AGAINST THE COLONIAL CARCERAL DIASPORA
S.M. Rodriguez
︎︎︎
S.M. Rodriguez
︎︎︎
African women’s leadership in rebellion against imperialism has traversed normative geographical and temporal understandings. In a time understood as postcolonial, whether read as “after the era of colonialism” or “affected by the era of colonialism,” the lives and wisdoms of those enduring penal systems demonstrate time-defying realities. Notably, the reality of imprisonment, suppression and extralegal punishment for African women’s political non-conformity reveal a colonial carceral diaspora, from which African people have named the prison as the preeminent sphere of social death globally.
Both the prison and the notion of a universal womanhood exist as colonial inventions dually repressing African women’s liberatory practice.![]()
i While numerous historical studies demonstrate that precolonial Africa featured gender diversity in political structures (the female king of Igboland, armies of women in Dahomey), coloniality introduced a limited conceptualization of womanhood (see Achebe 2000; Achebe 2011; Amadiume 1987; Oyěwùmí 1997, Were 2017). That narrow womanhood is a “contingent invention of Western, patriarchal epistemes, which has then been extended in conceptualizing the liminal public-private subjectivity of African political womanhood (Were 2017, 561). This womanhood rests not just on the political binary of a public-private sphere, but on a socially enforced sexed binary that invisibilizes and harms countless people who are born with chromosomal or genital difference (as they are intersex) or who reject the assignment of one sex or gender to transition to another (as they are transgender) (Kaggwa 2011; Kolanyane-Kesupile and McAllister 2021; Swarr, Gross and Theron 2009). The ultimate purpose of the social construction of gender difference is not just social control, whereby the world is divided neatly into two classes of people for the sake of cultural order, but also domination of one class by another, along racialized lines. In the context of African political womanhood, this plays out in the postcolonial project of nation-building, which silences the political presence of the feminized (Were 2017).
The silencing of African political womanhood occurs through cultural hegemony, where a taken-for-granted ideology of the natural order of gender permeates various, interacting social institutions (Hill Collins 1990). However, more centrally for this essay, it also occurs through overt force. I situate African political womanhood as a form of insight into and resistance against the force that reifies the colonial carceral. Developed by Mecke Nagel (2015), the framework of the colonial carceral describes the temporal, material and philosophical connections between European colonial power and the advent of the carceral society, as marked by the development of prisons.
By centering the disconnected diaristic and poetic writings and biographies of women of African descent who live(d) as prisoners due to their political power and presence, I rechart the temporal and geographic realities of African women’s political activism and defiance. This is inspired by the earlier work of Mecke Nagel, who argued that the United States has created a “new Diaspora of prison cages” by trafficking African descendants from prison to prison, already historically displaced by slavery (2008). In this essay, I emphasize the existence of a colonial carceral diaspora, from which African peoples are globally scattered, but ultimately form a coherent political call. A chorus arises from African women’s cells: regardless of geography, we are all harmed by racial capitalist domination. Prison is one mechanism of imperialism, which makes imprisonment always, inherently, political. However, in the case of political prisoners, it is the acknowledgement of their particular social power that leads state and (neo-)imperial forces to oppress by direct, overt, and excruciating force.
Methodologically, I consider the (auto)biographies, memoirs, and poetry of women of African descent who have been imprisoned on and away from the continent of Africa. This literature, according to Were, is grounded in counternarrative practices developed to reject “colonialism, apartheid and post-independence autocracy” (2017, 569). The literature of political prisoners inherently hybridizes “Western conceptions of autobiography as self-narration” with African and womanist oral traditions, ultimately reinventing the genre with lyricism (569-570). This literature, which Carole Boyce Davies calls the resistance literature of women, “challenges foreign domination but also the internal struggles against patriarchal domination and class oppression” (Boyce Davies 2007, 101).
Because I am interested in the overlap of experience and expression despite time, I write these struggles in the present tense. For me, this is both an Afrofuturist and Black Feminist Hauntological endeavor (Saleh Hanna 2015). Jah Elyse Sayers (2021) points to Afrofuturism as an imaginative project that creates a less constrained future for African people, while reorienting “Black Atlantic temporality toward both the production of futures and development of countermemory.” It is cumulative time, rather than passing time. Similarly re-imaginative of the essence of time, Viviane Saleh Hanna (2015) charts out Black Feminist Hauntology, which describes the ever-changing formations of anti-colonial resistance as transcendent and metamorphical shape-shifting. Although white supremacist institutions harm us, Black feminism haunts white supremacy. She writes the following:
The hauntological quality of my analysis rests in the destabilization of time and life span. The afterlives of these women and their works timelessly display the power to affect and unsettle the colonial carceral diaspora. The referenced body of resistance literature spans well over a century.
I write of women because they are often unmentioned when referencing political imprisonment. However, the unrelenting nature of their activism, the often-petty crimes used to arrest women, and the particular forms of sexual harms enacted, make them critical actors to understand. In this analysis, I include transwomen and ciswomen to the framework of African political womanhood, based not only on the obvious shared identity as women. Instead, I argue an experiential connection exists as parallel forms of sexual corrections. I name cases of formerly and currently incarcerated women who faced criminalization and sexual corrections for defying normative politics.
These revolutionaries all continue(d) to name the roots of oppression and call for radical collectivity against the co-constitutive, white supremacist forces of imperialism: (cishetero)sexism, racism, and capitalism. The narratives of their incarceration interweave the complex harms – physical, spiritual, material and sexual – that shape racialized subjection. More grippingly, the perseverance of their messages – which defy temporal bounds and spatial borders – inspires the future of abolitionist movements globally.![]()
ii
Claudia Jones writes herself into the archive as a force of nature: her will simulates sunrays and illuminates a path forward, past the bars that encage her body. Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, raised in and deported from New York City, USA, Jones lives locked up in an archipelago of carceral cells. She is ordered to be deported under the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950 while incarcerated in Ellis Island. She serves time for the Alien Registration Act, a law in place to criminalize “advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government” (Smith Act, 1940). Her indomitable spirit triumphs while her body sits in Alderson Federal Prison Camp, where she writes poetry reflecting various themes, “solidarity with other activist women, the meaning of the Atlantic, human existence, political commitment, and exile and placelessness” (Boyce Davies 2007, 110). Only months after, she arrives in England, the last island she will live on in her lifetime.
