Last weekend, I received an e-mail from a woman who said that she felt that my blog posts were missing something very important. She wrote: “You cover a lot of the ‘facts’ about prison and inmates but you leave out the heart.”

This has been haunting me. A stranger had me pegged. I am much more comfortable living in my head. I am less trusting with my heart.

She went on to write: “I am the other side of ‘Prison Culture’. I am the one left behind.”

I wrote back to her. We have since exchanged a few e-mails. I asked if I could write about this here. She said that it was fine as long as I did not use her name or other identifying information. I promised that I would not. I will call her Tina.

I wanted to write about our correspondence because Tina is right that I do not focus enough on those left behind because of mass or hyper incarceration. In my defense, this is because I really can’t presume to truly understand their experiences and their emotions. I can sympathize certainly but I worry that it means that I cannot write convincingly about their plight. However I certainly can do a better job of featuring their stories when they come to me. And I will.

Tina’s first e-mail was poignant and poetic. I can’t quote substantially from it without violating her confidentiality so I will try to paraphrase some of what she shared with me. She wrote of love; the abiding love that she feels for her incarcerated husband. She wrote about loneliness. Loneliness that she says is worse than the kind she felt when her mother passed away a couple of years ago. “Knowing that my mother is no longer on earth actually means that she is beyond reach to me, my husband is not dead, he is still on this earth, but beyond reach to me.” She wrote that no one in her circle truly understands what she is going through and that they are not sympathetic to her situation. She feels isolated. She is tired. She wrote to me about the burdens of black womanhood in the 21st century.

She told me that she has been following my blog for a couple of months. She was prompted to write to me after she read a post where I wrote about feeling hopeful in spite of living in an unjust society. She thought maybe I would be receptive to her story.

I truly hope that our e-mail exchange over the past week has conveyed to Tina that I see her. That while I cannot empathize, that I can absolutely sympathize with her.

I’ve been re-reading a lot of June Jordan in the past three months. I love her writing and her conviction. She wrote about justice, pain, activism, and most of all love. Love for self, for family, for community, for the world.

I am thinking a lot about love this week. Love and how it relates to abolishing prisons. Because of Tina, I am thinking even more about those left behind (parents, children, spouses, siblings, friends) once someone has been incarcerated. I am still struggling to formulate my own words for all of this. I am still struggling to find the “heart” of it all. The following words from June Jordan feel very appropriate to how I am feeling right now. I will borrow them and share them with Tina and you.

And it is here — in this extreme coincidence of my status as someone twice stigmatized, my status as someone twice kind to the despised majority — it is here, in this extremity, that I stand in a struggle against demoralization and suicide and toward self-love and self-determination. And it is here, in this extremity, that as a Black feminist I ask my self and anyone who would call me sister, Where is the love?

And it seems to me that the strength that should come from Black feminism means that I can, without fear, love, and respect all men who are willing and able, without fear, to love and respect me…this means that as a Black feminist I cannot be expected to respect what somebody else calls self-love if that concept of self-love requires my self-destruction.

As a Black woman and feminist, I must look about me, with trembling and with shocked anger, at the endless waste, the endless suffocation of my sisters; the bitter sufferings of hundreds of thousands of women who are the sole parents of hundreds of thousands of children, the desolation of women trapped by futile, demeaning, low-paying occupations, the unemployed, the bullied, the beaten, the battered, the ridiculed, the slandered, the trivialized, the raped and the sterilized; the lost millions of beautiful, creative momentous lives turned to ashes on the pyre of gender identity.

It is against such sorrow, such spiritual death, such strangulation of the lives of women, my sisters, and of powerless peoples — men and women — everywhere, that I work and live, now, as a feminist, trusting that I learn to love myself well enough to love you [whoever you are], well enough so that you will love me well enough, so that we will know, exactly, where is the love” that it is here, between us, and growing stronger.

Source:
“Where is the love?” in Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. Ed. Gloria Anzaldua, pp.174-176.