Is William Martinez Not Our Brother?: Twenty Years of the Prison Creative Arts Project
326
Is William Martinez Not Our Brother?: Twenty Years of the Prison Creative Arts Project
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Overview
"I cannot overstate how profoundly my experience with the Prison Creative Arts Project has shaped my life. It began my engagement with prison issues, developed both my passion and my understanding of them, and I continue to draw on both as I seek to contribute to a more rational, humane and just criminal justice system. PCAP prepared me to adapt to any situation, to take risks, to collaborate with people very different from myself in a manner infused with total respect."
—-Jesse Jannetta, researcher, Justice Policy Center, the Urban Institute
"PCAP provided me with an emotional education that I would not have received otherwise. PCAP continually opens the doors to the stark reality of our criminal justice system as well as our society's ability to right the wrongs of that system and provide justice to millions of men, women, and children . . . PCAP showed me the power I, and the individuals around me, have to make a difference."
—-Anne Bowles, Policy and Outreach Associate, Institute for Higher Education Policy
"PCAP looks beyond past mistakes and personal shortcomings to find the beauty and creative energies that help to heal the hurts we've done to others. They have not forgotten that we are human too! . . . Their program has given me a way to reach people that I would otherwise never reach. For that, I owe PCAP everything. They are my lifeline that I cling to."
—-Bryan Picken, incarcerated artist
Prisons are an invisible, but dominant, part of American society: the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world. In Michigan, the number of prisoners rose from 3,000 in 1970 to more than 50,000 by 2008, a shift that Buzz Alexander witnessed firsthand when he came to teach at the University of Michigan.
Is William Martinez Not Our Brother? describes the University of Michigan's Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), a pioneering program founded in 1990 that provides university courses, a nonprofit organization, and a national network for incarcerated youth and adults in Michigan juvenile facilities and prisons.
By giving incarcerated individuals an opportunity to participate in the arts, PCAP enables them to withstand and often overcome the conditions and culture of prison, the policies of an incarcerating state, and the consequences of mass incarceration.
Buzz Alexander is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of English Language and Literature, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, at the University of Michigan and was Carnegie National Professor of the Year in 2005.
Cover image: Overcrowded by Ronald Rohn
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472900374 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 09/02/2010 |
| Series: | The New Public Scholarship |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 326 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Is William Martinez Not Our Brother?
TWENTY YEARS OF THE PRISON CREATIVE ARTS PROJECTBy Buzz Alexander
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Buzz AlexanderAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-05109-0
Chapter One
The Beginning
PCAP began when I was a curly-haired blond boy of five with an odd name who was bullied on Chestnut Street, when I realized the bullying was unmerited since in my home I was loved and affirmed, when in response to the bullying I instinctively developed strategies-reading, modeling myself after my strong father, figuring out how to become popular-and when a seed of anger and resistance at all bullying was planted at my core. It began again when I listened to Europeans as I traveled the summer after graduation from college and settled into my studies at Cambridge and broke from my Republican family and voted for Jack Kennedy. PCAP was born in the three years in England and Italy, as I, still politically shy, thrilled at the civil rights movement back home. PCAP began in 1964 when I knew immediately that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a lie, in 1968 when I went to New Hampshire to campaign for Eugene McCarthy and co-headed a committee for him in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1969 when John Maynard, Everett Mendelsohn, and I initiated Harvard Faculty Against the War, in 1970 when I participated in civil disobedience at the federal building in Boston. It was born when I moved to Michigan in 1971 and knew that what I had learned would stay with me and that I needed to integrate it into the way I practiced my career. It began later in the 1970s when I interviewed courageous men and women from the 1930s for my book Film on the Left, when I cofounded the Ann Arbor Committee for Human Rights in Latin America, co-organized a Teach-in on Terror in Latin America, was turned down for tenure at Michigan and watched my students organize and force a reversal of the decision. It was born most dramatically during my trips to the peasant communities near Cuzco with radical Peruvian agronomist Miguel Ayala and when I saw an Irishwoman at the Freirean-inspired school, Cenecape CCAIJO, place a thermometer in the mouth of a campesino she was training to be a paramedic, and when I realized, as I walked to the outskirts of Andahuayllilas seeking mobilidad, that I needed to find my own way to join community struggles outside the University of Michigan.