Jones spends her life writing for survival, personal and collective, and the future survival of the movement indeed hinges upon her contribution to the archive. Just years later, in 1970, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela crafts a similar tune (2013):
Fighting against Apartheid South Africa, she asserted in 1962 that “nothing can be as valuable as being part and parcel of the formation of the history of a country” (Madikizela-Mandela 2013, 154). This is what sustains her when she is disabled, in prison, waiting to be convicted with her sister on terrorist charges for rejecting the racial subordination enforced by European colonizers in South Africa.
Seventy-six years before, Lucy Parsons emblazes the collective spirit that crowds around her. She addresses the crowd (1886):
Born enslaved, but living desperate for the broadest sense of freedom, Lucy spends her adult life protesting the tyrannies of wage labour and governance and advocating anarcho-feminism from and for the position of the working-class. Her relentless advocacy leads the Chicago police to dub her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters” (Rosenthal 2011).
Lucy is regularly jailed for “peddling literature without a license”. But, in her words, “Liberty has been named anarchy” (Parsons 1886) and that liberty includes the abolition of criminalization and of prisons. In a forum on penal reform, she reconceptualizes what is required to reduce crime by pointing to the harms that produce crime:
She, like Hajiya Gambo Sawaba in Nigeria, continues through and despite arrests. Gambo spends the 1950s until the new millennium fighting and organizing for freedom from oppressive governance during and after colonialism in Nigeria. She, like many of these women, defies the public/private, man/woman binary divide and suffers righteously for it. Often arrested for crimes of “public speaking and consorting with men in public,” she spends considerable time in prison, where she rallies her fellow encaged sisters (Nagel 2005).
The Politics of Pain: Sexual Corrections
Equally fearless in her ambition as in her truth, Gambo remarks candidly on the sexual nature of much of the pain she experienced while imprisoned. I ache, hearing her when she says, “There is no opening in my body – mouth, nostrils, eyes or anywhere else – from which blood did not gush out from because of torture” and when I learn that she received a hysterectomy due to torture, in 1957 (Agunbiade 2021). I call this type of experience sexual corrections, or the labeling, surveillance, punishment and disciplining of the sexed body (Rodriguez forthcoming). Defiant, undisciplinable women suffer as the imperial power systematically widens the range of disciplinary techniques, understanding the pathological nature of women’s deviance as requiring extraordinary punishments.
Sexual corrections demonstrate the interplay of the corrective violence of regulating sex and gender with the colonial carceral – or the “civilizing” structure of prisons. Some of these corrective devices are regularized, while others are on reserve for “the worst Black” (rest in power Cecilia and Sarah Serai1). Disciplinary techniques subjected on state labeled or self-identified women range from the regularized and legitimized sexual assault of “cavity searches”, to trans-specific anal examinations and intersex “sex verification.” Sexual corrections also include extralegal punishments like r*pe, vaginal abuse and torture, forced hysterectomy and abortion, and denial of care, especially as it pertains to sexual organs.
Therefore, in reality, it is not just the righteous, mutinous spirit that connects these women, but also the overstated violence of the state in its attempts to quiet them. Janine Africa doubles down when remembering the pain: “They were ordered to break us but it didn’t work – no matter what they did, they were not going to break us…” and you would think she is talking with Jane Muthoni Mara, a Kenyan freedom fighter detained with the Mau Mau at fifteen years old. Jane continues to fight the imperialists, in England, in 2016, when she finally wins reparations for the abuse of her people, detained in camps and sexually tortured en masse. She recalls the graphic, internal violence she survived at the hands of the English, for providing meals to “those who were fighting for the dignity and freedom of our people” (Mara 2013).
Jane wants “British citizens of today to know what their forefathers did to me and to so many others” (Mara 2013) and so her triumphant spirit utilizes the pain for an anti-imperial politic, just as Janine Africa. From prison, Janine tells the Guardian that “The murder of my children, my family, will always affect me, but not in a bad way. When I think about what this system has done to me and my family, it makes me even more committed to my belief” (Pilkington 2019). She writes despite decades behind bars. Janine serves time – over forty years – for affiliation with an anarcho-primitivist organization called MOVE, which advocates for the freedom of African (and all) peoples and enslaved animals from government, industry, and man’s law. Janine is accused and convicted of a murder that she could not have committed, like Assata Shakur who broadcasts the following from prison in 1973:
And similar to the others displaying Black political womanhood from prisons and jails, Assata writes graphically about the gendered and sexed abuse that she suffers, both through direct force and neglect. When pregnant, she is told by the white doctor originally assigned to her that it “would be best for everybody concerned if you have an abortion, no matter which way you have it.” The doctor attempts no care and agitates her when she is vulnerable, viciously enforcing his will. It is not until she wins the right to choose a doctor that she receives the care she required to deliver the baby.
While also pregnant and imprisoned, Stella Nyanzi faces hostility from corrections officers in Uganda. However, unlike Assata, she never receives antenatal care and loses her baby, who she decides to name Justice (Nyanzi 2020). Stella Nyanzi’s protests and “cyber harassment” charge led to her imprisonment. She names the role of criminalization in sequestering the poor and the political woman in her book of poetry, No Roses from My Mouth: Poems from Prison (2020). However, before and after imprisonment, she dedicates her research and activism to the liberation of gender minorities (2013) and all Ugandans from corruption and tyranny (Baral N.D.). Stella is particularly well known for her advocacy for African women and same-sex-loving people and for this she has faced considerable violence, like being arrested for her protests.
