Incarceration, Harm, and Accountability in Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage

Resumen

Tayari Jones’s 2018 novel An American Marriage depicts the corrosive impact of incarceration on the marriage between Black newlyweds Roy and Celestial after Roy is imprisoned for a rape he did not commit. The novel illustrates the injustices of the American criminal punishment system, not least of which is the harm caused to the families of incarcerated people, as a manifestation of structural racism. Moreover, it both engages with and subverts tropes common to fictional depictions of incarceration that perpetuate reformist imaginings of a safer, kinder prison and suggests instead the efficacy of transformative justice approaches to harm. In doing so, it reveals the increased influence of abolitionist thinking within mainstream discourse on race and incarceration in the United States. It also shows the potential for literary depictions of mass incarceration to move beyond and even challenge the acceptance and normalization of prisons within American society. Contextualizing the novel within this debate and the practices of transformative justice, moreover, helps us to retain focus on the characters are individuals who are accountable for their own choices even as they operate within systems that constrain those choices, as transformative justice also asks us to do.