September 20, 2015 - 17:37
During our second prison trip on Friday, I found myself especially reflecting on two things: visibility and forgiveness. This idea of visibility came out at the beginning when one of the women, Kate*, began to speak during the freewriting portion. She was eager to get started on conversation, and appears to be much more of a verbal communicator than written. Everyone hesitated to jump in and tell her to write for now, and that we would talk soon, but finally Jody did it. This eagerness to have her voice heard from the beginning ties into her own sense of visibility. Here is a small space where she has agency, where people will listen, so obviously she wants to take advantage of it. Does visibility equal agency? Visibility can be tied so much to speaking up in performative spaces like a classroom. In “Talking in Class,” Jane Tompkins says “For in that space in time, borne up by the audience’s attention, my existence is guaranteed. I can’t not be, intensely” (63). It is easy to feel invisible within the system, so sometimes you must take up space wherever you can, physically or verbally. People need to make themselves bigger and more visible in other ways.
As a little bit of an aside, this parallels the way that queer expression presents itself (I thought about this especially because Kate is visibly queer). Queers, especially AFAB queers, feel silenced and invisible within the larger system. Women, meanwhile, have been socialized to make themselves small and invisible as well. To directly contradict this, queer fashion relies on taking up space to make a statement: to dress in baggier clothes, to wear big boots, and often to be louder in their actions and voices. This is empowering, but it can also be overcompensation.
The concept of forgiveness came up very often in our discussion as well. There was so much pent up frustration over racism, but so many of the women talked about forgiving and forgetting. Moving on, because that is the only way to change the future, so that, as one of them put it “maybe one day my children won’t experience it.” In my own freewrite I wrote about “moving on” from racism on an individual level, but not a systemic level (easier said than done), because if we focused our whole being on the assumptions made on us, we would not be able to live for the pain. We have to choose not to live in pain, but still remember the pain. Forgive, but for the sake of our own mental well being and not for the perpetrator. Fight the system. But then there is the concept that only certain bodies are allowed anger.