Epilogue: Palliative Praxis or Pathways to Transformation?
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Published:September 2023
The epilogue borrows from Antjie Krog's meditation in Begging to Be Black on how to break through dividing borders. Krog summons the word suture as a means to “wash this world. Carefully, to stitch, to weave, this side to that side, so that [the] border becomes a heart-hammered seam.” To suture takes on a pressured imperative as the United States confronts a dispiriting political rupture and a national pandemic. The current ethos of vengeance and the continued expansion of the prison-industrial complex raise ever more urgently the book's original question: How can healing take place in a carceral setting? The epilogue revisits this question as it explores the opportunities, limitations, and ethical dilemmas of a prison writing program in the Pacific. It presents a tapestry of anecdotes—a stitching together of autoethnography and analysis.
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