“If It Hadn’t Been for Writing, I Think I Would Have Lost My Mind:” Resilient Dwelling and Rhetorical Agency in Prison Writing

Maggie Shelledy, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley 

(Published December 18, 2019)

On his suggestion, I met Saul at a prison-themed hot dog restaurant, home of the “misdemeanor wiener.”[1] “I thought you’d get a kick out of this place,” he says. The owner employs system-impacted people, and the walls are covered in graphs and statistics about mass incarceration and recidivism. Saul doesn’t work here, but he knows folks who do. Throughout our conversation, he smiles wryly as he speaks. Maybe it’s the absurdity of trying to explain his experiences to me, a middle-class, white academic. He speaks deliberately, and I can hear the backspace in his voice as he pauses, reaches for a better word, always revising, delivering lines that every qualitative researcher dreams of. He wants to get it right. He tells me with his signature smile that, after nearly two decades in prison, he is woefully unprepared to be an adult in the world. He says he didn’t know what he would do when he got out, but he always knew what he wouldn’t do. He wouldn’t go back to prison.

Saul is one of millions of Americans who have spent time behind bars. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 2.3 million people were locked up in the United States in 2019. With only 5% of the world’s population, the US now holds 25% of the world’s incarcerated population, with a price tag of at least $80 billion. The unsustainability of this system creates strange bedfellows, including civil rights advocates, deficit hawks, racial justice activists, and conservative political contributors like the Koch brothers. “Mass incarceration” has entered the general public lexicon, and criminal justice reform is generating bipartisan support. Though the election of Donald Trump has undoubtedly dampened the optimism of reformers, the 2016 election was not the overwhelming blow to criminal justice reform one might assume, as reform measures won on ballots across the country in November 2016.^[2] Although the rise of Donald Trump and popular support for his carceral jingoism—evident in increased surveillance and detention of undocumented immigrants and in calls for increased police surveillance in Black neighborhoods—demonstrates the unevenness in the recent shifts in support for criminal justice reform, that support is still evident, even in states that voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

In this milieu, college in prison programs are gaining in visibility and support, propelled by deep beliefs in the power of education to transform lives and hoist marginalized people into the public sphere and middle class. Writing studies scholars like Tobi Jacobi, Patrick Berry, David Coogan, Joe Lockard and Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Alexandra J. Cavallaro et al., to name a few, have explored the role formal writing instruction can play in resisting the dehumanization and oppression of incarceration, particularly the ways the carceral classroom might offer agency to the socially and physically marginalized people caught up in hyperincarceration. In this article, I extend the spirit of this work while questioning some of the assumptions about agency and literacy in which many of these arguments find their foundation. My goal is to consider what our predominant notions of rhetorical agency might fail to illuminate about the experiences of people whose modality of human-being is not reflected in the freedom, autonomy, and rationality of the liberal humanist subject on which traditional notions of agency are built. To aid in this task, I examine the lived experiences of two formerly incarcerated men, Saul and Ben, who enrolled in accredited college classes during their incarceration. Whereas prison literacy scholars have typically focused on the prison classroom as a space that creates rhetorical possibility through reflection, expression, and collaboration, my conversations with formerly incarcerated people like Ben and Saul suggest that what makes writing and higher education so vitally important for incarcerated students is not so much that it offers opportunities for expression in a (relatively) safe space (though at their best, they do), but that the prison classroom and its attendant ways of being support the everyday struggle to not only survive prison, but to inhabit it, to make a kind of home there. In the narratives of Saul and Ben, higher education and academic writing are extensions of this resilient lifestyle, and in particular, they are means through which supportive, caring relationships are built, expressed, and maintained. In response to these stories, I suggest that the role of higher education in the lives of incarcerated students is less about rhetorical agency that originates in reflection, self-expression, collaboration, and critique in the classroom than it is a matter of providing institutional cover for agential action that is already being practiced and of providing an arena for those actions to multiply, intensify, entangle, and develop in new ways.

These interviews are part of a larger study of the experiences of twenty-four formerly incarcerated people from five different states. I chose to feature Saul and Ben’s interviews here for two reasons. First, of the interviews conducted, they provided the deepest consideration of their writing practices during their incarceration experiences. Second, Saul and Ben have, at first glance, very little in common. A white man in his early fifties, Ben had been out of prison only two months when we met, and this was his sixth time getting out. Having been in and out of prison for much of his adult life, Ben had been married twice and had four children. Saul and Ben come from different states with different departments of correction and different prison cultures where they served their sentences. Despite these differences, their stories also reveal similar perspectives about their struggles to maintain dignity and a sense of selfhood in prison, as well as the role higher education played in their doing so.

