PART 4 OF A SELECTION FROM THE CHAPTER ENTITLED “BRINGING DOWN THE SHUTTERS”, IN THE NEW EDITION OF “A LEAF OF HONEY” Except for a narrow slit at the top of one of the walls, there were no windows, no ventilation, no view. Only the gaps between the bars in the cell gate allowed us to look down the dingy hallway lined by other cell doors. It was eerily quiet for a room filled with so many people. The other prisoners stood around me in a proxemic bubble that seemed to isolate themselves from the strange cleanliness of my white suit. Occasionally one of them would approach me and ask what a whiteman like me had done to be put in a place like this. I had to answer truthfully. “Je ne sais pas,” I said in French. I didn’t know. This was a surprisingly acceptable answer, and I sensed that if asked, perhaps many of the others would answer the same way, because they would respond sympathetically, “je comprends”. They understood that I didn’t know. Maybe people here didn’t expect to know why they were arrested. It was just what happened to poor and powerless people. But a guy in a white suit, this was a mystery. After a while, I went and leaned against a wall to take a break from standing. Trying to keep my balance in the foul muck was exhausting. I kept getting mired; if I stood too long in one place my shoes sank so deep I couldn’t see them. I feared losing one in the quagmire underfoot. The wall offered the only respite. The other prisoners made a space for me and I leaned like the others, sideways, so I would take up less space. However, as soon as my suit came into contact with the soiled wall, the proxemic bubble of empty space around me popped. I straightened up and saw that I now had a long brown wall-print on the shoulder of my suit. People noted this and moved closer, there was no longer a reason to avoid contact with me. Soon, I would be as dirty as the rest. I didn’t feel afraid being among the other prisoners, there were no threats or abuse from any of them. People whispered among themselves mostly in Ewondo, the language of the tribe that surrounded Yaoundé. They had many things to fear in the cell next door, things that happened in the night. I stood or leaned for as long as I could, but when night fell and no more daylight shown in through the slit, I did what the others began to do. One by one, we all laid down in the muck. The process was like carefully packing sardines into a can. We all lay on our sides to take up less space and faced one direction with our knees crooked together to make room for everyone. Elbows under our heads were our pillows and our only buffer against putting our faces in the fecal sludge. There were little cockroaches and other bugs that crawled over us in the night but no one moved, trying to get any kind of rest they could. I imagined what we must have looked like from above. It must have been like that historic diagram of the British slave ship Brookes that epitomized the cramped placement of slave captives aboard ships of the middle passage in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The only difference was we weren’t chained together. When people were tired of lying on their left side, they would nudge the last person in the row to turn over and face to the right. One by one, we each rolled over and faced the other direction, our knees again locked. I don’t think I slept. Late in the night a uniformed jailer wielding a long bastinado stick came to the door with a piece of paper and read out a name. Someone in the line of human sardines whimpered and got up. The rest of the cell was silent. He made his way to the gate; there was nowhere else to go, no place to hide and no hope of running away from what he knew was coming. They bound him with handcuffs and shackles at the wrists and ankles and dragged him to an adjacent cell just down the corridor. He went without resistance or bravery, just resignation. Soon, we could hear the shouts of the interrogators and the screams of the prisoner as they beat the soles of his feet with a stick. Everyone listened to the swish and the crack of the whipping cane on his flesh. His answers to their questions were incoherent to me. After half an hour of this torture, the prisoner was dragged back unfettered to the cell and thrown on the floor. He couldn’t stand and had to crawl to the empty slot in the line trying not to place the open wounds on his feet in the excreta on the floor. The next name was read. This continued all through the night. About eight people were beaten, some didn’t come back. As I waited to hear my name called, I understood for the first time in my life something of what the Síyáh-Chál in Tehran must have been like in the time of Baháulláh. I reminded myself that His prison was much worse. Towards dawn the interrogations stopped.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 11:47:05 +0000
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