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    Erasing Frankenstein: Remaking the Monster, A Public Humanities Prison Arts Project
    Erasing Frankenstein: Remaking the Monster, A Public Humanities Prison Arts Project
    Erasing Frankenstein: Remaking the Monster, A Public Humanities Prison Arts Project
    Ebook534 pages4 hours

    Erasing Frankenstein: Remaking the Monster, A Public Humanities Prison Arts Project

    By Elizabeth Effinger

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    About this ebook

    Who gets to write poetry? Whose voices are made public? Whose voices are heeded?


    Erasing Frankenstein showcases a creative exchange between federally incarcerated women and members of the prison education think tank Walls to Bridges Collective at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario, and graduate and undergraduate students from the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. Working collaboratively by long-distance mail, the artists and contributors made the first-ever poetic adaptation of Frankenstein, turning it into a book-length erasure poem, I or Us. An example of “found art,” an erasure poem is created by erasing or blacking out words in an existing text; what is left is the poem. The title reflects the nature of the project: participants have worked as “I”’s, each creating their own erased pages, but together worked as an “us” to create a collaged “monster” of a book.


    Erasing Frankenstein presents the original erasure poem I or Us alongside reflections from participants on the experience.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilfrid Laurier University Press
    Release dateJul 23, 2024
    ISBN9781771126199
    Erasing Frankenstein: Remaking the Monster, A Public Humanities Prison Arts Project

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      Book preview

      Erasing Frankenstein - Elizabeth Effinger

      : A cover page titled, 'Erasing Frankenstein: Remaking the monster, a public humanities prison arts project'. A Global Certified Accessible Benetech label is positioned to the top right corner. The editor name, Elizabeth Effinger is positioned at the bottom right corner. The cover page features colorful horizontal bars arranged from top to bottom in the background.

      Erasing Frankenstein

      Life Writing Series

      Wilfrid Laurier University Press’s Life Writing series celebrates life writing as both genre and critical practice. As a home for innovative scholarship in theory and critical practice, the series embraces a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, from literary criticism and theory to autoethnography and beyond, and encourages intersectional approaches attentive to the complex interrelationships between gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and more. In its commitment to life writing as genre, the series incorporates a range of life writing practices and welcomes creative scholarship and hybrid forms. The Life Writing series recognizes the diversity of languages, and the effects of such languages on life writing practices within the Canadian context, including the languages of migration and translation. As such, the series invites contributions from voices and communities who have been under- or misrepresented in scholarly work.

      Series editors:

      Marlene Kadar, York University

      Sonja Boon, Memorial University

      Erasing Frankenstein

      Remaking the Monster, A Public Humanities Prison Arts Project

      Elizabeth Effinger, editor

      The logo of WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS. The text in the vertical dark ellipse is W L U P 50. The website, w l u press dot w l u dot c a, is given below.Logo of Laurier with the tagline, “Inspiring Lives.”

      This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Funding provided by the Government of Ontario and the Ontario Arts Council. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

      The official logos of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Ontario, and the Ontario Arts Council.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Title: Erasing Frankenstein : remaking the monster, a public humanities prison arts project / edited by Elizabeth Effinger.

      Names: Effinger, Elizabeth, editor. | Adaptation of (work): Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851. Frankenstein.

      Series: Life writing series.

      Description: Series statement: Life writing series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230590586 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230590705 | ISBN 9781771126182 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771126199 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781771126205 (PDF)

      Subjects: LCSH: University of New Brunswick. | CSH: Canadian poetry (English)—21st century. | CSH: Prisoners’ writings, Canadian (English)—Ontario—Kitchener. | CSH: College verse, Canadian (English)—New Brunswick—Fredericton. | LCSH: University of New Brunswick. | LCGFT: Erasure poetry. | LCGFT: Adaptations.

      Classification: LCC PS8600 .E73 2024 | DDC C811/.6—dc23

      Cover design by Martyn Schmoll. Interior design by Aldo Fierro.

      © 2024 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

      Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

      www.wlupress.wlu.ca

      Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyrighted material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll-free to 1–800–893–5777.

      Wilfrid Laurier University Press is located on the Haldimand Tract, part of the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabe, and Neutral Peoples. This land is part of the Dish with One Spoon Treaty between the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe Peoples and symbolizes the agreement to share, to protect our resources, and not to engage in conflict. We are grateful to the Indigenous Peoples who continue to care for and remain interconnected with this land. Through the work we publish in partnership with our authors, we seek to honour our local and larger community relationships, and to engage with the diversity of collective knowledge integral to responsible scholarly and cultural exchange.

      Contents

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction

      Meet the Monster

      I or Us by the Erasing Frankenstein Collective

      Elizabeth Effinger in collaboration with Sue Sinclair

      I or Us

      The Erasing Frankenstein Collective

      Chapter 1

      The Harms of Incarceration and the Transformative Potentiality of Art

      Reflections from Experiential Knowledge

      Nyki Kish

      Chapter 2

      Harm Asks Questions of Me

      On the Practice and Ethics of Erasure Poetry

      Sue Sinclair

      Chapter 3

      The Composite Art and Carceral Aesthetics of I or Us

      Elizabeth Effinger

      Chapter 4

      Embracing the Workshop of Filthy Creation

      Frankenstein, Failure, and the Public Humanities

      Elizabeth Effinger

      Afterword

      Mark A. McCutcheon

      Further Reading

      Annotated List of Erasure Poems

      Notes

      Bibliography

      Index

      Acknowledgements

      Thanks to all the incarcerated and non-incarcerated participants of the Erasing Frankenstein Collective who cannot be named but without whom this project would not have been possible.

      This project has benefited from many individuals and organizations. I especially wish to thank Sue Sinclair and Jeannie Bail at the University of New Brunswick, Shoshana Pollack and Tori Poe at Walls to Bridges, the Walls to Bridges Collective, and Peter Stuart at the Grand Valley Institution for Women for energetically welcoming this collaboration. I acknowledge the generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Walls to Bridges, the Grand Valley Institution for Women, the University of New Brunswick, Broadview Press, and The Fiddlehead.

      For research and exhibition assistance, thanks to Shauna Deathe, Kendra Guidolin, Julianna Hallett, Colin Johnson, Lauren Korn, Niwar Obaid, and Ella Ratz. For help with the images, thanks to Jamie MacKenzie and Mike Meade. For permission to erase and for the donation of copies to incarcerated participants, thanks to Brett McLenithan and Broadview Press. For the careful unbinding and rebinding of I or Us, thanks to James MacIntosh.

      Thanks to the Fredericton Public Library and the Kitchener Public Library for their support in hosting free public exhibitions of the artwork from this project. Thanks to the Prison for Women’s Memorial Collective for inviting some of this artwork to appear in the Art of Survival exhibition at Kingston’s PumpHouse Museum in summer of 2023.

      I am immensely appreciative of my contributors, each of whom offers a different lens through which to better understand this project. Thanks to Duke University Press for granting permission to reproduce chapter 4, originally published as Elizabeth Effinger, Embracing the ‘Workshop of Filthy Creation’: Frankenstein, Failure, and the Public Humanities, in Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture vol. 22, no. 2, (2022), pp. 229–52.

      Thank you to Wilfrid Laurier University Press, especially Siobhan McMenemy for such unflagging enthusiasm for the project and professional expertise, Murray Tong for his work on the content of this book, and the design team for coming up with such a great erasure poetry-inspired cover. I am also grateful to the two external readers for this project, and while I couldn’t follow all their leads, the book is stronger from their thoughtful input.

      For their love and support, thanks to my family—Ed, Mary, and Christopher Effinger, and the entire Simpson clan—and my dearest friends, Michelle Coupal, Kishanie Jayasundera, and Terry and Priscilla Pickhaver.

      And, for filling every day with love, thanks to my girls, Lucy and Libby Hobbs, whose fort building, roaring laughter, and sweet cuddles make the moments between the writing great fun; my four-legged loves, Langley and Shirley, who have warmed my feet and my lap as I wrote this book; and my wife, Vicky Simpson, whose tenderness and brilliance electrify me, and whose support has helped me stitch this monster together.