Through these stories, I demonstrate that, rather than introducing agency to otherwise passive subjects, higher education extends and supports the vital rhetorical action that incarcerated people are engaged in on a daily basis. When advocating for marginalized students, we must be thoughtful about the ways we frame agency in order to avoid rendering those students as passive recipients of the predefined benefits of writing instruction. By framing these students as submissive, we risk overinflating our importance in the intellectual and social development of incarcerated students, a move that reinforces popular imaginaries of incarcerated people and participates in the political violence against dehumanized people. This is not merely a matter of how incarcerated students are represented, but a matter of generating greater understanding about how rhetorical agency emerges and circulates. In the sections that follow, I advocate for a proliferation of theories of agency interventions of higher education in carceral institutions. Next, I offer resilient dwelling as a concept to describe the everyday relational rhetoric through which incarcerated lifestyle emerges within the ambient rhetoric of the prison. Finally, I trace the ways Ben and Saul use higher education and academic writing to create mutually supportive relationships, which form the bedrock of their resilient dwelling.

The Trouble with Humanist Agency

In an essay for an environmental studies course he took in prison, Saul provides a moving polemic on the moral outrage of veal production, arguing that the material conditions of confinement that young calves experience violates the inherent sanctity of life:

The questionable housing procedures that isolate and restrict movement, and the dietary procedures that restrict herbaceous foods to induce iron deficiencies to produce the trademark light color in the meat, along with the systemic breakdown of the regulatory agency put in place to guard against the inhumane treatment of veal calves all show a clear lack of love, reverence, and respect for the natural expression of life . . .

The connection to Saul’s own life is hard to miss. Incarcerated at age fifteen, Saul himself was separated from his family, from meaningful connection, and placed in conditions that violated the sanctity of his life. In many ways, his essay exemplifies the emancipatory ideals of writing within carceral institutions and the forms of rhetorical agency on which most prison literacy scholarship is based. Here was a man whose everyday conditions preclude defiance and critique, who was offered an opportunity to express his own humanity and the inherent evil of a carceral logic that denies it to so many. But in our conversation, Saul practically laughs at my suggestion that classroom writing might offer such liberatory possibility:

You present me with information and you ask me to critique this information in such a manner. And I go back to my cell, I write a paper, and I give it to you for your critique of my opinion of the information that you presented me. You know? What is that?

Clearly, Saul didn’t think much of being “offered” this opportunity to express his opinions about the immorality of carceral logics. From his telling, the content of the essay had little impact on him whatsoever. It is easy to imagine prisons as overwhelmingly oppressive. Certainly, they are. But the opportunity to voice critiques of the prison are not hard to come by, and the opportunity to express oneself may not be quite as rare or as meaningful as prison educators may believe.

I suggest that it is in part a reliance on a humanist conception of rhetorical agency that sustains the majority of scholarship on carceral writing pedagogy, pedagogy that Saul suggests is not in and of itself transformative. Since the 1970s and gaining in the last decade, several writing studies scholars have drawn on their experiences in carceral classrooms to suggest that formal writing instruction has an important role to play in creating transformative potential within the harsh restrictions of prisons and jails (Cavallaro et al., Berry, Jacobi, Lockard and Rankins-Robertson, Plemons, Laurence, Rogers, Hinshaw, Ryder). Whereas early scholarship in this area reflects the role of writing instruction in rehabilitating the character of incarcerated individuals, more recent scholarship emphasizes the ways that literate practice, especially reflective life-writing, can help incarcerated people develop rhetorical agency and resist the isolating and dehumanizing effects of incarceration. These scholars write from a variety of theoretical and political approaches, but the framing of the rhetorical agency of incarcerated students and their potential for creating social change in these works reinforce a humanist approach to agency, in which potential for action is located in individuals’ conscious and critical capacities. In particular, these scholars’ agential frameworks tend to fall within two general emphases: personal or social reflection and public engagement.

The reflection approach locates change within the incarcerated writer themselves, emphasizing new ways of imagining one’s self and one’s future as the result of the reflective nature of the writing process and opportunities afforded through the writing classroom. Although community-building and relationships are often mentioned in these studies, they generally are treated as happy by-products of the work of the class.  Patrick Berry exemplifies the reflective approach to agency in his analysis of his work with Project Justice, a program that offers credit-bearing college courses at a medium security men’s prison. Berry’s aim, which I share, is to offer a less romanticized, more clear-eyed understanding of the value of higher education, independent from improved employment opportunities and recidivism rates. Instead, Berry focuses on the value of literacy in the “contextual now,” while the students are still incarcerated. Ultimately, he identifies the values of prison education in the opportunities it affords to “reimagin[e] oneself in the moment through education, writing, and the pursuit of realistic possibilities” (100).  Berry puts particular emphasis on self-authoring, arguing that “it is not literacy per se, but the substance of the narratives that arise from it (sometimes beyond the page) that has the potential to help individuals reimagine themselves and their place in the world around them” (45).