Less than a year after the publication of Nyanzi’s book of poetry, Shakiro Njeukam, a woman in Cameroon remarks upon the “hell” of being detained in a men’s prison (like Assata Shakur). Shakiro’s arrest was for public indecency and failing to produce identification, for merely existing in public as a transwoman. She is convicted of attempted homosexuality, despite being out to dinner at the time of arrest. Her region and identity mean that she has likely experienced the very politicized pain of a forced anal examination, a sexual corrections practice that has developed specifically in the era of reinvigorated surveillance of African same-sex sexual practices. However, Shakiro is a popular social media figure, who has used YouTube and Facebook to protest persecution of African gender and sexual minorities (Paquette 2021).
Alyssa V. Hope (Comrade Alyssa) is also using social media to rally those outside of cages. She situates herself boldly in her letter “to the LGBTIA Community” (2020): I'm a political prisoner, jailhouse lawyer, and socialist who was raised by adopted parents, aunts, uncles, and grandmother who were Black Panthers [as well as in the] Black Liberation Army… raised under the holy teachings of Sunni Islam…I've been steps ahead of my enemies. She points to the intergenerational carcerality and brutality that has shaped her, storying the police r*pe and assassination of her mother, which she witnessed as a child. Publishing essays on Patreon and using Twitter through two not-imprisoned allies, Alyssa challenges us to greater communal love and resourcing (Hope 2020), more intentional planning and organizing outside of the police (Hope 2021a), and to embracing the abolitionist cause, especially by highlighting the sexual violence occurring against imprisoned women in men’s prisons (Hope 2021b). The sexual corrections that transwomen endure include the sex-segregated imprisonment that often leads them to self-defense and retaliatory violence, as women face an increased risk of sexual violence when imprisoned with men – by both guards and fellow imprisoned people.3 This in turn leads to their increased time in prison, like Alyssa, who has received nine additional years for battering a corrections officer who sexually assaulted her friend, another transwoman.4
Therefore, sexual corrections exist not only to reify sexed labeling, but to suppress African women’s public, political and revolutionary presence. The acts constitute state terrorism, as state representatives utilize fear and violence for the political aim to modify behaviour. Winnie notes as she sits, “I am next to the assault chamber. As long as I live I shall never forget the nightmares I have suffered as a result of the daily prisoners’ piercing screams as the brutal corporal punishment is inflicted on them” (Mandikizela-Mandela 2013). In the same year, Jane laments “the abuse has affected my whole life and I relive the events I lived through on a regular basis” (Mara 2013). Because of the incessant experience of sexualized harms, harms that stick with these women forever, they must mobilize the pain for their own and for collective political resolve.
“I have bought this fight from you”: Comradeship and Coalition
Hajiya Gambo Sawaba takes on a scuffle on behalf of a girl who cannot fight. She says, “I have bought this fight from you.” The display of comradeship continues, lifelong, as she struggles on behalf of women and girls throughout Northern Nigeria. She is jailed sixteen times for the political fights she buys. Claudia Jones, who, like Assata, sits in Alderson prison, writes for a comrade with the pseudonym and title “consuela – anti-fascista” (Boyce Davies 2007):
It is a collective strength that sustains African political womanhood. Timeless, boundless, borderless: a resistance reprise rings out from the colonial carceral diaspora. These sisters connect the archipelago of cells with unified resolve, because as Claudia says, ‘‘What is an ocean between us? We know how to build bridges.’’ She wraps her hand around Stella, who connects with Gambo, who finds Jane, who touches Shakiro, who clutches Alyssa, who grips Lucy, who holds Winnie, who clasps Assata when Assata chants:
Both the prison and the notion of a universal womanhood exist as colonial inventions dually repressing African women’s liberatory practice.
i While numerous historical studies demonstrate that precolonial Africa featured gender diversity in political structures (the female king of Igboland, armies of women in Dahomey), coloniality introduced a limited conceptualization of womanhood (see Achebe 2000; Achebe 2011; Amadiume 1987; Oyěwùmí 1997, Were 2017). That narrow womanhood is a “contingent invention of Western, patriarchal epistemes, which has then been extended in conceptualizing the liminal public-private subjectivity of African political womanhood (Were 2017, 561). This womanhood rests not just on the political binary of a public-private sphere, but on a socially enforced sexed binary that invisibilizes and harms countless people who are born with chromosomal or genital difference (as they are intersex) or who reject the assignment of one sex or gender to transition to another (as they are transgender) (Kaggwa 2011; Kolanyane-Kesupile and McAllister 2021; Swarr, Gross and Theron 2009). The ultimate purpose of the social construction of gender difference is not just social control, whereby the world is divided neatly into two classes of people for the sake of cultural order, but also domination of one class by another, along racialized lines. In the context of African political womanhood, this plays out in the postcolonial project of nation-building, which silences the political presence of the feminized (Were 2017).The silencing of African political womanhood occurs through cultural hegemony, where a taken-for-granted ideology of the natural order of gender permeates various, interacting social institutions (Hill Collins 1990). However, more centrally for this essay, it also occurs through overt force. I situate African political womanhood as a form of insight into and resistance against the force that reifies the colonial carceral. Developed by Mecke Nagel (2015), the framework of the colonial carceral describes the temporal, material and philosophical connections between European colonial power and the advent of the carceral society, as marked by the development of prisons.
By centering the disconnected diaristic and poetic writings and biographies of women of African descent who live(d) as prisoners due to their political power and presence, I rechart the temporal and geographic realities of African women’s political activism and defiance. This is inspired by the earlier work of Mecke Nagel, who argued that the United States has created a “new Diaspora of prison cages” by trafficking African descendants from prison to prison, already historically displaced by slavery (2008). In this essay, I emphasize the existence of a colonial carceral diaspora, from which African peoples are globally scattered, but ultimately form a coherent political call. A chorus arises from African women’s cells: regardless of geography, we are all harmed by racial capitalist domination. Prison is one mechanism of imperialism, which makes imprisonment always, inherently, political. However, in the case of political prisoners, it is the acknowledgement of their particular social power that leads state and (neo-)imperial forces to oppress by direct, overt, and excruciating force.
