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Volume 6, Number 1 - Fall 2007
Never Forgetting
reflections
by Marcy Schwartz
Remembering, says the narrator in Lourdes Vázquez’s story, “Conversación en un bar,” “is a sort of necessary theater to which one turns in order to settle accounts.” (“El recuerdo es una especie de teatro necesario al que hay que recurrir para rendir cuentas.”)
Much of the discussion in our sessions draws on memory as we seek to validate participants’ life experiences. Most of my work with the program takes place at Yardville Correctional Facility, a medium security prison in central New Jersey.
For prisoners, memories’ bittersweet flavor has extra intensity. Memories of the children, wives and girlfriends they have left behind bring fears that the inmates will be forgotten or rejected by the time they return home.
As they recount memories of their court hearings, their sentencing, or their first night in jail, what emerges is pain, isolation and despair.
While discussing a passage in a story that described a character’s nervous habits, we turned to body language, gestures and physical sensations of stress. One said he remembered that the day he was sentenced, he “wasn’t hungry or thirsty, didn’t feel hot or cold.”
In another discussion around memories, I expected the participants to express their desire to forget prison life. Nevertheless, another surprise awaited me. One participant said that, once he is free, he will do everything in his power to think about prison every day, in order to never forget and never return.