PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program Names The L’Engle/Rahman Prize for Mentorship Winners
IT’S THIS WAY
by Nazim Hikmet
I stand in the advancing light,
my hands hungry, the world beautiful.
My eyes can’t get enough of the trees—
they’re so hopeful, so green.
A sunny road runs through the mulberries,
I’m at the window of the prison infirmary.
I can’t smell the medicines—
carnations must be blooming nearby.
It’s this way:
being captured is beside the point,
the point is not to surrender.
Dear Ones,
In 1968, Ahmad Rahman, a member of the Black Panther Party, was set up in an FBI sting and falsely accused and convicted of murder. He spent twenty-two years in prison. During that time he came into a deep Islamic faith, and earned not only an undergraduate degree, but a PhD as well. He also corresponded with our beloved Madeleine L’Engle.
L’Engle and Rahman were one of the first mentor/mentee pairs through PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing mentorship program which aims to “provide incarcerated writers with access to a wider literary community that understands them as serious artists in their own right and welcomes their contributions.” The two wrote each other dozens of letters from 1976 to 1990.
Reading their letters (or rather listening to them in the wonderful dramatic reading below) is a fascinating experience. Here are two people from very different walks of life, yet similar in their determination, their honesty, and their fierce belief in themselves, their stories, and their writing.
There were two moments in their revealed correspondence I found especially profound, and sharply relevant all these years later. The first was when L’Engle asked Rahman what he would like her to call him.
“Would you rather have me call you by the name on the photograph? Amilcar? Names are very important to me, and I feel that our names are one of the greatest gifts we can give each other.”
“Yes. I do prefer that you call me by my real name, Ahmad Amilcar Rahman Sundiata. My friends call me Amilcar.”
“Thank you for giving me your name. I give you mine: Madeleine.”
This Naming felt especially powerful to me, not only because it connected reality to fantasy, evoking Meg’s Naming of Mr. Jenkins in A Wind in the Door, but also because Rahman had changed his name when he converted to Islam. In affirming it, L’Engle also affirmed his faith as an integral part of his identity. I don’t know whether L’Engle ever knew transgender or nonbinary folks, who chose a name for themselves more true than the one they were given, but this exchange makes me think she would have wanted to know their true, chosen name, and would have taken that name, also, as a gift.
Another moment, for me, that speaks across the years is when Rahman critiques parts of L’Engle’s book, The Other Side of the Sun, specifically her depiction of Black characters in a book set in the American South in the early 1900s. After explaining the parts he doesn’t like, Rahman adds,
“But you mean well. That’s what gets me. I mean you mean so well. And all the condescending passages are unintentional. You just didn’t know how to express what you wanted, and what definitely needed to be expressed. If there’s one thing I deeply want you to gain from my friendship, it is the ability to express your ideas and feelings about this swirl of racial conflicts in a fashion that puts to use your considerable gifts for the good you strive to do.”
L’Engle responds simply, with gratitude and without defensiveness.
“Well, you’re teaching me a lot. I don’t think I want to ‘mean well.’ The road to hell is paved with good intentions…Don’t ever hesitate to push me into wider and deeper thinking.”
As a writer myself, and also a white woman, I can say that my writing and my striving to not be racist are probably the two subjects most difficult to receive critique on with equanimity. But how often in the last few years have we seen the damage that can be done when white women handle critique poorly, using their tears to gain sympathy, and insisting that they meant well and that intention matters more than the effect of their words and actions?
But L’Engle doesn’t react defensively – or if she does, she deals with it on her own and doesn’t ask Rahman to pamper her. She wants to be a better writer, and she wants to be a better person, so she welcomes Rahman’s critique, and thanks him. What a great example for us in 2020 of allowing ourselves to be “called in” to anti-racism work, rather than feeling “called out” by honest critique.
***
In September, 2020, Pen America announced the first class of the L’Engle/Rahman Prize for Mentorship, named in honor of their friendship and underwritten by L’Engle’s family. The prize honors four mentor/mentee pairs in PEN America’s longstanding prison writing mentorship program, which links established writers with those currently incarcerated. Hundreds of mentor/mentee pairs participate in the program every year, and these four have been chosen as modeling the ideal of the program. Those chosen,
“…exhibit the spirit of the L’Engle-Rahman exchange—committed and consistent communication, feedback that honors the writer’s intention and unique voice while being open and honest in rigorous critique, and a demonstrated dialogue between both writers on craft and intellectual ideas.”
You can read the fascinating essays of the four pairs of winners here.
As I read them, I was struck by how different all eight individuals were, and how different each pair’s chemistry as partners. Benjamin Frandsen and Noelia Cerna offered each other intellectual camaraderie and emotional grounding. Elizabeth Hawes and Jeffrey James Keyes dug into the nuts and bolts of writing and producing a play. Derek Trumbo and Agustín Lopez created space for frightening words to be fearlessly shaped into stories. Seth Wittner and Katrinka (Kei) Moore united in their belief of the power of writing, both in poetry and in prose.
But one theme that was common in each of their stories was that the mentors learned as much from the mentees as the other way around. These are creative, constructive relationships between individuals who are all imperfect, but all striving to create something worthwhile, something beautiful and true, out of their experiences and their lives, to push forward through the past and the present, and to create the future with their own pens.
As the Turkish poet and political prisoner, Nazim Hikmet, wrote,
“It’s this way:
being captured is beside the point,
the point is not to surrender.”
Tesser well,
Jessica
