The Prisoner's lament - Basic information
Every time people get taken away their personal liberty and
get imprisoned, they feel the necessity to express their feelings about their
fate in a variety of (literary) forms. It is not surprising that people in prison
use songs or short poems as the main medium to tell their stories, as imprisoned
people usually are not too well supplied with pen and paper. Hence he lack of
those supplies dictates the literary form of their expression.
The lament of prisoners also has a long tradition in literature until today.
Whenever in history people get locked up – justified or not – they
expressed their thoughts about their destiny. One can find prisoner’s laments
for example in antique Greek literature, through Irish and British literature,
through the literary production of prisoners in the World Wars, the period of
drug-smuggling in Mexican ‘corridos’ to the writings of imprisoned
people in jails nowadays.
In her book Kazett-Lyrik - Untersuchungen zu Gedichten und Liedern aus dem
Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen (concentration camp- lyric – investigations
on poems and songs from the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen), Katja Klein
among other things analyzes the psyche of prisoners in that particular camp.
She gives eight features of the prisoners’ psyche, which are significant
for all those poems and which we will also apply to the analysis of the laments
in the corridos de contrabando. One thing, which has to be considered regarding
those features, is that these people were locked up by the Nazis not because
they committed a crime, but because of their race and ethnical origin. But this
sometimes applies to the corrido del conflicto intercultural as well as Paredes
mentions in his book: “a man goes to prison under laws he had no part in
making, according to concepts of justice he does not understand. He feels that
he is in prison not because he committed a crime, but because he is a mexican.”
In her study, Klein observed the following characteristics:
1. CAPTIVITY:
no prisoner never forgot that he’s imprisoned, but captivity
itself never
becomes a them in those songs and poems. It is furthermore the natural background
for all the other themes.
2. FEELINGS:
poems and songs are a chance for prisoners to express their
feelings which
they are not able to in a world where is no space for feelings and emotions;
the
world in prison is described ‘rough’.
3. DEFIANCE:
defiance can be seen as a link between sadness and hope and
helps the
prisoners at least not to give up.
4. HOPE:
the human being cannot live without hope, especially not in
such a desperate
state; hope is the main theme in most of these poems and songs, even though
a
prisoner in one of his poems calls it “the hope of the hopeless”.
In most cases hope refers to the concrete end of the arrest the liberation from
the camp.
5. DAYDREAMS:
in order to cope with the reality in the camp, prisoners can
either accept
their desperation or flee themselves in other (imaginative) worlds and create
a world of harmony, peace and love.
6. REVENGE:
wish to take revenge on those who made the prisoners suffer
or just
imprisoned them. (This is a specific feature for those kind of prisons/camps
as
people were put in prison for no legal reason!)
7. APPEAL:
whereas the wish to take revenge was a feeling which was hidden
inside, the
wish for a change of reality was expressed through appeals to an imaginative
public.
8. THE CONCEPTION OF MAN:
this extreme situation in the camps required certain virtues
in
order to survive and which are described as ‘male’.
In his book A Texas-Mexican Cancinero – Folksongs of
the Lower Border, Américo Paredes mentions typical features of a
Prisoner’s song in a Greater Mexican tradition.
The characteristics he talks of and make a corrido a Prisoner’s song are:
(p.45)
· The crime
· The repentance
· The counting of the prisoner’s bars
· The sorrowing mother and
· The little bird that visits the prisoner
Analysis of the Prisoner's lament in "El Contrabandista"
This corrido starts not with the typical introduction (date, place, name of corridista), but gives right away an appeal to all the people outside the prison, how dangerous the contraband can be:
Pongan cuidado señores
lo que aquí voy a cantarles,
me puse a rifar mi suerte
con los mentaos federales.
Even though the narrator of this corrido knows that selling alcohol, cocaine
and morphine is illegal (crime), he does not stop it, as life is too good for
him. This can be seen in the second and the third stanza:
Comencé a vender champán
Tequila y vino habanero,
Pero es que yo no sabía
Lo que sufre un prisionero.
Muy pronto compré automóvil,
Propiedad con residencia,
Sin saber que en poco tiempo
Iba a ir a la penitencia.
What we also see in these lines is a certain regret or repentance
for committing those crimes. It is visible in the text that the narrator would
have stopped his smuggling-business, if he had had any idea how much he would
suffer in prison. He mentions as well, that the good things of life are outweighed
by the bad sides of jail.
Interesting enough he gives an appeal to all the people outside the prison who
still do contraband not to quit it, but keep on doing it more carefully. So
even though he’s in jail due to his smuggling, he obviously does not regard
contraband as a bad or negative thing. In the 13th stanza he appeals to his
contraband fellows not to stop it but to be more careful:
Mucho cuidado muchachos,
Todito el que sea bootlegger,
té nganlo por experiencia
Que con la ley no se juega.
In the 16th and 17th stanza we see how strong the prisoner’s feelings are when he talks about his mother:
Llegó un día que triste estaba
Y ese día lloré por cierto
Recibí carta enlutada
Y decía: -- Tu madre se ha muerto.
Yo lloraba y le gritaba
Y loco me quise volver
-- Te fuistes madre querida
Y yo ya no te volví a ver.
Once again one can see how the prisoner uses this literary form of a corrido to express his strong emotion for which there was not any place in the prison. The last line in stanza 17 (“Y yo ya no te volví a ver.”) also indicates the hope the prisoner had to see his family after he will be released from jail. How important family is to the prisoner is also visible in the 15th stanza where he talks about his parents forgive him for what he has done:
En ese mentado Paso
Donde mis padres quedaron
Recibí su bendición
Cuando a mí me sentenciaron.
So we see in this corrido as well a lot of the features Klein and Paredes mention
in their analyses, which makes it as well a true corrido de contrabando with
a Prisoner’s lament in first person narration.
Bibliography:
Klein, Katja. Kazett-Lyrik - Untersuchungen zu Gedichten und Liedern aus
dem Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen. Königshausen
& Neumann: Würzburg, 1995.
Paredes, Américo. A Texas-Mexican Cancinero – Folksongs of the
Lower Border. University of Texas Press: Austin, 2001.