strange world & its ways
A thick, congealed greyness over London today; just the sort of day to visit a prison in Brixton. We are ushered in through four or five levels of bars and gated walkways, surrendering various personal items along the way: a mobile phone here, a driving license there, one's sense of personal space left at the guardhouse. Inside, against a slate-coloured sky, the slender, elegant curls of barbed wire are our new horizons: macabre figure-eights looped in graceful double layers along all the surfaces. Loraine points at the hulking spikes studding the open-air courtyard. "To stop helicopters from landing," she says. There have, apparently, been some dramatic prison-breaks.
I'm here to watch a concert. It's a community outreach program; a way to integrate prisoners with the outside world. Professional musicians come into the prison armed with guitars, keyboards, amps, and a week to squeeze any musical talent out of a handful of selected inmates. There's a concert at the end of it. I'm here to watch.
It's 2.30. We're made to wait in a tiny cramped holding-room near the security booths. The concert has been delayed to allow the Muslim inmates to finish their prayers. When the time comes, we're escorted, cattle-like, to the chapel. A Christian chapel, I ask? "Multi-faith," Loraine replies, or so it has grown to be, from its strict Victorian origins. When we go in, I see Christ, splayed gracefully on his cross high on the altar wall, gazing serenely over to the wall opposite, which has become, impossibly, a makeshift surau, a place for Muslim prayer, and a row of taps to perform the wudu (ablution). High above, arched protectively over this great clash of civilizations, are the dingy, shadowy wooden rafters of Victorian English architecture. There's a silhouette of a mosque and the crescent-star, emblazoned onto one wall in pastel blue and yellow. Below it, in Arabic and romanized writing: Laa ilaaha illallah, Muhammadur Rasulullah. On the opposite wall, almost defiantly in turquoise and green: Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are my son.
I can't compute all this; and I have not even yet taken in the center of the room, in which is sprawled an astounding array of amps and electronic equipment, and a cluster of inmates picking uncertainly at their instruments. Someone hammers out a chord on the keyboard. A-minor. Of course; a major key would have been, somehow, inappropriate. As the bass picks up a simple riff, I am fixated on the corner of the room, in which stands, impossibly, a Christmas tree, awkwardly bedecked. I have the sense that decorating it had also been some concerted prisoner communal effort. The doors to the chapel are barred; a woman guard stands by, stoic. Now the drums are pounding out a beat, and high above, a reedy lead riff curls into the ensemble, like wire. The concert begins.
The music is unexceptional: spirited and well-intentioned strumming, gangsta rap over the top, lyrics like caricatures of laments. Ain't no fun bein' in prison, ain't wanna be in prison no more, no more. One mistake, whole life break. Sing wi' me, yo. Some irrepressibly aesthetic part of me wanted them to be hidden geniuses, hidden talent erupting sensationally for this brief hour-long concert, before vanishing once more into this strange space that hovers on the outskirts of societies and houses our unsanitary detritus. I wanted them to be criminals, social outcasts condemned to this human refuse bin in the middle of Brixton, who nevertheless still made music and prayed and laughed and fought over the chocolate biscuits after the concert. It's why, I think, I wanted the music to be beautiful, stupendous; it would be a kind of vindication.
The music isn't beautiful. But there is music, and there is prayer, and laughter, and a general scramble for the sweets afterward. And so instead of vindication, I am left only with unease. "Thank you all for coming," the woman in charge chirps brightly, "please help yourselves to tea and coffee, though we will have to move proceedings along quite promptly, as the prisoners have to, well..." The ellipses say more, too much. I am freighted with discordance -- Muslim and Christian, society and its rejects, chocolate biscuits and prison cells, freedom and captivity. Inside and outside. Stepping out of the chapel, we're escorted back to the gates by the stoic guard, past the reams of barbed wire, past the ludicrous spikes. The day is darkening.
What gesture, what outreach program could vindicate that spirited Ecuadorian keyboardist, who is so remarkably good at playing "Love Story" on the piano over and over again, and who is up for his third appeal in January? What about the black singer, unshaven, bespectacled and so very young, singing about freedom and women? And the Pakistani man behind the miniature keyboard, who speaks no English and can just about hit the right key every few bars? And that youth whom I saw furtively stuffing his pockets with chocolate biscuits? What are these places? What are these places, which lie so categorically outside what society knows and wants to know that they require infiltration, by little pockets of concerned musicians, dedicated social workers, criminologists and perhaps the occasional overly-curious PhD student, in order to remember them to an outside world that, for the most part, resolutely chooses to forget them? And in a way, also to remember the outside world to them, with our smiles, applause, post-concert chitchat, and the precious, ridiculously sought, fought-over chocolate biscuits ...
strange world & its ways. Just this morning my country's government placed five men under arbitrary, indefinite detention without trial. Can there really be such goings-on, such casual, nonchalant madnesses?