Methodologically, I consider the (auto)biographies, memoirs, and poetry of women of African descent who have been imprisoned on and away from the continent of Africa. This literature, according to Were, is grounded in counternarrative practices developed to reject “colonialism, apartheid and post-independence autocracy” (2017, 569). The literature of political prisoners inherently hybridizes “Western conceptions of autobiography as self-narration” with African and womanist oral traditions, ultimately reinventing the genre with lyricism (569-570). This literature, which Carole Boyce Davies calls the resistance literature of women, “challenges foreign domination but also the internal struggles against patriarchal domination and class oppression” (Boyce Davies 2007, 101).
Because I am interested in the overlap of experience and expression despite time, I write these struggles in the present tense. For me, this is both an Afrofuturist and Black Feminist Hauntological endeavor (Saleh Hanna 2015). Jah Elyse Sayers (2021) points to Afrofuturism as an imaginative project that creates a less constrained future for African people, while reorienting “Black Atlantic temporality toward both the production of futures and development of countermemory.” It is cumulative time, rather than passing time. Similarly re-imaginative of the essence of time, Viviane Saleh Hanna (2015) charts out Black Feminist Hauntology, which describes the ever-changing formations of anti-colonial resistance as transcendent and metamorphical shape-shifting. Although white supremacist institutions harm us, Black feminism haunts white supremacy. She writes the following:
The sociological ghost I call upon is a Black feminist. She is the voices and the intellectual contributions of Black women who have known and seen that which has not been articulated or documented in White-ologies. She (and her descendants) is a Black woman who lived hundreds of years ago on plantations, beneath the boots and belts of White men and their wives, and she (and her descendants) is the Black woman who lived thousands of years ago in societies and worlds predating racial colonialism and chattel slavery.
The hauntological quality of my analysis rests in the destabilization of time and life span. The afterlives of these women and their works timelessly display the power to affect and unsettle the colonial carceral diaspora. The referenced body of resistance literature spans well over a century.
I write of women because they are often unmentioned when referencing political imprisonment. However, the unrelenting nature of their activism, the often-petty crimes used to arrest women, and the particular forms of sexual harms enacted, make them critical actors to understand. In this analysis, I include transwomen and ciswomen to the framework of African political womanhood, based not only on the obvious shared identity as women. Instead, I argue an experiential connection exists as parallel forms of sexual corrections. I name cases of formerly and currently incarcerated women who faced criminalization and sexual corrections for defying normative politics.
These revolutionaries all continue(d) to name the roots of oppression and call for radical collectivity against the co-constitutive, white supremacist forces of imperialism: (cishetero)sexism, racism, and capitalism. The narratives of their incarceration interweave the complex harms – physical, spiritual, material and sexual – that shape racialized subjection. More grippingly, the perseverance of their messages – which defy temporal bounds and spatial borders – inspires the future of abolitionist movements globally.
iiAfrican Women’s Political Resolve
“…While this I know, my heart rebels
At screens that shut off sunlight’s beams
My thoughts rise too like tinkling bells
To welcome shafts of light in seams.
Ere as I write bright rays peep through
Their fiercer power pierce this dew
Strength born of atoms held at bay
Simulation of men’s will to cast all doubt away”
Claudia Jones
Claudia Jones writes herself into the archive as a force of nature: her will simulates sunrays and illuminates a path forward, past the bars that encage her body. Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, raised in and deported from New York City, USA, Jones lives locked up in an archipelago of carceral cells. She is ordered to be deported under the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950 while incarcerated in Ellis Island. She serves time for the Alien Registration Act, a law in place to criminalize “advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government” (Smith Act, 1940). Her indomitable spirit triumphs while her body sits in Alderson Federal Prison Camp, where she writes poetry reflecting various themes, “solidarity with other activist women, the meaning of the Atlantic, human existence, political commitment, and exile and placelessness” (Boyce Davies 2007, 110). Only months after, she arrives in England, the last island she will live on in her lifetime.
Jones spends her life writing for survival, personal and collective, and the future survival of the movement indeed hinges upon her contribution to the archive. Just years later, in 1970, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela crafts a similar tune (2013):
Although I staggered across the path of freedom with pain, I staggered forward and never doubted my goal even when the crown was nailed by my people at times, this was only history. I would not have been worthy of their great love without such. When the tortuous minutes, hours, months dragged by gnawing at the inner cores of my soul I remembered that ‘an army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers will not’. I also realised that honour and conviction are more binding than any oath.
Fighting against Apartheid South Africa, she asserted in 1962 that “nothing can be as valuable as being part and parcel of the formation of the history of a country” (Madikizela-Mandela 2013, 154). This is what sustains her when she is disabled, in prison, waiting to be convicted with her sister on terrorist charges for rejecting the racial subordination enforced by European colonizers in South Africa.
Seventy-six years before, Lucy Parsons emblazes the collective spirit that crowds around her. She addresses the crowd (1886):
I am an anarchist. I suppose you came here, the most of you, to see what a real, live anarchist looked like. I suppose some of you expected to see me with a bomb in one hand and a flaming torch in the other, but are disappointed in seeing neither.
Do you wonder why there are anarchists in this country, in this great land of liberty, as you love to call it? Go to New York. Go through the byways and alleys of that great city. Count the myriads starving; count the multiplied thousands who are homeless; number those who work harder than slaves and live on less and have fewer comforts than the meanest slaves. You will be dumbfounded by your discoveries, you who have paid no attention to these poor, save as objects of charity and commiseration. They are not objects of charity, they are the victims of the rank injustice that permeates the system of government, and of political economy that holds sway from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Born enslaved, but living desperate for the broadest sense of freedom, Lucy spends her adult life protesting the tyrannies of wage labour and governance and advocating anarcho-feminism from and for the position of the working-class. Her relentless advocacy leads the Chicago police to dub her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters” (Rosenthal 2011).
