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How to Get to Dublin

Fanny Howe

Pleasanton is a city of prisons, a purgatory on earth, about forty five minutes east of Oakland. Pleasanton includes--besides its many kinds of prisons--fast food strips and islands of manicured housing units, even some ritzy properties bundled up in trees and shrubs, out beyond the grim structures. It all seems of a piece, a sample of wholecloth, the seamless tapestry of brown fields in the Central Valley--with the Dante-like birdish wind propellors hardly moving with warnings of wind and dust storm--leading to this prison city. That the area housing Camp Parks--a Federal Penitentiary--should be called Dublin may be even more bizarre than a prison city called Pleasanton.
     But there it is--Dublin. And inside it Camp Parks seems as deserted as everywhere else around, like a military base that has been vacated because of a leak in its nuclear arsenal, so you follow the glitter of cars in a tarmac park and see the looped, spiked wiring over high fencing. And you know you are near the person you are visiting--one woman among hundreds locked up here.
     Check-in is lonely, a passage back and forth through an electronic arch, with others waiting to do the same, the abandonment of all personal articles at the desk, a signing-in, and then a temporary halt inside vaulted doors before admission into Camp Parks and the cafeteria area where your friend will meet with you. Women are there, several, being visited by men, children, parents and friends, all dressed casually, coolly due to the heat. There are vending machines. Soda cans on tables. A place for small children to play. An outdoor cement patch to sit on with a few flowers planted there. Indifferent female guards, clanking with keys.
     The view to the outdoors allows no memory to enter. The wiring. The fencing. The concrete. Here everything is contrived against remembrance. This place is the antithesis of the changeability of social emotion and nature's motion. Because women are the ones who live here, there is a lot of business around food and children. Popping of cans, ripping of candies, playfulness. But because every step is a baby step, and there is no measuring of steps anywhere else, the moral arc of this universe tends towards stasis. You want to ask How did you get here? And then you want to ask How can you bear it? You want to know what lies behind the steel door with the light that radiates red when a prisoner is ready to be released into the cafeteria.
     Many women have come here on drug charges. Some are in for life for having refused to snitch on a boyfriend. Many are in for decades though a violent act was not involved. Their children and grandchildren visit and depart. Many are "domestic terrorists" and will never be released in time to live reasonably youthful lives in the world. There are political prisoners--many of them former Black Panthers--who have been incarcerated for more than twenty years. There are more recent ones, who will be here indefinitely, including the MOVE family survivors. Some of the women here were involved in acts that resulted in bloodshed; others were not; but they all share belief in a real enemy.
     So what is such an enemy?
     Someone who has contempt for your fear of him and who, at the same time, will kill you if you overcome your fear and fight him. There are even parents, spouses, siblings who are variations on enemies like that. When a situation lacks motion, when a relationship is immovable, and the interior life goes still, an enemy is almost a given. And how does he know you? By your fear; once fear has been located in your face or gestures, its attributes emerge and confirm the worst about you. Certain references to people you know, associations of one thing you do with another, unforgettable past actions, written words suggesting betrayal--each one of these confirms for your enemy the justification for your fear and his suspicion. The end result is that you must spend your time protecting your fear, making sure it's hidden. In such a way the problem of identity is different here than anywhere else; your true identity is your hidden self, not the persona you show to the world. And because it is hidden, it gives birth to its own form of guilt, and guilty expression.
     The necessity to appear free of all atttributes, to give nothing away about yourself--and on the other hand the desire to be returned to a lively personal life--creates a conflicted environment ideal for torture by indifferent "guards." It's a no-win situation, a double bind, the one we all dread as children and adults: to be forced to inform against ourselves and/or our friends under threat of incarceration and/or torture. Somewhere along the line you discover that the stubborn adherence to the principle of silence in order to defeat your enemy becomes a weak defense. Now you don't talk because they will both torture you if you do and torture you if you don't. Like an abusive spouse, the prison system can lead you to that terrible position where there is no progress.
