Essay No. 5

From the Underside

Finishing my third week as an inmate at Federal Prison Camp Lexington Atwood, I realize that I have become rather comfortable here.  Not in the usual sense of comforts, because there are precious few amenities beyond the essentials.  Trust me, this is no “country club” joint!  But now I am able to move through this facility, this community-in-adversity, and do what I need to do without getting in anyone’s way.  I have also identified the oases of quiet and calm which help me remember who I am, despite the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle climate of humiliation.  So, yes, I have attained a degree of comfort.

But I recall my first days here as I struggled against emotional desolation that was, I think, a primal response to being confined.  Unlike most of my sister inmates, I had entered into prison bondage willfully, rather than make a moral concession that would have earned me the relative freedom of probation.  (The price tag on that probation was to promise never to return to Ft. Benning, GA in peaceful protest of the U.S. Army School of the Americas-- a price I couldn’t afford.)  But knowing I had chosen this prison sentence from the available options was only a slight consolation to me then, as was knowing that I’d make the same choice again!  For emotionally and spiritually I chafed at confinement.

As I sorted through my confusion and heaviness those first days, I frequently asked myself: Just why did I think this would be such a good idea?  What can I possibly accomplish in this straitjacket of a place?  I wondered: If compression transforms coal into diamond, dare I hope for some similar magic on my psyche while confined here?

If answers were being offered to me, they weren’t getting through-- save one image.  My mind had turned quickly to civil disobedience theory, hoping to orient myself via that familiar construct.  But every time my intellect tried to find solace there, I was stopped short-- by an image of my legs and feet sticking out from under a building!  I sensed that I was being urged to encounter that theory from its cramped underside--a new vantage point for me--rather than from the privileged spaciousness of seeming intellectual detachment.  I understood, obscurely, that I was in prison in part to learn how to think, feel and otherwise maneuver from a cramped, constrained condition, from society’s underside.

Surely all this was already implicit in what I had said to Judge Lawson at our SOA-10 sentencing, although I didn’t comprehend the implication so viscerally in court!  I told him--and I remember his eyes widening in response--that I wanted to relinquish my race and class privilege, and to represent worthily the interests of the majority poor throughout Latin America.  Now, I have no illusions about such a project; at best it can be achieved slowly, by degrees.  But with this incarceration, I find myself being introduced--admittedly in a small and brief way-- to some of the more visceral constraints of poverty.  From the unavailability of vegetarian protein and natural medicines, to the lack of choice, opportunity and movement (all deprivations more often dictated by dearth of resources than by court writ), I am trading in a wholly vicarious understanding of poverty for one that is at least partially lived.

Part of me balks at that phrase “wholly vicarious.”  I have, after all, spent some time in underdeveloped countries, so have seen and lived through harsh conditions.  But that time was spent as a visitor, graciously if meagerly treated, with a return ticket to privilege tucked safely in my fanny pack.  Similarly the political work I have done in solidarity with Latin Americans has issued from a wide range of choices, as well as a steady presumption of the wherewithal to do the work!  Arguably I still have a return ticket to abundance and choice in the form of a release date, but even so this confinement--compared to those earlier experiences--feels like a truer encounter with some of the constraints felt by the majority of people on this planet.

I don’t want to overstate my position, so let me say that I am well aware that even this prison population, because it is in the U.S., is part of the 5-6% of the world’s population that uses over a quarter of its resources.  Indeed, protein deficit notwithstanding, I eat very well here compared to the communities I have visited in El Salvador and Nicaragua.  But it is that more primal bondage, the very usurping of choice, that I am experiencing for the first time ever here.  If my brush with that bondage illuminates for me some of the ways--from the material to the spiritual--that men, women and children are compromised by poverty, then this sentence will have been a precious, introductory semester in unlearning my class privilege!

There is a liberating aspect to this as well.  Consider:  If we think of the poverty that issues from economic and political oppression as a straitjacket of sorts, then surely it must be a reversible garment that is also worn--and necessarily so!--by the minority privileged.  For if the poor are denied a gainful interaction with their social and natural environment, is it not equally obvious that exercising privilege at their expense requires being constrained from mutual regard within the global family?  As one example among many, consider how the indigenous people of southern Mexico are being killed and driven from their ancestral homelands, which cover vast oil reserves.  Few would find virtue in the active greed of oil companies exploiting native peoples, nor in the military enforcers of their greed (many of them SOA graduates).  But what of us who play the supporting role of avid consumer?  What of our war taxes?  What spiritual numbing does our complicity require?

It was by visiting and working in a Central America still reeling from a long history of economic and political oppression that I first began to chafe against my own standard-issue, imperial straitjacket.  I see now that it served, if not to rationalize, at least to obscure my privileged existence as a “child of empire.”  (I borrow this phrase from my fellow SOA-10 Prisoner of Conscience Brooks Anderson, who is currently incarcerated in Duluth, MN.)  There, in Central America, I was the guest of many wonderful people living toward the bottom of the global food chain.  As I responded to both their needs and their extraordinary generosity, those Salvadorans and Nicaraguans conspired to gently and persistently loosen the straps of my straitjacket, so that I might breathe more deeply of community.  I am forever grateful to them for that revelatory act.

Now it is my hope that this community-in-adversity at FPC Lexington Atwood, and the experience of confinement that we are sharing, can further release me from the hidden constraints of privilege.  As opaque coal gives way to luminous diamond, may unconscious dominance give way to conscious solidarity.

Margaret Knapke           

21 August 2000