“Home”: Trauma and Desire

Chapter 2 moves from the mediated and communal space of the disembodied classroom to proffer a close literary analysis of the writing generated in Hulihia VII: Writings from Prison and Beyond: “Home” Edition. As writing subverts the state-sanctioned imposition of a civic death, so do the polyvocal poems in the prison publication repel reductive notions of home and emancipatory narratives. The writings in Hulihia (Transformation) appear on the surface to diverge from the political, but the women's critique lives in the omissions, ellipses, eccentric grammatical usages, and counterperformativity of their writing. Poems about home, which appear in the prison publication Hulihia by the inside women at the Women's Community Correctional Center, serve as a political tool to counter the experience of dispossession in the carceral space to which they have been consigned.