Summer reading

It's a little late in summer to be starting on summer reading, but it won't be getting any earlier either. We'll talk about it in CoPhi, so we'd better read it now (or, minimally, read about it).

This year's recommended summer read for incoming freshmen at MTSU is by an impressive young man who went from prison to poetry to the classroom. Most of us will skip that first step, or at least will skip literal incarceration. But ignorance, inattention, sloth, and countless other shortcomings make their own kinds of prison. We can all take inspiration from this story.

Here's an interesting interview with the author of A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, R. Dwayne Betts. He'll be our convocation speaker on the 25th. See you there.

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On Saturday, December 7, 1996, a skinny sixteen-year-old named R. Dwayne Betts headed to the Springfield Mall, in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, with a friend. Betts had always been a bright, bookish kid—he was treasurer of the junior class—but in recent months he’d begun to drift, skipping classes to smoke weed with friends from the tough Suitland, Maryland, neighborhood where he grew up. That Saturday, Betts and his friend discovered a man asleep in his forest-green Grand Prix in the mall's parking lot. They carjacked him, holding him at gunpoint, and took off on a short-lived joyride. Within eighteen hours, Betts had been arrested and charged with six different felonies; within a year, he would be tried and sentenced as an adult. The judge who meted out Betts’s punishment—nine years in prison—told him, “I don’t have any illusions that the penitentiary is going to help you, but you can get something out of it if you want to.”

Betts has since proved the judge right—on both counts. In his memoir, “A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison,” Betts recalls prison as a place of ritualized humiliation, not rehabilitation. Yet his story is also one of redemption. Since his release in 2005, he has racked up a staggering list of accomplishments. It all began with a book club called YoungMenRead, which was featured in a front-page story in the Washington Post. The publicity garnered the attention of literary agents, and in 2007 Betts landed a book deal. He wrote “A Question of Freedom” while attending the University of Maryland on a full scholarship, and in May of 2009, he delivered the commencement address at his graduation. (The other speaker that day was Leon Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., an irony that Betts relishes.) His memoir was released in the fall, followed by a poetry collection, “Shahid Reads His Own Palm.” Betts now teaches poetry at the University of Maryland, and recently received a fellowship at the Open Society Institute, which he is using to write a non-fiction book about the social impact of incarceration. He also recently got married and became a father. Not bad for someone who just turned thirty.

I recently spoke to Betts about his time in prison and his writing. An edited version of our conversation appears below.

Did you know that books and writing would be so important to you in prison?
I was pretty pragmatic. I wanted to be an engineer before I got locked up. I knew I would do nine years and I didn’t want to come home with no talent. I thought being a writer was one thing you could do while you were in prison, one thing you could develop and take home with you. I just didn’t know I would be any good at it. From the very beginning, I was writing essays, reading books. I knew that that was the thing I was holding onto—I just had no idea how the world of writing and literature would open up to me.

There’s a scene when you’re in isolation (“in the hole”), and someone tosses you a book called “The Black Poets,” a collection edited by Dudley Randall. It was a pivotal moment for you.
At that point, I’d been in the hole for three or four months and I was reading three or four books a day, anything I could find, but I hadn’t read poetry, I hadn’t read Robert Hayden, Lucille Clifton, and all these poems that were in this book. It was the one thing that happened that I honestly think if it didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be a poet right now. It was sort of magical. I had been yelling out for books, and then somebody just threw me that one.

Did your enthusiasm for literature set you apart among the inmates?
I was pretty much a nerd, but I actually found that education was more democratic in prison. I met people whom I wouldn’t have expected to read a lot who did—everybody read. The weird thing is that I read a lot before I got locked up—Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, anything I could get my hands on. But it was always in my room, or by myself on the train. In prison, nobody would ever question why you were reading.

Did you ever have trouble getting access to books? Were the prison libraries well-stocked?
I never really found lack of books to be a problem. The only place where that was an issue was at Red Onion [the remote supermax facility to which Betts was transferred for several months] because they didn’t have a library. Most places the libraries were pretty good, because they had the old books, the classics, Shakespeare. I also bought books from mail-order catalogs. You know, I think the final battleground for mail-order catalogs is prison.

Nora Roberts was popular with the inmates. Was that just because of the love scenes?

It wasn’t just about sex. People get seduced by the narrative, too. That’s why a lot of us read Nora Roberts, and why we read fantasy. The point is, we were in a situation where narratives and story were far more compelling than when we were free. It sounds like a stereotype, but I think a lot of us were locked in poverty and cycles of violence. Most of the black men around me had children, a lot of the young dudes who were my age had fathers who were in prison. When we were in the world, we were locked in a space where we didn’t believe other narratives existed. Coming to prison and reading books was a way for many of us to try on different narratives, even it was just momentary flights of fantasy.

