Visit The Prisoner

This is excerpted from a Chapter from the Book, Sweet New Style: Brunetto Latino, Dante Alighieri and Geoffrey Chaucer, created, 1993; ‘Sweet New Style’ e-book Website created, Pentecost 2003

On October 15, 1981, four Dante scholars, William Stephany, Rachel Jacoff, William E. Gohlman and myself, gathered at Attica Correctional Facility at the invitation of the State University of New York’s University College of Arts and Sciences at Geneseo and the Genesee Community College’s education program. Ronald Herzman and William Cook noted in their introduction to the Conference, titled Learning in Exile: Dante in Attica, held to commemorate the Attica Prison Riot of 1971, that this was a unique event in the histories of prisons and academia. The four of us talked on different aspects of Dante to an audience of Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans for the most part, a third of whom were murderers. We were searched at the entry of the prison. We walked to the lecture hall through a multitude of gates that had to be specially unlocked by guards. It was as if we were in the landscape of Dante’s poem.

My paper, “Boethius the Prisoner, Dante the Exile,” was the second to be given. As you read its words, imagine yourself not in your comfortable study chair but instead as in its audience, composed of young “lifers,” who are in the prison’s college program, in a room with bars on the windows, with uniformed guards, many of them surprisingly, women, and also surprisingly, all of them unarmed, standing behind you, and resenting the fact that you have the privilege of hearing this lecture. (Guards with machine guns man the Gothic-styled Disneyesque outer towers of the prison, but since the Riot, guards on the floor of the main prison, which is built like a Romanesque dungeon and fortress, are never armed.) The lecture will be interrupted by walkie-talkie’s noisy commands and guards calling out individual inmates’ numbers, not names, who will momentarily stiffen in resistence, then obey, and leave the room.

I should actually like to begin with a story that happened in Italy, in Rome. I was there when it happened. The Italian Cardinals had elected an old man to be Pope, thinking that he would die soon and wouldn’t be a nuisance. Pope John XXIII, however, was of peasant stock, the kind of person who would take the Christian Gospel very literally. One morning, and I heard them, the Italians in Rome were saying to each other: “Do you know what the Pope did this morning?” “He went to Regina Coeli prison and visited the prisoners.” The Regina Coeli prison means the Prison of the Queen of Heaven, of the Virgin Mary, a beautiful name, like Attica, for a terrible place. The Romans were delighted at what he had done. The Pope’s actions, which obeyed Christ’s command in the Gospel that Christians visit prisoners, seemed to say that even the most sinful had the chance of being forgiven by the most holy, and this made everyone happy that morning, everyone could forgive themselves. A much loved photograph of Pope John XXIII shows him with a striped-pajama’d prisoner of Rome’s Regina Coeli Prison

Diane Fausel