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Mysteriously, Marguerite Duras gave her friend Georges Bataille her share of windfall profits from Hiroshima mon amour. It isn’t clear why. In 1957, she’d interviewed Bataille on the subject of “sovereignty,” a theme he’d addressed in a 1949 essay on Hiroshima, in which he wrote that the instant of the nuclear blast was the only sovereign truth Hiroshima offered us. He’d gone on to declare that instant, that blast, “a vanishing splendor.” Duras was herself not such a sick puppy as Bataille, but the common interpretation of her script for Hiroshima mon amour as “anti-nuclear,” a treatise on peace, is not quite correct. It’s more accurate to say that Duras both condemned human suffering and then again framed it as the only vital condition for the possibility of meaning.
Much of her publishing career was an encounter with misogyny: in the 1950s, male critics called her talent “masculine,” “hardball,” and “virile”—and they meant these descriptors as insults! (This kind of confused insistence on gendered literary territories has still not gone away, sadly.) The implication was that as a meek and feeble female, she had no right to her aloof candor, her outrageous confidence. And it’s true that you’d have to think quite highly of your own ideas to express them with such austerity and melodrama, but that is the great paradox, and tension, of the equally rudimentary and audacious style of Duras. “People who say they don’t like their own books, if such people exist, do so because they haven’t learned to resist the attraction to humiliation,” she wrote in one of her journals. “I love my books. They interest me.”
<3
At the end of the day, the kids made a presentation to the broader conference, announcing, to Gilmore’s surprise, that in their workshop they had come to the conclusion that there were three environmental hazards that affected their lives most pressingly as children growing up in the Central Valley. Those hazards were pesticides, the police, and prisons.
“Sitting there listening to the kids stopped my heart,” Gilmore told me. “Why? Abolition is deliberately everything-ist; it’s about the entirety of human-environmental relations. So, when I gave the kids an example from a different place, I worried they might conclude that some people elsewhere were just better or kinder than people in the South San Joaquin Valley—in other words, they’d decide what happened elsewhere was irrelevant to their lives. But judging from their presentation, the kids lifted up the larger point of what I’d tried to share: where life is precious, life is precious. They asked themselves, ‘Why do we feel every day that life here is not precious?’ In trying to answer, they identified what makes them vulnerable.”
Prison abolition, as a movement, sounds provocative and absolute, but what it is as a practice requires subtler understanding. For Gilmore, who has been active in the movement for more than thirty years, it’s both a long-term goal and a practical policy program, calling for government investment in jobs, education, housing, health care—all the elements that are required for a productive and violence-free life. Abolition means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of vital systems of support that many communities lack. Instead of asking how, in a future without prisons, we will deal with so-called violent people, abolitionists ask how we resolve inequalities and get people the resources they need long before the hypothetical moment when, as Gilmore puts it, they “mess up.”
Between 1982 and 2000, California built twenty-three new prisons and, Gilmore found, increased the state’s prison population by 500 percent. [...] Gilmore outlines four categories of “surplus” to explain the prison-building boom. There was “surplus land,” because farmers didn’t have enough water to irrigate crops, and economic stagnation meant the land was no longer as valuable. As the California government faced lean years, it was left with what she calls “surplus state capacity”—government agencies that had lost their political mandate to use funding and expertise for social-welfare benefits (like schools, housing, and hospitals). In the wake of this austerity, investors specializing in public finance found themselves with no market for projects like schools and housing and instead used this “surplus capital” to make a market in prison bonds. And finally, there was “surplus labor,” resulting from a population of people who, whether from deindustrialized urban centers or languishing rural areas, had been excluded from the economy—in other words, the people from which prison populations nationwide are drawn.
A person who eventually either steals something or assaults someone goes to prison, where he is offered no job training, no redress of his own traumas and issues, no rehabilitation. “The reality of prison, and of black suffering, is just as harrowing as the myth of slave labor,” Gilmore says. “Why do we need that misconception to see the horror of it?” Slaves were compelled to work in order to make profits for plantation owners. The business of slavery was cotton, sugar, and rice. Prison, Gilmore notes, is a government institution. It is not a business and does not function on a profit motive. This may seem technical, but the technical distinction matters, because you can’t resist prisons by arguing against slavery if prisons don’t engage in slavery. The activist and researcher James Kilgore, himself formerly incarcerated, has said, “The overwhelming problem for people inside prison is not that their labor is super exploited; it’s that they’re being warehoused with very little to do and not being given any kind of programs or resources that enable them to succeed once they do get out of prison.”
“Abolition,” as a word, is an intentional echo of the movement to abolish slavery. “This work will take generations, and I’m not going to be alive to see the changes,” the activist Mariame Kaba told me. “Similarly I know that our ancestors, who were slaves, could not have imagined my life.” And as Kaba and Davis and Richie and Gilmore all told me, unsolicited and in almost identical phrasing, it is not serendipity that the movement of prison abolition is being led by black women. Davis and Richie each used the term “abolition feminism.” “Historically, black feminists have had visions to change the structure of society in ways that would benefit not just black women but everyone,” Davis said. She also talked about Du Bois and the lessons drawn from his conception of what was needed: not merely a lack of slavery but a new society, utterly transformed. “I think the fact that so many people now do call themselves prison abolitionists,” Michelle Alexander told me, “is a testament to the fact that an enormous amount of work has been done, in academic circles and in grassroot circles. Still, if you just say ‘prison abolition’ on CNN, you’re going to have a lot of people shaking their heads. But Ruthie has always been very clear that prison abolition is not just about closing prisons. It’s a theory of change.”
For Gilmore, to “never forget” means you don’t solve a problem with state violence or with personal violence. Instead, you change the conditions under which violence prevailed. Among liberals, a kind of quasi-Christian idea about empathy circulates, that we have to find a way to care about the people who’ve done bad. To Gilmore this is unconvincing. When she encountered the kids in Fresno who hassled her about prison abolition, she did not ask them to empathize with the people who might hurt them, or had. She instead asked them why, as individuals, and as a society, we believe that the way to solve a problem is by “killing it.” She was asking if punishment is logical, and if it works. She let the kids find their own way to answer.
[...] Alex’s paintings, meticulous renderings of pixelated or otherwise fragmented images, were each the result of hundreds or even thousands of hours of work, technically precise and meditatively, masochistically obsessive. His source material was imagery that had a “specific emptiness”—travel brochures, postcards, amateur pornography. “Turning [these images] into formal arrangements of color, pattern, and repeated form,” he told Hudson in 1998, “becomes a sublimation, a ritual that allows me to enter their profound vapidity.” The frame of mind needed to make this work seems to have required a big buffer of loneliness, which Alex successfully located in Des Moines. He could stay there and paint, and Hudson, whose gallery was entering its heyday, would be his lifeline. That was the arrangement.
oooh i like this [painter alex brown]
I never wrote about most of the people from the Blue Lamp. If I transformed them into fiction I might lose my grasp on the real place, the evidence of which has otherwise evaporated. The bar is gone. All those people have died. That might be why. Or perhaps a person can write about things only when she is no longer the person who experienced them, and that transition is not yet complete. The person who writes about her experience is not the same person who had the experience. The ability to write about it is proof of change, of great distance. Not everyone is willing to admit this, but it’s true.