122 – Prison and Land Struggle with Amu Gib

Welcome to the Frontline Herbalism Podcast with your host, Nicole Rose from the

Solidarity Apothecary.

This is your place for all things plants and

liberation.

Let's get started.

Hello.

Welcome back to the Frontline Herbalism Podcast.

I'm sorry for not putting out an episode recently again.

Just same old stuff of my little one getting sick.

Foolishly went to a soft place so that he could see his daddy and picked up some sort of

ming.

As soon as I walked in there, I was like, oh God, there's.

It was just like full of kids.

But anyway, he's doing better now, thank God.

But yeah, today I have something really, really special.

So I have an interview with a prisoner called amu and if you have been involved in like

Palestine solidarity stuff, you've probably heard about the hunger strikers who, yeah,

were on strike with various demands relating to Palestine and their cases and you know,

their lack of trials and things like this.

And yeah, AMU was, was part of that and has been a very, very active prisoner in terms of

like, agitation around the conditions and yeah, public writing and organizing and all

the things.

So yeah, I got an email being like, oh, AMU would really love to connect about prisoners

herbal stuff and things we're doing.

And I was like,

yeah,

so we have done this interview and it's kind of like asynchronous, if that makes sense.

So I emailed the questions and then they recorded them to a friend and then they sent

me the audio and then another friend because some of my childcare stuff has chopped them

together for me.

So like, he's done an amazing job and it is like extremely smooth.

But I think maybe not every answer syncs to like every question perfectly, if that makes

sense.

But didn't want to leave anything out because AMU just, yeah.

Shares a lot of like,

painful insights into the prison system.

A lot of kind of like beautiful humbleness

around like political organizing and resisting imperialism and all the things they talk

about.

So yeah, I'm just really, really, really

grateful for their,

their time and energy and answering the questions and hopefully we can do like future,

future things like this.

I just, yeah, again I just feel bad because of my like,

very limited working hours and millions of commitments.

So.

But yeah, I think what they share is really, really special and I guess just like content

warning around references to things in prison, like self harm and suicide attempts and things

Also, I guess because people,

yeah.

Know me as an anarchist, I'm quite kind of

like public about that.

I have, you know, like, all of my work is centered around state Violence pretty much,

and resistance to the state and acknowledgment of the state as the ******* near enough

primary cause of, you know, harm and oppression.

And before, you know, after we were doing this interview and things like, it did come out

that AMU is like, running to be elected in like a local election.

I think they're standing for, like, Islington or something.

And like, we haven't had a chance to talk about that in terms of like, like curiosity of

like, why they're doing that and what they want to achieve.

And I guess, like, I feel attention around tactics like that.

Like, any tactic that kind of like, legitimizes the state, I really, really

struggle with.

So, like, it's just not my jam.

Like, kind of,

you know, I follow electropolitics because these people shape our lives.

But I, yeah, I don't, you know, an anarchist.

I believe in, like, direct action.

I don't believe in the States.

So anyway.

But I didn't want to just be like, no, I'm not

going to pub interview now, because I think what they share is like,

powerful and important and I want to amplify prisoner voices.

And if I only interviewed people that had identical politics to me, like, I wouldn't

learn anything.

Like, it wouldn't be interesting to anyone.

Like,

yeah, things are, you know, varied and complex and I,

you know, I feel like I can learn something from every person I meet and that's like, my

approach to life.

So I was very, very grateful to learn from AMU

and to start this conversation.

So, yeah,

and I guess just for context, what I think is interesting about the interview is that we

were both like, in similar situations of.

I was in prison for just under two years, but 19 months of that.

I was on remand.

And Amu has been on remand for a long time,

probably at least 19 months by the time I'm publishing this.

And obviously I was in for this campaign against this huge animal testing company and

lots of ALF stuff and direct action and they're inside for an alleged,

alleged action.

So, yeah, like.

And, you know, we've both been in HMP

Bronzefield and obviously prisons don't ******* change because they're just designed

to be hell holes.

So it's kind of interesting, like, feeling

that contrast like all these years later of what those conditions are like.

