Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters

"Prison literature is generally dominated by men. There are simply more male prisoners than women prisoners, so it’s in some ways normal that more men are publishing books. But, in other ways, it’s not so normal because women are the fastest growing demographic in prison. A lot of them are women of colour. Women are starting to get incarcerated at a higher rate because of the drug war. They are suffering through the same kind of traumas that Shaka Senghor suffered through. Wally Lamb’s book is one of several that raises up the voices of women prisoners who have suffered through unspeakable traumas before they committed their crimes. Most of these traumas and crimes can be directly related to misogyny and patriarchy. There’s no other way to say it. The violence against women, whether it was in their own homes or their boyfriend’s… “Women are the fastest growing demographic in prison” This book has the narratives of about a dozen women who took part in a writing workshop that Lamb taught on memoir. Memoir is a very therapeutic genre. You’re writing about yourself. For people who maybe didn’t consider themselves writers or did not have the ambition of a Malcolm X or a Jimmy Santiago Baca— and there are many women writers now, like Susan Burton or Frieda Barnes who have published memoirs from prison—but if you don’t necessarily think of yourself as a writer, it’s very humanizing to be in a class where somebody is asking you to tell your story. They’re trusting you and you’re trusting them that your story matters. Maybe nobody ever listened to you. Nobody ever acknowledged your feelings and so it was easy to abuse you or forget you or abandon you or rape you. And now you’re in this class and someone is saying, ‘That wasn’t right. Your experience matters. Your life matters. You need to write that.’ And you’re like, ‘Nobody’s going to read that!’ And you say, ‘Yes, they’re going to read that.’ And then you not only write it and have the community in the class who read it, but then it gets published in a book and people are reading the book. One of the women in this book won the PEN America award for prison writing. But do you know what happened when she did? The state of Connecticut, in which the prison was located where the workshop took place, attempted to sue all of the women in the workshop who published their stories for the entire cost of their incarceration. It’s not the first time that prisons have looked on writers with suspicion. They thought the women were making a lot of money from the book. They made some money from the book, but they weren’t millionaires. There’s an old law called the ‘Son of Sam’ law. He was a psycho killer in the 70s, who killed six people. He threatened to write a book telling how he did it all to make money. So they passed laws so you can’t do that. Later they realized this was not really constitutional, but a violation of freedom of speech. So they modified the Son of Sam laws to say that you cannot write about your actual crime to exploit the story for personal gain, but you can write about your life including, obliquely, your crime. And that’s what these women had done. Nobody wrote specifically about the actual facts of their crimes. Much like Jimmy Baca or Malcolm X they wrote about it as a way of dramatizing larger themes like racism, or patriarchy. Nevertheless the Son of Sam law can be used to say they’re violating the law. Moreover, they’re making money—and you’re not allowed to operate a business in prison. So they decided to sue them to get some of that big New York publishing money. It didn’t work. There was intense pressure and they had to drop the lawsuit. The women won settlement money but that went back into funding the writing workshop—a new computer, salaries etc. No, he’s a best-selling novelist."