Lucy is regularly jailed for “peddling literature without a license”. But, in her words, “Liberty has been named anarchy” (Parsons 1886) and that liberty includes the abolition of criminalization and of prisons. In a forum on penal reform, she reconceptualizes what is required to reduce crime by pointing to the harms that produce crime:
I will not rise to your reform bait. This is your society Judge Atgeld; you helped to create it, and it is this society that makes the criminal … And if the workers unite to fight for food, you jail them too … No, so long as you preserve this system and its ethics, your jails will be full of men and women who choose life to death, and who take life as you force them to take it, through crime. (Ashbaugh 2013, quoting Parsons in the 1890s).
She, like Hajiya Gambo Sawaba in Nigeria, continues through and despite arrests. Gambo spends the 1950s until the new millennium fighting and organizing for freedom from oppressive governance during and after colonialism in Nigeria. She, like many of these women, defies the public/private, man/woman binary divide and suffers righteously for it. Often arrested for crimes of “public speaking and consorting with men in public,” she spends considerable time in prison, where she rallies her fellow encaged sisters (Nagel 2005).
The Politics of Pain: Sexual Corrections
Equally fearless in her ambition as in her truth, Gambo remarks candidly on the sexual nature of much of the pain she experienced while imprisoned. I ache, hearing her when she says, “There is no opening in my body – mouth, nostrils, eyes or anywhere else – from which blood did not gush out from because of torture” and when I learn that she received a hysterectomy due to torture, in 1957 (Agunbiade 2021). I call this type of experience sexual corrections, or the labeling, surveillance, punishment and disciplining of the sexed body (Rodriguez forthcoming). Defiant, undisciplinable women suffer as the imperial power systematically widens the range of disciplinary techniques, understanding the pathological nature of women’s deviance as requiring extraordinary punishments.
Sexual corrections demonstrate the interplay of the corrective violence of regulating sex and gender with the colonial carceral – or the “civilizing” structure of prisons. Some of these corrective devices are regularized, while others are on reserve for “the worst Black” (rest in power Cecilia and Sarah Serai1). Disciplinary techniques subjected on state labeled or self-identified women range from the regularized and legitimized sexual assault of “cavity searches”, to trans-specific anal examinations and intersex “sex verification.” Sexual corrections also include extralegal punishments like r*pe, vaginal abuse and torture, forced hysterectomy and abortion, and denial of care, especially as it pertains to sexual organs.
Therefore, in reality, it is not just the righteous, mutinous spirit that connects these women, but also the overstated violence of the state in its attempts to quiet them. Janine Africa doubles down when remembering the pain: “They were ordered to break us but it didn’t work – no matter what they did, they were not going to break us…” and you would think she is talking with Jane Muthoni Mara, a Kenyan freedom fighter detained with the Mau Mau at fifteen years old. Jane continues to fight the imperialists, in England, in 2016, when she finally wins reparations for the abuse of her people, detained in camps and sexually tortured en masse. She recalls the graphic, internal violence she survived at the hands of the English, for providing meals to “those who were fighting for the dignity and freedom of our people” (Mara 2013).
Jane wants “British citizens of today to know what their forefathers did to me and to so many others” (Mara 2013) and so her triumphant spirit utilizes the pain for an anti-imperial politic, just as Janine Africa. From prison, Janine tells the Guardian that “The murder of my children, my family, will always affect me, but not in a bad way. When I think about what this system has done to me and my family, it makes me even more committed to my belief” (Pilkington 2019). She writes despite decades behind bars. Janine serves time – over forty years – for affiliation with an anarcho-primitivist organization called MOVE, which advocates for the freedom of African (and all) peoples and enslaved animals from government, industry, and man’s law. Janine is accused and convicted of a murder that she could not have committed, like Assata Shakur who broadcasts the following from prison in 1973:
I am a Black revolutionary woman, and because of this I have been charged with and accused of every alleged crime in which a woman was believed to have participated…
I am a Black revolutionary, and, by definition, that makes me a part of the Black Liberation Army. The pigs have used their newspapers and TVs to paint the Black Liberation Army as vicious, brutal, mad-dog criminals. They have called us gangsters and gun molls and have compared us to such characters as John Dillinger and Ma Barker. It should be clear, it must be clear to anyone who can think, see, or hear, that we are the victims. The victims and not the criminals.
It should also be clear to us by now who the real criminals are. Nixon and his crime partners have murdered hundreds of Third World brothers and sisters in Vietnam, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. As was proved by Watergate, the top law enforcement officials in this country are a lying bunch of criminals. The president, two attorney generals, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, and half the white house staff have been implicated in the Watergate crimes…
There is, and always will be, until every Black man, woman, and child is free, a Black Liberation Army. The main function of the Black Liberation Army at this time is to create good examples, to struggle for Black freedom, and to prepare for the future. We must defend ourselves and let no one disrespect us. We must gain our liberation by any means necessary.2
And similar to the others displaying Black political womanhood from prisons and jails, Assata writes graphically about the gendered and sexed abuse that she suffers, both through direct force and neglect. When pregnant, she is told by the white doctor originally assigned to her that it “would be best for everybody concerned if you have an abortion, no matter which way you have it.” The doctor attempts no care and agitates her when she is vulnerable, viciously enforcing his will. It is not until she wins the right to choose a doctor that she receives the care she required to deliver the baby.
While also pregnant and imprisoned, Stella Nyanzi faces hostility from corrections officers in Uganda. However, unlike Assata, she never receives antenatal care and loses her baby, who she decides to name Justice (Nyanzi 2020). Stella Nyanzi’s protests and “cyber harassment” charge led to her imprisonment. She names the role of criminalization in sequestering the poor and the political woman in her book of poetry, No Roses from My Mouth: Poems from Prison (2020). However, before and after imprisonment, she dedicates her research and activism to the liberation of gender minorities (2013) and all Ugandans from corruption and tyranny (Baral N.D.). Stella is particularly well known for her advocacy for African women and same-sex-loving people and for this she has faced considerable violence, like being arrested for her protests.
