A chiaroscuro parable.

By the time Antonio Gramsci IV was less than politely shoved into solitary for the fifth time, having been previously well acquainted with what his fellow Rikers Island residents variously tagged as “the hole,” the “pound,” and, when it suited the presiding authorities, the “Communicable Disease Unit” or CDU, the calendar had already flipped to December 31 and New Years Eve.  

Blinking at the sudden switch from stabbing shafts of hallway light to dank concrete-lined semi-darkness, he gave his new cellmates, a collection of the jail’s legendary rodents and roaches, his usual greeting: “It’s me, Fungo Felice, the happy mushroom.” 

Of course, the CDU moniker notwithstanding, Gramsci’s real disease was of the running mouth, not the dripping nose or contagious sputum; something he came by honestly. After all, his grandfather thrice distant was similarly imprisoned by Mussolini for opening his trap once too often, famously provoking the dictator with, “the old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born, in this chiaroscuro moment, monsters are born.”

“And so it is today,” his great-great-grandson would inform anyone within earshot. “Again, the established is locked in a death grip with the upstart, a new order struggles for the light of life, and monsters roam the halls of power and the streets in the transition.”

This, as you might expect, tended to seriously annoy the men in masks who just happened to be roaming the streets of Antonio’s neighborhood, looking for statistics to add to their deportation batting averages.  

And after hearing him loudly chant, “technically speaking, chiaroscuro is an effect of light and shadow created by light falling unevenly, but in this case, the metaphor’s more about the conflict between illumination and darkness and the inevitable rejection of authoritarianism,” they decided to remove the problem at its source.  

This was a task made considerably easier by concluding that a name like “Gramsci” had to be foreign, ergo, automatically arrestable.

It was his equally unfortunate decision to physically resist the invitation that got him to Rikers, instead of the usual detention center.  And it was his ongoing choice to continue to hector the guards at that institution that landed him, repeatedly, here.

“But I do not worry,” he told the scurrying multitudes. “Then, as now, the monsters feed on anger and fear. Then, as now, too many have responded to nascent re-industrialization and economic dislocation by embracing a dictatorial and corrupt regime. Then, as now, the calendar will turn, and it will be a new year."

And with that, he sat back, sitting silently, as the patterns of light and dark played across the prison wall.

Happier 2026. I hope.