Their words
The only weapon a prisoner is allowed? Behind Bars: Letters From History’s Most Famous Prisoners James Drake and Edward Smyth Bloomsbury €29
Dearest Mother, I am fighting, fighting, fighting. I have four, five and six wardresses every day as well as the two doctors. I am fed by stomach-tube twice a day. They prise open my mouth where there is a gap in my teeth. My gums are always bleeding… I used to feel I should go mad at first, and be pretty near to it, but I have got over that.’ These were the words of Sylvia Pankhurst, writing to her mother Emmeline, on hunger strike in London’s Holloway Prison in 1913.
Words are a prisoner’s only permitted weapon. Their only chance to be heard is to pour out their feelings in letter form, as this collection of correspondence across the centuries shows. It ranges from St Paul in the 1st Century, via Walter Raleigh and Marie Antoinette, to Nelson Mandela and a protester from the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot.
‘My brigade in the sewing shop works 16 to 17 hours a day. From 7.30am to 12.30am. At best, we get four hours of sleep a night. No one dares to disobey these orders. The harassed and dirty prisoner becomes obedient putty in the hands of the administration, which sees us solely as free.’ That was Pussy Riot singer Nadya Tolokonnikova, describing the inhumane conditions in the female correctional facility IK-14 in central Russia, in which she was imprisoned for her involvement in a 2012 anti-Putin performance. Not an easy read, this book, and the editors don’t spare us. The big divide question as regards our levels of sympathy for the various prisoners is whether they were guilty or not, and if they were, whether their ‘crime’ would nowadays be considered a crime.
Certainly not in the case of poor Oscar Wilde, imprisoned for homosexuality, who was broken by his two years in Reading Gaol. There’s a powerful letter from him about the appalling treatment of children in jail. He wrote: ‘It is not the prisoners who need reformation. It is the prisons.’ There are proper baddies here too.
Nazi Adolf Eichmann, three days before his execution in 1962, bleats in a letter that he was only acting under orders. ‘I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.’ No sympathy for him.
But the overwhelming majority of prisoners in this book are caught up in some monumental injustice. Take Emma Humphreys, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994, aged just 17, for murdering her abusive boyfriend. In a letter to her appeal judges she wrote, ‘I will stand in front of you and bleed my heart and mind for you to just try and grasp the realities, the effects and the damage of an abused child/woman’.
Her appeal was successful. As the editors of this book write, ‘Hers was a landmark fight for the judicial system to recognise domestic abuse as a cause of provocation in murder cases’.
That letter really did change the world.
Ysenda Maxtone Graham