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The Healing Project, Installation View, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2022. Credit: Photograph by Anita Johnson
Composer, pianist, and vocalist Samora Pinderhughes tells us about The Healing Project. The Healing Project, a fundamentally abolitionist project, explores the structures of systemic racism and the prison industrial complex. This story first aired February 2023.
The Healing Project takes action towards abolition with forms such as musical songs, films, an exhibition, community gatherings, live performances, and a digital library of audio interviews. At the center of the project are the intergenerational voices of people across the country, including folks incarcerated in prisons and detention centers. Their stories, experiences, and ideas serve as the foundation for The Healing Project’s vision for societal transformation.
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Anita Johnson: Today on Making Contact, we bring you to The Healing Project, a multimedia installation that features personal stories from those who are incarcerated and highlights the deep trauma that imprisonment has had on their lives and their loved ones.
When you walk into the The Healing Project at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, you see a piano centered in the middle of a huge space, connected to three smaller rooms. There is sound coming from every direction. People’s voices talking about their life experiences with prisons. There is an altar against one wall, draped with prayer beads, white candles, dried flowers, and bottles of alcohol. Above it is a mural of a person crowned with flowers. Their face is in silhouette, but somehow it still feels like you can look into their eyes.
Samora Pinderhughes: So yeah, welcome to the Healing Project. The heart of the project is in the interviews, some of which you’ll hear that we did across the country with folks who have experienced structural violence from a series of different contexts and talking to them about what they went through, but also about the healing practices. And it’s like a combination, like sound, visuality, language. We are trying to kind of basically cover all the bases. So these right here at the beginning, these are tapes that have short interviews on them from different folks that are incarcerated.
Anita Johnson: That’s Samora Pinderhughes, the Bay Area-raised composer, pianist, singer, and activist. He has spent the past eight years exploring structures of systemic racism — specifically how many families navigate the daily realities of state violence, and the system of detention and incarceration in the United States.
He comes from a family with a long history of social and racial justice activism. His father, Howard Pinderhughes, was an organizer in the anti-apartheid movement as a student at UC Berkeley. He later went on to work with violence prevention organizations and is an active member of the Brotherhood of Elders Network. His mother, Raquel Pinderhughes, is also an activist: fighting for environmental and racial justice, supporting solidarity movements in Latin America, and creating programs to support incarcerated youth and adults while also fighting to abolish the prison industrial complex.
Pinderhughes follows in his parent’s footsteps. He wants The Healing Project to lift up the voices of those who have been locked up and silenced, to not only show the world that this flawed system should be abolished, but to also show support for people who’ve experienced structural violence.
Samora Pinderhughes: Telling the truth about the violences of the current system and the true need to basically eradicate it, not to reform it and being like super honest about how it affects people. And then on the other side, actually showing what a type of other world is possible and what people actually need in their day to day if they’re going to actually be the healthiest versions of themselves.
The piece that I always talk about first or think about first is a piece that is narrated and spoken by my brother Keith Lamar, who’s incarcerated in Ohio on death row and it’s called “Sweet.” And it’s basically like a piece where he discusses, you know, his experience, not just being incarcerated, but even growing up previous to that as a very young person because he was incarcerated very young.
But basically, the thesis of it is he’s talking about the thing that he’s the most proud of throughout his whole time of his life is that he’s maintained and held on to his sweetness because every level from his childhood and, you know, growing up in this country to, you know, obviously being incarcerated, everything is designed to rob him of that sweetness and to kind of make him unfeeling and make him like hard and all this stuff.
And he’s just like, I always hold on to that sweet part of myself. And then he talks about also the people around him that help him maintain that and support that part of him. And I love that because, you know, obviously, number one, I really believe in that so much and that we all need to hold on to that and be able to hold on to that. But also because I think it directly contradicts the image that one wants to paint of somebody on death row.
Anita Johnson: Pinderhughes walks me to a room with words on the wall that read, “They chew you up, swallow you.” Audio is playing of a man named Keith Lamar describing how holds onto his humanity despite being incarcerated.
