Hunger Strike

I don’t cry easily, but this morning I had rivulets of tears on my face while watching a documentary at a labor conference. I choose to watch the movie over attending other parallel sessions because the theme seemed to resonate with the present—ICW abducting students and spirting them away to detention centres in the back of beyond. And, I wasn’t disappointed. The movie was about a how prisoners in California organized hunger strikes to protest against solitary confinement. The Security Housing Units (SHUs) are, as one former inmate described it, jails within jails. Some inmates spent decades in them on suspicion of being gang members. In many cases, those suspicions were based on evidence as flimsy as having tattoos or reading books by Black Panthers. I was moved to pieces y the courage and fortitude of the inmates as well as their friends and family on the outside who were agitating for their rights. Most of the campaigners on the outside were women (as I have frequently pointed out, most a majority of protesters on Palestine marches are women). If people can organize in the hell that is the US prison system, anything is possible and it is important to be reminded of this fact in these dark times. The cherry on the cake was a panel discussion featuring two former jail survivors who had spent decades in prison. They spoke with a moral and intellectual clarity that blew me away. The movie also reminded me of a blog post I had written six years ago after reading a piece by a former black panther who had spent decades in solitary confinement in conditions even more harrowing than the ones described in the movie. The title of that post was “If you canbreathe, you can get through anything” and it had chimed with my focus on breathwork as part of my yoga practice. This is also a good reminder to return to my yoga practice, which I have neglected. I am trying to avoid sitting cross-legged as I am nursing a sprained ankle, but my yoga practice just doesn’t feel the same without that foundational pose.