Monsour Owolabi is a poet for the people, speaking the word on the street, except he is incarcerated. Must that make a difference? Must that affect how we hear him and perceive his voice? In other words, what difference does his prison experience make for the impact of his declarations as they fall upon our ears? I hear a familiar beat. Both poetic and political, Owolabi’s voice, in fact, is much akin to slam poetry. For him, the personal is political. His positioning as a writer from prison may significantly disable him, restricting his ability to actually be on the streets, and his work, The Poetic Beauty of Resistance, is a rally-cry to the people.
He is on the frontlines and not. I wonder. What does it mean to truly wake up to the issues of our day, to raise awareness of mass incarceration and the issue of access, and really confront the injustices of the everyday hidden from our view? Owolabi commands us, “Open ya eyes — ya peep.” We have such a way of coasting in our work, sleepwalking through life, habitually repeating so many toxic patterns of mind and body, as we cycle through the ordinary routines and fleeting relationships of our worldly lives. We often forget how we get caught up so quickly in a bad way and how we are complicit. Meanwhile, someone like Spivak beckons us to “un-learn… our privilege as our loss” (Spivak, “Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution,” pg. 9). Owolabi beckons us to wake up: “The pigs on our corners are trying to creep and put us all to sleep.” You know? To sleep, to sleep. No, wake up, open your eyes and see! Dare to see, dare to take a risk and slow down enough to see. Owolabi’s work is visionary, “envisioning a world without locks.” He beckons us, as teachers, as visionaries, as close readers, as artists and architects, “Adjust your vision.”
Like a street poet, he is dedicated to riling up the crowd: “This is a message to the streets.” He imagines preaching, as if, from the street, educating the crowd about racial capitalism, challenging the workers’ complicity in white supremacy. You can hear him loud and clear. It’s a simple message, direct and to the point: “This is the reality of the criminal a.k.a. the new slave.” He calls out the racialization of the imprisoned Other, vividly describing how his Black body is decked in white in prison: “My clothes are all white except my gray socks.”
Did you know the carceral affects the everyday, inside and out? Owolabi addresses the carceral of the every day, as he says, “Class society is a society of Prisons inside of Prisons.” Such a view of being boxed inside a bigger system, suggests his hyper-awareness of the layers of his own enclosure and the surveillance of the prison-industrial complex. He writes, “I’m in a tomb for the living, locked in a box.” Even so, this view also reflects the expansiveness of his imagination beyond the prison walls. He sees a grander picture: “Those caged and those without.” It’s haptic. The metaphor of the cage opens the door into a new way of seeing, asking us to rethink our gaze on those incarcerated in prison and the metaphor of imprisonment itself.
The prison of mind is a metaphor and not. Clearly. Owolabi implicates the carceral state in imperial capitalism in his next line, declaring, “There’s much injustice in the imperial world.” The title of the poem, “Prisoner of War” itself makes a radical claim to be imprisoned as a result of “the war on crime, the war on drugs,” “wars on US.” We live in the wake of chattel slavery in the USA, such that African Americans continue to be disproportionately imprisoned: “KKKaptives.” As the poet’s focus returns to the prison cell, he thus emphatically distinguishes the prison of mind from the prison of the everyday: “I could go on forever and I’ll still be here.” Some of us have the privilege of being free, only conditioned to surveillance. We are free. He goes on, “I’m sentenced to forever, so, as you read this, I’ll still be here.”
Owolabi’s poetry contends with the assumed narrative of redemption. Can there be a cure for such social ills? Can we achieve prison abolition? Even as he says, “I’m talking prison abolition,” he struggles to say, “I’m incapable of redemption nor transformation, or so I hear.” His word challenges the narrative prosthesis that assumes writing “narratives operate out of a desire to compensate for a limitation or to reign in excess” (Mitchell and Snyder, pg. 53–54). In fact, he never discloses why or how he ended up in prison, continuing to paint a visionary image of himself as poet-activist, a.k.a. the “Prisoner of War.” His story may be a narrative of non-compliance: unrecoverable. He cannot even claim to want to know resilience: “Prison is daily sorrow, bloodshed and fear.” His stake in writing is perhaps more about survival and sustainability. How can anyone rest, knowing no sleep? He commands us to see: “Where I sleep, there is no Peace.” Do you know what he means? Ours too may be no good sleep.
References:
- Campt, Tina M. A Black Gaze. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023.
- Mitchell, David and Sharon Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis. Ann Arbor, MI: The University
- of Michigan Press, 2014.
- Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016
- Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. London, UK: Routledge, 1994.
- Theory. London, UK: Routledge, 1994.
- Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution,” with Elizabeth Grosz, in The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1990.
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