And anyway, I'm gonna stop rambling, please check it out.

Also, in terms of solid apothecary news, the herbalism, PTSD and traumatic stress course is

opening again on the 22nd of March,

spring solstice it's a ******* amazing offering.

No one's turned away for lac of funds.

Super, super comprehensive course all about

trauma and the nervous system and the politics of trauma and in depth stuff around nervines.

So 32 plants with an affinity for the nervous system.

How to understand what's going on in your body in terms of anxiety and distress and stress

hormones and all of the things.

So yeah, and that course like funds pretty much 95% of what I do.

So yeah, it's very,

is very important to all the work I do around herbalism and state violence.

So anyway, please check it out.

I'll put a link in the show notes.

Please join the waiting list if you can.

It gives me a lot of relief to know that people are interested in it when I see that

waiting list kind of grow before the launch and stuff.

So anyway,

all right, thank you for listening and I will be back soon.

Okay, take care.

Hello.

For people who don't know who you are or where you are or what has been happening in

recent months, please can you share more about yourself?

I really don't know how to answer this, so I'm actually gonna skip the first question.

But I guess at the moment I can say that I've been trying to recover from this hunger strike

and I'm really enjoying eating again and being able to move and feeling this like growing

sense of energy internally.

And then like it feels like the world and the movement is like absolutely buzzing.

So I've been plotting a lot and thinking about the year ahead and what we're doing and why

we're doing it and like needing a lot of help researching that.

And then I guess that leads to who we're doing this with and how we're doing it together.

And then like when and always the feeling is like 100 years ago, like 800 years ago would

have been good to have this done by.

But failing that, it's like just like a

constant battle to try and not rush or let my anger turn into frustration or bitterness,

especially at my loved ones or at myself.

But yeah,

this is like.

Even though the world is on fire, it's still quite slow work sometimes.

Or there's just different paces that we're going at all the time.

So yeah, that's a bit about where I'm at.

And

so when I was in HMP Bronzefield, a very long time ago now,

the prison was rife with abuse by officers,

neglect people, self harming and attempting suicide left, right and center.

Can you describe what it's like at the moment,

yeah.

In terms of the prison population, I'm meeting everyone that the system has failed

the way it was designed to.

So the unemployed cleaners,

you know, there's someone on my landing who thought she was going to go work in Abu Dhabi.

And then she.

And mothers and pharmacists and teachers and

data analysts, software engineers,

PhD students,

shoplifters,

drug takers, drug sellers and drug movers, the whole.

The whole cycle.

And yeah,

yeah, obviously, when you are meeting people that have sold drugs and they know who they've

been selling drugs to, I think the.

The classist nature of who ends up in prison and who are their customers, who are putting

them in prison just becomes a bit absurd really.

They're all survivors of domestic abuse or neurodivergent.

They're all,

or we're all, I guess, symptoms of 14 years of austerity government.

What are the people like, who you were meeting?

Inside, I found such a rich mix of amazing humans and the saddest of stories.

So many histories of childhood abuse, domestic violence, poverty and more.

This is the bit that is quite long and quite explicit about some of the ways that

people are not coping with being in Bronzefield.

So,

yeah, as I said, it's maybe not the right place for it, but I'll just read it to you

anyway and then we can talk about it.

So it's on the question of, like, who are you meeting?

Childhood abuse, domestic and poverty.

The prison peels back every layer of care you have around yourself and then force feeds you

a version of care designed to make you unable to care about anything ever again.

I'll try to be concrete.

My neighbor El,

let's call her,

is suicidal and bizarrely considerate about it.

She makes her way upstairs at lockup every day and threatens to jump off the railing.

So we all get locked up while they assault her to put her back in her cell.

But we're all about to be locked in anyway.

She bangs her head against the wall, a sign that someone needs help written clear as day

on her forehead, but not at nighttime.

The next door along from her is another woman.

I'll call her A.

She banged on her door and the small glass window in it until it smashed, then cut

herself on the glass and smeared her blood on the wall.