This focus on agency through self-authoring is echoed by Joe Lockard, who argues that prison writing is productively framed as a particular kind of working-class consciousness and who advocates for writing teachers helping incarcerated students to connect their work with the wider tradition of imprisoned writing and class-consciousness. Like Berry, Lockard’s project is not to explicitly develop a theory of rhetorical agency. But Lockard’s inherent conception of collective agency does rely on a humanist notion of individualism rooted in reflection and conscious resistance. In his explication of a poem by Michael Hogan, an incarcerated writer, Lockard suggests that through Hogan’s refusal of the logics of confinement, he “claims possession of experience and so achieves autonomous self-determination. Hogan states that although tightly confined—he spent a substantial amount of time in solitary confinement—he remains an autonomous subject within the prison” (22). For Lockard, then, autonomous humanist agency remains the foundation of collective consciousness and agency, achieved through a kind of Cartesian authoring of one’s world.

Ashwin J. Manthripragada’s essay on the unexpected pedagogical opportunities afforded within the strict confines of the prison classroom offers a more patronizing version of the agency-through-reflection position. Manthripragada suggests that incarcerated students develop an awareness of their own agency and social responsibility through academic literacy, specifically, assuming that incarcerated students are ineffective communicators because they do not think through the consequences of their actions, nor are they aware of their rhetorical choices. For Manthripragada, agency is connected to increased reflection in communicative action, including acting less impulsively and less violently during tense interactions: “Reflection also serves as an opportunity to observe the role of critical thinking and analytical writing in behavioral change. . . Some students mention that they have averted fights . . . because they have learned to deliberate before reacting on impulse” (82). Troublingly, Manthripragada frames incarcerated students as being “transformed into self-determining beings with a sense of their own agency” through the social justice pedagogy of outside teachers (79), and it is specifically through academic literate practices that these students “unmoor themselves from the heavy anchors of internalized prejudice, thereby changing the relationship each student has with himself” (78). Manthripragada thus engages in a deficit model of incarcerated student literacy and rhetorical agency, and he animates a literacy myth that connects advanced literacy with increased moral and behavioral progress. It is worth noting that this literacy myth fails to recognize the various social and systemic factors that contribute to criminalized activity. But, more to the point, Manthripragada’s notion of agency here relies on an autonomous notion of agency, which is best cultivated through the intellectual rigors of academic literacy.

This inward focus on reflection and self-authoring aligns with David Coogan’s work on rhetorical agency as kinetic energy that emerges from the context of the prison classroom. Coogan’s is one of few works that takes up the theorization of rhetorical agency directly, using his own experience of teaching writing workshops that combine traditional college students with incarcerated students at a local jail. Coogan argues that it is incorrect to assume that nonincarcerated students and teachers give agency or voice to incarcerated people, and, instead, agency emerges from the assemblage of the prison classroom. I agree, but Coogan locates the most powerful rhetorical agency in the metanoia his students express when reflecting on their experiences with violence: “The workshop asks students to stare directly into their own choices in order to open themselves to a range of emotions, including regret” (22). In other words, although agency here is communal and emerges in the assemblage of traditional college students, incarcerated writers, and literate practice, the trajectory of that agency is reflective and individual, aimed at forming more rational, autonomous rhetorical agents. For Coogan, story-sharing between incarcerated men and nonincarcerated college students offers an opportunity for each to reflect inwardly with a new perspective, the perspective of a group identity with which one did not previously identify. This form of agency, although distributed and emergent, ultimately re-inscribes a humanist reliance on reflection as the primary means to critical consciousness. Like Berry, Lockard, and Manthripragada, Coogan’s understanding of rhetorical agency is one that both derives from and is aimed toward reflection and inner transformation of individuals.

The second common approach to rhetorical agency in carceral literacy scholarship focuses on public engagement with incarcerated people’s writing as a form of counternarrative. In this approach, the location of social change is in the attitudes toward incarcerated people circulating in the public sphere. This approach operates under a logic of identification and is not mutually exclusive from a reflective approach (Coogan’s rhetorical agency exemplifies both approaches). Tobi Jacobi departs from Coogan’s focus on metanoia and locates agency and resistance in the counternarratives incarcerated women construct that “interrupt representations perpetuated by the media of prisoner-as-deviant or prisoner-as-victim” (Curry and Jacobi 10). In this prison writing workshop, teachers encourage students to write their stories “as tools for reclaiming power and control over one’s life and future beyond the usual rhetoric of individual responsibility and rehabilitation” (Jacobi 45). Jacobi’s aim, which I share, is to reconcile, or at least bring into productive tension, prison education and prison abolition, and like Lockard, she rightly advocates for prison educators to recognize the coalition-building potential within prison literacy programs. By focusing not on the incarcerated student but society as a whole as the locus of change, Jacobi provides an important model for abolitionist pedagogy, one followed by Michael Sutcliffe, who advocates for a “voices-out” pedagogy that resists the “prison literacy complex.” Sutcliffe argues that many “voices-in” pedagogies use deficit models for understanding incarcerated students and understand prison literacy programs as sites of rehabilitation. Sutcliffe also rightly points out that this “prison literacy complex” assumes “a benign or benevolent system and culture waiting to accept wayward members back into the fold” once they have been successfully rehabilitated.