Less than a year after the publication of Nyanzi’s book of poetry, Shakiro Njeukam, a woman in Cameroon remarks upon the “hell” of being detained in a men’s prison (like Assata Shakur). Shakiro’s arrest was for public indecency and failing to produce identification, for merely existing in public as a transwoman. She is convicted of attempted homosexuality, despite being out to dinner at the time of arrest. Her region and identity mean that she has likely experienced the very politicized pain of a forced anal examination, a sexual corrections practice that has developed specifically in the era of reinvigorated surveillance of African same-sex sexual practices. However, Shakiro is a popular social media figure, who has used YouTube and Facebook to protest persecution of African gender and sexual minorities (Paquette 2021).
Alyssa V. Hope (Comrade Alyssa) is also using social media to rally those outside of cages. She situates herself boldly in her letter “to the LGBTIA Community” (2020): I'm a political prisoner, jailhouse lawyer, and socialist who was raised by adopted parents, aunts, uncles, and grandmother who were Black Panthers [as well as in the] Black Liberation Army… raised under the holy teachings of Sunni Islam…I've been steps ahead of my enemies. She points to the intergenerational carcerality and brutality that has shaped her, storying the police r*pe and assassination of her mother, which she witnessed as a child. Publishing essays on Patreon and using Twitter through two not-imprisoned allies, Alyssa challenges us to greater communal love and resourcing (Hope 2020), more intentional planning and organizing outside of the police (Hope 2021a), and to embracing the abolitionist cause, especially by highlighting the sexual violence occurring against imprisoned women in men’s prisons (Hope 2021b). The sexual corrections that transwomen endure include the sex-segregated imprisonment that often leads them to self-defense and retaliatory violence, as women face an increased risk of sexual violence when imprisoned with men – by both guards and fellow imprisoned people.3 This in turn leads to their increased time in prison, like Alyssa, who has received nine additional years for battering a corrections officer who sexually assaulted her friend, another transwoman.4
Therefore, sexual corrections exist not only to reify sexed labeling, but to suppress African women’s public, political and revolutionary presence. The acts constitute state terrorism, as state representatives utilize fear and violence for the political aim to modify behaviour. Winnie notes as she sits, “I am next to the assault chamber. As long as I live I shall never forget the nightmares I have suffered as a result of the daily prisoners’ piercing screams as the brutal corporal punishment is inflicted on them” (Mandikizela-Mandela 2013). In the same year, Jane laments “the abuse has affected my whole life and I relive the events I lived through on a regular basis” (Mara 2013). Because of the incessant experience of sexualized harms, harms that stick with these women forever, they must mobilize the pain for their own and for collective political resolve.
“I have bought this fight from you”: Comradeship and Coalition
Hajiya Gambo Sawaba takes on a scuffle on behalf of a girl who cannot fight. She says, “I have bought this fight from you.” The display of comradeship continues, lifelong, as she struggles on behalf of women and girls throughout Northern Nigeria. She is jailed sixteen times for the political fights she buys. Claudia Jones, who, like Assata, sits in Alderson prison, writes for a comrade with the pseudonym and title “consuela – anti-fascista” (Boyce Davies 2007):
It seems I knew you long before our common ties—of conscious choice
Threw under single skies, those like us
Who, fused by our mold
Became their targets, as of old …
O anti-fascist sister—you whose eye turn to stars still
I’ve learned your wondrous secret—source of spirit and of will
I’ve learned that what sustains your heart—mind and peace of soul
Is knowledge that their justice—can never reach its goal
It is a collective strength that sustains African political womanhood. Timeless, boundless, borderless: a resistance reprise rings out from the colonial carceral diaspora. These sisters connect the archipelago of cells with unified resolve, because as Claudia says, ‘‘What is an ocean between us? We know how to build bridges.’’ She wraps her hand around Stella, who connects with Gambo, who finds Jane, who touches Shakiro, who clutches Alyssa, who grips Lucy, who holds Winnie, who clasps Assata when Assata chants:
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.5
Themes: Premonitions of Bodies, Wounds of Ruptures
Methods: Fragments, Archive
References:
[1] Sarah Serai and Cecilia were Mau Mau freedom fighters detained at Kamiti Detention Camp (now Maximum Security Prison) in the 1950s, before the many executions of 1957. Because they were codified as “hardcore Mau Mau women”, they were imagined to be witches, particularly dangerous to the colonial mission (Bruce-Lockhart 2014). Katherine Bruce-Lockhart cites the language of a British newspaper, which referred to Cecilia as “the worst Black” (“The Biggest Women’s Prison in the World,” Sunday Post, June 1956).
[2] Excerpted from To My People. Access the full speech in the autobiography titled Assata (Shakur 1987).
[3] Alyssa’s affidavit can be found under the title MICHAEL JONES, # 420-162 v. SERGEANT JANET PUFFENBARGER, SERGEANT, which was filed in the UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF MARYLAND in 2017.
[4] More information can be found by reading the appeal filed as State v. Castle, 2008-Ohio-4814. However, it misgenders both Hope and Castle and, as it is an attempt to distance Castle from Hope, the narrative does not address any of the state violence experienced. Alyssa Hope is referenced as Michael Jones.
[5]These are the closing lines of the previously referenced speech, “To My People”.
Works Referenced
Achebe, N. (2000). Farmers, traders, warriors and kings: Female power and authority in
Northern Igboland, 1900–1960. University of California, Los Angeles.
--- (2011). The female king of colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe. Indiana University Press.
Davis, A. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete?. New York: Seven Stories Press.