Keith Lamar: One of the things that I’m surprised about, and my friends tell me this, You know people who really know me, it’s kind of still kind of surprising to me. I’m sweet, man, you know? I mean, I love being sweet to my friends. You know, when I was younger, when I was growing up, it wasn’t cool to be sweet. I remember the sweet little boy I was, you know. And by sweet, I mean, I just like to make connections with people. I like that tenderness, you know, the human thing, to connect with people, you know. But this situation, you know, when we talk about the criminal justice system, what it is is a digestive system, a digestive tract. You know they chew you up with that education…
Automated voice: This call is originating from an Ohio correctional facility and may be recorded and monitored.
Keith Lamar: You know they chew you up with the education, swallow you, and you go into the stomach, small intestines, and then you come out as a piece of ––.
So one of the things that kind of most amazed about myself that I’ve been able to hold onto my sweetness. That’s one of the things I most like about myself. It’s only people that were close to me can kind of know. You know, because you have to have an opportunity. I’m sweet to myself, you know. I’m good to myself. Even though all I’ve been through. And, you know, that’s one of the things that I want people to know, that even if your worst fears come true, nothing but death itself can rob you of who you really are. Nothing. I can be myself.
One of my two close friends told me a long time ago, you know, no matter where you are, you can still laugh in prison. You can still cry in prison. You can still be who you are where you are. Yeah, yeah. That’s what I think I’m most proud about, through everything that I’ve accomplished, that I can still hold onto that sense of sweetness in myself.
Anita Johnson: Keith LaMar was sentenced to prison at the age of 19 for murder. He has spent over 30 years in prison, most of it in solitary confinement.
The Healing Project forces us to acknowledge the deep problems in America’s so called “system of corrections and rehabilitation.” Pinderhughes exposes the system’s focus on forced servitude, imprisonment and punishment, and its failure to consider the futures of those reentering society and the impacts on their families and communities.
Sam: The prison is like, I mean, it’s like an embassy. That’s the only way I can think of it. They don’t have to follow the rules of the government. They just have their own policies. And there’s no one there to say it’s not okay.
Cyril: I think that so much of what happens in prison is conditioning right? Conditioning to see oneself as inferior. Conditioning to break people, conditioning to try to have people to be less of themselves, right? And I’m very intentional and very habitual about this for myself, that I refuse to walk with my head down, I refuse not to look somebody in their eye. And when I see somebody do that, you know I definitely point it out to them, “Nah, heads up.”
Pitt: You know it’s kind of like there’s nothing good that’s going to come out of this situation except for me leaving this place.
Bliss: Titles like inmate, convict, ex-felon, they’re demeaning titles. They’re put in place to diminish self-respect and dignity and to demean you and your character and to break your spirit. And I believe it’s all connected with the billion dollar industrial prison complex.
Michelle: How do we capture? They have conferences when they get together where they think really hard about how to make a better cage. And they sell their products to them, and they implement it on us. Caging.
GTL voice-recording: Thank you for using GTL.
Anita Johnson: The Healing Project is a haunting tapestry of instrumentation and stories about the cruel nature of prison. Each interviewee offers truth and vulnerability about their experiences, in hopes of expressing their pain, and bringing attention to the inhumane realities of incarceration. The Healing Project shows the deep trauma that the prison system causes for families. And the long journey of healing that must take place.
Walking through the exhibition, I enter a dark grayish room with images of men and women being projected off the wall. Recorded voices of people talking about the challenges that come after incarceration.
Speaker: This is why I needed to get my record expunged, man, because I’ve always faced these battles, you know, especially if I’m trying to get some property. I’m trying to do something like that. I’ve always faced these battles. I still feel that pain, you know, being disenfranchised, being civilly dead.
Speaker: No one wants to give you a home. No one wants to give you a place to stay because they think you’ll be a problem just because you’ve been to jail, in prison. You’ll have the wrong people come in and rob it. You know, these are the assumptions that they make up of all people that’ve been in prison, when really, all we want to do is get a place to stay, get some stability, and get on with our lives. But it’s hard, since I know what that mentality of mind that is.
Anita Johnson: Now I’m in a blue-lit room. I can hear interviewees talking about the psychological warfare of prison and the trauma they experienced.
Samora Pinderhughes: it’s based like a mixtape. So like I took all the interviews, cut them up, brought them to different producers, and then I basically like made a few different pieces with each of the producers. So there’s, it’s like, each of the pieces are about 3 to 5 minutes, and they’re on loop. So it’s basically like if you stay for however long you stay, you’re getting that amount. But if you were to come in at a different time, you might hear something totally different.