My scholarly and pedagogical approach to prison education as social justice work is heavily indebted to these and other scholars. Their approaches, however, are undergirded by a liberal humanist theory of rhetorical agency as something emerging from conscious reflection, possessed by rational individuals, and granted through privileged institutional practices of higher education, emphasizing the absence of agency in the oppressive prison. Steve Parks sketches the pitfalls of a pedagogical commitment to giving “voice” to marginalized people, arguing that such a model of transactional agency and individual deliberative capacity fits comfortably within the neoliberal paradigm of individual responsibility (511), and, I would add, that this paradigm provides the foundation for the exclusion and dehumanization of the incarcerated students whose agency is of concern here.

Dylan Rodriguez provides an incisive critique of prison educators’ project, demonstrating that whatever else college classrooms may be doing in prison, they are also expanding the surveillance and coercive apparatus of the prison regime. He writes:

The political and structural symbiosis between prison educators, prison philanthropists, prison staff, and prison administrators involves the production of new institutional spaces (‘prison classrooms’) and intra-institutional relationships: hence the prison school requires a particular vectoring of power between ‘teacher,’ correctional officer, and warden. This vectoring, in turn, folds into the production of new punitive discourses and technologies . . . .  (94)

The relationship between the work of prison educators and the oppressive apparatus they hope to resist is made up of feedback loops that the liberal humanist conception of rhetorical agency is ill-equipped to fully address. In fact, the concept of rhetorical education that increases agency through increased reflection and savvy depends upon a subject, as Rodriguez points out, “whose relative mobility, nominal freedom, and bodily autonomy were in fact the hallmark of modernity’s definitely liberal humanism” (78). I want to be clear that, although there are harmful ways of doing prison education work, crafting counternarratives, writing proposals to improve a prison education program, engaging in reading groups, and so forth, all have real value that my research participants have gone so far as to call life-saving. At the same time, the way rhetorical scholars theorize rhetorical agency matters. As Alexander Weheliye argues, reliance on volitional agency as the “sine qua non of oppositionality” reinforces the white western epistemic order that excludes and disciplines other modalities of human-being (121). Robert Yagelski draws connections between the ecological crises of the Anthropocene and the ways humanist orientations reinforce the Cartesian, autonomous subject who acts upon a submissive world. To understand how people get free, we need a proliferation of theories of human-being and rhetorical agency, just as Arun Saldanha argues that “[r]ace should not be eliminated, but proliferated, its many energies directed at multiplying racial difference so as to render them joyfully cacophonic” (21). It is to one such theorization of rhetorical agency that I now turn.

Entanglement: Social Death and Resilient Dwelling

I met Ben at a picnic shelter in his small Midwestern town’s public park. Looking a little nervous and fiddling with his plastic water bottle, Ben introduces himself: “I can’t say I’m your average person walking down the street. I’ve spent a lot of my life incarcerated, and I don’t think that’s probably average. But I don’t think I’m necessarily a bad person. I try to help people. I try to be kind and courteous. I’m just someone trying to make my way through life.” Ben has four children, and from what he tells me, they are still adjusting to him being in their everyday lives again. He tells me that his youngest daughter has been over for supper at his place, though she swore she never would again after this, his sixth prison sentence. “Why do I keep going back if I hate it so much?” he asks. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense. Nothing makes a lot of sense, I guess.”

According to Ben, prisons are “designed to belittle.” For him, this effect was produced both through interactions with correctional officers, who “treat everybody like the same piece of crap,” and through design elements of the prison he was in. He describes the shower area, wide open and separated from the noisy common area only by transparent glass. There is no privacy, no dignity. Saul’s account is similar, saying that incarcerated people are viewed as “less than human,” which then justifies inhumane treatment by correctional staff. I asked Saul what that inhumane treatment looked like, and he explains that, although there are instances now and again of more grossly inhumane treatment, humiliation, and direct violence, most often it’s that everyone is treated exactly the same—“cookie-cutter”—without regard to their individual differences and needs. No one is recognized.

What Ben and Saul describe here are ways the prison produces social death, a concept drawn from the work of Orlando Patterson and generally defined as the social practice of exclusion or domination of a person or group so that their social status is radically changed. Lisa Guenther explains the way the exclusions of social death refigure subjectivity for incarcerated people. She demonstrates the devastating effects of isolation, arguing that “’becoming unhinged’ is not just a colloquial expression; it is a precise phenomenological description of what happens when the articulated joints of our embodied, interrelational subjectivity are broken apart” (xii). Although this “unhinging” is most apparent in the extreme isolation and sensory deprivation of solitary confinement, all incarceration experiences are marked by some measure of alienation, humiliation, and violence, which Joshua Price delineates as the three components of social death.

Although neither Ben nor Saul discussed experiences with solitary confinement, they certainly experienced alienation from the relations that produced and supported their senses of dignified personhood. The “cookie-cutter” treatment, like prison numbers and uniforms, paired with the threat of violence and humiliation, work against one’s ability to “hold on.” This is social death’s material dimension. This form of violence also reflects an extreme register of humanist subjectivity. Although the humanist subject is autonomous and reflective, the torture of isolation and alienation in prison reveal that human-being is less consistent, more entangled than the image of the Cartesian subject can capture.

