Session 3: Shifting Subjectivities - Political Expression Through Creativity
Chair: Danine Farquharson

Laurence McKeown - Writing our own History: The Creative Writings of Irish Political Prisoners in Long Kesh Prison Camp
Mullaghbawn, Co Armagh, Northern Ireland

Long Kesh prison camp (HMP Maze) in the north of Ireland is most renown as the place that held those interned without trial in the early 1970s, the hunger strike of 1981 in which ten republican prisoners, or the many escapes and attempted escapes. What is less known about is the informal system of education that republican prisoners developed within the prison in the 1980s and 1990s.

Influenced greatly by the pedagogical principles of Brazilian educationalist, Paulo Freire, and their own personal and collective experiences of prison struggle, the prisoners developed a very radical approach not only to political education but in terms of how they organised their communal lives.

These developments, whose origins lay in the ‘blanket protest’ for political status during 1976-1981, shaped their future lives within the prison and the manner in which they continued to wage their (successful) prison struggle.

The political education process later lay the ground for the development of creative writings. In the late 1980s poetry workshops were established; a magazine, An Glór Gafa/The Captive Voice, produced in its entirety by the prisoners and distributed on the outside was founded; a music tape secretly recorded within the jail, Music from the Blocks, was produced; a script for a video was written and its production directed from within the prison; a book containing the personal accounts of 28 prisoners who had endured the blanket protest and hunger strikes was published (1994); a dramatisation of the poetry of Bobby Sands (IRA volunteer and MP who died on hunger strike in 1981) was staged and a screenplay for a feature film based on the 1981 hunger strike (entitled H3) begun.

As someone personally involved in all of these developments my paper will present a ‘view from the inside’ – a look at the radical political and organisational development within the republican prisoner community of Long Kesh.

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Astreia Soares - Within the Beige Pants Country: A Comparison of Texts Written by Detainees in Brazil
Belo Horizonte, Brazil

The present paper aims to analyse the Raps lyrics written by prisoners in Carandiru, the largest penitentiary complex in Latin America, which is in São Paulo, Brazil. It compares those prisoners’ narratives with the one written by Graciliano Ramos, a political détenu in the 30’s, in his book Memórias do Cárcere.

The literature about political prisoners’ experience in Brazil unveils a narrative about the edge, but supported by a revolutionary dimension recognised within the democratic liberal thinking. Yet, contemporaneous common prisoners’Raps picture the edge itself, and all that was jutted beyond the national boundaries. The narrators are not the viewers of what is narrated. They are not on a stage held by a society of spectacles. They create a direct literature, like shooting at each other. It is about a poisoned life, led in series by ordinary people, about one whose head is at the aim of a machinegun, about the scent of death and lots of debts to be liquidated. Unpredictable dangers in and out the imprisoning walls. Readers are to hold their breaths.

This perspective leads us to the post-colonialist thesis, when it is said that the observation of internal frontiers show that the national narrative takes place over a heterogeneous, not plural space. Plurality comes to addition, heterogeneousness does not.

From the legal viewpoint, the authors of these writings are prisoners who have carried out common offences as robberies and drug dealing. However, in their writings, they think of themselves as victims of a political system aloof from the social problems and the risks threatening youths, most of them black people who are being brought up in slums surrounding large urban centres. For them, Rap is the point of union of a “brotherhood” of excluded ones, a revolution able to invert the relation between centre and periphery.