On my 30th birthday, she also climbed over the railings and let go.

As I reached her in time to grab her legs,

I crocheted her a hat.

Two weeks later, she did the same thing again, but this time I walked away from her rather

than towards Her.

This is how the prison forces us to obey its reality,

changing us with its unchanging logic that we are not fit to be part of the world,

that we are not safe to be around,

that we can't be trusted, shouldn't be loved.

Another neighbor, S,

was on hunger strike as well, and first strike in Bronzefield for six months.

She was taken to hospital twice a week to be pumped full of fluids and intubated.

Force feeding is only illegal if you're of sound mind.

Lots of things are only illegal if you can act normal enough that the state can easily

discredit you.

Can't easily discredit you.

Disappear you.

Anyway,

S recently smashed her TV and used a glass to cut herself to the bone.

She might get freed on Friday, so she's handing me back the crochet stuff I lent her,

along with patches for a blanket we're collectively making for Kesa.

These are some of the women who wear their pain on their sleeves,

who have razor blades in their stomachs and staples in their necks, tweezers in their

forearms.

And the ones who exhibit less attention seeking behavior,

the ones who aren't white.

I can't say why or how exactly their whiteness defines how they behave.

I have some ideas,

but of course it does.

And the ones who cry themselves to sleep every night,

the ones who never leave their cells,

the ones who are always locked in,

the ones who don't speak English,

are in prison for six months past their release date.

My friend M was in Peterborough for over a year for stealing a gold necklace,

then in Bronzefield for months over her sentence,

waiting to get immigration bail until she was released onto the street.

Having to make her way to Croydon with no phone to sign in at a probation centre.

She was told she was HIV positive as she left the prison.

She'd been HIV positive the whole time she was in jail, but no one had told her.

Or maybe they told her, but without bothering to get a translator.

Either way, she almost walked onto the train tracks.

She left me a shawl she'd made her first and only crochet.

Project C was remanded on arson charges for trying to kill herself with an oven.

I made her a hat too.

She has very sensitive ears.

She said she was going to plead guilty to the charges because she felt bad feeling bad,

feeling guilty and pleading guilty.

She couldn't deal with the noise levels and would bang her head to drown it out,

pick her skin off her forearms when she was locked in, throw chairs and fight guards when

overwhelmed,

flood and bang, scream and rip and then play hide and seek trying to sneak up and pounce.

She likes skips and Cherry Aid,

milk chocolate, digestives and word searchers.

But what about the murderers?

It's worth noting here that there are people who have killed and wear uniforms in

Bronzefield.

How are you spending time during Bang Up?

During Bang Up I yap a lot on the phone with all my loved ones,

expensively.

And I read a lot.

I just finished reading against the Loveless World by Susan Abelhawa and I think a mutual

friend, Alex gave the same book to my co defendant in Bristol,

Louis.

So we have this little book club going.

I'm writing a lot.

It's become a big part of my life in prison.

Not that I've ever written anything before,

but yeah, like a lot of people it becomes.

Yeah,

yeah, it becomes an important part of your life.

And like everyone, I guess, like we're all like my friends and I, trying to find ways to

be in solidarity with Palestine and also more recently with the women's revolution that's

under attack in Rojava.

Also building connections between the arms trade, war, displacement and mining.

So yeah, Bang up is kind of,

kind of a dreaded part of the day because of short staffing.

It's often like indefinite time behind a locked door.

But I try and see it as an uninterrupted time to plot the demise of imperialism, you know?

Yeah,

I just, yeah, I'm like already in prison, you know, so if they're going to lock me up, I'm

definitely going to make them regret it.

I know getting outside on quote unquote association can feel like a rarity,

but can you describe what the prison courtyards are like?

Have you been able to find any weeds and plants?

Yeah, the.

The prison courtyard is 124paces from main

street to the house block.

I counted it the other day.

So from activities to residents, it's just like not that much space really.

But in that space is cherry trees and New Zealand flax and rose bushes and lavender

bushes.

But best of all there's the irises, which in summer are so lovely to look at as they are

green and they kind of flip and flop in the wind.