Blue Room Audio collage: Civilized people don’t live like this.This is the way animals live. I’m not an animal. A prison is like an embassy. That’s the only way I can think of it. This is the only way I can think of because like they don’t have to follow the rules of governing land. They just have their own policies. And there’s no one there. To say it’s not okay. So you can buck against the system that they’ve got in place. And it’s literally just like slavery. You can run but if we catch your ass this is what gonna happen. So they let you see the folks that kick up against the system. They parade them around handcuffed, with a dummy box, a spit mask on. Psychological warfare. Bottom line is what it is. It’s psychological warfare and it has broken many people.
Anita Johnson: Sitting in the blue room, feeling the vibration from the woofers strategically planted underneath the bench, you cannot escape the raw and painful stories of people who could be your brother, your student, your neighbor, your friend, or even you.
Samora Pinderhughes: if a person is coming in here that’s 15, they have to hear –– that they, that’s a resident ––. But then also we have strings and we have like, if a person comes in that’s 60, it’s gonna be something for them too, you know? All original production music from me and like 20 other cats, like all around New York. And then we mixed it specifically for surround sound, for the space. So there’s different parts of it coming out of every speaker. Maximum impact. Maximum impact.
Anita Johnson: Many people who enter the carceral system bring a series of traumatic experiences with them, including a lifetime of dealing with micro and macro level racism and oppression. Incarceration only adds to the trauma which is oftentimes generational.
Speaker: I’ve been into every prison in California and out. Behind my father’s, I kind of grew up in the prison, where the prison guards kind of knew me and my mom. He always, my dad wrote me letters since I was born. And he would always open the letter with the same phrase. You know, and I never wrote back because I was a kid. So I just expected my dad to write these letters. And he always did.
He always remembered my birthday. He always remembered any dates that were important. He was good with dates. So he would write and say, oh, yeah, you did this today. That’s the relationship I have with him. And just all in my head, I have this fantasy about what I wanted him to be to me. And he just never could. You know, I’ve seen my dad ten months clean before he died, and I hurried up and went to take photographs, you know, he wasn’t there for me or my sister when we were born, but he got to see Eric born with me, you know, he got to see my son.
Anita Johnson: These transparent conversations have similar heartbreaking themes: families torn apart and lost time. One part of the project is made up of over 100 powerful testimonials, and a LP titled “Grief,” created by those who’ve been locked up. Pinderhughes has put these interviews together with songs. I sat with him to talk more about the messages in the music. He told me about the one of the songs that best encapsulates the project, titled “Process.”
Samora Pinderhughes: I would say probably “Process.” You know, I would say that that song definitely builds it because I think that that song represents this idea that, you know, the key to moving through all of this in real time is understanding that we’re not going to get through it tomorrow, it’s not going to get better tomorrow. That’s just the reality.
So in that context, we do the best we can and also we recalibrate our expectations of what healing looks like. It is not like a competitive triumph over one’s demons or whatever one’s going through. It’s trying every day to make it a little bit better. And it’s trying every day to extend grace to yourself the way that you would to a person that you love, you know. And I think that that is a very important part for those that are going through those things. And that is, at the end of the day, what the project is made for. I want everyone to experience it, but the project is made for those that’s going through the things.
Music excerpt from “Process”
Anita: Pinderhughes highlights the harsh realities of the prison system, the traumatic experiences it causes for entire families, and the difficult, long road to healing. He knows that the songs in The Healing Project are intense – he’s pushing his audience to connect with those who are unseen, and feel their undeniable pain and sorrow.
Music excerpt from “Process”
Anita Johnson: The Healing Project is asking “How do we survive America?” What does it mean to maintain one’s humanity while dealing with the trauma of relentless systemic racism?
Samora Pinderhughes: I don’t really believe that true healing can exist in this type of capitalist society, because the whole society is built on exploitation. So it does not exist without exploitation. There’s no way for it to exist. And that’s another function of the prison is that the prison is where we put all the people that would show us how much society has failed. You know, it’s like you don’t want to look at how this capitalist system has created a problem with so many people being unhoused or has created the problem with so many people losing their mortgage or so many people, you know, not being able to have a job. It’s like, you all did this, but you don’t want to look at it so you’re going to take everybody and put them and lock them up.
