Writing as resistance

by John Nixon

Anyone who wants to know anything about prisons and prisoners' experience should read this latest edition of The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons Anthology (1988-2002) titled 'Writing as Resistance'. It provides unique and penetrating insights to the forces that shape and influence the radical prison mindset. This is the fifteenth edition of the journal (now an annual) and Canadian Bob Gaucher, its editor and indeed, the various fellow editors who have laboured, lived and loved (and hated) their way through these voluminous works which are made up of contributions from prisoners throughout the world deserve more than gratitude.

The world of the prison is at the worst of times a cruel esoteric domain. It is a world where myopia and parochialism conspire to stifle and suffocate the base human desire to discover an inner or intrinsic lebensraum. At any time it's a world that is divorced from the reality and normality of conventional life experience, an environment that most people on the outside don’t know or want to know about. But ultimately as *Breytenach points out there is a universality to all prison experience that only those who have been through the crucible or the belly of the beast know and understand. Writing as Resistance provides us with vignettes via the language of the prison house.

The essays in this anthology illustrate the spirit of resistance that characterises the survival strategies of most prisoners especially prison bound writers and intellectuals. More importantly they confront the "monster" stereotypes of the criminalised and incarcerated which dominate and contaminate the public perception.
For those of us who survived the crucibles of H Block, Long Kesh and Crumlin Road Gaol we know too well the value of writing as a vehicle of passion, sentiment, suffering and most of all the inescapable fact that man, not prison alone can destroy or break the indomitable spirit. But writing from within the prison dimension goes well beyond this.

Writing as Resistance is complex and carries deep analytical, critical and thought provoking contributions from Gaucher "Inside Looking Out: Writer in Prison", Jon Marc Taylor, "The Resurrection of the 'Dangerous Classes"'. There are, of course, articles from Former Irish POW's Ned Flynn, Paddy O' Dowd, Mary McArdle, Sean McMonagle among others.

The influence and importance of Irish political writing via the prisons from John Mitchell (Prison Journal) to Behan (Borstal Boy) from Bobby Sands 'The Rhythm of Time' to George Jackson's Soledad Brother. If I could meet them all at the same time I would urge them to read this book. An immediate affinity would be established.
A cliché from Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is quoted by Jackie Dana/Sean McMonagle in a chapter titled 'Deconstructing "Criminalisation", The Politics of Collective Education in the H Blocks' is apt: No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from their oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.

All prisoners who write about their prison experience are in essence pedagogic for in many ways they share, subliminally or otherwise, a unique understanding and perception of life that is denied to most. This anthology requires a more comprehensive review . Suffice to say that each contribution enhances our knowledge of the effects of the prison regime and culture on the wider human landscape. Its intrinsic value to our understanding of how prison shapes and determines the thoughts of not only those who are lost to the world, but indeed, those within society who carry the responsibility of advocating, shaping and administering penal policy or reform.

The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons was intended as a vehicle for the accounts and analysis of prisoners "to bring the knowledge and experience of the incarcerated to bear upon…academics and concerns, and to inform public discourse about the current state of our carceral institutions"

The extent to which this has succeeded may be judged by the essays presented in this anthology.

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