“We could pause by the side of the road for a moment, and gag in peace.”
-Octavia E. Butler Parable of the Sower
I have mixtures in my life that reflect the complexities of my soul. Mixtures of people, thoughts, prayers and plans. Mixtures of ideas, principles and aspirations. Everybody has a point. Some of us have too many points. I don’t know how to mix those of drastically different and harmful elements without a critical condition
resulting for some. People outside have ideas about prisons and prisoners. They want to limit us, they study us to explain us to other outsiders. Like we are zoo animals. But zoo animals eat healthy food and receive adequate medical care. Zoo animals are not beaten, drugged, pepper sprayed or raped by their captors. Evil plots are not devised against animals to drive them to their deaths in their cages by
their researchers. They study all the reasons we should not want, think, or believe anything bigger or better than our cage. Like having the audacity to desire treatment as good as an animal in a zoo. Serving Life lends itself to a unique, painful perspective that can open us to politicization, a depth of faith that drives, a constant bridging of divides, to exposing lies, and a dream that defines
us. We have things happen to us in here. Things inflicted upon us. Nothing that they’ve done to me is new, and nothing is just for me. I am not special. #270925. A whole number, a number running towards being scrawled on my body bag in sharpie. Some of those things they’ve done to us are difficult to think about. Some are impossible to write about. Because of the points. Too many sharp points. If you collect the points they start to hurt. You have to file them down to be safe. And those things they’ve done to us don’t get easier to think about, or talk about, or write about. They get more difficult as we learn more about them. Sometimes we don’t really understand what our abusers did to us then, or do to us
now, even as adults. Things still happen to us. Of course, I knew the pigs shouldn’t use flashlights. But I thought I deserved that. And they were morally superior professionals, so was it just my ignorance that caused them to do it? Surely, there must be a statute permitting what they did, what they do routinely with caged women? Or was it just how it was? Or was it that they did everybody like that? Or that they were just trying to provoke violence? Always a sharp point. Somehow, I didn’t define their acts as violent, only mine got that tag. My response to the flashlight earned me more pain, which again was framed in a way that made me think I deserved it. I didn’t learn that what they were doing was sexual assault until recently. I never thought of it like that. When I realize, over and over, what kind of sick, twisted, demented, immoral creatures look down on us and call us animals, but treat us far worse than animals, something happens in my mind. Things begin to fall into place. A hellish Jenga with oddly shaped pieces of traumas and griefs falling into place. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, ask for it to happen slowly, because the alternative will drop you. It will knock the wind out of you. It will choke you and make you weep. It will make you see everything created and uncreated differently. Staff ask me what instigated my choice to live a little more politically, a little more vocally, and a lot more
publicly. I didn’t ask them why they did that to me with a flashlight with twenty pigs and a dog. Maybe I think everything should be so public. Nervous? Maybe twenty other people want to see what you did, too? Maybe the pressure in this industrial cooker is creating new places to let out tiny bits of steam? Maybe the bodies of my friends you have killed are pressing me down, and I need a place to scream? Maybe the torture of sporadic movement, ripping me out of my unit by the coercion of robbing me of my support system, had this side effect? Maybe I want an uncensored place to call pigs pigs? Maybe Allah sent a revelation? Or a revolution(ary) to show me in a dream that I am not nothing. That I am something already. Somebody. That I am a human, not an animal. And that I have the capacity to be more. Maybe, it was realizing that I am something made me understand that I did not deserve a flashlight? Maybe, one day I was suddenly made to realize that none of those twenty pigs watching would have violated the dog like they violated me? Or laughed. Maybe, I think it’s time to tell the world what this industry truly produces? And the animals are really
in uniform. In disguise. Pretending to be part of “our community” to manipulate. To conflate us and them, good and evil, real and fake. They can never be us or good or real. Not after that. Not when we are awakened. Maybe, I think giving my sisters a place to scream with me is necessary? Maybe it’s none of their fucking business why
I set out to become a paralegal in 2017. It was a step towards where I am now, towards who I am becoming. If I survive. All that and this and what’s next. I just wanted to help my sister get out of here, legally. I don’t know how to use any tools from anywhere else, yet. And if the Law is the master’s tool, I’ll fight with it until I learn another way. I was just trying to help my sister. I didn’t know I was learning to use a weapon against slaveholders
who want to use us, kill us, then throw us away. I didn’t know they were slave masters. Maybe, reverting to Islam was the next step? I was given Islam, that wasn’t my choice, it was Allah’s. Without the pains from injustices dished out over the years by pigs I wouldn’t have picked politics as my sharp point. I have found my home. My home is with my people. The people this busted system and its twisted supporters say are broken. We are not broken. I don’t care that, as Garrett Felber writes, exactly “…who should be recognized as a political prisoner has been contested within radical movements as well as by those who oppose them.” I don’t care, because I know who I am. And I don’t have to ask for
permission to know “for who am I.” I knew the moment I was on the ground sobbing trying to find a way to keep breathing. I knew then. Who am I to argue with the wise? But I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t. I get annoyed by non-cons who sit in their comfortable offices trying to call the shots about what terms and phrases are permissible among convicts. At least come into a prison before defining us. Come in before drawing up plans. Come in before creasing your brow to ponder our plight. But most won’t come in. Most won’t ever come in here. With the animals? Most are sacred on the west side or in the slope. They can’t come in. I know they draw more lines and build more walls and string up razor wire like tinsel on a commercialist’s tree of dead gods and benjamins. I know for who
