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Philosophy for the Guilty: Andy West Interviewed by Rob Doyle

Andy West in conversation with Rob Doyle.

 

Andy West’s The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy is a unique and fascinating book about the UK’s prisons that is also urgently personal. A philosophy teacher who leads inquiries with prisoners into the weightiest questions of morality, truth and existence, in the book West confronts his own troubled inner world, the extensive psychic scarring left by his crime-ridden family background. I’ve known Andy since we met while both working at Islington’s Union Chapel concert venue in our twenties. We’ve had countless rich conversations down the years and I relished the chance to talk with him about his book. We conducted the interview over WhatsApp, while he was in London and then Lagos and I was in Singapore.

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Rob Doyle: I was aware over the past few years that you’ve been writing this book, and I’ve known you for many years now and seen you wrestling with the questions and themes running through it. But what I didn’t quite expect, and what I’ve found especially riveting in The Life Inside, is how intensely personal it is. I didn’t know you were going to go right to the heart of these dark aspects of your own past and your psyche. You descend into deep, murky internal waters here. Was it challenging to face up to all this stuff in writing?

Andy West: I didn’t expect it either. When I started the book, I knew if I was going to be writing about prison then I would of course be doing it with a horse in the race, given how I’ve had family inside. The prison stories I used to hear as a kid from my uncle and brother were often shared for entertainment, to alleviate the boredom you feel on a council estate, like the boredom people feel on the wing. So when I sat down to write my own prison stories, I, likewise, wanted to play it for laughs. But despite my intentions, I found I kept writing about the feelings of inherited shame that have oppressed me in periods of my life. My horse in the race ended up being much more wild and powerful than I realised it would be. That was scary, but I discovered I was hungry for a reckoning with shame, both my own and the prisoners’ more generally. I wanted to describe the stickiness of shame, how it narrows your world (even for those already living in confinement), how people transcend it or how they find a way to live in spite of it.

RD: The most disarming aspect of the book for me was seeing how seriously messed up you are! I feel I can say that because you come across as a notably sane, reasonable person — far more so than me — as well as entirely competent and empathetic. But in the book, while you go into prisons and talk to these people who are guilty of all sorts of crimes, you don’t hide from the reader this other side of your self which is irrational, not so sane, shadowy, disturbed. The part of you which has been to hell. It makes it a relatable read, so that the reader is rooting for you as you describe living with this ‘executioner’ in your mind, the sword of Damocles dangling above you at all times. Crucially, it’s a non-judgemental book, in these very judgmental times of ours. Does this anguished side of your psyche help you to empathise with and refrain from judging the prisoners you work with and write about?

AW: I think if you’ve experienced intense shame then things tend to go one of two ways. You can either pass it on and shame the next guy for being even more of a lowlife than you are. Or it can open your heart and make you more merciful, because you know for yourself just how important mercy is.

That said, I’ve occasionally met people in prison who have done things that I find really awful and I can’t always manage a Christ-like, all-forgiving response. I think that’s where I’ve learned to be ambivalent about people. A single prisoner can be both kind and brutal, honest in one corner of their life and fraudulent in another and many contradictory things at once. I’ve found that someone with those inner pluralities tends to make for an interesting person to have a philosophical conversation with.

What I don’t want to do is say that someone’s moment of brutality therefore annuls their kindness and make the worst thing someone has done the most fundamental thing about them. That’s the executioner. I try not to put any more of that kind of thinking into the world. Teaching philosophy is a great way to do this because I get to relate to people in terms of their possibility rather than by their rap sheet.

RD: Regarding this question of shame, there’s a section where you go to teach the so-called VPs — vulnerable prisoners — who are at the bottom of the prison pecking order, despised and harassed by the other prisoners (the VPs are sex offenders, police informers, people with drug debts and so on). While doing your philosophy sessions with these VPs, you find you are not immune from regarding them with a degree of revulsion and you feel relieved when your time with them is up. What conclusions do you draw from this experience?

AW: As a teacher I’m focused on people’s future rather than their past, but a few times I’ve been teaching someone for a month or two and then I discover that they are in for sexually abusing children. It’s hard not to feel ambivalent. What I also found really intense was the VP versus mainstream pecking order itself. As I was teaching VPs, there were men outside punching the glass of my classroom window. It’s a bleak ecosystem where the punished need to punish those lower than them.

