Prison in the Age of Euphemisms
My high-school English teacher Ms. Dachs did three things I remember my senior year: she cried openly in front of the class on September 12, 2001; she introduced us to William Safire’s column “On Language”; and she played a cassette tape of George Carlin’s stand-up bit on euphemisms. That’s all I have of her. (What fraction of me will my own students remember?)
I’ve played that Carlin clip, now available online, to my undergraduate students every semester for the last seven years. I consider it a small homage to Dachs and a huge one to Carlin, who showed my young self that when we attend closely to language, we’re less likely to be duped, and that this has everything to do with politics. Carlin made a career of not letting the government jargon its way into exculpation; “the CIA doesn’t kill anybody anymore, they neutralize people, or they depopulate the area,” he says. If George Orwell were to write a stand-up comedy bit, this mid-90s special would be it. Fifty years earlier in “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell put it this way: “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.”
But with every semester, my students’ laughter has gotten less boisterous, thinning and thinning until last year Carlin’s ten-minute bit was met in my freshman writing class with almost utter silence. The room felt heavy, and more than ever before, his words stung. “We have no more stupid people, everybody has a learning disorder,” he says at one point with that last phrase drawn out, to which one student during discussion afterward said quite bravely, “I have a learning disorder, and I’m not stupid.”
A few weeks later, I played the same ten-minute clip to my students incarcerated at a maximum-security facility. They laughed riotously the whole time.
At the college where I teach, the grounds are green and constantly manicured, and a fountain raises the arms of its jets in the middle of it all. The previous year, protests erupted on campus over race issues, prompting administrators to resign. On November 9, 2016, the day after Trump was elected President, the flag on campus was flown at half-mast, behind which a lake, miles in the distance, snaked away into the sky.
Forty miles due north, beauty is almost impossible to come by at the correctional facility. This is not irrelevant to say. Even birdsong, that harbinger of spring, can grate on inmates simply because it’s inescapable: it can’t be tuned out at 4 a.m., plus the yard is a veritable dropping ground. Etheridge Knight opens a poem from his 1968 collection Poems from Prison, written while an inmate at the Indiana State Prison, with this: “It is hard / To make a poem in prison. The air lends itself not to the singer. / The seasons creep by unseen / And spark no fresh fires.”
Life in prison is gray and metallic, and their lexicon reflects that hardness, is engendered by it. A gentler vocabulary wouldn’t survive a day in there. Prison talk is the opposite of euphemistic in that it doesn’t back down from confrontation. Don’t get me wrong, prison lingo is rife with codes and circumlocutions, which I try to learn every time I’m in there. But learning disorder and handicapable—terms to protect vulnerable people—are not bandied about in prison, precisely because prison isn’t in the business of protecting vulnerable people. Orwell again: “When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find—this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify—that the German, Russian, and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.” The state-sanctioned violence of a maximum-security prison yields hard, dysphemistic diction.
This has happened before in my college classroom: I’ve played a YouTube clip on the screen, and a fifteen-second ad comes on beforehand, but there’s no way to skip it, so the class has to watch the ad as it plays and it’s about something vaguely sexual, what else, and then something strange happens: the class laughs at it, aloud and a bit nervously. The ad wouldn’t phase them for a second in the privacy of their homes.
There’s something generative, transformative, about sitting beside another, shoulders nearly touching. In any shared environment, a kind of experiential osmosis takes place. It occurs to me that an offensive piece can be offensive to me because of how I project others in my various communities would respond. I feel with them and on behalf of them. Taking offense is a kind of empathy, a kind of imagination: when one feels offended in solitude, they’ve populated their empty room with people who aren’t laughing, who are in fact hurting.
Environment shapes us, thresholds and all. I think my college students felt hesitant to break the funereal quiet of our classroom with laughter at Carlin, as did I. But my prison students laughed, as did I, in part because everyone else in the room was doing it. In larger part, many of the incarcerated students had never met a person whom this would offend; perhaps they had no progressive voice to populate their imaginations with, to then cultivate within themselves.
One incarcerated student once accused me of using the word beautiful too much. I considered this, and concluded both that this was a compliment and that I only use the word myself because other, better male voices made it permissible for me. “Soft words are rare, and drunk drunk / Against the clang of keys,” is how Etheridge Knight’s second stanza starts. I myself am slightly more apt to curse in the prison classroom. It was Carlin’s cursing that Ms. Dachs had apologized for the moment before pressing down on the cassette tape’s play button, her one trigger warning back in 2001 before we laughed riotously the whole time.
