When I first arrived at Groot Drakenstein Prison I saw fifteen prisoners, reduced to a brutal sameness by the orange or the blue uniforms, by the obedient way in which incarcerated men shuffled from one place to another at the order of a guard, by my own fear of them. Nine months later, I have piles of handwritten stories and poetry on my desk. The paper carries with it the unique smell of the prison: a dusty grey hopelessness of lives turned to ash. It turns the stomach. And yet the writing speaks to me of a quiet heroism. These fifteen men turned up at the page, so to speak, every day. They resisted the inertia that creeps into the bones and turns one's knees to water when one thinks of twenty-five, thirty years in the same small scrap of space and wrote. That slow, carefully accumulated effort has produced this book. Writing demands that one go to the dark places of the mind and face them. The writing in this collection speaks of the places and experiences rarely glimpsed, rarely represented in our fractured and violent society. Evident in many of the pieces is a reaching back for lost goodness and terrible grief for that lost self, for that other life not lived.
