The Mount and Western Massachusetts’ Straw Dog Writers Guild brought nine writers to Edith Wharton’s historic home in March to develop new work. Keeonna Harris was one of them.
“I'm from Los Angeles, California, was raised in the 80s during, the drug war and crack epidemic," she told WAMC. "Prison has always been in the background of my life, whether it's my father, my uncle, my cousins, my ex-husband. So that's where my passion for incarcerated folks and issues around criminal justice stems from.”
When Harris earned her PhD from Arizona State University, she wrote a dissertation titled “Everybody Survived but Nobody Survived: Black Feminism, Motherhood, and Mass Incarceration.”
Harris spent her time at the Mount building on those themes by exploring her own history.
“The memoir is going to be detailing the experience of raising children with an incarcerated partner," she explained. "But more importantly, it's going to be discussing the self-love and community building that are acts of radical resistance against the prison industrial complex that tried to shut us off from the world.”
Titled “Mainline Mama,” the book is scheduled for release next year from Amistad Press.
Harris says one underdiscussed aspect of incarceration is the isolation and separation from community it imposes on not just imprisoned people but their families.
“A lot of times through my journey, and that many other women have talked about, is this loneliness, right, and this shame, because we don't really get any empathy," said the writer. "And that could come from family or friends, because when we are sad, or when we feel alone, all of our choices are rooted in choice, right? So, folks love to say, well, that's your choice, you're choosing to be in this situation. Whereas I don't think that- Other folks are not asked that questions. Like, for instance, if you are married to someone that's in the military or a business person that has gone or traveled internationally, no one asks you why you stay in that relationship, right? But they're also absent. And I know for me personally, another thing that I noticed while writing the book and revisiting my archive is that I am missing in a lot of my family photos, because a lot of the times when my family will get together for holidays, weekends, etcetera, I would be at the prison visiting. So, you have a decade of worth of pictures were my children and I are not in any of those pictures.”
Harris’s research about Black experiences with incarceration has taken her back to the era of slavery.
“Basically what I'm finding is that this repeating cycle, if you will, of slavery and bondage, but just repackaged," she told WAMC. "We love to kind of compartmentalize things and say, oh, that was a long time ago. But when you really get into it and researching, every decade, there's a new law or something new or new policy that adversely affects Black folks.”
Reopening her own complicated memories and exploring centuries of Black trauma for her writing took a toll on Harris.
“So there's times where it's really difficult to write, right, and to get those thoughts down," she said. "But I also think, right now, we're in a very good time of, I think, opening up the minds of a broader society. And also, maybe reimagining what society would look like without prison being the first line of defense when we think someone did something wrong, right? And I think the pandemic has a lot to do with that. Because when the pandemic first started and everyone was stuck at home, I think as a collective, as a whole, it was the first time in our society where we could actually feel what it was like to be stuck somewhere and cannot go anywhere for an uncertain time. That collective experience of what's been going on the last couple of years with the pandemic has really opened the eyes to the inhumane experiences of folks that are incarcerated.”
Harris says prison abolitionism is about redirecting resources away from punishments and into preventative measures to address root inequalities in American society.
“Most folks are not committing these heinous crimes," she told WAMC. "They're committing crimes to be able to live.”
