Writings from a Greek Prison: 32 Steps, or Correspondence from the House of the Dead

by Tasos Theofilou, Ben Morea (Preface by), Eleni Pappa (Translator)

Overview

Even though I did not commit the offences for which I am accused, I am not innocent. I committed the one offense that includes all others. I am an anarchist. In the class war, I chose the side of the excluded and the underprivileged, the prosecuted and the accursed, the poor, the weak, and the oppressed.

Writings from a Greek Prison is a literary work of biting realism. Tasos Theofilou gives testimony on the brutality of prison life, and its centrality in contemporary capitalism, through a blur of memoir, social commentary, free verse, and a glossary of the idiom used by inmates in Greek prisons.

A political prisoner in Greece from 2012 to 2017, Theofilou’s work centers on exposing the conditions of widespread exploitation and social struggle that persist in Greece as a result of the debt crisis—in prisons as well as in mainstream society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942173311
Publisher:	Common Notions
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Tasos Theofilou is an anarchist-communist and a former political prisoner in Greece. He is the author of six books. Through speculative fiction, noir, and graphic novels, he illuminates the conditions of exploitation and social conflict in Greece. While in prison, Theofilou also authored a book on Attica as part of the international solidarity with the U.S. prisoners' strike on the forty-fifth anniversary of the prison uprising.
Ben Morea is a painter, publisher, and direct action political figure. As the unseen hand of the 1960s revolutionary underground, Morea is infamous for shutting down MoMA, forcibly entering the Pentagon, occupying the Fillmore East and Columbia University, and dumping the neglected garbage of the Lower East Side into the fountains of Lincoln Square. He was the force behind the 1960s art/anarchist collective Up Against the Wall Motherfucker and the legendary anarchist zine/broadside Black Mask.

Editorial Reviews

With sensitivity and intelligence, Tasos Theofilou conveys the harsh reality of Balkan prisons. He simultaneously provides a glimpse of the romantic soul of a Greek anarchist. Although widely known as one of the world’s most radical scenes, the Greek movement’s interior has seldom been so honestly revealed.
—George Katsiaficas, activist, author, and co-editor of Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party.

“Tasos Theofilou’s intervention sheds light on one of the most observed periods of contemporary Greek history through the eyes of an anarcho-communist militant who suddenly found himself charged (and imprisoned for 5 years) for a crime many, and above all his prosecutors, knew he had not committed. Combining wit and scathing social criticism, the book is a documentation, a damning testament, a literary expression, and a glossary written from the perspective of an inmate. But it is not confined to Tasos’ own experience. It unveils the repressive mechanism of class domination that is the same all around the world: the prison system. It is, for this reason, an indispensable testimony of a world everyone knows exists but few pay attention to. Above all, it is an unwavering call for its abolition.”
—Pavlos Roufos, author of A Happy Future Is a Thing of the Past

From the Publisher