Panel: Agency, Imprisonment, and Practices of Memory
Copanelists: Gail Okawa and Simon Rolston
Long part of a Western literary inheritance, the prison is often the place from which imprisoned and non-imprisoned authors critique the world outside the prison walls. Recent political developments in the United States and Canada, however—the “tough on crime” policies emerging in both countries, combined with the increasing privatization of prisons (a recession-proof industry)—bode ill for poor, racial, and disenfranchised groups, who represent a growing prison population.
If readers are travellers as Michel de Certeau argues, the prison author is equally a traveller who mediates between two spaces—the world inside and the world outside of the prison. My paper looks at the way incarcerated Canadian authors translate the largely unimaginable physical and social space of the prison to a non-imprisoned reader. These authors’ attention to physical space often overwhelms their descriptions even as they retreat into interiorized narrations. In my sampling of recent life writing by imprisoned authors, I will explore the extent to which context imprints itself onto text. I will look at instances where prison is placed on a continuum with the outside world, and instances where prison is seen as a disruption or inversion of it. Authors of certain racial groups, for instance, and some who perform class-based analyses, typically insist upon themselves as representative, as belonging to an imprisoned culture before their imprisonment. While some prison texts suggest that, as Michael Hardt puts it, “Prison is our society in its most realized form,” others insist on the prison as an inalienable space, a place of radical difference.
As a place typically seen as eroding individual identity, the prison provides a unique vantage point for witnessing the rebuilding of identity, both individual and collective. In addition to exploring these authors’ translation of space, I will also consider their reflections upon what happens to subjectivity in the prison. Given that many of these writers become authors out of their imprisonment, how does the prison occasion the discovery of a writing self? Finally, my paper will consider this writing’s implications for literary criticism and life writing. These texts prompt recognition of literature as social praxis at the same time as they develop a praxical view of theory— that is to say, an understanding of how literary forms change as they are inflected by different social contexts and a questioning of what new approaches and taxonomies emerge as genres migrate and travel from different cultural spaces.
Deena Rymhs is Assistant Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University (Nova Scotia). A specialist in Canadian literature, she has worked on narratives of incarceration with a particular focus on indigenous writers. She is author of From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Literature (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008), and she is currently writing a second book on prison literature in Canada.