution teams were reported as being more likely to appropriate discourses of gang insignia and music videos or lyrics, particularly hip hop and rap genres, as a way of building a JE [joint enterprise] case against BAME prisoners.198
trap trap in the bando I don’t wanna look like you199
Disclaimer: the artist / artists would like to clarify no persons in my music, mixtape videos are in anyway involved or condone any illegal activities as portrayed in the lyrics or contents of any video or song produced.200
Genre is a medium security prison201
This chain which now you wear so openly:
Beside the charge, the shame, imprisonment202
37 per cent of prisoners reported having family members who had been convicted of a non-motoring criminal offence, of whom 84 per cent had been in prison, a young offenders’ institution or borstal.203
Do you think a young Muslim man could meet or make a friend or brother or a son in a UK prison?204
People in prison had called him Roy’s pops, but he’d just assumed it was a joke.205
You can’t pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.206
I cannot tell whether he is ascending or descending. Is he suspended in a vacuum of time?207
The feminist killjoy is a manifesto. She is assembled around violence; how she comes to matter, to mean, is how she exposes violence.208
I’m not there or should I say here but where is here cos I’m in the middle of nowhere alone with my thoughts.209
Prisoners with a convicted family member were more likely to be reconvicted in the year after release from custody than those without a convicted family member.210
You hold yourself aslant, the tip of your own hemisphere, a circumference hole and entire, above clouds and horizons and ozone layers.211
At least two generations have been disciplined to expect (and receive) little or nothing from the state except punishment or the threat of punishment.212
In Search of Lost Time is the narrative of a desire to write213
All she can get back to now is this: Society’s collective fear of love must be faced if we are to lay claim to a love ethic that can inspire us and give us the courage to make necessary changes.214
The impact on the students was profound.215
No, I did not describe the mirror – I was the mirror. And the words they are themselves, without a discursive tone.216
Antigone’s Lament
I never taught Antigone in the prison. There was no reason not to. Maybe such stories take their truest form within these walls. (Ismene is convicted under joint enterprise, after all.) Which raises the question of what to teach in prison, and why. What kind of city we might make. It is not a city if it takes its orders from one voice. There’s another line, which sounds a warning: How about you, in a public brawl with justice? And the response comes back, There is no threat in speaking to emptiness.