A student in my prison class who’s been down for thirty-five years told me essentially what Allen Ginsberg howled in line 1 about the best minds of his generation. My student wrote in a paper that he’s still got “all his fries left in his happy meal,” but not everyone’s so lucky. I’ve heard stories of an inmate befriending a cockroach in solitary confinement. A CO told me that an old-timer wakes up every morning in his cell and packs his bags, ready to go home, even though he’s in there for life. “The guy hides his own Easter eggs,” the guard put it. Prison is so good at ransacking feeling, it’s no wonder my students in there often ask me, as they hand in their essays, to be ruthless in my written feedback, to not hold back, to rip into them. I never once hear this in my classroom on the outside.
It’s also not irrelevant to say that these guys have seen or heard or participated in enough stabbings that it’s commonplace—no hyperbole here. They’ve accumulated multiple lifetimes of hardship. I get the sense that, when resources are scarce, not much energy is left to expend on lexical niceties. Of course, there are plenty of sensitive men behind bars. It’s just that in prison, sensitivity isn’t a mechanism for survival; on the contrary, openness is a way for their lives to be infiltrated and used against them. They make fifty cents an hour, they can’t vote, they need permission to use the bathroom. Motivational posters decorate the schoolhouse walls: “Study hard!” “Positive + Goal + Teamwork = Success.” What else would this euphemistic language be to them than trickery?
I think about how the incarcerated students would respond to the yogic argot of our world—“Cherish every day,” “Be present.” This would be not only platitudinal to them but counterintuitive. Prison is perpetual waiting: for chow, to be let out of the cell, to be let back into the cell, for the days to pass, waiting to receive forgiveness from victims, from loved ones, waiting to forgive themselves. In that waiting, they learn to let their minds leave. Rainer Maria Rilke, in his first letter to a young poet, wrote, “And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sound—wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past.” Prisoners do this expertly. They are “great dreamers,” writes Danner Darcleight in his memoir Concrete Carnival. They know how to make the days pass less I.V. drip–like. “Be present”? “Study hard”? How free does this get them?
Etheridge Knight goes on in his poem: “Wide eyes stare fat zeros / And plead only for pity.”
During the Carlin semester, I had both classrooms of students exchange analytical responses. Each had read James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew (“My Dungeon Shook”) from The Fire Next Time and analyzed it, then responded to their partner’s analysis. This peer review was a success. It forced students on the outside to concretize prison, what Angela Davis called “an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about [them].” Feeling always the hollowness of their invisibility, one prison student said that reading the college student’s analysis, and the response to his own, made him feel “normal” again. Another prison student wrote to his college partner, “I want to write like you one day. You sound like a revolutionary.” They took the task seriously, some calling my college students out for laziness of writing or thinking.
In one exchange, though, a prison student went off on the college student he was paired with for writing about “white privilege.” The prison student, also white, asked what the hell this term meant: where was his white privilege in the trailer park he lived in with the drug-addicted parents and poverty as far as the eye could see? It was hard for him to see privilege at work when he hadn’t firsthand felt its magic, neither where he grew up nor where he was currently housed. Acknowledging one’s privilege in the absence of tangible proof is another form of empathy, of imagination. But this white inmate was privileged, of course. CO’s hit black and brown inmates with more tickets, more violations; that’s no secret. The white inmate was privileged, just not relative to the college student who had typed his response out in his quiet dorm room beneath the motivational posters he gets to tack up willingly, whose words he believes in his heart.
“Pity is not for the poet; / Yet poems must be primed. / Here is not even sadness for singing, / Not even a beautiful rage rage, / No birds are winging.”
My college students still hold tight to PC culture, the way I still hold tight to the notion that I can transform my students with my instruction. They sport a radical unwillingness to accept structural wrongdoing; I love that about them. They inspire me. I see them try on the garb of resistance terminology, tailoring it, figuring out their political fashion sense in real time. The world needs more people who don’t stand for injustice: water protectors, and language protectors, and people protectors. They are what we all should hope to grow into—engaged in the practice of calling people what they want to be called, treating people how they’d prefer to be treated—and I still think that good teachers can change the world.
Political correctness doesn’t exist in prison, nor do the guys feel it should. Even the theater group members and the Trump-haters believe the country is growing too sensitive. This doesn’t mean they don’t want to see structural change. (In fact, plenty of people behind bars are activists against the prison system—activists, at least, in thought. Their actions are policed, but not their minds, and they cling to this freedom. They know what happens when activism is expressed through the body—Attica in 1971, e.g.—and they know that ending.) Instead, their lack of political correctness means they know that a certain strength—a numbness—is required to live in their world. They laughed at Carlin with a kind of hungry vengeance that would never occur to my college students. In their laughter was the embodiment, in a sense, of Baldwin’s claim that “To smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need.” It was the recognition of Carlin as a kindred antiestablishment spirit, whose point was that the people in power “have invented a language to conceal their sins.” They laughed like they were taking some of that power back.
