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Description
The following two quotations, from the Attica Manifesto of 1971 and from the priest and anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan while he was on the run, frame my discussion of the prison intellectual and his/her role:
Attica Manifesto
We, the inmates of Attica Prison, have grown to recognize beyond the shadow of a doubt, that because of our posture as prisoners and branded characters as alleged criminals, the administration and prison employees no longer consider or respect us as human beings, but rather as domesticated animals selected to do their bidding in slave labor and furnished as a personal whipping dog for their sadistic, psychopathic hate ... We, the men of Attica Prison, have been committed to the NYS Department of Corrections by the people of society for the purpose of correcting what [have] been deemed social errors in behavior. Errors which have classified us as socially unacceptable until programmed with new values and more thorough understanding as to our value and responsibilities as members of the outside community ... [Yet] under the facade of rehabilitation ... we are treated for our hostilities by our program administrators with their hostility as a medication.
Attica Liberation Faction, 1971
Daniel Berrigan
I think a sensible, humane movement operates at several levels at once if it is to get anywhere. So, it says communication, yes; community, yes; sabotage, yes--as a tool. That is the conviction that took us where we went, to Cantonsville. And it took us beyond, to this night. We reasoned that the purpose of our act could not be simply to impede the war, or much less to stop the war in its tracks. God help us; if that had been our intention, we were fools before the fact and doubly fools after it, for in fact the war went on. Still, we undertook sabotage long before any of you. It might be worthwhile reflecting on our reasons why. We were trying to say something first of all about the pernicious effect of certain properties on the lives of those who guarded them or died in consequence of them. And we were determined to talk to as many people as possible and as long as possible afterward, to interpret, to write, and through our conduct, through our appeal, through questioning ourselves again and again to discuss where we were, where we were going, and where people might follow.
My hope is that compassion and affection and nonviolence are now common resources once more, and that we can proceed on one assumption, the assumption that the quality of life within our communities is exactly what we have to offer. I think a mistake in [the] past was to kick out any evidence of this community sense as weakening, reactionary, counter-productive. Against this it must be said that the mark of inhumane treatment of humans is a mark that also hovers over us. And it is the mark of a beast, whether its insignia is the military or the movement.
Letter to the Weathermen, 1972
Imprisoned intellectuals (1)
Incarcerated for years in Mussolini's Italy for his socialist beliefs and activism, Antonio Gramsci wrote in the Prison Notebooks that, 'Every social group ... creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields.' For Gramsci, everyone thinks critically and philosophically, hence everyone is an intellectual; yet not everyone officially functions as such in society. (2) Some may superficially assume that only professional intellectuals recognised writers and pundits in the public realm, academics and policymakers--constitute an intellectual formation. However, every group has an 'organic' intellectual caste, one that functions as a vehicle to articulate, shape and further its aspirations. As my opening quotations attest, American activists caged in Attica prison or hiding from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) because of their anti-war actions wrote their own prison notebooks. And their acts, sacrifices and words significantly influenced the political outlook of the larger American public.
The "public intellectual' encompasses the oft-forgotten 'prison intellectual'. Like his or her visible counterparts, the imprisoned intellectual reflects upon social meaning, ethics and justice; only s/he does so in detention centres and prisons which function as intellectual and political sites unauthorised by the state. Consider a special grouping of imprisoned intellectuals, political prisoners. Incarcerated for their political beliefs and acts or politicised after being jailed for social crimes against people or property, progressive political rebels, surviving or succumbing to incarceration, wrote as outlaw intellectuals. Facing repression because of their political stances, they provided unique and controversial insights into social justice and humanity.
My opening quotations both offer a brief glimpse into the roles and writings of imprisoned intellectuals in the United States during the movement era of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first passage from 'social prisoners', politicised while housed at Attica in New York State, protests against racism and human rights abuses;... |
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