Rewriting the State-Sanctioned Narrative: How Hope and Grief Are Essential to the Coronavirus Story
It was everything.
That was the line I can still hear in my mind — the tenor in her voice capturing this emotion that I hadn’t witnessed before in any previous interviewing experience, much less over Zoom.
She was speaking about a protest she had organized, how it was her first, and more specifically, how seeing 200 people outside the governor’s mansion in Austin, all socially distanced and carrying posters in the middle of a pandemic, had meant everything. I saw children carrying posters saying that my father is more than a number. My mother is more than a number. It means something.
Behind her in the computer frame, a vacuum leaned against a wall underneath a poster of Tupac, his hands together, the shadow and lighting draping over him reminiscent of a Glamor Shots portrait. Her computer screen was tilted slightly so that the lower half of her face and part of her neck and shoulders were missing at different points in conversation. She’d gesture while discussing her fiancé behind bars, communicating through the impossible, and detailing her frustration with prison conditions — a lack of food, healthcare, and information. A few times, her phone would ring. Other organizers and people from the protest two days earlier calling to debrief. It was all still so fresh.
Lovinah Igbani was my first interviewee for Sheltering Justice, a new initiative of the Texas After Violence Project, to capture stories at the intersection of the pandemic and mass incarceration. We spoke Memorial Day weekend, the day George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis. Ideas, like prison abolition, were still relegated to niche activist communities. Questions of policing not yet a mainstream conversation. And I haven’t been able to un-hear her voice in my head since:
It was everything.
Lovinah and her testimony are far from the exception. All of the individuals I’ve interviewed up until this point for the Sheltering Justice project have loved ones incarcerated by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, and all echo this same spirit of hopefulness. They all find meaning that fuels them, although their details vary. A mother with her son who she hasn’t seen in years because of an arbitrary rescission of her visiting privileges — a move she knows is a retaliation on the part of prison administrators in response to her activism with “Beat the Heat,” a campaign organized by Texas Prisons Air-Conditioning Advocates. A wife who is also formerly incarcerated and runs a re-entry program to help women with housing and employment during their first months after being released from prison. A husband working to bring together other individuals with loved ones on the inside, with posters and organizational T-shirts beside his wedding photos and beautiful drawings his husband sends from prison. These are only a few of our storytellers. And yet all of them carry this same hopefulness — while also carrying an immeasurable burden of despair.
New research from the Journal of the American Medical Association that uses data from the UCLA School of Law’s COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project shows that the coronavirus death rate in prisons is three times higher than in the general population. The case rate in the United States grows at a little less than 3.5 percent every day, while in prisons that number increases at over 8 percent daily. These numbers are devastating. They suggest very little resembling hope.
But after years of retaliation, lies, fear, and worry, each storyteller offers stories that were unflinching in their clarity of the tragedy of the current moment and the necessity to change it. In this moment of uprising, the business of “warehousing” people, in the words of one storyteller, lays bare all of the realities that existed before COVID-19. Even before a lack of testing, even before a refusal to release individuals who are granted — not to mention eligible — for parole, even before retaliatory tactics of infection with correctional officers spitting at folks behind bars, and even before solitary confinement operating as “healthcare,” mass incarceration revealed the oppression, racism, and violence so many are now galvanized to protest and emboldened to speak out against. As governments, architects of mass incarceration, and investors in the continuation and expansion of this system fight to “control the narrative,” the fight against silence is animated by these storytellers — by both their hope and their grief. These storytellers are changing the state-sanctioned narrative of the pandemic. Their hope and their grief, the inextricable nature between the two, are essential parts of this moment and of what it means to change it.
The only means of sustaining advocacy work is by listening, remembering, and holding fast to these individual stories. Their acknowledgment of the complexities of this moment, in all its interwoven political, emotional nuances of loss, is everything to keep us moving forward.
Murphy Anne Carter is the project coordinator for Sheltering Justice. She has taught creative writing in Texas jails and prisons for four years and serves as Executive Director of Freehand Arts Project, a non-profit dedicated to bringing creative arts classes to individuals incarcerated in Texas. A graduate of the LBJ School for Public Affairs, Murphy has taught nearly every age, from PreK to the elderly, and currently works with Casa Marianella, a shelter for recently arrived asylum seekers. She believes in community storytelling, narrative power, and memory as transformative, abolitionist tools for both the personal and political.
