Who Cares for the Caged Bird?
Bravehearts
Chapter 7
“I got a call saying, ‘He is in the ICU, he might just… Go away.’ I thought, ‘Oh my God, is he going to go away without seeing his son? Is he going to die? We [had] no way of contacting [each other]. He called me after three months and he started crying. I asked, ‘Why are you crying?’ He said, ‘No, I am hearing your voice after so long.’ And he just burst [into tears]. When he finally came out, he had lost around 15-20 kilos. I still have those photos, I was looking at them the other day and thinking…”
Originally used to describe the cognitive, bodily, and expressive efforts service workers perform to retain their jobs, the term emotional labor takes on a new bitterness in the gendered, carceral context of caregiving. Not only did the women we spoke to have to strategically manage their own feelings of anger, anxiety, grief, and more, but they were also expected to negotiate the emotions of others around them.
Emotional labor takes on a new bitterness in the gendered, carceral context of caregiving.
One woman described the feelings she navigated while her brother was jailed: “Everything became disturbed. Everything. At that time, we were completely thinking of him, and our mother. Mom was completely depressed. Others [in my family] were all stronger than her. We were trying to console her…” Over the four years of her brother’s imprisonment, this caregiver became the family's pillar of strength, showing unwavering determination and resilience despite the deep sadness she felt within her. Each new day was a chip in her spine, as shelled out lakhs of her savings to “fraud” cogs in the legal machine in an attempt to assuage her mother’s anguish, sadness, and rage.
They were, over and above their role as emotional mediators, keen observers to their loved ones’ pain. “[My brother] used to say there was sickness, some people were dying,” a caregiver shared. “Nobody is bothered. They do not even say hello to them.” She was referring to both those operating in the institution of prison as well as those who had severed ties with their incarcerated family members. “In many cases, I was very angry. Sometimes, you know, my brother would not even speak. He would say, ‘Leave it.’ You know, no, when they are alone, the circumstances are like that. They are in their room and nobody is near to them,” she expanded, highlighting how she disguised her own feelings and pinned her braveheart to her sleeve to accommodate her brother’s emotions. Asked about the experience of placing her emotions on the back burner, she responded in exasperation, “Emotions, what? I lost my everything.”
“Emotions, what? I lost my everything."
This continued even after caregivers’ family members were released from prison. “During COVID, I lost touch with my husband,” one caregiver revealed. Her husband had been imprisoned for two years before the pandemic hit. When it did, his regular phone calls stopped. For months, she had no news of his whereabouts as everyone isolated at home and government offices shut down. One day, she received a phone call informing her that her husband had contracted COVID. He was moved to a hospital, where he did not have access to a phone. She expounded, “I got a call saying, ‘He is in the ICU, he might just… Go away.’ I thought, ‘Oh my God, is he going to go away without seeing his son? Is he going to die? We [had] no way of contacting [each other]. He called me after three months and he started crying. I asked, ‘Why are you crying?’ He said, ‘No, I am hearing your voice after so long.’ And he just burst [into tears]. When he finally came out, he had lost around 15-20 kilos. I still have those photos, I was looking at them the other day and thinking… ” She could not bring herself to finish her sentence. Even in her darkest hour, her husband’s emotions took priority over her panic. It was apparent that the wounds of their shared experience were still fresh, although he had returned home to his family two years prior.
In addition to performing emotional labor, we found that caregivers carried a peculiar kind of mental load. Life is chaotic enough to plan as it is, before it is put through the criminal grinder. When it is peppered with lawyers, prison visits, court hearings, police sirens, handcuffs, and more, the mental load transforms into what feels like a meaningless to-do list. This is an endless list of tasks that caregivers keep in their heads, because they do not want to hold on to another piece of paper to inevitably lose, balled up and stuff into the bottom of their purses alongside waiting line ticket numbers and business cards for public representation officers. It is a list they cannot share with anyone else because they hope to walk amongst the world without the shadow of prison obscuring them and their path forward. It is ever-evolving and programmed for chaos.
Children’s drifting emotions and their vagabond sense of curiosity took an additional toll on the caregivers. Another woman explained, “[My brother’s] children would ask, ‘When will dada be out?’ Mine asked, ‘Why is it not happening, mumma? Such a long time, why is it [taking such a] long time?’ What answer can we give? It is not in our hands.” When she would grant her brother’s or her own children an answer, and her predictions proved inaccurate, there was more spilled grief to mop up. It soon became clear that the caregivers carried a bitterness along with them in both hands. In one palm, they held on tightly to the remorse of occasionally leaving this spill to rot, waiting for someone else to clean it up. With the other, they could not snatch onto the invisible boundary between lover and case worker. Both roles demanded care in different ways, but the former was laden with an outpouring of emotion they could not stash, throw, burn, or close their eyes and imagine away.
One caregiver, incarcerated at the same time as her husband, had to get creative to stay in touch with him. “I had no means to talk to my husband [other than conference calls],” she explained. “We used to fix timings; we would call [a phone number outside prison] at the same time.” The person on the outside would then merge those calls, known in prison as a conference call. She continued, “If I had to make a call but there was a crowd, I would miss the call. Let us say I had to make a call at 4 pm, I would get up and look by 3:15 pm, what is the state outside. If there is a huge crowd, I would go and stand there that time itself. Otherwise, you know, you can gauge. You can judge that it will be free.” She carried this guesswork gymnastics beyond the central prison, utilising and refining her ability to manage her mental load as she fought for her husband’s release.
The violence of conforming to so-called sanity and its norms, its principles, while maneuvering carcerality is rarely discussed in the mainstream narrative of prison as a civilising force. Any non-conformity must be hidden, suppressed, or well-disguised, lest it be labelled “non-cooperation,” forcing caregivers to, for instance, endure harassment by the police or wait, fatigued, for another court date. Truly one of the most deranged aspects of caring for the incarcerated is the contortionist act one becomes an expert at, packaging emotions neatly into prison visit lockers or envelopes holding paper after paper of meaningless jargon. The repetition and the unexpected jolts, both at once, can drive caregivers mad.
Truly one of the most deranged aspects of caring for the incarcerated is the contortionist act one becomes an expert at, packaging emotions neatly into prison visit lockers or envelopes holding paper after paper of meaningless jargon.