You incorporate a lot of the prison slang into your writing.
I think as a poet it was really important for me. Some of the words are really cool, like “kite.” You can’t really get a better word for a letter than kite. Some of it is cruder, and really makes your stomach wrench. Every time you hear it, it’s a slap in the face, a reminder of where you are.

There’s also the technical jargon used in the legal system; you write about how alienating it was. 
The entire language about concurrent sentence, parole, probation, resentencing report. All of these words that have nothing to do with real life, I have no reason now to ever have a conversation about them, but they become something that defines you. I thought it was important because in some ways our world was controlled by language. That’s probably why I taught myself Spanish, too, because I wanted to commit myself to something that would give me a new way to see the world.

One of the most dramatic moments in “A Question of Freedom” is at your sentencing trial. You had a number of character witnesses who each said basically the same thing: you were a good kid who went astray because your father wasn’t around. You stood up in court and contradicted them. Why did you feel the need to do this?
If I said I did it because I didn’t have a father, I would, essentially, also be saying that I did it because my mother wasn’t good enough. But I did it because I was being a fool for a moment. My crime was a common occurrence in the neighborhood where I lived. It wasn’t like when they showed me on the news anyone said, “I can’t believe he did that.” It was more like, “Didn’t such-and-such do that, too?”. The weird thing is that throughout this whole process, there were a number of adults who suggested that I blame someone else, or say I was high. From police offices to counselors to lawyers, everybody understood that at sixteen, I couldn’t be totally responsible for what happened.

While in prison, you went by the name “Shahid,” which means “witness” in Arabic. What motivated the change?
I grew up my whole life not expecting to go to prison, thinking that was for the other guys. When I ended up in prison. I realized I had become the other guy, I had the opportunity to witness how men ruin themselves and say something about it. So every time people called me “Shahid,” it just reminded me that I was a writer, I was a witness. Now I’m Dwayne. My family just wasn’t going to call me “Shahid.”

Since your release in 2005, you’ve accomplished an extraordinary amount. Did you feel motivated to make up for lost time?
I think the main answer is that prison made me obsessive, and I never slept that much anyway. Maybe I had a chip on my shoulder, and I was driven to prove something to the world. I would take on more just because I felt like if I just did what everyone else does, it wasn’t good enough. I think it’s probably an unhealthy thing, but fortunately for me I didn’t drop the ball. I did most of these things pretty well.

As part of your Soros fellowship, you’re working on a non-fiction book about the effects of incarceration. Can you tell me about it?
There’s a poem by Yehuda Amichai called “The Diameter of a Bomb.” He talks about how even though a bomb is small, the impact of it reaches the whole world. That’s what I’m arguing about prisons. The center of the book is Glen McGinnis, who was executed when he was twenty-seven for a crime that he committed as a juvenile. He’s the center of the story, but there’s a group of people who got attached to him that I will follow.

Are there any non-fiction books you’re looking to as models? 
I’m looking at it as creative non-fiction. One person who does a good job of this is Michael Lewis. The movie of “The Blind Side” was terrible, but in the book he seamlessly wove all of this really interesting information about football into the story of Michael Orr. I also like “The Devil in the White City” by Erik Larson. I was telling my students at the University of Maryland that one of the reasons they write mediocre poetry is because the people in their poems only get to be perfect. Usually people in real life aren’t perfect. Great poems and great books are willing to allow somebody to have flaws. The public’s understanding of crime is always based on facts that get parsed out to them for whatever reason. What I’m trying to do is figure out how to tell people that—that you can’t make decisions on crime and punishment based on partial facts.

You think there are always half-truths when it comes to our understanding of crime?

Yes, but more than that. What I’m getting at is why there are half-truths. Glen McGinnis’s mom turned him in, but she didn’t tell police that she poured hot oil on him, or that the man she was living with hit him upside the head with a bat. I’m not even saying that all of those thing should have changed his punishment, what I’m saying is that all of those things should complicate the way we look at justice. The New Yorker

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POSTSCRIPT.

“You’re going to college and part of you says you’ve already made it. But I wonder what part of you is willing to have a dream that makes absolutely no sense right now. Because those are the dreams that change the world...

“Tomorrow morning, the next chapter of your life truly begins. Your exploration for growth, for knowledge, for achievement, starts down a new an exciting path that will take you places you have only dreamt about … There will also be a lot of hard, roll- up-your-sleeves type work.” 

And a lot of good conversation and collaboration. Let's go create some dreams, four years can and should transform you!

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NEXT YEAR. Now's the time for faculty, staff, and students to recommend next year's Freshnman Summer Read and Fall Convocation speaker. Send your suggestions to Laurie.Witherow@mtsu.edu.

Vanderbilt's freshman class read this, this past summer. I read it last year, & recommend it highly: