Like most people, I have interests. Mine, unfortunately, have a distinct tendency to gravitate towards the somewhat odd. I try not to talk too much about these things, lest I convince strangers that I am totally banana-cakes or bore my friends to tears. This is fairly easy, because rarely do these things come up in normal conversation. Prison hunger strikes is one of these little nooks, where I sometimes live and seem to have an endless capacity to read but for which my friends have about a thirty second attention span. And that is the generous estimate.
But can we talk about them for a second?
Because here is the deal: there are people on hunger strike in prison. Like, right now. One of them just died earlier this month. Officials won’t give a cause or say whether or not it was related to his hunger strike. But if I were a betting woman, my guess would be “yes.”
These actions are powerful to me on a number of levels. The legal implications of force feeding tugs at my more academic inclinations. The IRA history is fascinating and, I suspect, directly relevant to how the United States has handled/is handling the hunger strikes at Guantanamo Bay. The international split on the issue – from the World Medical Association to the ICTY to the ECHR to all the individual nations – is a like a Chuck-E-Cheese ball pit of joy for nerds. But, more than any of that, it is the powerful, human connection that brings me back to this action again and again.
Hunger strikes, without intervention, force society to watch someone die for their beliefs. And to watch them die slowly and painfully. There is, of course, a tremendous amount of literature on the different types and tactics – not everyone engaged in a hunger strike wants to take it to that end. And even if they did, at least in the vast majority of jurisdictions in the United States, the prison system can and will intervene to prevent death (and in the process, at least in my opinion, violate not only fundamental human rights but also the Constitution and our international treaty obligations).
It is to me one of the great travesties of our nation that this is all happening right under our noses and yet we are, for the most part, unaware. We continue on, even those of us vehemently opposed to the prison system. We do not stand in solidarity. The strikes are rarely reported and quietly quashed, with the vast majority of us never knowing they existed at all. Because prisoners have so little power, even their boldest act is so easy to silence.
But we aren’t in prison.
We don’t have to be silenced.
And what if we refused to be? Hunger strikes are often accompanied by a list of demands. What if people – people like me and you – went on hunger strike? What if we refused to eat until those demands are met? What if we forced the nation to watch us die slowly and painfully? What if we tried be the human microphone for those whose voices are being institutionally silenced?
Of course, we won’t. We won’t because rarely will one willingly die for another. For such an undertaking to be successful, if it could be at all, it would require the ultimate commitment – the willingness to follow through and truly and literally starve to death. People just don’t do that sort of thing for one another all that often. I know it scares me out of action, or at least that action. I am ashamed to admit that, but it is true.
But what if?