     My friend, Marilyn Buck (one of the Resistance Conspiriacy defendants along with Laura Whitehorn, Susan Rosenberg, and Linda Evans), who was transferred recently from prison in Marianna, Florida to Dublin, has written about her life as a female political prisoner. Each of us has to decide how to guard our interior beings, to protect our psyches from being profiled, analyzed, and assailed. Every waking moment is a knowing moment." In her small pamphlet On Self-Censorship she provides a series of cool insights into the experience of being a female prisoner who is fundamentally "unrepentant." Indeed she remains absolutely committed to the beliefs that led her to Dublin. If anything those beliefs have been confirmed and strengthened by the prison experience.
     She writes: "Women are subject to censorship in a very distinct way from men prisoners. There is a disapproval of who we are as women and as human beings. We are viewed as having challenged gender definitions and sex roles of passivity and obedience. We have transgressed much more than the written laws. We are judged even before trial as immoral and contemptible, fallen women. For a women to be imprisoned casts her beyond the boundaries of what little human dignity and personal right to self-determination she already has."
     Women are sentenced to fifty or a hundred years for weapons possession and political affiliation. For drug possession, for resistance by silence. Three to a cell. Days monitored down to a minute. No time or privacy. Whispers. Strip searches and physical surveillance. Poetry written to express the mental fragmentation, to speak in code, to self-express. It's the final humiliation known only too well by people who are abused by their spouses or followed by jealous eyes. You don't even allow yourself to think certain thoughts, to glance in certain directions, to move a certain way. You become your own guard, and you become therefore no one but a liar and harbinger of hate, a dreamer of revenge and escape. Sleep is freedom. Waking days are spent in a dry state of dread. Like being trapped in a domestic scene where you are terrorized, monitored, mistrusted from daybreak to daybreak, the power of someone else's psychosis is nearly supernatural. Jealousy, envy, greed--these are only the ordinary psychoses that oppress others in the outside world.
     Marilyn Buck wonders, "How long can one stay conscious of each act of self-censorship before it becomes a habit no less potent than an alcohol or drug addiction? Where is that place within the self that enables one to resist--to carry on?" It is the question I want to ask her. The same question she asks herself. Where? She has replied, in a poem, that it is "the pale moon of memory" that brings her "home." So memory becomes the most secret vault, locked from locks, invisible to guards, and the name "home" is the name for liberation as it is in fairy tales and quest stories. A quick survey around the room gives the impression that these women are no different from the women on the streets, the women you know and love; they are gentle, jovial, shy or sad. But if you exchange a longer look, pausing to gaze into the eyes of one or the other, there is an unfamiliar quality of withdrawal and silence. It is as if you are looking at someone who is facing an interior that is distant and secret, one you will never see. The place where memory and hope hide together, share the same nourishment and look into an absent future.
     Once on the phone I began to ask Marilyn for directions to her location in Dublin, then realized that she couldn't answer that question. And so I vowed that I would describe to her how I got there, when I did. I only wanted to be able to describe, for her, the rolls of fleshy hills, the purgatorial measurings of miles on the interstate, the smells of cattle burning off karma, the sense of being "on earth" rather than "in the world" that you get from travelling through the Central Valley to the prison. First the land is a marketplace, a place where reproduction leads direct to the bank, and then it is a prisonscape. But why would I tell her all that when time was limited for us to be together. We talked instead about our personal histories, about poetry, about the forms that violence takes.
     And when the bell goes off, I go to one line, she to another. You have to pass your stamped wrist in front of a detector before the door will unlock you and release you to return to your car. There are various people standing around outside, waiting their turn, and they seem to know the routine by heart, how long they have to smoke, how they can bring money in, and how to joke. The children are impatient. The mist that is the California sky hangs over the coop-like barracks. Chicken Little thought the sky was falling in, and indeed it lies on the land here like an ocean of unresolved water, or like the memory of a time when there was an ocean here.

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

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