“The Sacred Family” by Rachel Kushner, recommended by the PEN Prison Writing Program
Issue No. 162
AN INTRODUCTION BY ANTONIO AIELLO
What role does prayer play in our daily lives? My relationship with prayer involves often desperate and privately psychotic pleas to a god I don’t believe in to turn traffic signals green, to make my children behave like human beings, to prevent that odd-looking freckle on my shin from turning into stage IV melanoma—inane requests indicative of the amount of faith I put into whatever higher powers may be.
his spring, as part of the World Voices Festival of International Literature, PEN asked prominent writers from around the world to write and then perform short pieces that explore the power of prayer and meditation as experienced in our post-millennial, technological, and increasingly agnostic or fanatical age. Among those pieces was Rachel Kushner’s “The Sacred Family,” a beautifully crafted story that reads like one man’s unintended meditation on God, freedom, mercy, and prayer as a kind of existential confession.
The story opens with the protagonist, Hauser, on leave and wandering toward La Sagrada Família, Gaudi’s “masterpiece of ridiculous splendor,” alone among throngs of tourists, stuck on the Christian belief that freedom is tied to God. “He understood the idea. God created man as something free, a being with a purity of freedom, so-called.” Hauser’s students are all LWOP, life without parole, and “well beyond the moment, the act, that had shifted their life to a punishment that would go on forever.” They are in varying states of acceptance, except Diana, the youngest, who “still doesn’t have the maturity to grasp that she will never leave.” A sense of helplessness permeates the prose as Hauser tries to make sense of the evil in the world, and not the evil of his students. “Twenty, thirty, forty years, is a long time to consider your life. But instead of self-revelation, they were meant to achieve only living death, and then one day, be carried out with a state-issue cloth over the face.”
The real power of Kushner’s piece—and the reason I feel so strongly about recommending it—lies in the layers of narrative complexity that emerge as she explores the contradictions of God, faith, and the power structures that give and take away freedom and mercy. With casual references to Jean Genet, Frans Hals, and Pasolini, Kushner deepens the internal conflict of her characters and the bigger issues at stake, primarily the meaning of freedom in a country that boasts about being the land of the free, but has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
The story was first partially published in the chapbook The PEN World Voices Book of Prayer and Meditation, a companion piece to the 2015 Festival.
Antonio Aiello
Content Director and Web Editor, PEN America Center
Support Recommended Reading
The Sacred Family
by Rachel KushnerRecommended by the PEN World Voices Festival
He understood the idea. God created man as something free, a being with a purity of freedom, so-called. And as Lieutenant Garcia liked to say, a fool and his freedom are soon parted. The original joke was about money, of course, a fool and his money. The idea as Hauser understood it was that if God had created man as a being who lived a perfect, untroubled existence, that would mean freedom was banished. Man would not be free if his life could not be ruined. If he could not ruin his own life, God had designed him in chains.
Hauser himself considered God a not-there. Religion to him was culture, references in art and literature. But working in a women’s prison, he adapted himself to the idea that no one inside its walls did not believe in God. This was not because to be in prison was to be closer to God. The opposite. You were abandoned there, by the world, and God seemed also to have forgotten you. You maintained your opening to him through need. You got a choice inside, King James or International, which the women called “the easy version.”
He didn’t want them knowing his first name. That was the shield he held up to protect himself. The last name was on his staff ID, which he wore pinned to his shirt. It read “G. Hauser,” but the G. was his secret from them, these women he taught, all of them LWOP, life without parole, including his newest student Diana, who spoke in a breathy and elegant whisper and knew she was beautiful and told him they had forced her confession at fourteen with no lawyer or guardian present. Growing up, she told him, her father locked her in a bedroom for weeks at a time, and instead of allowing her out to use the toilet he threw disposable diapers through the door. That was when she was twelve. When she was thirteen. At fourteen, she was an adult, or at least tried as one in a court of law.
Some of them told Hauser everything. They were well beyond the moment, the act, that had shifted their life to punishment that would go on forever. Forever, for each person, lasts precisely up to the moment they die. No one should die in prison, he knew. Twenty, thirty, forty years, is a long time to consider your life. But instead of self-revelation, they were meant to achieve only living death, and then one day, be carried out with a state-issue cloth over the face. The younger ones could not understand Life Without Parole. It takes maturity to grasp that you will not leave. Diana was trying to find a way out, using that breathy grace on him. Who wouldn’t, in her position. She had left parts of the story vague. It was considered impolite to wonder what someone had done, to ask, to be curious. And yet it was a curiosity for truth. But maybe, Hauser considered, maybe the truth itself is obscene.
Of course it was, and he avoided it for as long as he could. But her large eyes, a lost look, stained in even on his vacation. The women would all die there and that fact alone kept them in his thoughts as he wandered Barcelona and remembered, while he did, how dreary tourism was. How you saw the things that the other tourists saw and shared your experience with them, fellow outsiders, except you remained solitary, among strangers, and you all watched one another not have a genuine experience. That was his sentiment, as he walked toward the thing, the Sagrada Família, in all its tacky magnificence, the scaffolding and cranes like ladders to God, and this added to its grandeur, that it could not be finished. He fixed on a column that crushed into the back of a tortoise, as if the column on its back were part of the gravity that allowed the tortoise’s head to emerge from its shell. A girl told Hauser the place was only open one more hour. He said fine, it’s enough time, and bought his ticket.
He had been reading Genet on this trip, and in thinking of Genet sauntering along La Rambla and into the Barrio Chino, Hauser felt less inauthentic and alone. Genet embroidered sacred joy over abject states of existence. To Genet the colors and roughness of prison clothing were reminiscent of the fuzzy petals of certain flowers. Genet wrote that theft was a hard, pure, luminous act, which only a diamond could symbolize. He said handcuffs shone like jewelry. Jewels and jewelry and flowers.
Hauser had read a little of it every night, but the night before this day, visiting Gaudi’s cathedral, he had ruined himself instead. Maybe it was the safety of a hotel room far away, but one night Hauser searched on the Internet. He found so easily, as terrible acts are often marked by ease, what young, pretty Diana had done. Now he knew, and his mind felt like those metal grates in the public toilet stalls Genet described, corroded by hot piss. Evil trickled down over his thoughts. But it was not her evil, even as what she had done was bewildering. What she had said to Hauser was that something went wrong. Something went wrong.
God in prison was the single thing they wouldn’t revoke, you could end up naked in the Secure Housing Unit but they would never take away your right to pray. Only God cared about the women, which meant no one cared about them. Because God was not a person but something outside the world even for those who believed in him, and what Hauser meant by care was not God’s love. He meant human care and these women had none.
New fiction from Rachel Kushner, two-time Finalist for the National Book Award.
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