Confined in space and time, a mental state of my own
design. Submerged in the love from within.
Inside this container of mine.
Amir’Whadi Hassan, “This Container of Mine”
Our bodies contain it all — the thoughts, the blood, the guts, the memories and pain, the articulation of our ancestors, the genetic material of the future. Filled with hope and energetic exuberance, they are bound and they are universal. As our friend Walt Whitman asserted: “I contain multitudes.” Well, this week, our writers share myriad insights into strategies for survival when bodily autonomy has been removed by the conditions of incarceration. Travis Asbill stood today in the OSP workshop to deliver a poem with full-bodied expression, the words spilled out in an elegant cascade of truth, profanity, and the faith. He was a cathedral.
We move through the world in these containers that we may forget to adequately acknowledge with the reverence they deserve. Take a moment to simply marvel at your hands. They labor all day with little protest. My fingers are tapping across the keyboard in perfect concert with my language center, moving as quickly as my thoughts command. Of course, these bodies of ours rebel after too little sleep or nourishment, when they have been pushed too far with emotional overload or physical exertion and like a tantrumming two-year-old, they shut down. Fingers refuse to move, brain fogs, eyes close, until there is a physical respite: a nap, a coffee, a walk, a dose of loud music — each of us has a way to reorient and reset our bodies.
To that end, we start with Angela Kim who writes a reflective piece from home — a place of her own (thankfully) far from prison. Angela documents the excruciating realities and dangers faced by women who are incarcerated. In “The Hunger for Validation: Women, Incarceration, and Rebuilding of Self.” Angela shares an honest and moving account of her prison experience, and the insight she gained about herself and her peers:
During my 17.5 years of incarceration, I watched this happen over and over again. Women entered the system already carrying wounds — trauma, poverty, addiction, abuse — and the criminal justice system rarely offered healing. Instead, it compounded their pain. They were processed, reduced to numbers, and treated as less than human. Over time, many began to believe that was all they were worth.
That erosion is not abstract; it is enforced in deeply physical and psychological ways.
Forty-eight percent of women incarcerated were themselves victims of crimes and 95% of women were victims of domestic abuse or sexual violence in their lifetime. With these numbers in mind, it is self-evident our population of female-identified prisoners require great care than a carceral experience provides. While incarcerated Angela taught music lessons and participated in as many programs as possible. She built strong friendships with like-minded and supportive women.
Next we have “One Man’s Hobby Born in a Bomb Shelter” a profile of Ali Mattar by Kurtis Thompson, a prison journalist writing from Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution. Living in the trauma of war-torn Beirut, Ali Mattar found refuge in his writing. His fingers writing over the fear center an occupation that helped him survive:
“It helped me get through that moment,” he said. “Every time we went to the bomb shelter, when we had to segregate ourselves from the conflict, writing came to mind. So, I just stuck with it. All that caused me to focus on writing.”
We end with Jai’s “Jazz Mam” a three-part poem written to the bodily experience of listening to Dave Brubeck quartet. Read the loose-limbed play of keyboard and horn. Here we have dancing fingertips, in this case, they keep time with the ear and the explosion in the heart that only music releases:
A horn, of clear distinction, muddles
it’s way through foggy morning eyes.
With a breath and a shudder,
another breath and a shake,
a surreal hushhh tisk, hushhhh tisk,
the whispering whisk slides across snare.
Jai expresses whole body listening, the transportation that moves a soul over 30-foot walls. Let’s end on this note:
Brubeck! With a
Summer Song for a morning cathedral,
a review where the church pews all sing.
With a smile, I invent a brand-new day.
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