      Introduction

      MEET THE MONSTER

      I or Us by the Erasing Frankenstein Collective

      Elizabeth Effinger in collaboration with Sue Sinclair

      Who gets to write poetry? Whose voices are made public? Whose voices are heeded? These are questions at the heart of the Erasing Frankenstein Collective (EFC). This experiment in collective authorship weaves many different voices together with that of Mary Shelley, our source author and central voice. The project Erasing Frankenstein includes incarcerated and non-incarcerated members of the Walls to Bridges Collective (W2BC)—an organization dedicated to providing educational opportunities for incarcerated people—as well as students and recent alumni from the University of New Brunswick (UNB). Together, participants have performed a book-length erasure of Shelley’s Frankenstein. The project was initiated by the writers of this introduction, Elizabeth Effinger and Sue Sinclair, both professors in the Department of English at the University of New Brunswick on Wolastoqiyik Territory.¹ We offer here a history of the project and the motivations underpinning its inception, while acknowledging that this perspective is but one on a project that involved multiple participants, partners, and publics—it is this multiplicity that generated the need for the several framing texts that are integrated into this publication of I or Us.

      Erasurists create poems by taking words away: one begins with a source text (in our case Frankenstein), then paints over, blots out, or somehow erases selected words. The words that remain are the poem.² Our title, for instance, I or Us, is an erasure of Shelley’s original title: Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus. The title reflects the nature of our project: participants have worked as I’s, each creating our own erased pages, but together we have also worked as an us creating a collaged monster of a book. The practice of erasure raises obvious political questions—who is erasing whose words, how, and why?—which we will delve into in what follows.

      GROUNDWORK AND BACKGROUND

      The project unfolded in two parts across both distance and time. While participation was a mandatory assignment for most of the UNB students, it was strictly voluntary for the incarcerated EFC members, many of whom had prior experience in a classroom setting with university students through W2BC courses, and others who simply had a general interest in creative writing. The project began with our W2BC members, who each erased several pages and mailed them to UNB. Their UNB partners responded by erasing subsequent pages. The completed text alternates between W2BC and UNB voices. Apart from creating the gaps that would allow this interweaving of voices from separate institutional communities, pages were distributed randomly (although the group did accommodate one request to erase page 101, in which a female character, Justine, is unjustly accused of murder). The book was physically taken apart in order to distribute the pages, which were transformed by hand; they were then carefully stitched back into an us, a process that recalls Shelley’s Creature’s own assemblage from a variety of parts. Rebound, the variegated and delightfully crinkly pages create a one-of-a-kind book, a Creaturely homage, whose facsimile you hold in your hands.

      The groundwork for this project began in fall 2017 when project facilitators travelled from UNB to the Grand Valley Institution for Women (GVI) in Kitchener, Ontario. There we offered an in-prison workshop for W2BC participants. For one three-hour evening workshop, we sat in a classroom, in a circle, discussing Frankenstein and trying our hands at erasure poetry. Circle pedagogy is an essential part of Walls to Bridges learning; it involves campus-based students and criminalized students learning with and from one another within the shared space of the circle. As one formerly incarcerated Walls to Bridges member, Rachel Fayter, writes, it is an egalitarian circle pedagogy that emphasizes respectful dialogue, experiential learning, and shared inquiry. In a ‘circle of trust’ we speak our own truth, while listening receptively to the truth of others, using simple personal testimony without affirming or negating other speakers.³ The circle also helps keep each participant equal, reducing the traditional structural hierarchy of the classroom with professors as sole knowledge-keepers.

      Copies of the novel had been sent to W2BC members months earlier, allowing ample time for members to read and sit with the novel. Acting as facilitators rather than talking-head lecturers, we led the circle in a roundtable discussion, whose aim was to listen to Mary Shelley to consider her themes and diction, looking to see what background cues and concerns might become foregrounded through judicious removal of text. We offered some contextual information on Shelley and the historical period of the novel, including the longer tradition of associating monstrous powers with the female imagination, and we guided the class through the Prefaces to the 1818 and 1831 editions—the latter of which marks Shelley’s ownership of her hideous progeny.⁴ Even this claiming of the Creature by his author, however, is marked by ambivalent language; even here he cannot entirely shake off the linguistic forms of disavowal and abuse he has endured within the narrative. He is never given a proper name by Victor Frankenstein and is instead assaulted with pejorative epithets ranging from Devil and Fiend to Vile insect and Daemon.