But when they dry out and before the rot sets in,

then you can weave them,

which I've had a lot of fun with actually.

What was your relationship like with land before being in prison?

I would say our relationship with land has been deliberately sabotaged, you know,

since the closing of the commons and people during the Industrial revolution needing to

move from the land to cities for work and,

you know,

opportunities and just because that's how things were going.

But yeah, like in these cities, people just were living in buildings without any kitchens

in them.

And just like, I feel like immediately is so

clear, like how that connection was like chipped away at, you know.

Yeah.

But personally, I've always been privileged enough, even though I grew up in London, to

have lots of access to outdoor spaces.

And I've always done gardening with my mum or at these allotments.

Yeah. But it's actually weaving that really makes my heart sing.

So harvesting rush from the river near our boats on the Thames with a neighbor's

paddleboard and a pair of scissors.

Or gleaning willow from community willow beds in the Highlands or yeah, the irises leaves in

prison courtyards.

That feels to me like more rooting than

anything else and how we resist the pressure to be industrialized or institutionalized.

Yeah. For me, that's how everything comes together and connects.

I heard you were an active member of the Land Workers Alliance.

Can you share more about what they do and why you feel it's important?

So the UK branch of La Villa Campesina is LWA Land Workers alliance,

but La Villa Campesina represents 200 million peasant farmers.

Like one of the other branches, for example, in Brazil is Momento center,

which I think we all should draw a lot of inspiration from.

There's these massive landowners,

obviously in Brazil,

but there are also these people that even though they don't technically,

because of just a lot of corruption, basically have access to land.

They just show up to different sites with tools and materials and wood, and they build

schools and housing and a bar so they can have a party as.

As Jyoti always says,

and they just reclaim that space, you know.

So I think we have a lot to learn from them.

Yeah,

of course.

Yeah. Like the, the scale, the power and the

urgency of.

Of that kind of work is vital to all of us

because it's our climate collapsing and it's food, not bombs, that will keep us alive.

So nothing and no one really is more important than farmers.

You've been a passionate supporter of Palestinian liberation, a struggle inseparable

from land.

How do you feel land struggles relate to those

of us in the so called uk?

I would say that land struggles in the UK connect to Palestine in the way that all land

struggles are linked and that we are strongest when we are our most connected, our most

rooted in relationship,

which have always sustained us.

So of course, settlers, colonizers, Zionists and imperialists will always target our

ability to feed and sustain ourselves,

which Asike Janu,

an incredible comrade and.

Yeah,

yeah, incredible comrade from Kerala, taught me is our birthright.

Roaming and foraging and being able to stop and sleep wherever you want.

Yeah,

there's no way that isn't the way we should be living, you know?

Yeah. And the.

The pattern of imperialism is always the same,

even though they weave with all these different colored threads.

The commonality is disconnection through displacement or extraction,

high taxes or poisoned water,

burning olive groves, or in the UK context, releasing sewage into the Thames.

You know,

this is always the work of those whose relationship to the world is one of, like,

utter entitlement and possessiveness,

which,

yeah, I guess it's closest to.

Closest to rape, really, and is enabled in the same way with silence.

You've been incredibly brave to undertake a hunger strike during your time

inside.

Can you share more about why you did this and

what it has felt like in your body?

Because we've watched the genocide play out live on our phone screens for two years

and we've been trained as bystanders and forced to look and feel as though there's

nothing we can do as Palestine and Sudan and the Congo are violated and destroyed,

and as Palestinians have shown us and as prison has shown us, even from a prison cell,

you can act,

not asking for change, but demanding it.

And I think being imprisoned is an

intensification or a concentration of that disconnection.

And if disconnection is a pattern and fascism and capitalism and war are the threads, then

prison is like a tightening.

It constricts until you can barely imagine breathing.

John told me that in Czech they call a rib cage a rib basket.

I don't know why we call it a rib cage in English.

I'd really rather have a rib basket,

but, yeah, anyway, I decided to resist and to break free of that logic and control in the

way that people always will as long as they're detained and incarcerated.