Whilst I find it personally impossible to forget the harms done by child abuse, I also know that the focus on VPs as fundamentally evil, unchangeable and inhuman is used to legitimise and extend the leviathan violence of our prisons. Not long before the actor Micheal K. Williams died last year, he did an interview where he spoke about being a victim of sexual abuse as a kid. He said that he wished that people with desires towards children were able to talk to a professional instead of creating more victims like he had been. My view is somewhere in that area, I think.

RD: The epigraph is from Jean Genet: ‘By my guilt I further gained the right to intelligence’. I remember when you were knocking about ideas for a title, one you had in mind was ‘Philosophy for the Guilty’. Has your work in the UK prison system as well as your own background — going straight but coming from a family heavily marked by crime and addiction — inculcated a certain defiance in your writing, a determination to stand with the guilty, as it were?

AW: There’s a scene in the book where I’m talking with a recovering heroin addict in my class about moral luck. I say to him, ‘Each of us could have been anyone else.’ My brother, also a recovering heroin addict, went to prison twelve times but I’ve only ever been inside with keys on my belt to let myself out at the end of the day. Siblings are like a ‘possible worlds’ thought experiment made flesh. They give us a tangible sense of an answer to the question ‘Who would I be if one or two small details about my life had been slightly different?’ To me it’s because of eerie chance that I am on this side of the wall whilst others are inside. So I’m quite sceptical about the existence of ‘The Guilty’. Like Nietzsche said, they are a group we invent so that the hangman can keep his job.

It’s interesting that you ask me if I’m defiant. Drafting and redrafting a memoir is a bit like cleaning a mirror and gaining an ever clearer reflection of who you are. One of the things I discovered was how growing up I spent a lot of my time trying to stoically accept the existence of the jeering gallows crowd, rather than turning to them and giving them the finger. On uncovering that half way through writing the book, I felt sad about having put so much energy into resignation. The defiance that you see emerging as The Life Inside develops was both me going against the retributionists and me writing against myself.

RD: The emotional heart of the book involves your relationship to your older brother, to whom the book is dedicated. He was in and out of prison throughout your childhood, adolescence and adulthood, and this experience of having a brother behind bars has clearly marked your life profoundly. You write about him in a moving, loving way. How is your relationship to him now that you’ve written the book?

AW: Jason has not been to prison for over a decade now. That takes some getting used to. In his absence, I’d formed a relationship with the idea of him. But now he’s here in flesh and blood. The book is about figuring out how to let go of my attachment to the absent Jason of my teenage years so that I can have a relationship with Jason as he is present today.

Working on the book, I wrote quite honesty and directly about the details of his life, many of which are quite gruesome. But I was aware that my brother wanted to move on from his old life and I didn’t want to pile a second era of shame on him. I feared coming to him with my finished manuscript that he might say, ‘What the fuck. There’s no way you’re publishing this.’

In the end, when I finished the book, I went to meet him in the park. I remember it was a sunny day. I said, ‘Look, in one chapter I write about how you used to inject heroin into your toes. In another I wrote about that time you were high in court and fell asleep on the stand. I’ve used a pseudonym because there’s lots of dark stuff like that and how you went to prison a dozen times.’

‘You should use my real name’, he said.

He was wearing a pair of shorts that day. One of his shins is permanently black and purple from abscesses and infections he had years ago. But he still wears shorts when he wants to. I realised that I had been more sensitive about his shame than he was. Like lots of figures in the book, he’s received so many castigating looks over the years that he’s had no choice but to reclaim dignity through a kind of shamelessness.

RD: This feeling you harbour of inherited shame, and the associated dread and paralysis, seem only partially resolved when the book ends. There can be an expectation that by writing books which examine our demons and torments these will be alleviated, yet this tends not always to be the case. Is it just a matter of learning to live in some sort of uneasy truce with ‘the executioner’?

AW: The demons that arrive in your childhood years, they don’t just get into your head, they are one of the experiences that help build your brain. I suspect the executioner is architectural for me. But I think you can build something else; turn your attention in another direction and have other experiences. As a teenager the executioner could crush or nullify whatever enjoyment I was feeling. I felt I had to acquit myself in order to get that joy back. But of course you never can quit yourself, because you’re in a Kafka-bind where arguing for your innocence only proves your guilt.

In the philosophy classroom I ask my students to allow themselves to have two different thoughts at once. I have to ask that of myself too, to feel the obscure guilt and dread from the executioner, but at the same time to also feel whatever enjoyment, pleasure or beauty is available to me in the moment. I don’t need an acquittal, I just need to turn my attention to something bigger than the shame.

So you’re right, it’s not a triumphalist story. But I hope it’s an honest telling of how people make a way to find joy in life despite everything.

RD: During your philosophy classes, in which you’ll typically tell a brief story deriving from literature or the history of philosophy to stimulate discussion, your prisoner-students frequently come out with counterintuitive, odd, or thought-provoking responses. There are some great quips too. There’s one prisoner who claims there aren’t enough hours in his day, while another — a Malaysian doing heavy time — insists that prisons in the UK are too soft (in part because there’s no caning). While I’m keeping in mind the poet Don Paterson’s claim that anyone whose students ‘teach him as much as he teaches them’ should lose half his salary, do you often find yourself surprised or challenged by your students’ contributions?

AW: I’ve sometimes found myself in the slightly comic situation of telling my students that I think prisons should be more therapeutic and humane only for prisoners to tell me that ‘Prison is too soft. Take people’s tellies away. Bring back hard labour. Make them not wanna come here.’

I don’t know what to make of it. These guys have serious life experience that you want to respect, but they are also very brutalised. Do they think that way because living on the wing leaves them with no illusions about how dark human nature can be? Or is it that they are so conditioned into a punitive logic that they can’t imagine a different way of doing things? Maybe they are pleading for punishment because they themselves are desperate to change in some way but don’t know how to. Or maybe they are not really talking about themselves at all when they talk about prisoners. We all like to think that we are perfect exceptions.

RD: The book is no diatribe, but you do express reformist attitudes regarding the prison system in the UK and you seem dismayed at what it does to people. I’m reminded of the brilliant BBC three-part drama series Time with Sean Bean, which I know you’ve seen too, and which left me with a bleak impression of incarceration in the UK. What would make the prison system better, in your opinion?

AW: Kafka said that ‘Once we have taken evil into ourselves, it no longer insists that we believe in it.’ I think I’ve experienced something similar. Having family inside made me less impressionable to the us-and-them story the jailer relies on. Putting people behind a wall allows ordinary people to feel like darkness, chaos and violence somehow belong on the other side of it, when all those things are within all of us. I think we’d have less people inside if the public had something more than newspapers and politicians telling us that there are insidious evil people that need to be locked up. Instead, we need stories that remove the wall.

RD: Franz Kafka comes up repeatedly throughout the book and you write about how his stories had a profound resonance for you ever since you first read him in your late teens. What does Kafka mean to you now?

AW: Kafka said that he had hardly anything in common with himself. That mysterious and contradictory nature always brings me back to him. There’s something pleasing about the fact you can’t quite put your feet on the bottom of a Kafka story. You can try and say that Kafka is about twentieth-century European authoritarianism or about Oedipal shame or about the absurdity of existence, but there will always be something left over.

But I have to part with Kafka at the threshold of the erotic. I can read about his world of insects, hunger artists and malevolent officials, but then spring comes. The animals start mating, the flowers come out and I put down his book.

There is of course a very rich, dark form of sexual intensity to Kafka’s stories of punishment, torture and death, but I think Kafka himself remained tantalisingly and neurotically at the edges of that intensity. He was famously very afraid of sex. There’s a scene in The Trial where the judge’s wife tries to seduce Joseph K. and suggests they run away together, but K. wants to know more about his hearing. In Kafka’s universe you find Thanatos without Eros.

RD: If tomorrow you were suddenly brought to trial, found guilty of a heinous crime and sent away for a very long time, and your jailer allowed you to bring one book of philosophy with you, which would it be?

AW: That book that compiles all the short stories and essays of Jorge Luis Borges. I think if I was in prison I’d want to be able to escape into another world and his work transports you to new universes. And since you’ve now had me commit a heinous crime, Rob, I’m remembering that Borges has one of my favourite lines about justice: ‘I don’t speak of vengeance or forgiveness; forgetting is the only revenge and the only forgiveness.’ Reading Borges in my new cell would be a good way of forgetting my heinousness.

 

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Andy West (above) is the author of The life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy (Picador 2022). His writing has been published in The Guardian, Aeon, 3:AM Magazine, and Litro. He is philosopher in residence at HMP Pentonville in London.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Rob Doyle is the author of Here Are the Young Men, This is the Ritual, Threshold and, most recently, Autobibliography.

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