Reviews
Ron Jacobs
Looking for Our Nation's Soul: A Review of Kathy Kelly's Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison (Counterpunch/AK Press 2005)
Over the years, I have followed the work of Voices In the Wilderness with interest. How does a group devoted to nonviolent direct action in the spirit of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. function in today's world of protofascist governments and other groups that use violence as a primary means of letting their will be known? How can a small group of dedicated people make a difference in a world where one of those governments can kill and invade at will? What makes the members of groups like this tick?
So, it was with interest and excitement that I read of Voices In the Wilderness member Kathy Kelly's new book, Other Lands Have Dreams. This book is the latest in the collaborative series published by AK Press of Oakland and Counterpunch magazine. Like other books in this series, Kelly's text is a collection of reports and essays she wrote for Counterpunch with some extras added in. Despite the fact that I had read many of these pieces before, the efforts of Kelly and her editors make this book a brand new creation. The essays become more than individual pieces here. This is one of those moments where the sum is truly greater than its parts.
Kelly has lived a life of activism. Part of her inspiration comes from a perception of Jesus as a revolutionary-indeed, a resistance fighter-who identified with the humans left on the side of the road that the Roman Empire took on its march toward world conquest. This view of Christ is obviously quite different from the one provided by the reactionary death worshipers currently interpreting the New Testament for America, but it is the perception that many Christians consider the more truthful. Like the Berrigan brothers and their community, Kathy Kelly and Voices In the Wilderness understands the true spirit of Jesus to be one that opposes mercenary power and the methods those powers utilize to maintain their control.
That is why Kelly put herself in Iraq, Palestine and elsewhere; and it is why the state put her in prison. The connection is quite clear, just as the stories of Kelly's time spent behind bars makes the connection between Washington's wars on working and poor people abroad and Washington's war on its own working and poor. Nowhere does this link become clearer than inside the prison-industrial complex of US prisons. Kelly's short tales about life in prison and life for prisoners is a revealing look at not only who gets sent to prison the most, but also at the lengths that the prison system will go through to dehumanize those prisoners. Unique to Kelly's prison essays is that she is in a US women's prison. Usually prison stories are told by men, since the majority of prisoners are men. Despite the rapid rise in the US female prison population in the past decade, this is still true. Like George Jackson in his collection of writings titled Soledad Brother, Kathy Kelly does not shrink from the truth. Unlike Jackson, she knew that she would be getting out of prison and, most importantly, that she was a white woman, not a black man. Nonetheless, Kelly's observations and critique of prison life are as angry and as insightful as Jackson's.
This book is not heavy on analysis. It doesn't need to be. The reports and essays here provide a truth that too much analysis would only obfuscate, much like the spin spun by the media after every presidential debate, news conference, speech, etc. The text lays bare the ruthless emptiness of a country that rationalizes the deaths of half a million Iraqi children and thinks nothing of ravaging families already torn asunder by drugs and the governments “war” on them. Unlike many leftist writings, this book doesn't let Joe and Josephine Citizen off the hook, either. Kelly not only understands our culpability, she points it out and wonders how this can be turned to action, instead of guilt or apathy.
Part of this dynamic is the psychological aspect of war that demands the dehumanization of the enemy in the eyes of the soldier and the society that sends him there. This process makes it okay for the soldier to commit acts on the enemy population that most of them would never commit at home. In prisons, this process demands that the system strip away as much of a prisoner's human trappings as it can. Kelly's throws the oppressor's psychology back in our faces. Her writing reminds us all of our common humanity and the positive potential of that commonality. Writing like this can be instructive in making the world a better place if enough people read it. That is certainly my hope in encouraging everyone to read this book. Then, act on what you've read.
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