Anita Johnson: Pinderhughes believes that it’s possible to support alternatives to our draconian prison system. while also recognizing that people are complicated.
Samora Pinderhughes: I definitely try to be very conscious of saying this project is not a project about innocence. Like a lot of the people that are a part of the project have done different things, you know? But they’re also some of the kindest, most brilliant, most loving individuals I’ve ever met. And when you get deep into them dealing with and talking about why those things happened and where they are now, number one, they’re actually evidence of what a real like what a real process of accountability can look like because they’ve actually moved through these processes in a way that few of us have and definitely not because the prison did that for them, but because they did it themselves in spite of their conditions.
Anita Johnson: In The Healing Project, Pinderhughes shines a light on the fact that true rehabilitation and healing cannot happen within systems built to enforce oppression and structural racism. He puts faces, voices, and humanity to people behind bars. He wants to see systemic change, and stop the cycle of increased trauma and harm. His vision for the future is filled with hope for stronger organizing efforts to dismantle the prison industrial complex. And he put this energy into his music.
Samora Pinderhughes: “Hope,” I think that was the last song I wrote for the record. And it was something I wanted to represent…, I often get response from people of like, oh man, your work is like so dark, it’s so like heavy and whatever. And I’m like, yeah, well, that’s what I’m thinking about. But I kind of titled it that as a kind of a cheeky being like, hey, well, here you go. But obviously it’s not a purely happy go lucky song. But to me it does represent what hope means to me, which as I said, hope is a discipline. And I think for me, it represents this idea of, for some people, the things that are going on is not a reality we can check in and out of.
But I think for a lot of other folks, you know, a lot of white folks, a lot of rich folks, a lot of different people, you can check in and out of the fight depending on when it’s comfortable for you to be there and how you feel about, you know, how guilty are you today that’s going to determine whether you would participate or not. And so I wanted to do a song that challenged that and said, if you really want to represent hope, you can’t just say, oh, hope means I just going to hope it gets better. You have to participate and you have to realize that it’s not going to just go away because you wish it away. It’s only going to go away if we organize.
Musical excerpt from “Hope”
Samora Pinderhughes: One of the most powerful things about The Healing Project is the community of creators that have created it with me is almost 100 different people between folks who are narrators, who have lent their stories, share their stories, visual creators, artwork, music. And this is very much of a collective project. And the best part of it, I think, is that hopefully when people step into the space, whether it’s digitally or whether it’s physically, they will feel that collective notion. They’ll feel that thing of, this is a group of folks that have come together to try to really almost create an artistic rendition of them being around the dinner table, talking to each other about these things, but from all around the country.
And my hope is that when people will step into it, they will feel like they need to give themselves into that. You know, I don’t want them to think, oh, I’m going to take something away. I want them to give themselves to it. You know, so that’s my hope for how people will approach it.
And I would say the other secondary one would just be, I think the other powerful thing about it is the practical tools that people can get away from if they’re really listening, particularly to the pieces in the sound room, inside that kind of security. If they’re really listening to the pieces in the sound room, I really believe that people will be able to have physical, practical tools that they can take away for when they go through a grieving process, when they’re dealing with something that’s really hard, when they’ve experienced, you know, some type of trauma or they’re trying to heal from it. They’ll have practical things they can do.
Anita Johnson: This project functions as an abolitionist narrative. It calls for an end to the current prison system. It urges us to create new ways of addressing conflict and processes that are more humane.
In October of 2022, Samora Pinderhughes was awarded a one million dollar grant from the Mellon Foundation in further support of The Healing Project. Funding will go towards the expansion of art works in The Healing Project exhibition, the creation of a book, free community programs, and the creation of new content. The grant also provides the initial funding for The Healing Project Transformative Impact Fund, which will offer seed money and mentorship for selected interviewees who are currently or formerly incarcerated to work on their own special projects. All work is based on the premise that the deepest healing strategies come directly from those who have been traumatized and oppressed.
To learn more about The Healing Project and listen to audio stories visit us at radioproject.org. Thank you for listening. I’ve been your host Anita Johnson, and you’ve been listening to Making Contact.
