I had not been in a prison till late in my life. Physically, I mean.

When I first walked into a prison for a literacy project I carried along with me many ghosts. I had been haunted by prisons throughout my youth.

To be thrown in prison and tortured was an everyday threat to all of us, students.

Nobody was reading my thoughts and yet I feared. I voiced nothing and yet I feared.

Fear, I guess, came from arbritariness. Anyone could denounce a person to the military police and that could mean immediate imprisonment.

Writing, I realized, could be a means of balancing fear and courage.

Writing metaphorically could be a way to free one´s thought from fear.

It was not new, I would learn later. But at that point in my teen years it was a revelation to me.

I think that was the moment I began to build upon this idea so dear to me now. The idea that being able to write is revolutionary.