December 3, 2015 - 19:04
some of my reactions to meiner's chapters here come also in the wake of my reflection on the silence exercise shirah and i created, as well as reading some of anne’s pieces that involve religion and spirituality.
meiner starts the chapter in a bit of a critique of the ways in which the adult participants in her classroom wrote their autobiographies in a practically formulaic way (“the redemption genre”).
i understand this critique on the level of the institution. she questions the limited tools that are given to these individuals to process their incarceration and traumas, which definitely has a major hand in shaping the internalization of the criminal, deviance, and incarceration narratives.
however, i think there should be something said about the positive effects that religion can play in the lives of traumatized individuals. religion as a tool of control is not to be completely ignored here, but i also want to call to attention the transformative aspects of religion in the recovery process.
meiner herself says that special education and recovery frequently go hand in hand. and, in a way, that is the basis also of our work in rcf; i see us trying to offer a different kind of classroom in which we incorporate education and hopefully a sort of healing opportunity for people to talk about the things they want to talk about. i don’t think that this is the full way that we have structured our classrooms, but i certainly see it as a framework that we take from.
she gives the example of aa as shaping various deviance narratives that people use to grow. while these spaces should be called to question in their potential to continue the institutional cycle and internalization of the deviance narrative, i also think that aa can be added to the idea of religion and spirituality in this context. also to be added is, i think, the self-help genre that sweeney references seeing a great number of incarcerated women reading during their time in the prison.
all this is to say that religion and spirituality, no matter its form, can play major roles in the lives of those experiencing trauma. meiner and her co-teacher continued to try to get the women to talk about themselves outside of the redemption genre — citing the use of journaling, poetry, and discussions to name a few — but to what goal? is the purpose of this exercise to make a person redefine the very ways they have come to see their identity?
i think, rather, the goal should be to add to their existing tool box, to allow them more methods of recovery and critique, perhaps while even using the existing framework these women have.
in the stephen article, she describes being part of “a small company of silent worshippers”, which gave her a sense of freedom and peace in her choice to be silently with g-d. further, there is a community organization within the quaker system, which can give a sense of belonging that stephen alludes to as well. this ministry is open to everyone, without pay, which means that people who are considered deviants and people who are poor are still welcome within said community. and within this system, stephen warns, “let no one go to friends’ meetings with the expectation of finding everything to his taste.” this to me means that there is space for criticism and change, space for there to be a question of the use of their spiritual practices as suppression wrt institutions.
linda-susan beard’s quite beautiful essay even states that this was something she looked for, though not on the scale of all institutionalization; she was instead “searching for a religious community that was intellectually respectable and historically defensible in terms of its slave past.” while she did not find exactly what she intended to find, she did find an inner peace and power in silent prayer. she also recalled a time where there was created a “split between religious commitment and intellectual achievement”, but does not say that this split was necessary or needed. in fact, it is her intellectualism that allows her to critique the religious system’s whiteness while also still “believing in” it.
is this not what we want to make happen within our prison classrooms? do we not wish to create an environment in which these incarcerated individuals may combine the spiritual with the intellectual, recovery with education? perhaps anne’s 10-20 minute silence exercise for our 360 classroom should have been more utilized throughout the semester as also simulations of exercises we should enact in the prison classrooms.