More seeds were planted in 1981 when I created English 319, a course where my students and I produced videotapes supporting the organizing efforts of Locals Opposed to Concessions and Teamsters for a Democratic Union in Detroit, the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee in Pittsburgh, and wildcat Teamster strikers in Toledo. Those seeds grew when I realized that theater was more provocative as a political tool than video because during and after a performance, actors and audience were in the space together, not separated when the videotape ended. English 319 became an action theater and guerrilla theater course. We chose social justice causes and disrupted classrooms, libraries, dorms, and outdoor university and community spaces with our performances. We often contacted community organizations and created skits and plays that contributed to their efforts. Three homeless citizens from the Ann Arbor Shelter joined us in performing Joey's Story, a project with the Homeless Action Committee, and an AIDS outreach counselor from Vida Latina in Detroit helped plan and performed in our play about AIDS. A member of a local movie projectionist union educated us and performed with us in a series of skits outside theaters owned by the Kerasotes Corporation, a theater chain from Illinois that had taken over twenty-seven Michigan theaters and fired union workers and eliminated senior discounts. While we performed, we passed a sheet collecting several thousand boycott signatures, were sued by Kerasotes for half a million dollars, were defended by the National Lawyers Guild, and won the right to continue performing in front of the theaters. I was drawn to the power of these collaborations across social divides.
And so in January 1990, when Liz Boner approached to ask if two lifers at the Florence Crane Women's Facility in Coldwater could take English 319, I didn't hesitate. Joyce Dixson and Mary Glover were lifers enrolled at the University of Michigan, their way smoothed by dean Eugene Nissen, my colleague Dick Meisler, and students like Liz who traveled with course materials and met with the two women. Mary would win a prestigious Hopwood writing award and graduate with honors after writing a thesis on mercy. Both women would graduate Phi Beta Kappa. I had no idea Mary had been lead plaintiff in Glover v. Johnson, a famous lawsuit that had gained equal educational and other rights for women in Michigan prisons. In fact, I knew next to nothing about prisons and could not in my wildest imagination have imagined that my yes would lead to PCAP and affect the lives of thousands of urban and incarcerated youth, prisoners, and University of Michigan students. I had no idea that seventeen years later Mary and I would remain close friends and be coworkers within PCAP.
Each week Liz and Julie Rancilio (both enrolled in 319), and I made the three-hour round trip to Coldwater and met with Mary and Joyce in the small muster room, just down the narrow corridor past the bubble where we were shaken down. It was an odd and resonant space for PCAP to begin: here the corrections officers gathered at shift change, here incarcerated mothers met with their children and the walls were decorated with a mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, here a black woman and a white woman, both sentenced to life in prison, met with a white professor and two white female students from the University of Michigan.
For six or seven weeks we talked theater, university, and prison, we played and improvised, and we analyzed the characters and situations we improvised in terms of race, class, and power. It was an electric, lively, charged, fun space. Yet while at least equal in personal dignity and input, we were not equal in our situations. The three of us were free to come and go, while Joyce and Mary were incarcerated and under the control of others.
In 1985, not comfortable with the dominant, patronizing attitudes of my three University of Lima colleagues on a video project I had initiated in the pueblo joven of Huaycán, a year-old shantytown growing up in dust and rocks outside of Lima, I had asked the people who lived there to put us on camera and interview us. We set up in a space outside one of their woven cane homes, and one at a time they investigated our motives and goals. The power balance shifted. Now we asked Joyce and Mary to brainstorm in a corner of the room for twenty minutes, writing down questions for us.
As I had expected, they first asked, "What are you doing here? Are you 'interested' in prisoners?" Now we were vulnerable. We had to dig inside for the honest words that would best explain our presence. I don't remember now what we said, only that we were not pretentious. They next asked what we would do in certain prison situations. Were I new to prison and another woman stole from me, I said, I would do nothing-I certainly wouldn't report her to an officer. Mary and Joyce seemed satisfied with this, though I realize now they would have liked to hear that I would also find a way to stand up to the thief. One of my students was told to imagine herself in the shower, assaulted by a woman covered with lesions, then rescued by a male officer, who then asks for favors. What would she do? I'm sure Joyce and Mary saw that we were babes in the wood so far as incarceration was concerned and sure that they appreciated our sincerity as we groped our way. When this session ended-and twenty years later as I write this I can picture this moment, where they sat next to each other-Joyce and Mary turned to each other and said, "We have to open this to the entire population."