I am not. Without a rhyme or a reason? Never. Regardless of what people say about us, we all have points. Yes, prisoners have points. Yes, those kinds of points too, sometimes. Islam was similar for me. Similar to this case, and point. When Islam was presented to me, for me to finally see, I saw along with it all the hate that I would receive from Christians. And Jews. But Islam had my heart, I was called to it. I didn’t seek it. I pondered if I should turn to it day and night. And I was alone in here. Until Allah made more Muslims. Now we are many. And we are joined earnestly, except for the greedy and the half pigs/half pets, who are demented entities. The rest of us are united, like in Brother Sostre’s experience, where “virtually all aspects of Muslim life and property inside Clinton Prison were autonomous and communal” (Felber). The base of Islam was always unity. But I was far too Right to see that unity invites others outside of Islam. To the point. Always to the point. But I know when all this ugliness falls who will be
Left. I knew I needed to know what was left, just as powerfully as I needed to know, what was that black square with all those people walking around it? We don’t really know where our home is until we get there. Those nightmares we all have, where we make it home and find strangers living there, it is not a nightmare. It is real. Not only in Palestine. Except when this shit falls, and the people make it home, there won’t be thieves there. Those there will let you in. And you’ll learn a new way to live. To be. Even if you don’t understand so much. Even if you don’t comprehend that pronouns are not even in the scales that determine heaven or hell. Even if you were once far too Right too. As H.L.T. Quan says, “The terribly difficult work of movement and world building is made more complicated by many gender troubles.” We just don’t know so much. Inside these cages people speak of things every day I don’t understand. In the last seventy-two hours I’ve had to ask what the “Dog Pod”, a fire-stick, and a DM are. Sometimes there is mockery in the answer, but I am not embarrassed to ask. I found my way home by seeking simple directions to where we all need to get to. Turn left. Just turn left. I didn’t know
I was lost. Walking in circles, around a box, in a cage, in the desert, far too right. I am here for reasons. Not for killing. Not for taping, striking, chasing, stabbing, questioning, hacking and blah blah blah. I am here to have received directions to that black box with all the people walking around it. And to be given directions to turn left. And to sharpen the point that points. To only write
at this point. We need to take the light we are given to others. Or bring them to it. Some are silly and think they are in love with light, but they must be tolerated. They don’t know that’s unacceptable. Against the rules. And odd. They can learn too. They can be awakened too. We, who know for whom we are will take the light further and dispel the dark and Insha’Allah won’t be made
to forget. We are not animals, or expendable, or dumb, or stupid, or more violent than free people or unworthy of respect or dignity or futures. We don’t deserve to be berated or lied about or screamed at because we are prisoners. We are not nothing. Mohammed El Kurd, from a different cage, who lived the nightmare of demons in his house, tells us “Propaganda must be debunked, certainly we need to meet people where they are in order to move them.” We, even prisoners, after being shown we matter, want to meet people
where they are. Where we once were sometimes. We all want to learn, to understand, to help. To keep coming back until the nightmare is dead. The dream is real. We can go home to find no strangers in our house. Until then we will stumble and fall. We will tell it like it is and be harmed for doing so. We will be ostracized and whispered about. We will be shunned in almost every space. We will be hated by the pussies who mistreat us. We will be called animals and liars and psychopaths. And those things are all so much more honorable than being called Zionist, or MAGA. Someone said today “There’s nothing we can do!” But that’s not true. We can be sincere, and we can be vocal. The least we can do is understand that “This consequential moment called on us to raise the ceiling of what is permissible, that it demands that we renew our commitment to the truth, unflinchingly, unabashedly, *cleverly*, no matter in what conference room, no matter in whose face” (El-kurd). In honor of you, for who so many are, I struggle to accept that we will never finish
this endeavor. This sentence? Nor this sentence, not in the precise way they demand I must. But in the meanwhile, we will do what we can to let people know they can protest the obvious things we thought we had no right to protest. We will show them how to speak out. We will show them what it looks like to know we deserve humane treatment. We will show women it’s ok to be independent. It’s OK to contemplate autonomy. To not lean on or look to the captors for help every second. To not look at the authority reigning above, but to the kingless underground. Peer to peer in this prison is dangerous, such things cannot be regulated by cops. What sense does that make? Emily Thuma says that “self- and peer- directed services, based in values of interdependency, autonomy, and egalitarianism, would safeguard against forms of professionalism and hierarchy that fostered dependency and exploitation.” We can show them we make better decisions together than with them in control. That collective decision making is so empowering that it makes us see the rule-makers for what they are. Peer-to-peer facilitated by pigs defeats the purpose. We can show them it’s ok to define safety as we as a group see fit. For you to define it as you and your group see fit. We can find out, day by day, how to work together without being dependent on them. For who am I?
us.
Works Cited
El Kurd, Mohammed. Perfect Victims: And the Politics Of Appeal. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2025
Felber, Garrett. A Continuous Struggle: The Life of Martin Sostre. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2025
Quan, H.L.T. Become Ungovernable: An Abolition Feminist Ethic For Democratic Living. London: Pluto Press, 2024.
Thuma, Emily. “Against the ‘Prison/Psychiatric State:’ Anti-Violence Feminisms and the Politics Of Confinement in the 1970s. Feminist Formations 26, Issue 2 (Summer 2014), 26-51.
The title, “For Who am I?” was the title of a lecture given by Dr Aaron Allen at A.S.P.C. Perryville, Santa Cruz Unit on 7/12/25
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