asha bandele: One Mother's Perspective
"Every day we [as a nation] choose prisons,
we don't choose children or ourselves."
I have long admired asha bandele's writing, so there was much I
wanted to ask her. However, because I wanted to keep the focus on
children of incarcerated parents, I painstakingly prepared questions
ahead of time. I reread her books, reviewed interviews she had given,
and located articles written so long ago that bandele herself had
probably forgotten all about them! Yet I needn't have worried; bandele
is thoughtful and earnest, a good listener and just as eager to provide
others with the benefit of her myriad and intelligent musings. As a
result, at a certain point during our conversation, I put aside my
questions and just listened.
In The Prisoner's Wife: A Memoir (Pocket Books, 1999),
bandele narrates her relationship with the man who would become her
husband: Rashid. Though when she met him Rashid had already spent nine
years in prison, bandele would "do" several more years with him as
his wife and the mother of their child. Ultimately, Rashid was released
and deported to his native Guyana, where he lives today. In Something
Like Beautiful: One Single Mother's Story (Collins, 2009), bandele
tells readers about the deportation notice that changed her life, and
spends some time describing her visits to Rashid, but mostly this is a
story about raising a daughter as a single parent in New York. Again,
since the focus of this issue is children of incarcerated parents,
bandele and I spoke primarily about incarceration and the impact it has
on children and families.
MS: In Something Like Beautiful, one of your chapters
is appropriately titled "Statistics Don't Tell the Story, the Story
Tells the Story." You want readers to consider the role of storytelling,
but you also mean that statistics—whether about single parents or people
in prison—do not alone tell us very much. Nevertheless, your story
speaks to what many families of people in prison endure: the indignity
of visiting, worries about transportation to and from prison, paying for
collect calls, etc. Your story is unique, but it resonates with other
women (and men) who travel to visit spouses in prison. Can you speak to
these specific effects of incarceration on a family?
ab: What we so seldom talk about is the shift that takes place
between being a prisoner's wife and becoming a wife and mother,
particularly with respect to finances. Before a woman has a child, she
is going to visit her husband in prison, and she makes certain choices.
After she has a child, she has to consider who is going without. When
you make a choice to travel as a wife, you may go without in order to
pay the expenses needed to travel to prison, to visit, etc. When you
have a child, you are not the only one going without. In addition to the
financial impact, we don't talk about the energy it takes from a mother.
You may have a woman who works five days a week, and then on the sixth
day she goes to visit the prison, and on the seventh she has to do
laundry, etc. There is so much having a child entails.
For my child, the effects [of her father's incarceration] were
blunted, because I come from a functioning family and community. Yet
even then you can't get away from the impact of a parent's incarceration
on a child. When she was three years old, Nisa asked me not to tell
people her Daddy was in prison. [bandele laughs] I told her that cat's
outta the bag, sweetie! There were also times she wanted to prove to
others that she had a Daddy who was alive and in her life.
The greatest challenge is to raise a child; it takes a community
effort. Yet what do we do?: we leave women alone, and then we take away
community resources. It's not natural; nowhere else in the world do we
expect women, or even men, to raise children alone. Yet here [in the
United States] it's the norm. We see these incredible stories on
television; a woman braves the cold and raises six children alone and in
poverty and they all end up going to Harvard. This becomes the standard!
In reality, nobody is supposed to do this alone. I have a lot of
support, especially when compared with the other women, urban black
women who are not particularly wealthy and whose partners are in prison.
I have a lot of privilege; I mean one of my friends is one of the top
doctors in the world. Yet I still wake up shaking. Women do not have an
outlet where they can say how hard all this is and how hard it is to go
through a prison. Something in you shuts down when you visit a prison.
When you shut down one thing, you have to wonder what else gets shut
down. That's why I stopped visiting the prison. Although at the time my
daughter was only two years old, I knew that a critical time period for
children was these first years, and I did not want Nisa to see me
shutting down and acquiescing to all the bullshit you have to acquiesce
to when you visit a prison. Before I had a child, I stood up for myself
in the face of the prison, but afterward I couldn't take the chance, and
finally, I did not want my daughter to see this. This was the larger
imperative: I didn't want to be shut down for or in front of my
child.
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