Warden Carol Howes approved our proposal for a theater workshop. Notices went up in all the units. One hundred twenty women signed up, some of them believing they would be coming to a performance. Sixty actually came to the large recreation room the first day, in early May. When I asked them to stand in a circle, they held hands, sensing that this was a special place where, as in religious services, they were exempted from the prison prohibition against touch. After a few words about why we were there, I gave them instructions for "Vampire," an exercise I had learned from Pregones. Everyone walks about with her eyes closed and arms folded across her chest. Then one person, eyes open, puts her hands around someone's neck; that person transforms into a vampire with a horrendous scream, stretches her arms and feels for the necks of others. Normally the space fills with chilling screams and with deep loud sighs, when hands find the neck of another vampire and turn them back into human beings. But here I soon realized that I was hearing no sounds and encountering no necks. I opened my eyes-I can picture where I stood as I write this: three of us were walking the room, thirty women had left, and another twenty-seven or so were in chairs watching us. Screaming is forbidden in prison. And for a group over 60 percent of whom had suffered domestic violence, "Vampire" may have triggered memories. I hadn't thought. I hadn't understood where I was. I was confident and excited, but had so much to learn. We gathered with those remaining, promised them we would come on a weekly basis from then on and that eventually we would create plays. When we closed, several women came up and asked, "Can we scream every time?"
Each week we brought warm-up games, exercises, and improvisations. At the end of the term, Julie left the workshop and Liz continued. I was thoroughly enjoying myself, but also very challenged. As I wrote in a June 4 letter to my friend Melissa Hagstrum,
We've been there four times, but on the fourth time, yesterday, we learned how prison politics-among the prisoners-is threatening to destroy what we are doing. The two women we worked with, strong, admirable people in for life, have been manipulating who can come ..., and the others are resenting it and some aren't coming, and they themselves have become erratic in their commitment to the work. Neither were there yesterday, and those who were there let us know what was going on, and we've asked them to take over the responsibility for getting people there next time. We're on a six-week trial basis with the prison, and this hasn't helped. We've had powerful moments, one when Bertha was in tears [crying by herself at the side of the room; I had described an imaging exercise on family and had brought everyone to a space to begin], remembering the loss of her twin children through crib deaths. [Joyce went to her, then came and told us] she wanted to work on that loss theatrically. [Everyone was looking at me. I didn't know what to do, then suddenly remembered an exercise John Malpede had taught, so] I had her narrate, crying [her way through it], the story of what happened, while we acted out what she narrated. There are a lot of stories needing to come up and out in there, and they do come out-a substantial majority of women in prison were survivors of abuse before they committed their crime, and the "theatre of the oppressed" exercises we work from enable them to look at situations they bring up and have us work through alternative ways of handling them. It's powerful, though sometimes I feel a little out of my depth.
From my journal on June 24:
Today I am missing an O-33 workshop at Coldwater, am unhappy to be away from those strong women, Mary, Joyce, Dee, Charanne, Mame, Bertha, Mary W., Ewalk, Char, and on and on. They are survivors, in very tough shape and struggling. Sharon was new last week, said she was going through a lot of bad stuff in her life, and came to the workshop because she heard that we laugh. Last week we did the costume improv and they decided to be at a family picnic. Charron, who loves acting, was shot part way through and for the last 10 minutes had to lie dead on the floor!
And July 9:
How can I spend two hours in bed talking, holding, making love, talking, feeling so full, then go to the prison where these women have been cut off from anything even remotely like that, some of them-Joyce, Mary, Char-for life? How can I come into their presence like that? The feeling of helplessness and anger Cristina [Jose-Kampfner] talks about. And how almost no one knows about what it is like to be in a prison and doesn't care.... For me going to the prison and going to [peasant communities in] Peru are the same thing: when I come back, no one knows where they are and no one gives a shit. They don't want to hear. They don't want to ask.
