A Perspective for the Oppressed

Written By Kenneth Williams

by

John Proctor

Image: kmw

In the time since I began facilitating workshops at Rikers Island seven years ago, I’ve tried as often as possible to acknowledge and document how untrained and unprepared I was for the experience. I was also in a fragile time for myself as a writer and as a person. A time when I felt my own voice terribly insufficient at conveying the horrors of both my country in 2017 and the carceral apparatus I was choosing to interface, first as a facilitator and eventually as a monkey wrench.

One decision I made when I started those first workshops that April was to take a one-year break from submitting my own writing for publication or speaking publicly about even doing the workshops. Another decision was to reread Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and use it as a tool for channeling the voices of the people I worked with while decentering my own voice. I think both these choices served me well at the time, but they also led me into a bit of a morass as a writer. I lost faith in my own public voice. I’ve struggled mightily with this in the years since then, only recently resuming work on my creative nonfiction after dropping it for years. With only a couple of exceptions, the only work I’ve published has been these dispatches, first on my own and then as part of Re/Creation.

Once I began working with Freedom Agenda and the Campaign to Close Rikers in 2021, I’ve further sublimated my written perspective in service of the leaders of the campaign who’ve been most directly affected by the horrors of Rikers. Now, as I work to resume my own writing, I’ve struggled to refine what in fact is my public voice, or to be more specific, what my voices are.

I made a discovery of a new possibility for my public voice over the holidays late last year and into the new year.

After reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch in December and having some conversation with my friend and Re/Creation writer Carolina Soto about it, I can’t stop thinking about the voice it’s told in, which I might call the communal first person - shifting voices, sometimes many within one sentence (the sentences do run on for multiple pages), mostly nameless and unidentified, telling the story of living under a brutal tyrant. I love this perspective, and want to try to find more of it, in fiction, nonfiction, whatever, and I’d like to try consciously writing with this voice. 

Some fictional variants I can think of are Killing Mister Watson and As I Lay Dying, though they do separate the voices into sections by name; also Requiem for a Dream, which like Autumn of the Patriarch intentionally eschews quotation marks. In nonfiction, I’m thinking of Riley Hanick’s Three Kinds of Motion and my friend Matthew Gavin Frank’s Preparing the Ghost, both of which shift perspective between personal and historical in ways that aren’t exactly the same but are similar to what I’d like to do.

I started asking friends for more possible examples of this, even as I tried to define what “it” is for myself as a writer. Here’s a working anthology I’ve pulled together from their suggestions so far of work written in the communal first (ok, sometimes third, but still communal) person:

I then discussed the communal first person voice in an ensuing Re/Creation workshop, and also my idea to try writing about Rikers in this voice. After talking it out, I used my part of our devoted writing time to try it out. Here’s my first shot at writing about Rikers in the communal first person — it’s raw still, but I thought I’d share my process.

“We told people the costs of keeping people at Rikers, first in human terms (loss of human rights, civil rights, and sometimes life), but they didn’t listen. We then told people the costs in the most American terms possible: $250,000 a year per person, the price of a four-year Ivy League education. But even that number seemed paltry when it ballooned during the pandemic to a monstrous $554,000 person — over half a million dollars to take one person and destroy them. But some of us don’t care, we’re willing to spend any amount if we think we’re paying for our safety. But we’re no more safe than if we didn’t pay half a million dollars per person to deny them their human rights and sometimes — thirty times in the past two years — their very lives. Every life we’ve destroyed has made each of us a little less human. It’s a dark bargain, and we must call bullshit.”

Ok, who’s ready to call bullshit with us?

John Proctor is a writer, educator, activist, and founder of Re/Creation. He is also Communications & Digital Organizing Manager at Freedom Agenda, a member-driven project of the Urban Justice Center dedicated to organizing people and communities directly impacted by incarceration to achieve decarceration and system transformation.

Kenneth Williams
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