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A few years ago, the writer Nikki Giovani gave me some tips for writing about the lives of public figures; Most of them I understood and noted in a notebook. However, one of them even intrigued me: "If you receive a letter from someone in prison, make sure you answer." I felt confused but also guilty. I had received a correspondence with the address of the sender in a penitentiary and I had not responded. "Do it," he said to me. "You do not know how much a letter means to someone in jail.You can not imagine what they have to do to get just the stamp."
Since then, I've followed this advice, but sometimes it is not possible to answer. Once, in a reading club at Rikers Prison, a man told me that he did not want to reveal his name or identity card because he did not want to to be disappointed not to receive a letter. Those of us who live freely in the era of digital communications often take email for granted. However, for those who are imprisoned, it is the best way to contact a company that has excluded them.
Nelson Mandela was from November 7, 1962, to February 11, 1990, a political prisoner in South Africa; imprisoned for his role as leader of the African National Congress and his struggle against the apartheid regime. Four years after his departure, he was elected president. And today, almost five years after his death at age 95, his legacy as one of the most distinguished and influential freedom fighters of the twentieth century is undeniable. But we still do not know much about the man
In Robben Island Prison, where Mandela was being held, people had to sit in the yard and take in gravel. Credit Cloete Breytenbach / Daily Express
As prisoners from around the world, Mandela wrote letters: hundreds of them, each an abbreviated autobiography. They were collected in a forthcoming book, The Prison Letters by Nelson Mandela, which includes more than 250 letters, more than half of which have never been published. In a way, these letters balance the pedestal on which his figure has been erected since 1990, because they allude to a complicated humanity. I do not mean "humanity" as if I say "with faults". The prison letters do not reveal defects in the foundations of their faith or their commitment to justice; the messages to his family, friends, colleagues, elected officials and prison administrators reveal that Mandela is just as vulnerable as any other human being.
Mandela's letters, especially those to his family . , reveal that even the most commendable cause does not inoculate anyone in the throes of separation.
Prison is an environment of deprivation. Those who are incarcerated live without healthy food, comfortable beds, adequate health care or the freedom of movement that many of us who have never been behind bars take for granted. They are subjected to strong violence, as if their belief invalidates the legal protections that they must have. These gaps are difficult, but Mandela's writings point to another source of violence in isolation: jailed humans are stripped of their families.
When he was captive, Mandela was like Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and other leaders. who fought against racism and colonialism. However, only in his cell, it was also like an international group about which there is little talk: the opponents of North Korea, the women in Arizona who have to give birth to the hands and feet in handcuffs and the migrant children in North Korea. cage on the southern border. United States
Our humanity is born of the most intimate relationships. Mandela's prison letters, especially those addressed to his family, reveal that even the most laudable cause inoculates no one before the agony of separation. Mandela was allowed occasional visits. Those of Winnie Mandela, his wife, were very restricted. His daughters could not see him until he was 16 years old. Visits, while valuable, were also ephemeral, but these letters provided a tangible link with their loved ones. For the duration of their imprisonment, their captors even censored some of the missives; Noting the strength and comfort that he received from these sheets of paper, it is surprising that the prison authorities allowed him to have mail, period.
Although there are limits to what a paper and a pen can achieve. When Mandela's son, Thembi, died in a car accident, the South African was banned from going to the funeral, and the prison deprived him of key years of his daughters. In a letter written to Zenani, one of them, shortly after his twelfth birthday, reminds him of a brief meeting that he had nearly ten years ago while he was there. was hiding and living far from home. "In a corner you found my clothes, you picked it up, you gave it to me and you asked me to go home, you held my hand for a long time, pulling it almost desperately while you ask me to come back. "
This recount suggests another function of the cards: to make their memories tangible. She wanted to remind her 12 year old daughter that he loved her, but also the love that she had, at age 2, for her missing father. Winnie Mandela was also in prison for a brief period when she was pregnant with Zenani and Mandela also reminded her that she is one of the few people who has been behind bars since her birth.
Mandela tell a story that goes beyond his words. The book includes several images of the pages, in which the letter is cautious but crowded, as if it wanted to include more words than can be on a piece of paper. Perhaps he wanted to take care of the rations of paper and ink that he had, although he also seemed to want to bridge words that brought him back from prison to the house where his wife and her children were waiting for her.
We chose to celebrate the ability to forgive Mandela without thinking too much about what he had to forgive. And these letters remind us of the price of their freedom.
The words overflow pages, and yet there is a disturbing feeling that it does not express everything. Mandela wrote the letters knowing that they were going to be censored. Several times, he asks about previous missives that may have been intercepted or destroyed. On August 1, 1979, he wrote to Winnie, "May I assume that you did not receive my letter of July 1? How to explain this strange silence at a time when the contact between us is so vital? "
He probably suspected that the letters would also be read by people all over the world.This lack of intimacy is a loss of intimacy at the center of the relationships that support us. "There are problems in life where third parties, no matter who they are, should not be able to participate." Although he has been able to show thousands of unspoken words. writes: "I suspect that with the photo you expected to direct a special message that no word can express. I want you to know that I have it. "
The Mandela that so many have venerated since his triumphant liberation in 1990 is an elderly but elegant politician, intelligent and approachable and, above all, brave and resilient.His gray hair and smiling face, his fist clenched as a sign of past troubles , have supplanted the image of a much younger man who appeared before a court in 1962 in a cloak made of jackal skin, when the raised fist was a more immediate message of a challenge. the promise of dismantling apartheid not only angered the illegitimate white government of South Africa, but also governments such as Ronald Reagan in the United States. United, who called it a terrorist.
In a way, we chose to celebrate Mandela's forgiveness without thinking too much about what he had to forgive, and these letters remind us of the price of their When he left, Ma Ndela has been received with state dinners and parades, and he is happy to see that a hero is justly rewarded. However, the fall of apartheid and even the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize (which he shared with South African President FW de Klerk) did not allow him to regain what he had lost : decades of intimacy with a young family growing up in his absence.
Separating someone close to him is the clearest expression of the power of a state over his people. I can not help thinking, reading Mandela's daughter begging her to return home, to the crying children on the southern border of the United States. I understand that I want to focus on Mandela's civility and eloquence in these difficult times. How can one think that a man forms philosophies so generous and so brilliant in the face of cruelty and injustice? Mandela was unique. How many times in a generation does a giant walk among us with brio and courage that is guided by an immobile moral compass?
But it would not be fair with Mandela's memory to celebrate what sets him apart from other people who suffer less. To honor Mandela, we must remember him as a man; one of the millions of incarcerated people who are separated from their families and deprived of their basic rights.
In a letter to his son, Mandela wrote: "Those who want to eliminate poverty from this planet they must use other weapons, other than kindness." is acting urgently against the very structure of social injustice. You are right. Although anyone who reads the collection of his letters will also find the power of the little touches that remain in a paper and are kept in an envelope, something that, to say of a letter from Mandela, has the power to "break through". Huge doors "of iron and dark stone walls to bring to the cell the splendor and warmth of spring. "
Someone, in a cell – in your city, in a detention center at the border, in a country you do not know … is waiting for a letter
………
* Tayari Jones is Professor of English Literature at Emory University and author of the novel "An American Marriage", about a couple separated by prison
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