In a way, it's the only way that I could think to take action and call for urgent

mobilization.

And, yeah, it was tough.

Hunger strike is a daily commitment to a dream, really.

But resisting gave me a euphoria that can only come with the understanding that you belong to

the world again,

you belong to yourself.

And there's always energy and always grief in resistance,

and always victory and defiance and in laughter.

I've never done a hunger strike.

Like, sadly, we had next to no organized

prisoner support or much like outside solidarity.

However, like, hunger was a really familiar experience in prison.

I remember regularly not being able to sleep from Being so hungry.

And it really didn't help being vegan in prison.

But yeah, it was like an undercurrent of my prison experience.

How is hunger used as a weapon in prison?

Hunger as a weapon in prison is such a precise line of questioning.

And I'm really sorry.

Firstly, that you went to sleep hungry while you were in Bronzefield.

It's absurd that anyone goes to sleep hungry.

And I guess that's the way that they ensure scarcity.

Today they actually told another landing on 2B that they wouldn't allow seconds.

So even though there's enough food, they won't let prisoners line up for seconds because

apparently prisoners are unruly about it or something, you know,

which.

Yeah, it's just one of the many ways that

prisoners are punished for like planned scarcity and incompetence, you know.

So, yeah, I'm not sure what it was like when you were here, but the kitchen's still under

order every day.

There's supposed to be 2 pound spent per prisoner per day on food,

which is not much out of the £63,000 a year that they get as a private company from the

public government funds.

But, yeah, hunger is definitely a weapon of the state.

Yeah, on Christmas Day, there was a bag of popcorn served for Christmas dinner.

Yeah, it was.

It was an interesting time.

Can you speak to nutrition or a lack of it in a present diet

in terms of nutrition?

So I think.

I'm not sure what number question we're on

now, but I think it's the last section of the plants and land struggle.

The nutrition is mostly iceberg lettuce.

I read in east of Eden by John Steinbeck.

Sorry, this is such a tangent.

That trains,

like refrigerated trains, were invented partially to transport iceberg lettuce to New

York.

Or they weren't invented because of that, but

that was one of the first things that they transported.

And there's something like hundreds of thousands of tons of ice were made in a week

to be able to let New Yorkers have crispy lettuce in their burgers.

Anyway,

I think if you took the iceberg lettuce off our plates, most days there would only be

warburton sliced white bread and these chips that regularly break prisoners teeth.

There's a prisoner who like buried one of her chipped teeth in the prison courtyard.

Like, apparently that brings good luck.

But I'm like.

To who? You know.

Yeah, obviously it can definitely always be worse,

but it's the root of a lot of conflict and body shaming and mental health and Also

because there's like the mother and baby unit and these pregnancy wings.

It's the issue in the development of baby health as well.

If prisoners could decide what to eat rather than relying on,

ironically, a French catering company, then obviously things would be really different.

And they kind of are different already in government run jails and in Peterborough, you

know, Sodexo's other UK prison.

But yeah, Bronzefield is,

well, like Pentonville is like under investigation for human rights abuses.

Yeah, I'm always just feeling that Sodexo should have stuck to feeding school kids, you

know, rather than killing their mothers.

The hunger strikers have done an amazing job at shining light on the conditions

of UK prisons.

As they say,

rot doesn't grow where the sun shines.

What do you want to bring to light about the prison system

in terms of bringing stuff to light?

Just that anyone could end up here in prison.

It doesn't matter what you've done or whether

you've done anything.

There are 500 prisoners in Bronsfield and each one of us is an evidence bag of the failings

of the state and the world, not the cause of it.

Sometimes people can end up like exceptionalizing political prisoners.

And yeah, I know full well how prisoners inside for involvement in different social

struggles are often treated differently,

especially in terms of surveillance.

But I'd regularly feel frustrated when repression of political prisoners was not

connected to broader repression and the regular routine violence of the state.