      The dehumanizing experience of the Creature resonates with the lived experience of Fayter, who was incarcerated at the GVI, and is now completing a PhD in criminology. She writes:

      From my perspective, the entire experience of incarceration prevents people from being more fully human. We are forced through a confusing and unjust system in which verdicts are influenced by money, power, and various lawyers’ interpretations of the law. Everything we know and love is taken from us; we are separated from our families, friends, and communities; we are herded like cattle, numbered and counted like economic products, and locked up like wild animals. . . . Everything we say and do is recorded by our handlers, and used to classify and place us. We are seen as ‘inmates’ (rather than citizens), known primarily by our Fingerprint Section (FPS) number and do what those in power believe is best for us. We have no voice, no choice and no identity outside that of ‘criminal.’⁵

      Frankenstein was chosen as a source text not only because 2018 was the two hundredth anniversary of its publication, but also because one of its commonly overlooked themes is imprisonment; no fewer than six of the novel’s characters are impacted by imprisonment.⁶ This neglected theme is highlighted by the erasure of page 97, titled On Prison, which works with Shelley’s text to provide a heartbreaking indictment of the prison industrial complex: go, mourn and weep for the eternal lack of love in this place.

      The prison industrial complex is the enmeshment of business and government interests. Its purpose is profit and social control. Its public rationale is the fight against crime.⁷ It is a collection of social structures, systems, and policies—including institutional racism, the War on Drugs, and mass incarceration—that work together to confine and imprison people,⁸ including a disproportionately high number of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour across North America, a phenomenon we will discuss in more detail below. However, as Stephen J. Hartnett reminds us, the prison-industrial complex does not house monsters but humans.⁹

      At the GVI, the core of our lively discussion was driven by an interest in interrogating this concept of monstrosity: Who or what is the monster in the novel? The Creature himself calls his supposed monstrosity into question: Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?¹⁰ Some participants in the circle identified Victor Frankenstein as the monster for abandoning the Creature; another participant noted it was the men behaving badly in this text that otherwise empties itself, in various violent ways, of its women; while another participant noticed what she called the injustice system (a system that wrongly sentences a woman, Justine, for a crime she didn’t commit) as the bigger monster lurking in the background.

      THE INJUSTICE SYSTEM

      This injustice system lurks not only in Shelley’s novel; it stalks real lives in insidious ways. We know, for example, that Black and Indigenous people are the unfair targets of police profiling and brutality, receive stricter sentencing, and are also disproportionately represented in North American prisons. Within the Canadian system, over 30 percent of prisoners are Indigenous, and nearly 10 percent are Black. The numbers change even more dramatically when we consider the demographics of women in Canadian federal prisons: Indigenous women account for 42 percent of the incarcerated population. Provincial rates across the country can be even worse. As Ivan Zinger, Correctional Investigator of Canada, declared in January 2020, The Indigenization of Canada’s prison population is nothing short of a national travesty.¹¹ It is, as many scholars including Robyn Maynard¹² and Pam Palmater¹³ have noted, the extension of the legacies of slavery and residential schooling.¹⁴

      Anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism within the Canadian carceral system demand our attention. As a recent article in The Conversation states, it is not just policing agencies that have a systemic racism problem, Canadian prisons do too.¹⁵ As Maynard reminds us, Anti-Blackness in Canada often goes unspoken. When acknowledged, it is assumed to exist, perhaps, but in another time (centuries ago), or in another place (the United States).¹⁶ In effect, Maynard continues, there is a generalized erasure of the Black experience in Canada from the public realm.¹⁷ And, as Desmond Cole puts it, Those who do acknowledge slavery in Canada often add that it was ‘not as bad as in the States,’ a nod to the white Canadian proverb used as a checkmate end to a conversation. No need to consider anti-blackness here.¹⁸ Activist art projects, we believe, can help call attention to these erasures and continue the conversation around disproportionately disenfranchised people in this country—a country that is, as Cole notes, the product of a white supremacist ideology that claims this land as the property of a white European colonial government. To maintain its stolen land, the government is engaged in an ongoing, centuries-long genocide of Indigenous peoples. Our government is designed to assimilate or eradicate Indigenous peoples, and unfortunately it works exactly as it was designed to.¹⁹

