The Rhetoric of Redemption in African-American Prison Memoirs

ABSTRACT

Some critics have theorized redemption in prison memoir as capitulation to prison’s disciplinary gaze. But a closer look at African-American memoirs emerging from the War on Drugs reveals that redemption is not an artifice of oppression or a singular destination but a topic for rhetorical invention. This essay shows how two memoirists—Jeff Henderson and Susan Burton—formed narrative identity from traumatic experiences and oppressive conditions of poverty and racism that led to crime and incarceration. Redemption begins when they question interpretations of that experience and create new narrative identities in the social worlds of upward mobility, recovery, and emancipation. Inventing redemption does not relieve them from the burdens of their histories but gives them new ways of relating to their histories and, in this way, new hope in controlling their futures. The rhetoric of redemption in African-American prison memoir is a powerful counterweight to the rhetoric of mass incarceration depicting African-Americans as unredeemable.

Notes

1. I would like to thank RR reviewers of this manuscript, Alexandra Cavallaro and another reviewer who wishes to remain anonymous. 

2. Self-knowledge about a coherent pattern may not always be possible. Bessel van der Kolk has shown that brain activity in severely traumatized people being treated, clinically, for their condition, is often compromised in the left frontal lobe regions that are associated with language and memory. Cathryn Molloy has also revealed significant limitations in the use of linear narratives as a form of treatment for people with dissociative identity disorder. But in most cases where severe trauma or psychological disorder is not at issue, a new relationship to experience is possible.

3. Burton’s transformational experience through telling her story is not uncommon. Courtney Hook and Patricia Geist-Martin have shown that women in prison who share their histories with “abuse, trauma, and minimal family support” often experience “moments of epiphany, catharsis, healing, or transformation” (138). In much the same way, writes Riki Thompson, women survivors of sexual abuse who shared their stories were able to recreate “the self—one that is no longer a victim” through “discourses of healing” (654-57). Beth Daniell adds that women in recovery who write and share their writing are likewise able “to negotiate their identities” and “gain a kind of power, more personal and spiritual than political, but power nonetheless” (39).

4. Psychologists have shown health benefits to unburdening from traumatic memories: “the process of actively inhibiting feelings and thoughts about bad experiences requires excessive psychological work, reflected in higher heart rate, skin conductance, and blood pressure” (McAdams 14). Paradoxically, “the more a person tries to inhibit” the memory of traumatic experiences, the more they become a part of the person’s narrative identity.

5. For more on Kemba Smith see: The Sentencing Project: https://www.sentencingproject.org/stories/kemba-smith/.

6. For more on Shake Senghor see: https://cut50.squarespace.com/shaka-senghor.

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Notes on contributors

David Coogan

David Coogan is an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, the author of Writing Our Way Out: Memoirs from Jail, and the coauthor of The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement. His work has appeared in Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, College Composition and Communication, College English, Community Literacy, and in the books Working for Justice: A Handbook for Prison Education and Activism and Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric of Social Movements.