Gehenna Trauma, Prison Hell

Abstract

Maia Kotrosits's brilliant new book, The Lives of Objects, considers how ancient objects are created, negotiated, ingested, discarded, destroyed, and rebuilt. Kotrosits contemplates the indeterminacy between real and fantasy objects as they become scriptural and theological truths; these produce, in turn, materiality that bears the marks of ancient power relations. Of particular interest to me is Kotrosits's account of the way that ancient and contemporary people integrate the trauma of conquest into their interaction with physical and psychic objects. She reads literal ruins alongside fragments of the psyche; both are "vital and active participants in social life" (44). Kotrosits shows how ancient objects are animated through fantasy, in their ancient contexts and on into the present, including in racialized contexts. I am inspired by this work to explore themes of trauma, ruination, and refuse as they pass through scripture to influence contemporary carceral structures that discard and consume racialized communities.In this short essay, I draw on Kotrosits to argue that the materialities of ancient war trauma and bodily ruin live on in the idea of Gehenna and hell, which are amplified and concretized in the twenty-and twenty-first-century inferno of the prison industrial complex. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the US prison system began its rapid growth, there was an explosion of evangelical discussion about whether punishment in hell is eternal or whether the damned are eventually annihilated. As many evangelical theologians defended eternal punishment, courts allowed longer sentences in smaller spaces, and the prison population grew larger. In political discourse, John DiIulio coined the term "superpredator" and told a Senate Subcommittee on Youth Violence that black youth were a "horde from hell " (1996). This reverberation between secular and religious spheres created an environment that normalized pain for "the wicked" in the human realm of prisons.