The assertion that subjectivity is “hinged” finds resonance with a constellation of rhetoricians engaged with materialist, networked, ecological, and posthuman rhetoric and agency, for whom meaning and potential emerge in relation to human and nonhuman actors. Thus, social death is not simply dehumanizing discourse that alienates incarcerated people but is ambient. Resonating with Guenther’s assertion that social and sensory deprivation leads to a disarticulation of identity, Thomas Rickert’s theory of ambient rhetoric proposes that an environment is not simply background to human-being but is interwoven with it. As Rickert puts it, “Human beings are in multifold fashion hardwired and ‘softwired’ into each other, making individuation an achievement never fully realized, since the affectability already implicit in human being is never lost, shed, or abandoned” (161). The ambient rhetoric of the prison, according to Saul and Ben’s experiences, includes elements of architectural design, disgusting food, strict habits of relations, discourses about incarceration and incarcerated people, and more, but it cannot be reduced to a simple aggregation of these elements. Ambient rhetoric names a weaving together to produce the conditions of habitation and habituation for incarcerated people, that is, how they constitute and are constituted by an environment whose organizing principle is alienation.

Apparent in my interviews is that this alienation results in a struggle to maintain hope and dignity, a struggle that is constant and conscious. Saul says that the biggest part of his struggle was maintaining hope that things would get better and that he would make it out of prison “unscathed, you know, physically, mentally, emotionally.” The prison makes this struggle especially difficult by creating rifts between incarcerated people and their loved ones. Saul describes once going seven years without receiving a visit, as well as long stretches without letters or phone calls. When I asked why maintaining connections is so important, Saul explains, “It’s almost like recognition, to realize that someone else sees you, almost like validation that you exist as a human being.”

This struggle against social death, to “hold on,” is an emphatic refrain in each interviewee’s story, and any articulation of the rhetorical possibilities of the prison classroom must start here, with the rhetorical action incarcerated students are engaged in daily. Saul and Ben, along with millions of other formerly incarcerated people, see themselves as people who came home with their humanity, not unscathed, but intact. This indicates a kind of rhetorical agency at play, one that pre-exists and exceeds the prison classroom. If incarcerated people are engaged daily in a constant struggle to build lives that reject the terms of engagement of the prison regime, even if not in direct opposition, then any conversation about what prison education and literate practice can do in terms of agency for incarcerated people must be viewed in the context not just of the seemingly monolithic authority of prison policy, but also the modalities of human-being that exist within and against the workings of social death, particularly those that do not exhibit full oppositional agency. A humanist theory of agency, taken singly, reinscribes a universal form of a metacognitive way of being that cannot fully account for the multiple and entangled forms of becoming that incarcerated people are engaged in.

Saul does believe his experience with the college program was important. He tells me that having taken college classes in prison doesn’t do much for him in any immediate material sense. It hasn’t helped him to secure employment, and it didn’t carry any social currency within the prison. But the quality of interactions he had in the college program, the mutual recognition and respect, mattered:

It increased my ability to withstand all of the negative treatment. It’s like, I remember that I’m human, and as a human, I deserve to live . . . as long as you keep living, that’s the priority . . .  Living is surrounding yourself with people you love, people you care about, laughing, eating good food, and assisting those people who need assistance . . .  because at the end of the day, I ask myself, can I really be ok if my neighbor isn’t?

Saul’s practice of “living” as relating ethically to other people, wasn’t learned from the college program; Saul was only in the program for one year, and his narrative is full of examples of how he put this philosophy into practice long before he entered the program, including teaching cellmates to read by helping to decipher letters from home.

What Saul calls “living”—the struggle to make prison habitable—is what I, again drawing from Thomas Rickert, call resilient dwelling. Rickert defines dwelling as “how people come together to flourish (or try to flourish) in a place, or better, how they come together in the continual making of a place; at the same time, that place is interwoven into the way they have come to be as they are” (xiii). In other words, it names a disposition toward the assemblage of actors that brings forth the conditions of possibility for being. Although Rickert’s update of Heidegger’s concept pushes dwelling beyond the idyllic, he doesn’t fully delineate what dwelling might mean in inherently violent spaces designed for systemic control, discipline, and oppression (240). The prison is not intended for flourishing. If dwelling is the fundamental core of thriving human-being-in-the-world, how might dwelling be possible in such a place? That dwelling would be, I believe, of a quality that is not at odds with Rickert’s definition, but may not fit easily with the often halcyon language used to describe the concept. “Resilient dwelling” is my attempt to articulate the unique quality of dwelling under duress, a simultaneous attunement to both the immediate environs of the prison, including one’s own body, and imagined or invoked environments, like home, school, or the street. It isn’t simply ignoring the realities of incarceration. As my research participants repeatedly remind me, forgetting where you are is profoundly dangerous in prison.