Agunbiade, T. (2021). Hajiya Gambo Sawaba: ‘The most jailed Nigerian female politician’. Al Jazeera News. Accessed on https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/2/15/hajiya-gambo-sawaba-the-most-jailed-nigerian-female-politician
Amadiume, I. (2015). Male daughters, female husbands: Gender and sex in an African society. Zed Books Ltd.
Ashbaugh, C. (2013). Lucy Parsons: An American Revolutionary. Haymarket Books.
Baral, A. (N.D). Girls’ Periods, Political Disillusionment and Activist Anthropology: What is happening to research in Uganda?. Accessed on https://antroperspektiv.org/2017/06/22/girls-periods-political-disillusionment-and-activist-anthropology-what-is-happening-to-research-in-uganda/
Boyce Davies, C. (2007). Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Bruce-Lockhart, K. (2014). “Unsound” minds and broken bodies: the detention of “hardcore” Mau Mau women at Kamiti and Gitamayu Detention Camps in Kenya, 1954–1960. Journal of Eastern African Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4, 590–608.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.
Gilmore, R.W. (2007). Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Univ of California Press.
Hill Collins, P. (1990). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and The Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Hope, A. (2020). Essay to the LGBTQIA Community from August 2020. Accessed Oct 2021, on Patreon.com target="_blank">Patreon.com target="_blank">Patreon.com, Comrade Alyssa.
--- (2021a). Essay on unity and organizing. Accessed Oct 2021, on Patreon.com, Comrade Alyssa.
--- (2021b). Living as a Transgender Woman in a Prison for Cisgender Men. Accessed Oct 2021, on Patreon.com, Comrade Alyssa.
Kaggwa, J. (2011). Intersex: The forgotten constituency. In African sexualities: A reader. Tamale, S. (Ed.). Fahamu/Pambazuka Press.
Kolanyane-Kesupile, K. and John McAllister. (2021). Indigeneity and ‘authenticity’ in African trans* activism. Sexualities. Vol. 24(1–2): 111–130.
Mandikizela-Mandela, W. (2013). 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Mara, J.M. 2013. In Kenya's Mau Mau uprising: Victims tell their stories. BBC News. Accessed on https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22797624
Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.
Nagel, M. (2005). Political Prisoners. In Joseph, S., & Naǧmābādī, A. (Eds.). Encyclopedia of women and Islamic cultures: Family, law and politics (Vol. 3). Amsterdam: Brill. pp. 436-39
--- (2008). Prisons as diasporic sites: Liberatory voices from the diaspora of confinement. Journal of Social Advocacy and Systems Change.
--- (2015). The Case for Penal Abolition and Ludic Ubuntu in Arrow of God. Working Paper. Accessed on https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2231510/component/file2231508/content
Nyanzi, S. (2020). No Roses from My Mouth: Poems from Prison (Political Prisoner Series Book 1). Kampala: Ubuntu Reading Group
Oyěwùmí, O. (1997). The invention of women: Making an African sense of western gender discourses. U of Minnesota Press.
Paquette, D. (2021). She was a transgender social media star in Cameroon. Now she faces five years in prison. Washington Post. Accessed here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/15/shakiro-cameroon-transgender- rights/
Parsons, L. (1886). I am an Anarchist [Speech]. Accessed on https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1886-lucy-parsons-i-am-anarchist/
Pilkington, E. (2019). Move 9 women freed after 40 years in jail over Philadelphia police siege.The Guardian. Accessed on https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/25/move-9- black-radicals-women-freed-philadelphia
Rodriguez, S.M. (forthcoming). Forging Black Safety in the Carceral Diaspora: Perverse Criminalization, Sexual Corrections and Connection-Making in a Death World.
Rosenthal, K. (2011). Lucy Parsons: 'More dangerous than a thousand rioters'. Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal. Accessed on http://links.org.au/node/2480#_ednref50
Saleh-Hanna, V. (2015). Black Feminist Hauntology. Rememory the Ghosts of Abolition?. Champ pénal/Penal field, 12.
Sayers, J.E. (2021). Black Queer Times at Riis: Making Place in a Queer Afrofuturist Tense. Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies. Vol 22.
Shakur, A. (1987). Assata: An Autobiography. London: Zed Books.
Swarr, A.L., Gross, S. and Liesl Theron (2009). South African Intersex Activism: Caster Semenya's Impact and Import. Feminist Studies, 35(3): 657-662.
Were, M.N. (2020). African Political Womanhood in Autobiography: Possible Interpretive Paradigms. Auto/Biography Studies, 35(3): 557-577
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[i] For a cinematic depiction of Black femme refusal, see: SUBTLE GEOGRAPHIES by Anna Sango
[ii] More abolitionist manifestations can be found in: INTERCOMMUNALISM AS ABOLITION: HUEY P NEWTON AND THE POLITICS OF BORDERS by Nivi Manchanda
Methods: Fragments, Archive
References:
[1] Sarah Serai and Cecilia were Mau Mau freedom fighters detained at Kamiti Detention Camp (now Maximum Security Prison) in the 1950s, before the many executions of 1957. Because they were codified as “hardcore Mau Mau women”, they were imagined to be witches, particularly dangerous to the colonial mission (Bruce-Lockhart 2014). Katherine Bruce-Lockhart cites the language of a British newspaper, which referred to Cecilia as “the worst Black” (“The Biggest Women’s Prison in the World,” Sunday Post, June 1956).
[2] Excerpted from To My People. Access the full speech in the autobiography titled Assata (Shakur 1987).
[3] Alyssa’s affidavit can be found under the title MICHAEL JONES, # 420-162 v. SERGEANT JANET PUFFENBARGER, SERGEANT, which was filed in the UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF MARYLAND in 2017.
[4] More information can be found by reading the appeal filed as State v. Castle, 2008-Ohio-4814. However, it misgenders both Hope and Castle and, as it is an attempt to distance Castle from Hope, the narrative does not address any of the state violence experienced. Alyssa Hope is referenced as Michael Jones.