      Lessons of Frankenstein are uncannily relevant for us two hundred years later, especially in light of the proliferation of systemic violence against Black and Indigenous lives. Indeed, as Elizabeth Young observes in her book Black Frankenstein and elsewhere, there are many racial resonances of the Frankenstein story. In an 1824 parliamentary debate, the British foreign secretary George Canning, who supported the gradual abolition of slavery, used imagery from the story to argue that freed West Indian slaves would become like Frankenstein’s monsters. A few years later, Canning’s words would then travel across the Atlantic and be adapted by proslavery advocate Thomas Dew to articulate anxieties over Black rebellions in America.²⁰ Even today, BIPOC people continue to be treated as monsters. As Young rightly says in a 2018 interview, the Frankenstein metaphor is still tragically relevant, citing the case of Michael Brown, a young Black man shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Young notes that in his testimony, the officer said Brown looked like a ‘demon’. That is the language of black monstrosity, seeing black men as frightening monsters who must then be subdued.²¹ As she elsewhere writes, As a third century of Frankenstein stories begins, the undead monster prompts an ever-undead metaphor, and writers and artists remain vital to showing how Black lives as well as monsters matter.²²

      And just as the acts of abuse and disregard committed against Shelley’s Creature are never punished, so state violence—that is, harm caused by governments and their programs, policies, services and in/actions²³—is rarely held accountable. As Maynard reminds us, "Not only is state violence rarely prosecuted as criminal, it is not commonly perceived as violence. Because the state is granted the moral and legal authority over those who fall under its jurisdiction, it is granted a monopoly over the use of violence in society, so the use of violence is generally seen as legitimate."²⁴ Disavowing such violence as violence is part of the logic of incarceration.

      PRISON ARTIVISM AND EDUCATION

      Race is but one of many dimensions to a carceral logic. Frankenstein also invites us to think about the intersectionality of other forms of incarceration more broadly. How are we all living within various carceral systems? How does a carceral logic operate within and against sexualized, gendered, racialized, and (dis)abled bodies both inside and outside of prison? For we are all, in the infamous words of radical poet William Blake, imprisoned in our own mind-forg’d manacles.²⁵ How can art and the imagination, and conversations and making art with one another help us slip these various shackles? In the face of our current injustice system, then, Jackie Wang’s Blakean question in Carceral Capitalism rings loud in our ears: What counter-spell is powerful enough to break the prison’s stranglehold on our imaginations?²⁶ One answer, we hope, is making art together. Of the 60 EFC members, 15 belonged to the W2BC (10 of whom were incarcerated), 43 were UNB students, and two were the project co-facilitators. The co-facilitators are white settler scholars; the poet-artists are Black, Indigenous, white, Asian, non-incarcerated, incarcerated (from both medium- and maximum-security units), cisgender, trans, and gender-nonconforming. We are a diverse group brought together by an interest in challenging the erasures of the prison system by making of erasure a tool, something with which to explore Frankenstein and its pertinent themes, something with which to build relationship.

      I or Us is in kinship with other projects of artivism (artistic activism), such as #JailBedDrop from the Green Corn Collective, a group that identifies as A Constellation of Indigenous Feminist Bosses. #JailBedDrop was a 2017 collaboration with activist coalition JusticeLA involved the creation of a jail bed beaded in the colours of the four directions directions—to call attention to the high number of Indigenous people incarcerated in American prisons—as well as the installation of fifty jail beds at public sites with long histories of oppression and violence against Black and Indigenous Peoples, including the Los Angeles Walt Disney Concert Hall, a former site of slave selling. Furthermore, like the book Razor Wire Women, a collection of writings by women inside and outside of prison, I or Us imagines art as a way to connect these spaces of inside and outside, and to allow the reader, in the words of Kathy Boudin, once incarcerated and now co-director and co-founder of the Center for Justice at Columbia University, to connect to the dimensions of lives of women inside that cannot be captured by statistics or journal articles, just as the experience of creation allowed the women to access new ways of thinking and new ways of communicating across the separation.²⁷

      While we heed the reminder of Black Canadian feminist scholars (including Peggy Bristow, Dionne Brand, Linda Carty, Afua Cooper, Sylvia Hamilton, Robin Maynard, and Adrienne Shadd) that in the context of the institutional erasure of Black women’s lives in Canada, the telling of Black women’s individual stories helps us to begin to resuscitate Black women’s realities in Canada,²⁸ this project took a different approach to challenging institutional erasure. Sinking deeper into the political ambivalences of erasure itself, which can be both oppressive and liberatory, the EFC used erasure poetry to deconstruct the three dominant narrative voices—Victor Frankenstein, Robert Walton, and the Creature, at least two of which are white, cisgendered, able-bodied, European men—and, in doing so, radically transformed the voices and the text, turning it into a patchwork of brief conversations and stand-alone statements. By design, then,

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