Prison visit two

 

He sits in the law library hour after hour typing letters to send to legislators. Hundreds of letters. If he makes 25 cents an hour and stamps are 70 cents; if each envelope costs 10 cents; if there is paper involved, it's hardly a winning proposition . . . he writes to call attention to prison conditions, as he once wrote to ask for drug rehab. He was sentenced to 20 years for using meth. Where do these letters go? he asks the local politician on the other side of the circle. They're probably filed away, the politician says, her face pointed down, her eyes uneasily up. 

 

"When do you feel outside of community?" was the evening's central question. The word of the evening was "judgment." Why we judge others, even though we hate being judged. Why judgment hurts. The men on the inside have particular knowledge of being outside community. On this evening, the organizer shows a short film about trans-men in Samoa. Fa`afatama do not have the honored place of fa'afafine (trans-women) in the culture. Where I sat, in a curve of the circle, there was grumbling. "What is the world coming to?" But the grumbling faded out like the end of a 60s rock song. The film over, the group talked about choices, about creating community where there was none, about filling roles, about the wedding of a fa`fatama that ends the film. 

 

"You get to choose who you are," says one inmate. "Do you think of yourself as a convict, or as something else?" he asks a more skeptical colleague. He's the wisest among them, at least for this evening; says he's a bad dad, absent from his kids. "I want to be a trans-good-dad," he says. 

 

"If I could vote," another man says, looking at the local politician, who is running for state-wide office, "I would vote for you." "Why?" ask other men; "explain yourself." "You've come to spend time with us more than once," he responds. The man next to him looks at her and says, "You seem to think of Hawai`i not as a business, but as a community.

A prison visit

 

I facilitated a poetry workshop in a prison the other evening. I was reminded of my mother's Alzheimer's home: here were men shut off from (and, more importantly, by) the outside world, locked in and locked out. As I left, I remembered closing the door with a thud on an old man in her home who wanted to leave. 

 

One man who stayed late said he'd taken English 100 at another prison. "It was so much fun!" he said. I told him I hadn't often heard the word "fun" used for that course. "We wrote five papers," he reported. He wants more classes. He'd promised his father he'd get his degree. "Education is everything," he said. His aunty had taught Hawaiian Studies at the local college.

 

We wrote "I remember" sentences (not so possible in my mother's "home," which would now be called a "memory care facility"). Locking up involves a lot of loss: one man had a sentence each for his children; another remembered how to skin an animal and how to fish; another remembered his first kiss with his wife, 40 years ago; the young guy remembered wanting flares at a fair, saying "but they're just flares!" after his father said no. He's the pastry chef in the prison. "Good haupia!" the others exclaimed. He remembered the flight to Arizona (where lots of Hawai`i prisoners are sent). And he remembered taking photos of his dog, which for some reason worried his mother.

 

One man made his every memory and later, his every moment in our exquisite corpses, about ice cream. He was truly the emperor of it.