In this context, resilient dwelling names not out-and-out opposition to prison policy or staff, nor is it a social movement against the prison-industrial complex. My focus is not the kinds of rhetorical action that can create possibilities for change in systems of oppression that support the carceral state, but the ways people create meaningful lives from within the daily denial of their humanity. It names modalities of the human that, as Weheliye puts it, “come to light if we do not take the liberal humanist figure of Man as the master-subject but focus on how humanity has been imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain” (8). Rickert gestures toward this conception of dwelling in his riff on War’s “The World is a Ghetto,”[1] [MS2] [JK3] [MS4]  asserting that “the fourfold remains present even in the heart of strife—not, as I will show, to foster simple accommodation but rather to help kindle a coming together within and across difference. War’s ghetto is simultaneously an indictment of what ‘home’ is and a call to see that a ‘home’ must still be sought, without, perhaps, knowing in advance precisely what that will be” (242).  Dwelling, then, is not a passive acceptance of what is but a lifestyle attuned to the transhuman powers of a location. In the prison, it is a vitality whose possibility emerges alongside and is conditioned by the very social death it stands in defiance of. It is a rootedness from which to imagine and practice unclear yet hopeful futures.

As critical practice of hope, resilient dwelling is the work of building in an environment designed for annihilation. Elizabeth A. Flynn et al. in their introduction to Feminist Rhetorical Resilience, define resilience as a communal, relational, and social rhetorical response with transformational potential. It is not an intrinsic psychological quality, but a process of engagement with material and discursive circumstances. Resilience, however, is not heroic. It emerges from sites of subjection and does not offer a permanent solution to oppression or suffering. Rather, it names the way a life is lived against the horizon of social death.

Resilience and Love-Rhetoric

Ben and Saul both describe their practice of resilient dwelling as a conscious effort to “hold on,” “maintain humanity,” and “stay human.” Saul explains it this way:

If you want more, if you want to maintain your humanity, you want to be more than the prison number . . .  you have to hold on to your desire to be seen and treated and recognized as a human being to keep from losing it . . .  So that, along with the encouragement of some of the guys I grew to love and respect in there.

Saul asserts that the recognition must be reciprocal. He tells me that, although he was unwilling to put himself out for people who were unwilling to help themselves, he always believed strongly in “being even with everyone, allowing them to feel like there’s a place for them.” This mundane but resistant form of rhetorical action—“embracing [oneself]” by extending oneself to others—is the result of a rhetorical agency that emerges not so much from conscious reflection and rhetorical savvy, as in the liberal humanist framing, but through procedural embodied engagement with one’s environment. This is not to say that conscious reflection has no place in Saul’s rhetorical action, but that an emphasis on autonomous agency fails to grasp the ways this action depends as much on the assemblage in which he is embedded.

The importance of recognition, of being treated with dignity and respect, resonates across my interviews and suggests that one of the most crucial modalities of resilient dwelling is care, stewardship, love. According to Eric S. Jenkins and Josue David Cisneros, like rhetoric, love is a labor that must be remade daily and is intrinsic to social connection and thus, too, to subjectivity. For Ben and Saul, resilient dwelling is, foremost, building connections of care, even imaginary ones, in a violent, hypermasculine environment. Though Saul acknowledges the mostly emotional (and sometimes physical) risk of care, hope, and vulnerability in prison, he underscores the importance of forming loving relationships in order to survive.

These caring relationships, as well as the desire to be of service to others, did not originate in the college classroom, but they did find expression there. Saul tells me he first started taking college classes just to get off the wing, to help break up the relentlessness of time, and he doesn’t ascribe much value to those community college courses he first enrolled in. He felt they weren’t challenging and that the instructors were not invested in his learning. So why did he go out of his way to join that college program in his final year of incarceration, a time that can be particularly stressful? He says he decided to join after he was “brow-beat” by other students in the program. When I asked why they were brow-beating him, he said, “It’s the whole notion of being around people for so long, some of those people you get close to. And it’s like, ok, we’ve been cool for over a decade, you know, I wanna see you do something good. There’s something good over here, you should try that out.” These relationships, which had profound impacts on Saul’s life, found an arena in the prison classroom.

Writing as a Practice of Relating

Ben says he wishes he could write. He wants to write fiction, though he’s intimidated by character development, plots, subplots, all the constitutive parts of a story. In fact, his first experience with the college program was through a non-accredited craft of fiction course. But for Ben, writing in his everyday life was important for crafting and maintaining meaningful relationships before he took any college classes. Ben describes keeping a notebook where he wrote to his girlfriend, not every day, but a couple times every week. I asked Ben what that was like, trying to not only maintain a long-distance relationship through writing, but to have that long delay between the writing and the receiving:

I wrote to her because I needed to, I needed to, even though she wasn’t getting it and I didn’t know if she ever would get it. I needed to write for me because it made me feel like I was still in touch with her . . .  So, yeah, I think if it hadn’t been for writing, I think I probably would have lost my mind, probably, a lot of times.

