Prison art and civic pride

Southern Review, The, Spring, 2003 by Richard Katrovas

WHEN I WAS NOT QUITE EIGHT YEARS OLD, my mother confirmed what the kid downstairs had taunted me about. My father was indeed in prison. The kid's mother had noticed that the letters my mother received every day were from the federal facility in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and obviously had communicated this fact to the rest of her household. We were poor and white, on welfare; they were white working poor. Our family consisted of a woman and five kids of whom I was oldest, theirs of two parents and four kids. It was 1961. Our dilapidated, bifurcated rental in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, bordered the poorest black section of town just a few years before the end of (official) apartheid in America. We were the beginning of our black neighbors' containment.

I should have known my father was in prison. We were all together when he got caught, and the police had let me see him one last time in the holding cell before our mother took us on a Greyhound bus to Elizabeth City. He touched my face through the bars. But my mother had said it was all a mistake, that he'd gotten out and was now "learning a trade." We'd lived my entire life on the road while he scammed car dealers and wrote innumerable bad checks. That crumbling upstairs apartment was the first more-or-less permanent living space we kids had ever occupied.

For the duration of my childhood from the age of eight, I thought a lot about prison. It was a place, like heaven and like hell, that contained a father. It was a place from which voluminous correspondence issued. It was the origin of hope, because when our father got out of prison, life, we believed, would be better.

My entire adulthood I have thought a lot about prison, having avoided, barely as a younger man and with the exception of a ten-hour visit to a holding tank, direct experience of such places. What I thought and felt as a child underpins what I now feel and think, though my childhood visceral connection to the idea of incarceration has broadened into an adult "interest." That is, I'm interested in the idea of freedom, particularly freedom of expression, and I'm interested in the actual physical relation of the artist to the state. Like almost everything else, this takes us back to Plato's rhetorical puppet, Socrates, who, even as he solved the problem of freedom of expression by insisting that the rhapsode have it elsewhere than in his, Socrates', ideal community, was incarcerated and compelled to commit suicide for insisting upon it for himself. But across the ideological spectrum, the twentieth-century artist--Ezra Pound in his cage on the dock at Pisa, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in the gulag, Nazim Hikmet in a Turkish prison, or Vaclav Havel in a Czechoslovak prison just months before becoming president--has focused, has stood as a synecdoche for, one of the fundamental philosophical issues of the age: what "freedom" means from culture to culture, political system to political system.

Over the past few years, four separate personal initiatives have not so much focused as refracted, like four lenses aligned at odd angles, this issue for me: opposing a prison arts project; teaching convicted criminals how to write poetry; "visiting" the site of the Nazis' "model" concentration camp; and considering the literary work of an American Gypsy-rights advocate. In each instance, my own motives were a muddle to me; that is, in each case I had strong feelings I could not wholly account for, feelings I knew were rooted in personal experience, but that I also knew were nourished by what I understand, alas too poorly, of the brutal history of the past century. In what follows I'm simply trying to find some clarity, trying to extricate complex personal feelings I may never fully understand from a sense of history that will never adequately account for what I feel. I'm trying to free what I know and feel about art and its relation to personal volition from a historical perspective warped by strong feelings that must be accounted for, even if never fully understood.

Until recently, I lived most of each year in the Czech Republic, in Prague, and the rest in New Orleans. With my Czech spouse I ran an arts-and-humanities summer program for a university in New Orleans, an institution with which I was affiliated for almost twenty years. I am a writer, probably best known as a poet. My spouse and I have two perfectly bilingual, bicultural Czech-American daughters, the older born--to the day--nine months after the demonstrable beginning of the Velvet Revolution, a glorious event I was privileged to witness on a Fulbright fellowship in Prague. This is all to say that I have been deeply invested in facilitating and encouraging all positive linkages between Prague and New Orleans.

A New Orleans lawyer who owns a bad-debt collection agency, a man of Czech descent who is the honorary consul of the Czech Republic in the city, recently worked a deal with Sheriff Charles Foti, the manager of the local jail. Foti's is one of the larger jails in the country, though New Orleans is quite far down the list of U.S. cities in population. When I took my kids to the "Christmas in the Oaks" celebration in City Park one year recently when we were in New Orleans for Christmas, we saw all the swell things the inhabitants of Foti's jail do for New Orleans children: They build wonderful life-size dollhouses, "Cajun Village Christmas" stuff kids love. It is delightfully unsettling to consider how such fanciful, even whimsical structures could have issued from the labor of men so far removed from innocence, and by this I do not mean to assume anything about their particular conflicts within the Louisiana legal system, but rather simply wish to highlight the dramatic contrast between their lives as incarcerated citizens and the nature of those structures they produce, under Foti's supervision, for children: stereotypical swamp shacks, draped in moss, decorated for a more-or-less traditional Christmas, and at night lit up gaudily for the "Christmas in the Oaks" processions of cars. As a father, I applaud such civic efforts, though as a fellow citizen of those prisoners, I do wish that Foti's name did not appear quite so prominently on plaques attached to those structures they, not he, labored to assemble. Saying this, I do not mean to chide Sheriff Foti, an elected official, so much as voice what many will no doubt consider a rather idiosyncratic prejudice: I do not like to see the names of politicians on public structures--buildings, bridges, or public works-of any kind.