[5]These are the closing lines of the previously referenced speech, “To My People”.
Works Referenced
Achebe, N. (2000). Farmers, traders, warriors and kings: Female power and authority in
Northern Igboland, 1900–1960. University of California, Los Angeles.
--- (2011). The female king of colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe. Indiana University Press.
Davis, A. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete?. New York: Seven Stories Press.
Agunbiade, T. (2021). Hajiya Gambo Sawaba: ‘The most jailed Nigerian female politician’. Al Jazeera News. Accessed on https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/2/15/hajiya-gambo-sawaba-the-most-jailed-nigerian-female-politician
Amadiume, I. (2015). Male daughters, female husbands: Gender and sex in an African society. Zed Books Ltd.
Ashbaugh, C. (2013). Lucy Parsons: An American Revolutionary. Haymarket Books.
Baral, A. (N.D). Girls’ Periods, Political Disillusionment and Activist Anthropology: What is happening to research in Uganda?. Accessed on https://antroperspektiv.org/2017/06/22/girls-periods-political-disillusionment-and-activist-anthropology-what-is-happening-to-research-in-uganda/
Boyce Davies, C. (2007). Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Bruce-Lockhart, K. (2014). “Unsound” minds and broken bodies: the detention of “hardcore” Mau Mau women at Kamiti and Gitamayu Detention Camps in Kenya, 1954–1960. Journal of Eastern African Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4, 590–608.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.
Gilmore, R.W. (2007). Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Univ of California Press.
Hill Collins, P. (1990). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and The Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Hope, A. (2020). Essay to the LGBTQIA Community from August 2020. Accessed Oct 2021, on Patreon.com target="_blank">Patreon.com target="_blank">Patreon.com, Comrade Alyssa.
--- (2021a). Essay on unity and organizing. Accessed Oct 2021, on Patreon.com, Comrade Alyssa.
--- (2021b). Living as a Transgender Woman in a Prison for Cisgender Men. Accessed Oct 2021, on Patreon.com, Comrade Alyssa.
Kaggwa, J. (2011). Intersex: The forgotten constituency. In African sexualities: A reader. Tamale, S. (Ed.). Fahamu/Pambazuka Press.
Kolanyane-Kesupile, K. and John McAllister. (2021). Indigeneity and ‘authenticity’ in African trans* activism. Sexualities. Vol. 24(1–2): 111–130.
Mandikizela-Mandela, W. (2013). 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Mara, J.M. 2013. In Kenya's Mau Mau uprising: Victims tell their stories. BBC News. Accessed on https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22797624
Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.
Nagel, M. (2005). Political Prisoners. In Joseph, S., & Naǧmābādī, A. (Eds.). Encyclopedia of women and Islamic cultures: Family, law and politics (Vol. 3). Amsterdam: Brill. pp. 436-39
--- (2008). Prisons as diasporic sites: Liberatory voices from the diaspora of confinement. Journal of Social Advocacy and Systems Change.
--- (2015). The Case for Penal Abolition and Ludic Ubuntu in Arrow of God. Working Paper. Accessed on https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2231510/component/file2231508/content
Nyanzi, S. (2020). No Roses from My Mouth: Poems from Prison (Political Prisoner Series Book 1). Kampala: Ubuntu Reading Group
Oyěwùmí, O. (1997). The invention of women: Making an African sense of western gender discourses. U of Minnesota Press.
Paquette, D. (2021). She was a transgender social media star in Cameroon. Now she faces five years in prison. Washington Post. Accessed here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/15/shakiro-cameroon-transgender- rights/
Parsons, L. (1886). I am an Anarchist [Speech]. Accessed on https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1886-lucy-parsons-i-am-anarchist/
Pilkington, E. (2019). Move 9 women freed after 40 years in jail over Philadelphia police siege.The Guardian. Accessed on https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/25/move-9- black-radicals-women-freed-philadelphia
Rodriguez, S.M. (forthcoming). Forging Black Safety in the Carceral Diaspora: Perverse Criminalization, Sexual Corrections and Connection-Making in a Death World.
Rosenthal, K. (2011). Lucy Parsons: 'More dangerous than a thousand rioters'. Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal. Accessed on http://links.org.au/node/2480#_ednref50
Saleh-Hanna, V. (2015). Black Feminist Hauntology. Rememory the Ghosts of Abolition?. Champ pénal/Penal field, 12.
Sayers, J.E. (2021). Black Queer Times at Riis: Making Place in a Queer Afrofuturist Tense. Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies. Vol 22.
Shakur, A. (1987). Assata: An Autobiography. London: Zed Books.
Swarr, A.L., Gross, S. and Liesl Theron (2009). South African Intersex Activism: Caster Semenya's Impact and Import. Feminist Studies, 35(3): 657-662.
Were, M.N. (2020). African Political Womanhood in Autobiography: Possible Interpretive Paradigms. Auto/Biography Studies, 35(3): 557-577
[i] For a cinematic depiction of Black femme refusal, see: SUBTLE GEOGRAPHIES by Anna Sango
[ii] More abolitionist manifestations can be found in: INTERCOMMUNALISM AS ABOLITION: HUEY P NEWTON AND THE POLITICS OF BORDERS by Nivi Manchanda
S.M. Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Rights and Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science. A scholar-activist, they have spent the last decade researching queer and racial justice movement-making throughout the African Diaspora and organizing with the Audre Lorde Project in New York City. Their first book, The Economies of Queer Inclusion: Transnational Organizing for LGBTI Rights in Uganda (2019) questioned the effect of transnational activism on the grassroots movement in Uganda for kuchu dignity and safety from state violence. They formerly worked to develop Hofstra University’s programs in critical criminology and LGBTQ+ studies.
︎ @dr_simplicity
︎ @Prof_Rodriguez1
︎ www.smrodriguez.com
︎ @dr_simplicity
︎ @Prof_Rodriguez1
︎ www.smrodriguez.com