Knight’s poem ends with this mystery we can still make sense of: “The air / Is empty of laughter. And love? / Why, love has flown, / Love has gone to glitten.”
But every world is replete with its own “And yet.” For example, prison yields hard diction—and yet, a religious student in my prison class refuses to curse. Plenty of black students in there refuse to use the “n” word. Or this: prison hardens everyone it touches—and yet, the prison students in my creative-writing workshop last year responded with great heart to poems about gay love, even to poems written in the persona of a convicted murderer. Of course, these guys are the exception in prison. They enter class and embrace each other, look me warmly in the eye when they shake my hand. They vocalize their praise, they “Mmm” aloud in delight, they perform their pleasure, which is the opposite of most of my college students who, like me at nineteen, keep their hearts in their chests and out of their mouths.
Prison can numb the senses—and yet, one of my students said that prison has turned him empathetic. That was his word, “empathy.” Prison, he said, has freed him from his self-destructive ways. This was the narrative he’s arrived at. Who’s to say he’s wrong?
And yet. Danner Darcleight began writing letters with a woman from the community. He eventually married her in the prison’s waiting room. Prison doesn’t always deaden feeling. Another of my prison students, formerly in a marriage to a woman on the outside, entered into a relationship with a fellow inmate who identified as female and, because she hadn’t yet received transition surgery, was still kept in a male facility. The couple, both of whom were in my class, would poke and giggle quietly during discussion. They would write essays about the other’s sweetness and courage.
On the first day of class two years ago, we stepped into the prison and were immediately stopped by a CO in the waiting room. Prison does its work on guards, too, who trudge toward retirement; pension waits like a sad carrot that sits for twenty-five years on the kitchen counter. There’s a real-life time clock on which guards actually have to punch in, punch out, and I’m sure some of them count off the number of levers they have to pull till the last one. It’s a physical decision, that final gauntlet before entering the “hostile work environment” (euphemism alert) of prison. For the most part, they hate their jobs, they hate the men they’re in charge of, and they hate us, the purveyors of a free education. At the security desk, some guards chose to rifle through our folders, studying each paper. Some make female volunteers go into the bathrooms to remove their bras after the wiring activates the metal detector. One once turned the coordinator of our program away that day because his belt buckle set off the alarm and who knows what he’s hiding down there. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say they were trying to keep us out. I’d say, further, that prisons are trying to keep inmates in. And the inmates know it.
“You guys here for school?” the guard asked gruffly and we said yes, the new teachers waiting for his scorn that our orientation had prepared us for. He paused for what felt like a long time, then said, “You know what, I think what you guys do is great,” and smiled tenderly, I swear, then moved on.
And yet. It takes grit to go against the grain, especially in prison, but it’s possible. One must throw all one’s weight against the carceral forces simply to remember what love tastes like. “And love? / Why, love has flown, / Love has gone to glitten.” True. And yet, Knight’s poem was published, flown to readers, created its own love on the page. “It is hard / To make a poem in prison.” And yet, he did.
Love is easy nowhere, but on a college campus it hasn’t yet ossified, which is why Carlin’s routine stung my undergraduate students as sharply as it did. I didn’t play Carlin this past semester for the first time since teaching college courses—this man so formative to me, whose message I believe in but whose crude words may obscure it.
When I told my college class how uncomfortable Carlin’s routine made me this time around, that I was considering scrapping it from next semester’s syllabus, two students spoke to me in defense of keeping it, but it was only in private, after class, in hushed tones: one was a sophomore in an otherwise freshmen class, and the other was a Lebanese student, both of whom believed their peers too thin-skinned. (It’s the same reason Seinfeld said he doesn’t play college campuses anymore.)
Should I teach him at all? I suppose where I teach him will determine how I teach him. I think of what we try to scrub out of the record, intending only to heal, hoping that expurgating cruel words can expurgate their cruel histories. Perhaps playing Carlin to my students can tip the scales of their belief systems one way or the other, or at least open a discussion about what we find offensive, and why, and how that came to be.
This much is for certain: Carlin’s humor enlivened the prison students. Bringing him into that loveless place made the students feel a part of the world again. And to humanize, after all, is the unending and difficult and gratifying work of every comedian, every writer, every teacher on earth. The world—whichever one we live in—is not always conducive to joy. Our jobs are to create space for, and glimpses of, the beautiful “And yet.”