When Liz left the workshop late in the year, I asked Jody Eisenstein, a former student with strong theater background, to join me. On April 28, 1991, in the recreation hall with an audience of eighty women, we performed The Show, a collection of monologues, dialogues, and scenes.
Jackie Wilson opened with a monologue, rushing on stage, picking up a phone, and screaming to her mother that her mother's brother had raped her. Later, she did a stand-up piece about losing her tooth while bowling. That was the range. Lupe Merino, angry that her brother got the toy guns for Christmas, climbed a tree and refused to come down until promised she could have some too. In my first performance ever, I wove an account of a recent restaurant conversation with my brother about his partner's AIDS with a memory of witnessing the death of a close friend by asphyxiation after her reaction to an anti-allergy shot. Connie Bennett, too shy to act, read from a podium a poem about a runner falling during a race, then rising and finishing. We presented comic prison scenes. In a spoof on the chow, we used a rubber chicken (still a prop seventeen years later) and wore chicken beaks and Mary pranced around in a chef 's cap.
The audience gave us a standing ovation and plied us with excited questions about the scenes and process. We left very high and thought the extreme shakedown we received on the way out simply indicated a stringent shift command on duty that night. I was stunned when I phoned the prison the next day expecting compliments and learned from Deputy Warden Foltz that we were fired. A letter from Warden Howes a few days later said our performance had bordered on inciting to riot.
The chow scene and two other comic scenes were the culprits. In one, as a corrections officer, I told a prisoner to pack up because she was being transferred to the Annex. She didn't wish to go and talked back until finally the corrections officer prevailed. In the other, three women rehearsed a dance for the upcoming performance. I, again a corrections officer, appeared, and as they noticed me one at a time, they stopped dancing until one remained dancing alone, and he cut off the radio. The audience was delighted and amused.
Dean Nissen wrote an official letter to Warden Howes, backing the project. My own letter described theater as an art form and explained that the offending scenes were simply a comic rendering of common prison occurrences that we thought would be enjoyed by all. We were not satirizing officers. As it turned out, we were lucky in our warden. Carol Howes was an advocate of programs and very supportive of the women. She was also on the advisory board of the local theater. We made an appointment with her and learned the security issues: officers who are made fun of lose authority, which can lead to disobedience and even assault. It was a useful lesson, and I vowed to follow it. She called in Assistant Deputy Warden Terry Huffman, who had been offended by the scenes, and told her the program would continue.
As I look back 243 prison plays later, I think of the moment in that office and will always be grateful to Carol Howes. It was my first experience of the difference between the creative and sometimes naive language and behavior we bring in from the outside and the equally legitimate and necessary inside language of restraint and security. Without Carol, it might have been fatal.
Word began to spread. Assistant Deputy Warden Silva Goncalves of the Western Wayne Correctional Facility in Plymouth asked me to start a theater workshop there. Then Penny Ryder of the American Friends Service Committee relayed a message from George Hall of the American Lifers Association at the Egeler Correctional Facility in Jackson: the lifers wished to create a play that would convey their real humanity to an outside audience. Soon I found myself in a meeting room at Egeler with about twenty men, all or almost all of them, I thought, connected to at least one death. They were friendly, they brought me coffee, they made me comfortable, it was like any meeting out in the world. Their agenda included voting to raise funds for the homeless in Jackson. We discussed their goals, I talked about the play-building process I had in mind, and we reached an agreement. Heartened by these contacts with Western Wayne and Egeler, I phoned the Cotton Correctional Facility in Jackson and offered a workshop, which was enthusiastically accepted.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Is William Martinez Not Our Brother? by Buzz Alexander Copyright © 2010 by Buzz Alexander. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 The Beginning 19
Chapter 2 Is William Martinez Not Our Brother? 37
Chapter 3 The University Courses 57
Chapter 4 The Workshops 77
Chapter 5 A Matter of Language 103
Chapter 6 "This is our bridge … and we built it ourselves!" The Annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners 124
Chapter 7 Is the Scapegoat Not Our Brother? 149
Chapter 8 The Prison Creative Arts Project: Crafted Out of Newspaper, Modge Podge, Paint, and Glitter 177
Chapter 9 Failure 186
Chapter 10 The PCAP Associates: Places Like Rwanda 202
Appendix 227
Notes 239
Bibliography 273
Index 281