Jackie Wang: My major inspiration was Robin D.G. Kelley, and in particular his book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. That book is about the imaginative work of the black radical tradition, so it talks about black communism, black internationalism, Afrofuturism, pan-Africanism and even literary movements like black surrealism. Kelley combines movement history, literary analysis, and personal anecdotes.
Kelley highlights that social movements are not just about the nuts and bolts of political organization, but it’s about social imagination: the practice of envisioning a world that does not yet exist. Even movements that aren’t using poetry directly in their struggles are engaging in a practice of imagining new worlds. I just felt like there was so much opportunity to think about the role of social imagination in struggles to abolish prisons. This is something that many prison abolitionists have written about before me, people like Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who have thought about the effect that prisons and carceral structures have on our imagination. I wanted to think about how prison abolitionists have tried to imagine other worlds, worlds without prisons, which people say is this impossible world that will never be realized. But instead of defensively saying, “Actually, let’s look at the Netherlands and Northern Europe and all of these case studies that we can point to that show that this is a realistic project,” I wanted to say, “What if we don’t have to concede to these terms when thinking about the world that we want? What if we don’t have to be beholden to a social realism that is circulated by a white supremacist capitalist system?” As a poet, I feel very comfortable inhabiting that space of uncertainty.
In the concluding chapter, I also wanted to discuss the phenomenological experience of incarceration, as narrated by people who have been imprisoned. One question that I was interested in unpacking is what it means to cage people. What does it mean to have a world where if there’s some kind of social rupture that needs to be repaired, prisons are offered as the social solution? If we agree that people have certain basic needs—the need for meaningful activity, time in nature, the ability to socialize with people, the ability to work towards something in their lives—to me then, prisons seem anti-life. The practice of putting people in cages forecloses the possibility of prisoners inhabiting the world and their lives in a way that is meaningful. Prisons are anti-life on a fundamental level. More here.