For example, quote unquote, social prisoners, a really imperfect term, also face very, very

high usage of remand, disruption to posts, visits and calls, physical abuse from

officers,

solitary confinement and segregation, excessive license, conditions on release,

stitch ups from the cps, the Crown Prosecution Service, falsifying evidence and all the

things.

So yeah, like how can we make this more explicit in our movements?

Like, what do you think needs to happen for people to connect the dots between social and

political prisoners and like the broader oppressive nature of the prison system.

As for me, no one should be in prison, full stop.

So it doesn't or shouldn't matter whether as a political prisoner you broke the rules on

purpose or as a social prisoner you broke the rules by accident.

I don't know.

The point is that the rules are breaking all

of us.

And then when you're here for whatever apparent reason,

it's quite a radicalizing process understanding that things need to change now

with your probably racialized, probably Muslim, probably neurodivergent, probably poor

body in one of His Majesty's prison cells as a living proof.

Yeah, I would say this is Me learning what we should be doing.

I think that's part of the reason that I wanted to be in touch with you.

Like Prisoner's Herbal keeps coming up.

I think there's two copies of it in reception for me that people have sent in that reception

won't let me have at the moment.

But I know that other prisoners in here have

read it and are doing these herbal foot baths and taking care of themselves as best they can

using Prisoners Herbal,

you know.

So I think,

yeah, I think I have loads to learn.

What are your thoughts on prison abolition?

Have they changed since becoming a prisoner?

And I couldn't really say whether they've changed since I became a prisoner.

Actually a friend of mine was asking me about this yesterday and I think it's more like the

framework of my understanding has become a bit more colored in like the,

the.

The point that the world is failing people and

prisoners are the result of those failures.

Like we're symptoms of these wider issues

rather than the cause of them.

Has. Has been kind of a constant as,

as been a constant since.

Since I was kind of like doing a sleepover at the occupation of Holloway Women's Prison with

sisters Uncut.

Or since they don't stop people from doing

crime or since they don't rehabilitate people.

You know, there's like a thousand examples of how prisons don't work and there's a lot of

people that have been doing that work of like defunding the carceral state and the police.

So I would really defer to them.

I think what I'm trying to do at the moment is

be in touch with people and like make this point that the arms trade and these weapons

manufacturers and these massive budgets for defense spending,

like this 2 billion pound contract to Raytheon that the MOD has just given out.

It's like 2 point whatever billion pounds on what?

You know, like each one of these armored cars that are being made in Wales and parts of that

are being used in Sudan or whatever.

You know, wherever this money ends up being used,

it's on misery elsewhere.

And there's like health and education and

housing in the UK that are underfunded deliberately and have been for forever.

What trajectories do you think movements need to take in terms of ending

imprisonment?

Trying to.

Well, I'm trying to disband the Met Police in

like a short term and like do some troublemaking in prison while I'm here.

But I also just want to talk to these groups that are kind of coming into my awareness that

have just been doing this work so well,

Like. Yeah, like NEJMA Collective or Bent Bars and Beyond Bars.

Also sds and I would love to see whether there are people that are still working on Detained

Voices.

I'm not sure if you've heard of it, but it's

like it.

It was a place that people that were in detention centers could record things directly

over the phone and then would be played.

I don't know whether it was radio or like a podcast series, but yeah, I think that

Detained Voices might have kind of stopped.

Yeah.

And I think Prisoner Solidarity Network as well.

I'm not sure what's going on with that, but yeah, again, just kind of trying to join the

dots and learn from other people.

Yeah. I've heard that there's a black mama bailout in the US for example.

Like.

Like people.

Yeah.

Anyway,

you probably know much more than I do, so I'm just gonna stop talking now.

Yeah, I think maybe that's enough for now.

Sorry. Yeah, I kept thinking that I was going to be more coherent and I just wasn't.

So I thought I would just give you material and you can decide whether to use it rather

than.

Yeah.

Rather than try and do it better, because that's been.

Anyway, I'm just going to stop talking again.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to the Frontline Herbalism podcast.

You can find the transcript, the links, all the resources from the

show@solidarityapothecary.org podcast.