Here, writing acts as a medium through which a relationship is enacted—not necessarily through its communicative function, but through its asignifying operation (Davis; Muckelbauer). That is, writing functions here not to produce meaning and understanding but to perform a constitutive relation between lovers, though the arena of the relationship is internal. Practicing this imagined connection, he believes, still keeps him from “losing his mind.” By maintaining that connection in the face of prison policy that creates rifts between loved ones, Ben describes having been able to put into practice not only his romantic relationship, but also a sense of self that depends on the recognition and love of another, even if that person is absent.

In “An Attempt at a ‘Practitioner’s Manifesto,’” Casey Boyle asks, “How might writing be understood as a practice of relating?” (209). He suggests that, rather than the reflective, “purifying process” that much of composition studies takes writing to be, Latour’s use of notebooks for producing “risky accounts” offers an alternative conception of writing as “something done with practice” wherein accounts are multiplied and versions (of subjectivity, of relating, of ontological politics) are practiced (210). In the way Ben describes his own notebook, then, I see Ben practicing, as Boyle puts it, “sensitivities for cohabitation,” a loving relation that is constitutive and a crucial component of his resilient dwelling (216).

But for composition scholars, what might be most remarkable is Ben’s description of his academic writing practice and the role of mutually supportive friendship in that endeavor. He tells me that he and his friends would workshop each other’s papers and encourage each other all the time, not because they were required to by the instructor, but because they wanted to help each other succeed.

First off, we were all so proud of ourselves for getting in. And then you’re proud of your buddy for getting in. You’re proud of him because he got an A on his paper or you’re proud of him because he got a C and then we get to do a revision and he brought his up from a C to an A-. . . . Which is, you were talking earlier about how you stay human? That’s part of it, is you have people you care about and you have to feel that you’ve got people that care about you. Or else you can just go into a really dark place that’s not a very fun place to live.        

Workshopping their papers and encouraging each other in their academic pursuits, then, became an important way for Ben and his friends to practice recognition. In practicing habits of the academy, they also practice love-rhetoric. Matthew Heard shows that the intimacy and vulnerability of sharing affects the experience of writing and the ways students, in Boyle’s terms, practice ways of relating through writing. Heard proposes that we “try beginning from the assumption that sharing is an act of cleaving, an act that can create room for writers to change their habits in response to the potentially jarring and disruptive consequences of contact.” Heard gestures to the ways Ben and other incarcerated students, in making themselves voluntarily vulnerable to each other, contribute to the conditions of possibility for resisting social death through affirmation and care.  The practices of revising his college essays and of creating positive, loving relationships are inextricably entwined.

Friendships were not the only relationship in which the practice of academic writing played a role for Ben. The very first thing Ben told me, when I asked him to tell me a little about himself, is that he’s a father. His kids, three daughters and a son, come up repeatedly in our conversation, and every time, his guilt is palpable. When he describes how his experience in prison this time was different from the first time, he says:

I’ve got my kids and I’m anxious to get out and spend time with my kids and watch my grandkids grow up and do this and do that, but I know how much easier it would be if I didn’t. Because I feel so bad. Cause they’re like, Dad, not again. And I’m missing so many things, and I know that it just tears them up.

Ben struggled with how to be a father from prison. He tells me you don’t really get to parent when you’re incarcerated. He felt that he had lost the moral authority to tell his kids what they could and couldn’t do, and although he wanted to be there for his kids and offer support, for the most part, he felt they weren’t interested in receiving it. But he did have a good relationship with his oldest daughter, who decided to make the effort to stay in touch with him over email and the phone during his last bit. She graduated recently with a degree in journalism and was the first person in her branch of the family to go to college. Her support and encouragement played an important role in Ben’s decision to apply for the college program. He tells me that they would talk about school often because it was something they had in common. When he was deciding whether to apply for the program, she encouraged him to apply, saying she would feel better and telling people her father was going to college rather than telling them, “Oh, my dad cuts grass at the prison.” And, like his relationships with his friends, academic writing plays a role in the relationship he works to maintain with her:

I used to think when I was in high school or whatever that I can write. I can spell. And I know what a paragraph is, and I know what a sentence is . . . But then we started writing our papers and I start using transitions and all that kinda thing, you know? So then, even when I would write emails to my oldest daughter, I would practice my writing with her. I’d try to make everything proper and correct, . . . and I would practice using transitions. I would just practice my writing in writing letters, which I think amused her.

 Ben says one of the most valuable things he got from his experience with the college program was confidence, because he wasn’t sure he was smart enough to be successful in an academic program. Even when he was getting As, he questioned his ability, and he turned to the authority of his daughter for her honest opinion. He describes the way she put him at ease by reporting that she had seen worse papers get the grades he was getting and assuring him he wasn’t a bad writer. Though Ben was uncomfortable assuming the role of authoritative father from prison, he used the practice of and discourse around academic writing to connect with his daughter in a new way through a common experience in which she was the authority.

