As it were, one need only to go back in time to see in this story of silence none other than the ghosts of U.S. prison practices. In 1829, Philadelphia’s infamous panopticon-designed Eastern State Penitentiary first instituted the brutal systems of what came to be known as the separate and silent treatment. These treatments included solitary confinement, silent labor, and prohibitions on speaking, reading, and writing.
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When prisoners tried to communicate, they faced severe punishments such as being violently silenced with an iron gag or being flogged so hard such that their skin could not be used as a site for forms of language inscription like tattooing. Prisoners under compulsory silence would be forced to perform hard labor, such as grinding corn or grain on treadmills (the treadmill in today’s gym is a moniker for this punishing prison labor apparatus), with older, popular broadside ballads like “Brixton Tread Mill” and “The Treading Mill” depicting these prisoners as the walking dead.
Modern nineteenth-century prisons in various parts of the world, including in the British empire, began to model their own prisons off of the Eastern State Penitentiary, instituting separate and silent treatments that suppressed language. One of literary history’s most recognized inmates, Oscar Wilde, had himself happened to briefly visit the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln during his tour of America, seeing the drab, isolating cells that would then personally haunt him across the Atlantic just some years later. Wilde condemned proscriptions on prisoner language as a form of state-sanctioned mental death and urged prisons to dedicate space for weekly book reading and letter writing.
In a Daily Chronicle letter to the editor published in the late 1890s, he wrote, “Deprived of books, of all human intercourse, isolated from every humane and humanising influence, condemned to eternal silence, robbed of all intercourse with the external world, treated like an unintelligent animal, brutalized below the level of any of the brute creation, the wretched man who is confined in an English prison can hardly escape becoming insane.”
The prison treatments that have been long underway in the Land of the Free, that is to say, are not at all distinct from but rather historically related to the contemporary silencing of prisoners seen in various parts of the world—whether in El Salvador, in the ghastly prisons in Syria, or in the unspeakable prisons in Russia that tortured war journalists like Viktoriia Roshchyna for so much as smiling. Indeed, while the Trump administration proposes to reopen Alcatraz, a notorious prison where the state made escape virtually impossible, it appears to be returning the country to its rather far older prison roots. Imprisonment, after all, is more than the “the nation’s default response to crime.” It goes all the way back to the first national crime: the shackling of indigenous and African populations.
Arguably the earliest known examples of America’s prisoners and prison authorship can be located in enslaved Africans working on plantations, ships, and other forced labor conditions and the numerous slave spirituals they sung and passed down to others word-of-mouth starting from the seventeenth century. These poetic songs lay bare what W.E.B. Du Bois has called “the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment.” They show the long historical residue of modern prison literature—of speaking despite language suppression and literacy prohibition—on land that touts liberty for all while repeatedly flouting it for some.
If the founding story of America is the prison story, then what we are witnessing in the contemporary expansion of mass-scale imprisonments is not something novel but rather a quintessential version of the American prison story. In this story, an age-old struggle looms between compulsory silence and the compulsion to escape. It is a story of suppression and disclosure of the letter—the root word of literature. The tattoo too, which has become under the Trump administration synonymous with gang affiliation, is the story of the state using language inscription as a punishment against the imprisoned. Such at least is an unfortunate explanation for how the words “mom” and “dad” tattooed on the forearms of Andry Hernández could have possibly rendered him from asylum-seeker into the sinister hands of indefinite CECOT internment.
The mental suspension of belief in the prison wall structure, which language and literature relies on by way of its abstract sign system, remains an essential threat to the power of the nation-state to this day. If sentences can be broken, literally and metaphorically, by the imprisoned themselves then the state’s jurisdiction, a favored term of legal power play, has been breached. One might consider this to be the broader rationale behind the Pentagon’s decision to characterize poems written by post-9/11 Guantánamo Bay prisoners a “special risk” to national security, officially barring them as classified information. Held in a military prison in Cuba for years without charges, without due process, and with suppressed literacy, Guantánamo Bay prisoners earmarked as “illegal enemy combatants” and subjected to the tortures of waterboarding on an island surrounded by water miraculously found the means to cling to literature’s hope over and over again.
If the founding story of America is the prison story, then what we are witnessing in the contemporary expansion of mass-scale imprisonments is not something novel but rather a quintessential version of the American prison story.
Whether inscribed on paper, Styrofoam cups, toilet paper, skin, clothing, or walls, the topics and forms of prison literature demonstrate prisoners waging an oft-silent war on the state’s sentences. As Guantánamo Bay prisoner Abdulaziz puts it, whose poem was among those slipped out to the world beyond the cell, “Even though the bands tighten and seem unbreakable, / They will shatter.” The couplet of Sami al Haj, a detained journalist from Sudan, divulges this dilemma of the wretched prison author breaking free despite all attempts to detain the human: “After the shackles and the nights and the suffering and the tears, / How can I write poetry?”
The prison sentence is after all not merely served; it is written. And the imprisoned have always written poetry. For Rümeysa Öztürk, the recently released Tufts University graduate student detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the simple, involuntary reflex of breathing in prison air itself constitutes bodily ailment:
The air is full of fumes from cleaning supplies and is damp which triggers my asthma.
We don’t get much fresh air which also impacts my ability to breathe well.
The conditions in the facility are very unsanitary, unsafe, and inhumane.
There is a mouse in our cell.
While taken from a declaration intended for the District Court of Vermont, the lines invite a general reader to witness the intrusion of noxious elements against which one remains utterly defenseless. Unlike the biological cell, the prison cell has no protective membrane. The air, like the mind, is full of prison.
Prisoner requests to read books, to draft literature, and to speak to loved ones embody at each turn the crux of escaping the rigor mortis of confinement. For what begins with a letter can conclude with transformation. The iron fist, meanwhile, shown by the state in preventing those extradited to El Salvador’s prisons so much as a word to say represents none other than the nation’s return to unspeakable cruelty and derangement. What has it come to when silence itself is the canary in the mine foretelling mortal dangers? If the future must know the American prison story, let it know how the prisoners made it out.