Through Our Eyes, In Our Voices, the ARTS in our lives. Story by 'Judah'

Takia “Judah” Parham is a United States Army Combat Veteran, theatre artist, published poet, public speaker and community arts educator. Her work has been featured in Duende Literary Journal’s ​Incarcerated Writers Feature​, and ​“Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 5”​ Anthology. Judah’s role of The Scarecrow in a musical production of The Wiz through Rehabilitation Through the Arts, staged at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, was highlighted in The Huffington Post, and shown at the 2017 United Nations Symposium on Poverty and Criminal Justice. Her story is featured in the forthcoming documentaries The Waiting, produced by former CNN reporter Murat Bilgincan through Columbia University, as well as the Twenty-Twenty: Twenty Years of Art, a film about Rehabilitation Through the Arts’ prison programming. As a public speaker Judah has lectured on the trans-formative power of arts in community throughout many New York institutions such as The New School University, Marist College, Hunter College and the Reintegration Forum at Desmond Fish Library. Currently, Judah teaches Peekskill’s youth in the Arts 10566 theater program, and is an undergraduate at Marymount Manhattan College, working towards a BA in Theatre and New Media. 

I wanted to be a Marine, their uniforms were impressive and a staple in Americas expressions of class and power.The only thing was I was in the wrong recruiting office to wear that uniform. I had dropped out of Coppin State college from work weariness. I held two jobs while going to school since 16 and I needed a career but first I needed a gap year, one I never had the privilege to have. $20,000 bonuses will influence the best of us so I became an Army soldier. I trained in May and swore my oath by September. By the next September I was preparing to deploy to Iraq from my first duty station at Fort Drum, NY. By that time I had experienced death twice. That year I learned by pay phone my Aunt had passed away two days after I left for basic training, her fight with cervix cancer was over. Then my Uncle passed away his fight with lung cancer had been lost. The month of my deployment I found my grandmother was dying of gastrointestinal cancer.                         After I left Kuwait and landed in Iraq I was ready for death face to face. I received a Red Cross message and flew out of combat to face another more personal combat. I buried my grandma during the December holidays and returned to war. Not knowing it would be the last time for a long time I would see my family in particularly my mother. I worked multiple 16-24 hour shifts, diligently working out, managed a lower back injury, minor foot surgery, while cleaning up my credit, and going to Art school as well as finishing up my Psychology degree at another school.                                                                                                Photography as an art really helped me during the war. I attended Academy of Art University and learned the skill behind becoming a professional Photographer. Behind that lens I saw the circumstances of war differently. Midway through I learned my mother had lost her hearing in a brain surgery and tried to commit suicide in the hospital from the side effects of steroidal medication to reduce her brain swelling. I called home from my desert office to find my mother hallucinating and scarring me from her paranoid fear. They diagnosed her with schizoid effectiveness. I told no one I again kept my military bearing. Somewhere between ambition and exhaustion, I endured six months of military sexual harassment, and pressure, which lead to military sexual trauma and combat related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I wasn’t aware of my condition and what was happening to me but my unit administrative officers were and advised me upon deployment completion and reintegration to see outside therapists, so I did. Unfortunately, a car accident would send my depression into a spiral and my condition would become worst. I found myself suicidal and was admitted to a psych ward for soldiers for accidentally overdosing on my back medication, the next week after being received by my Platoon and going back to work, I was very emotional and confused on my medication which would cause the higher ups to intervene. Yet, I was holding a secret I could not discuss with any of them. That one of their own superior officers coerced and forced me into an illicit relationship, we lived together, and I was being abused; art became a distant memory.                                                          We had signed papers when I swore in to this allegiance not to practice homosexuality; Don’t Ask Don’t Tell law. So I didn’t at least I didn’t tell. As I lost my grip on reality sinking further into my skin until I landed in prison.                                                                            Prison is where I was given a time out on life’s pressures. Things I could no longer enjoy due to my state of mind when I was free. I questioned even when I had my camera in the desert, was I really free?                                                                                                           I needed healing and I found it in 2013, that year I also lost my mother to gastrointestinal cancer. Prison was a form of torture, 90+ days after fighting a war for my country. Through the guidance of my friend Pamela Smart and  a few other “long-termers” inmates who had 20+ years in their sentences and still counting,I learned how to live in prison.                         I was invited to a play by my friend Pamela Smart, given through a program she volunteered in named Rehabilitation Through the Arts, it would take place in Bedford Hills Correctional Facilities gym in the summer with the heat reaching 103 degrees that day, however; I was accustomed to 132 degrees and this production was worth it- it would change my life. I was so taken aback by the performance, the fact that there were “real clothes” as costumes instead of state green uniforms. There was this ability I saw in the cast to let their hair down so to speak becoming someone else in front of an audience. All of these things without it being a part of the sub-culture’s rules of being the toughest, roughest, persona you could muster so no one would harm your body or push you over because you were nice or caring,  right there in prison and this style of acting was appreciated. I immediately asked my peer where do I sign up. I signed up and every medium of art I participated in from prose style poetry, to spoken word, fine arts and crafts,  a full production, plays with music, learning how to read, write, and understand the lingo of music. Physical theater, improvisation, comedy, and hip hop dance all revealed to me a new way of building my esteem from the shame that had come with being incarcerated.                           I gained a leadership role as a member of the RTA steering committee. I also put on a full production of  The Wiz where I played the character “Scarecrow”, a role Michael Jackson performed as a young man. I became a published poet through this program in Duende Literary Journal, and all this from a volunteer program that I received much like therapy every week. I slowly healed course after course. I even began to take college courses through the Marymount Manhattan college program at the facility, without art I could not complete the strenuous college classes but I looked forward to them because I knew though Rehabilitation Through the Arts was work, I was achieving something my spirit could deal with and I was revived by participating.                                                                                         The harshness of the daily living in prison, with the constant noise, officers yelling, inmates yelling, doors slamming, lights blazing, keys jingling, potential locks in cells for unknown days if small errors that mirrored freedom were made or misinterpreted, and the unpredictability  of it all. I began to breathe art again and to believe within myself. Though the cell mirrors were foggy or scratched I could see myself as who I was, valuable, because expressing myself no longer had to fit inside of an illusion of sameness but who I was could be expressed by the merits of my own ability and willpower.                                                       My first love of writing and acting was restored and I finally saw a future,  not because RTA was making a star or celebrity but because they helped me celebrate me as a human being. 

Prison alone could not do that for anyone. I knew when I reached my redemption, my liberation, I could not let go the hands of the Arts ever again. It saved me from what my life had become.

Iraqi Mental Prison

I can still see endless hot sand/expansive

sepia tone skies

Every now and again a plane glides by in my mind

while I drink sweet hazel coffee in my cell

I simply stare,

Sometimes it feels like an r and r vacation.

Peace covers over me against frustration,

I wait for my dates and dates pass by.

Once in awhile I scrub the mirror to see

if I can see my future from this place.

I have been stuck for quite sometime now/still look the same.

Left the quaking desert seat.

I've been changed by it whether I welcome it or not.

I dream free dreams against the sounds

of AR -15s and M-16s /bombs disturb sleep/reality.

Each year I age but still love the child

holding the rifle in me/somethings they wont understand

and will always judge.

Perhaps we are all judges without robes.

War gave me invisible scars/age gave me nicks.

Prison didn't sweep me under the rug/saved me

from the rest of the war.

Wounded soldiers still need love.