Epilogue: Palliative Praxis or Pathways to Transformation?

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.