Keltria
02-01-2006, 11:52 PM
How a murderer's hands can take up a pen and write
Award-winning author Diane Awerbuck gives her impressions of Durban's Westville Prison after presenting writing workshops for inmates
You know that Westville Prison is ahead before you see the signs to it. There are columns of people toiling up the slopes with bundles on their heads - pregnant women, young men in the tweed caps of the rural areas, old men with sticks.
They are all going like ants to the same place, and they are all only going for visiting hour.
Outside the youth centre at the prison someone has abandoned a project to write the name of the block in grass letters on the slope after the first three letters, in such a way that only the "Y-O-U" is visible; the rest of the title will come later. In the youth centre offices three soccer trophies are proudly displayed in front of the desk. Prisons are, after all, just institutions; they are not that different from schools and families and hospitals.
The South African penal system is proud of its adoption of the "rehabilitation model" after 1994, as opposed to the old "punishment model".
Prison, of course, is still the card nobody wants to draw. This is one of the ways that we know we have failed as human beings - that we need to lock other human beings away from us.
The difference now is the idea that most people are salvageable; that there is some good in all of us - or at least that there is some potential for reform so that we do not harm those around us again.
A few prisoners in the women's block are grateful to be here. One says, "This is my second sentence," and shrugs. "My first one was my marriage. Here no one beats me; I have enough food to eat. This is just the second sentence."
But mostly prison is about waiting - for keys to turn, for exercise time, for permissions to be granted or withheld. Holding creative writing workshops in prison is also a kind of waiting - for trust to develop, for inmates to take projects seriously, for the return of lost dignity.
It seems both fatuous and difficult to sit behind a tiny desk and say to them, "My name is Diane Awerbuck. I wrote a book because my mother has cancer." What can we possibly have in common? Why waffle about hope, about starting over, about the different kinds of imprisonment of the body and of the mind?
They watch me intently, young women with scrubbed faces, 50 -year-olds with their wedding rings biting into the flesh of their fingers, old women who are going to die in Westville Prison, serving out their terms. Why bother to write at all? Why not just resign yourself to this new society of outcasts?
Many inmates have resigned themselves. Of the 4 200 in the male prison of Medium B (built to accommodate 1 900), about 10% have signed up for the creative writing programme.
But that 10% are working wonders. Professor Michael Green of the University of Natal, who has headed the project for the past three years, says they have been "unfailingly interested, challenged and welcoming, and the majority really become engaged".
So the answer to the question of resignation seems also to be about keys, about unlocking parts of yourself so that you can see further, understand more.
In Medium B (a mixed medium and maximum-security block), there are rooms full of grown men standing at blackboards in their bright orange jumpsuits; huddled like scientists, chalking out arcs, doing sums, outlining the spectrum. They are finishing matric. Some of them are involved in tertiary study, something they could not have imagined they would do - neither the crime itself nor the surprising aftermath of it.
In their poems the notion of regaining their honour surfaces repeatedly - this struggle to become your own person again; a different one from who you were before.
Green says: "Our hardest job is to take the prisoners from their immediate first recourse to confessional and apologetic modes - intensely though not consciously stylised life histories: 'this is what I did wrong and why but I'm a much better person now' - into creative modes that allow them a very different form of insight and expression." He sees the creative writing project as a way for "... both them and us to go beyond our institutionalised modes, [which is] the whole point of taking creative writing into the prisons".
There are massive logistical problems in even the smallest things, like getting writing materials to prisoners who are not registered elsewhere for formal study; time issues; access within "the tight but random mysteries of prison life"; simply getting in and out.
"The experience has been very important to both myself and any of the other tutors I've taken in," says Green.
For this session, prisoners produced their pieces in preceding weeks. The idea behind the workshops was that they would have a feedback forum with visiting international writers who had been given their pieces beforehand.
The inmates are very curious about us, about anything that disrupts their routine. The guest writers are Helon Habila, a Nigerian writer who won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize First Book Award in 2003 for Waiting for an Angel ; Sonallah Ibrahim, an Egyptian writer famous for his imprisonment in the 1950s and 1960s and his refusal to accept the prestigious prize of the Arab Novelist Assembly in 2003 for his book Sharaf ; and Unity Dow, who in 1998 became the first female judge to be appointed to the Botswana High Court.
Dow's novels - Far and Beyon', The Screaming of the Innocent, Juggling Truths - deal with women's struggles for equality and justice in Botswana.
There is an audible shifting when the prisoners are told Ibrahim's credentials and the nature of Dow's day job. We are given the same kind of scrutiny that I found myself giving them when I first walked in. Dow's graciousness and humour win them over as she talks of being split by her professions and how writing allows someone to be whoever they want. Vicarious experience is its gift. In prison it is a double gift.
So how good is the writing? It needs a little more time, more practic e; it needs the kind of editing that any first-time writer would need.
One woman produced a poem about watching (imagining?) her son win an athletics race, and that poem as it stands is good enough to publish. It's also good enough to make you cry. Dow asks the writer whether she has told her son how proud she is of him.
"I sent him a copy," she says.
In jail she is nobody's mother. She must start over only as a model prisoner in the surface-life, or a gang leader below the institutional radar. Writing allows her to start over as herself; to create a new kind of identity. Her washing-up hands, which became murdering hands, can be writing hands. If she wants.
It also seems to me that loss is useful. Loss can be used to compare the empty with the full, so that striving for fullness is possible. It seems to me that this brokenness is a gift.