Saul, on the other hand, doesn’t talk much about academic writing, and when he does, his view is, as shown earlier, a bit more cynical. At the same time, although he questions the radical potential in performing critique for a grade, he puts great value in “all the things that orbit that, which is [the teacher’s] desire for me to look beyond the experiences I’ve had before this program, and attempt to express myself in a manner of total openness and without fear of retribution for expressing whatever opinion it is I have.” For Saul, then, it isn’t the course material or the assignments themselves that have significant value, but all the affective attachments that “orbit” it: the quality of interactions in the classroom, the reciprocal recognition of dignity, and the orientation toward discovering what is true and best. For Saul, the rhetorical value of academic writing lies less in the development of his reflective and critical capacities, as suggested in humanist forms of rhetoric and writing, and more in the embodied co-incidental practice of recognition.  

Conclusion

As a quotidian practice, resilient dwelling is not, in and of itself, the antidote to the epidemic of hyperincarceration. If it were, abolition of prisons would have been achieved a century ago, as resilient dwelling has been practiced from the beginning. As a practice of survival, rather than opposition, it may be seen to reinforce the inhumane criminal punishment system. But I would offer that survival is an overlooked but crucial component to resistance. In the United States, 95% of the 2.3 million incarcerated individuals will be released. Of the twenty-four individuals I interviewed, twelve are now working for systemic change, as community and campaign organizers, social workers, mentors, and advocates. Those who are closest to the problem are closest to the solution, but they cannot be effective agents for change without support, recognition, and becoming while incarcerated and after.

Writing studies needs more stories that move beyond the privileged spaces and practices of our discipline, stories that can bring clarity about the sometimes beautiful, sometimes troubling, always messy, and relational ways people make meaning, especially as it relates back to those privileged classroom practices, but without attempting to codify them. What these stories offer are not better approaches to teaching writing, but an invitation to adopt new dispositions from which to imagine and dwell-with student writers, beginning with the forms of agency and action that they already practice. Liberal composition pedagogy, as Sharon Crowley points out, “insists that students’ identities are the subject of composition” (227), and certainly in my conversations with my research participants, I do hear them describing the ways that the literate practices of the academy contribute to changing practices of self-making. But that tenacity, that resilience does not appear to support a kind of introspective, autonomous model of subjectivity and “rehabilitation.” Rather, what I see time and time again are people in the process of becoming, and that becoming proceeds relationally. They are engaged in acts of encounter, of attunement, of self-making as an iterative process. Rather than a humanist politics of representation, I see people embedded in a complex and dynamic network of actors and affective economies who are responsive to new relations, habits, and material and discursive conditions.

There is nothing inherently liberatory or even reformist about college in prison programs. We must not be lulled into a false narrative in which the university is a neutral or even virtuous institution in contrast to the dehumanizing prison. But, as I have tried to show, in the nexus of these two state institutions, both of which reinforce logics of domination and exclusion, I find the makings of coalition-building, and the refusal of social death in my participants’ narratives suggest the possibility for constructing new modes of relation and habits of being. I am heartened by Gillian Harkins and Erica Meiners’s suggestion that those engaged in prison education might use the tools of higher education for “crossing the walls separating incarcerated people from ‘free world’ populations, redistributing resources and benefits for which college personnel are ‘gatekeepers,’ and displacing the college campus as the center of intellectual, cultural, and social capital while reinventing the public function of higher education institutions as meaningful sites of learning.” Harkins and Meiners, building on the work of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten advocate a turn away from critique, a quintessential liberal humanist exercise, as the primary method of the university and instead suggest a turn toward coalition. The aim is composition, creating new modalities of humanity and new worlds. This necessitates focusing our energies not only on transformation within prisons, but on university campuses as well.

As composition practitioners attempt to theorize the rhetorical, agential possibilities for writing instruction for marginalized people, we must not occlude the fact that these individuals are already agents. This rhetorical agency, although deceptively simple, is rhetoric at its most fundamental, illustrating an elemental affectability and relationality, as well as a tenacious will to survive.  These students are building, in fits and starts, resilient dwellings. Without romanticizing, without becoming complacent to oppression, we must recognize that they practice in innovative, risky, kairotic maneuvers a habitable being-in-the-world. They cultivate loving connections in their everyday lives. They craft lives that matter. In several of Ben and Saul’s most important relationships, they used the college program and writing to create loving connections and to build resilient dwellings in a place that could have crushed them. But higher education is not the only basis of these relationships, or even necessarily the most important one. I asked Ben, when he told me about practicing his academic writing with his daughter, if he ever used the notebook he kept for his girlfriend for that purpose. He smiled:

No. Because I tried to give all that time to [her]. And so I just let everything else go, and this was just all hers. I didn’t want her thinking I was thinking about something else at the same time. So I didn’t really try to practice it there, just because it became a free-for-all, just to let her know that, you didn’t hear from me, but I was still there.