Issue No. 21 • Spring 2020
“There’s a whole world in there,” said my uncle across a candlelit table. He had driven 2,354 miles across the country from our home-city of Philadelphia to Phoenix, where I was a professor at Arizona State University, to bring me my car, so that I was spared the taxing drive. This drive was a tremendous act of care, layered atop the many acts of care he had bestowed upon me during our lives up to this point. We shared a perfect dinner that night, me looking at my uncle and seeing my father, his other brother, and my grandfather--Big-Dad, we called him. I said as much, to which my uncle poetically replied, “3 versions of the same man.” His kind eyes flickered beneath the thick beard many associate with the Nation of Islam. “There’s a whole world in there,” he said. We had never talked about his time away, when he was disappeared by the state for being a little too Black and a little too free in his attempts to survive the crack epidemic. Perhaps this was what it meant to grow up. The unsaid things get said. He continued, “Doctors, lawyers, spiritual leaders of every tradition...and artists. So many artists. There’s a whole world in there.” The comment stayed with me--I wished the world out here could see the world my uncle described--full of people trying their best to live full lives in conditions of exile, where they were reduced to inmate numbers or, well-meaning statistics.
When the group that pitched Just Mercy in our theme selection process for CURA’s 21st issue got the most votes from the class, I was quite anxious. How would the students, most of whom had not had mass incarceration touch their lives, learn to encounter, with tenderness and reverence, the precarities of this monster of injustice, and the web of institutional violence it is tangled in? How would I reach writers who the state wanted to silence? How would I bring my lens of theatre and performance to bear on this issue that is at the heart and soul of injustice in America? These are the questions that I sat with over the course of the semester.
It was an honor to partner with PEN America’s Prison Writing program to connect with incarcerated writers, most of whom would not have been able to receive the call for submissions in time without PEN’s existing relationships. It was also especially exciting to be able to highlight some of PEN’s incredible footage of documented performances from years past, including a live reading of the poem that Bryan Stevenson featured in “Just Mercy,” the class’s initial inspiration. It was important to me to bring together incarcerated and non-incarcerated artists; as Caits Meissner, the director of PEN’s program reminded me in conversation--incarcerated writers must be recognized as a part of the larger creative community; in other words, for more than incarceration. Towards this end, I have invited in some of the most forward thinking writers, musicians, and performing artists working at the intersection of art and social justice. I am also thrilled that proceeds from our student fundraiser will go towards Black Mama’s Bailout, an organization that supports Black mothers and caregivers returning to their families.
I hope REVERB helps to move us towards imagining what justice could look like in the next millennia. It is not perfect, but it is an experiment and an inquiry towards the liberation of all of those incarcerated not only by bars, but also by the social matrices of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and transphobia that create them. REVERB joins the chorus of voices reverberating across time and space in protest of mass incarceration, and the violence it has done especially to Black and Brown communities in the United States. It is not the first attempt, nor will it be the last. But it is my hope that it shares, even just a little bit of what my uncle called “the world in there.”
In solidarity,
Nia O. Witherspoon, PhD
Editor-in-Chief
Editor-in-Chief: Nia O. Witherspoon
Editors: Liam Ryder + Michaela Connelly
Founding Editor: Sarah Gamibto