A report back on the day of the tenth anniversary of Tamms CMAX prison, concerning an event called TalkingPoint at Hyde Park Art Center, December 10, 2007
by Laurie Palmer
It felt like a great weight falling off; or like a stone decomposing in response to vibration. The weight was an old calcified idea, a prohibition that many artists have imbibed and accepted: that our work has to be “accessible” or “direct” in some strained or simplified way to be relevant in a political context, and especially if the work is going to speak to a group of people with widely differing backgrounds and experiences. The vibrations that decomposed this burdensome idea were generated by the energetic crowd gathered at the Hyde Park Art Center to talk and hear about the Tamms prison in downstate Illinois, and to discuss strategies for how to, first, help improve conditions, and ultimately, to shut Tamms down. The crowd included poets, artists, former prisoners, relatives of prisoners, activists, lawyers, Public Square AAAH participants (Artists, Activists, and Authors After Hours), Hyde Park Art Center visitors, members of the Tamms Poetry Committee, the Tamms Families Committee, and the Year Ten Campaign, curious visitors, and friends of all of the above. The program included live readings of poems written by Tamms prisoners as well as a direct phone call with Victor Safforld (on death row) who read a poem of his own, and a showing of Space Ghost, a video by Laurie Jo Reynolds that compares being in prison with space travel.
Space Ghost is an experimental video constructed with juxtapositions and non-linear narrative. It is not about Tamms specifically but about isolation, mediation, separation; being de-linked from the world of touch, and time, and dailiness, and human contact. It’s about the attempts in face of that disconnection to read mystical connection into any links you can find. It’s about the craziness of isolation, about not being able, literally, to move; about living in virtual not real space, and about disappearing there. It’s about a sister and a brother communicating only by telephone; it’s about not having pancakes, but seeing pictures of pancakes. After the video, all of the audience was palpably affected, and several people spoke about how and why. I don’t remember now exactly what each person said, but I do remember thinking, and feeling, that this was a remarkable moment, and that a great weight was falling away.
How did this happen? Laurie Jo Reynolds made a really powerful video. But she and everyone else on the Tamms Poetry Committee have also been doing significant, ongoing, dedicated work in solidarity with the Tamms Families Committee and other prison activists. This double engagement led to the exultation of such a large and mixed crowd gathering there, and to creating the context of trust in which that weight mentioned earlier could be felt to dissolve—the weight of carrying a false idea, as if there were a class divide between those who might appreciate complex and layered art forms and those who don’t—another false division, dissolved! In 2004 the Poetry Committee sent a poem to each of the 270 men imprisoned at Tamms and committed themselves to continue to correspond with everyone who replied. Many did, and many with poems of their own. The committee has kept up their ambitious commitment to correspondence and connection with these men whose lives have been shrunk to a tiny cell and no human contact for years and years and years. This correspondence has been a lifeline for many of the prisoners, who write in their poems and letters about how difficult it is to keep from going crazy, testifying to the fact that what they are being subjected to at Tamms is a form of torture, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and criticized by the U.N. Convention Against Torture.
“Day and Night”
dedicated to all the staff at Tamms
by Luciano Garcia
The days pass like a lightning Flash. the night
Is slow like an earthworm. Day or night. Night or Day
what differenece does it make. if I can’t make sense.
Left. Right. Up. Down. but here I am.The day is fast. the night is slow. day or night.
Night or Day. why do you care if I go or stay.
I see you clearly but yet when you speak you sound
so fuzzy…The day is fast. the night is slow. Day or night
Night or Day. The saying goes so true to its words.
beauty goes no deeper than your skin. the rot from
within shines out through your eyes…The day is fast. the night is slow. Day or night
Night or Day. Now I know why you sound so
fuzzy. why left is right and up is down. I thought it
was me. but it’s all you. why do you care if I
go or stay…The day is fast, the night is slow. Day or night
Night or Day. I now understand the flash and
the worm. left. right. up. down. it all makes sense.
Here I am. where are you?
Tamms was initially meant to serve as a one-year “punishment” for prisoners from other facilities, but most of the men transferred there have no idea why they were put there, and some have been there the whole ten years. This means they have been in solitary confinement for ten years, because everyone there is in permanent solitary. The basic rights of prisoners to be healthy, to have human contact, to stay sane, not to mention to be able to learn and grow and change which every living being demands by virtue of being alive—these have all been taken away. How we treat prisoners is a direct reflection of our collective valuing of life. That some lives are valued more than others removes the value of life for its own sake altogether, and is unconscionable, incoherent (and so obviously racist). The connections between torturing prisoners in the U.S. prison system and our torture of prisoners of war has been directly mapped. Tamms should never have been built; it was known to be a bad idea even before it was born, and now ten years have passed.
There will be nothing easy about dissolving the great weight of Tamms. The basic rights of prisoners is not high on the list even of progressive causes, and especially in the context of fear and constricted vision that presides. There will be nothing easy about dissolving this really big stone, though the vibrations that the Tamms Year Ten Campaign has started to generate are powerful and deeply resonant. Sympathetic vibrations have already gotten going: the Supermax Subscriptions project initiated by Temporary Services (donate your frequent flyer miles to buy magazine subscriptions for Tamms prisoners), the Tradeshow performance RATIO (Raising Awareness to Inspire Others), the benefit parties at Danny’s, at the Hideout, at Funky Buddha Lounge…all with donated space, and energy, and time; along with other, as-yet unregistered responses to the voices of the Tamms prisoners themselves, which, thanks to the Poetry Committee, are being heard by everyone who wants to listen.
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