An Approximation of Resilience
BY ALEX KETLEY
Anne Huang
Ja’Moon Jones in An Approximation of Resilience
DURING THE YEARS I spent caring for my dying father, I was struck that if he had not had my family he would have been alone in this final transition. From that awareness I became a hospice volunteer and was about to embark on a performance project called Still Witness , which had the intention of exploring our country’s com- plicated relationship with dying. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, our planet was struck by a global pandemic and I found myself quarantined at home. I still felt the need to work, and this concern around people’s loneliness was still
deeply in me. I have also long been concerned about our carceral system, so taking those two together, in the mid- dle of the night I went on the website Write-A-Prisoner and began looking through the profiles. I came across the pro- file of Bill Clark, an artist and death row inmate who con- veyed that his writing practice was the salvation from what he described as a soul-crushing loneliness. For the individu- als on death row at San Quentin, they are only allowed out of their 4-foot by 9-foot cells for 12 hours a week. I awk- wardly wrote a one-page letter to Bill saying hello, and two
weeks later received a beautiful eight-page handwritten let- ter in response. That began a friendship that has been one of the most impacting of my life, and a collaborative rela- tionship that has changed me immeasurably. For dance to feel necessary, I need to place my body in direct relationship with the communities I am concerned about. My friendship with Bill has given me a window into incarceration no amount of reading could compare with. At San Quentin, Bill and I met weekly in what can only be described as a glorified dog kennel. We were both
locked in a tiny cage for three hours while being circled by guards. San Quentin is also like a medieval castle set against the most beautiful views of the San Francisco Bay, views that the inmates can’t see because the win- dows have never been cleaned so nearly no light shines through them. Bill has not seen moonlight in the span of his 33 years of incarceration. He also shared that if you care about an article of personal clothing you wash it in your toilet, otherwise it will be stolen by the general population’s laundry service. And despite how horrific
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