Award-winning author Diane Awerbuck gives her impressions of Durban's Westville Prison after presenting writing workshops for inmates
You know that Westville Prison is ahead before you see the signs to it. There are columns of people toiling up the slopes with bundles on their heads - pregnant women, young men in the tweed caps of the rural areas, old men with sticks.
They are all going like ants to the same place, and they are all only going for visiting hour.
Outside the youth centre at the prison someone has abandoned a project to write the name of the block in grass letters on the slope after the first three letters, in such a way that only the "Y-O-U" is visible; the rest of the title will come later. In the youth centre offices three soccer trophies are proudly displayed in front of the desk. Prisons are, after all, just institutions; they are not that different from schools and families and hospitals.
The South African penal system is proud of its adoption of the "rehabilitation model" after 1994, as opposed to the old "punishment model".
Prison, of course, is still the card nobody wants to draw. This is one of the ways that we know we have failed as human beings - that we need to lock other human beings away from us.
The difference now is the idea that most people are salvageable; that there is some good in all of us - or at least that there is some potential for reform so that we do not harm those around us again.
A few prisoners in the women's block are grateful to be here. One says, "This is my second sentence," and shrugs. "My first one was my marriage. Here no one beats me; I have enough food to eat. This is just the second sentence."
But mostly prison is about waiting - for keys to turn, for exercise time, for permissions to be granted or withheld. Holding creative writing workshops in prison is also a kind of waiting - for trust to develop, for inmates to take projects seriously, for the return of lost dignity.
It seems both fatuous and difficult to sit behind a tiny desk and say to them, "My name is Diane Awerbuck. I wrote a book because my mother has cancer." What can we possibly have in common? Why waffle about hope, about starting over, about the different kinds of imprisonment of the body and of the mind?
They watch me intently, young women with scrubbed faces, 50 -year-olds with their wedding rings biting into the flesh of their fingers, old women who are going to die in Westville Prison, serving out their terms. Why bother to write at all? Why not just resign yourself to this new society of outcasts?
Many inmates have resigned themselves. Of the 4 200 in the male prison of Medium B (built to accommodate 1 900), about 10% have signed up for the creative writing programme.
But that 10% are working wonders. Professor Michael Green of the University of Natal, who has headed the project for the past three years, says they have been "unfailingly interested, challenged and welcoming, and the majority really become engaged".
So the answer to the question of resignation seems also to be about keys, about unlocking parts of yourself so that you can see further, understand more.
In Medium B (a mixed medium and maximum-security block), there are rooms full of grown men standing at blackboards in their bright orange jumpsuits; huddled like scientists, chalking out arcs, doing sums, outlining the spectrum. They are finishing matric. Some of them are involved in tertiary study, something they could not have imagined they would do - neither the crime itself nor the surprising aftermath of it.
In their poems the notion of regaining their honour surfaces repeatedly - this struggle to become your own person again; a different one from who you were before.
Green says: "Our hardest job is to take the prisoners from their immediate first recourse to confessional and apologetic modes - intensely though not consciously stylised life histories: 'this is what I did wrong and why but I'm a much better person now' - into creative modes that allow them a very different form of insight and expression." He sees the creative writing project as a way for "... both them and us to go beyond our institutionalised modes, [which is] the whole point of taking creative writing into the prisons".
There are massive logistical problems in even the smallest things, like getting writing materials to prisoners who are not registered elsewhere for formal study; time issues; access within "the tight but random mysteries of prison life"; simply getting in and out.
"The experience has been very important to both myself and any of the other tutors I've taken in," says Green.
For this session, prisoners produced their pieces in preceding weeks. The idea behind the workshops was that they would have a feedback forum with visiting international writers who had been given their pieces beforehand.
The inmates are very curious about us, about anything that disrupts their routine. The guest writers are Helon Habila, a Nigerian writer who won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize First Book Award in 2003 for Waiting for an Angel ; Sonallah Ibrahim, an Egyptian writer famous for his imprisonment in the 1950s and 1960s and his refusal to accept the prestigious prize of the Arab Novelist Assembly in 2003 for his book Sharaf ; and Unity Dow, who in 1998 became the first female judge to be appointed to the Botswana High Court.
Dow's novels - Far and Beyon', The Screaming of the Innocent, Juggling Truths - deal with women's struggles for equality and justice in Botswana.
There is an audible shifting when the prisoners are told Ibrahim's credentials and the nature of Dow's day job. We are given the same kind of scrutiny that I found myself giving them when I first walked in. Dow's graciousness and humour win them over as she talks of being split by her professions and how writing allows someone to be whoever they want. Vicarious experience is its gift. In prison it is a double gift.
So how good is the writing? It needs a little more time, more practic e; it needs the kind of editing that any first-time writer would need.
One woman produced a poem about watching (imagining?) her son win an athletics race, and that poem as it stands is good enough to publish. It's also good enough to make you cry. Dow asks the writer whether she has told her son how proud she is of him.
"I sent him a copy," she says.
In jail she is nobody's mother. She must start over only as a model prisoner in the surface-life, or a gang leader below the institutional radar. Writing allows her to start over as herself; to create a new kind of identity. Her washing-up hands, which became murdering hands, can be writing hands. If she wants.
It also seems to me that loss is useful. Loss can be used to compare the empty with the full, so that striving for fullness is possible. It seems to me that this brokenness is a gift.