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 contrabando de
El Paso"
Already in the first stanza the prisoner expresses his feeling of desperation:
El día siete de agosto
estábamos deseseperados,
que nos sacarán de El Paso
para Kiansis mancornados.
Against his will he is chained together with other prisoners and – together
with them– taken to another place he chooses to be. One can see that the
captivity is directly linked to the prisoner’s state of desperation.
In the stanza three the prisoner hopes to see his mother and to receive her
blessing:
Yo dirijo mi mirada
por todita la estación,
a mi madre idolatrada,
pedirle su bendición.
In the fourth stanza he reflects upon when he’s going to see his friends
and family again:
¡adios todos mis amigos!
¿cuándo los volveré a ver?
This passage shows also the prisoner’s hope to see his friends and family
again, which probably is a major factor in his sustaining the suffering.
In such rough world there is no place for feelings and the narrator of the corrido
tells his fellow prisoners not to show any emotion in the fifth stanza:
les dije a mis compañeros
que no fueran a llorar.
These lines also show a new conception of man, as in the rough world of prison
only the strong ones can survive and not the ones who cry.
That the good sides of smuggling do not pay off the bad sides in prison makes
the prioners appeal to all his other friends who smuggle in the 10th stanza:
Yo les digo a mis amigos,
que salgan a experimentar
que le entren al contrabando,
a ver dónde van a dar.
In the 15th stanza he expresses the same opinion about that smuggling and its
profits are not worth suffering in jail:
Es bonito el contrabando,
Se gana mucho dinero.
pero lo que más me puede,
las penas de un prisionero.
According to Paredes’s ideas, this appeal shows clearly the prisoner’s
repentance and that he has committed a crime. We also find a reference to the
sorrowing of the prisoner’s mother in the last stanza:
Allí te mando mamacita,
Un suspiro y un abrazo.
We have to admit that the mother’s sorrowing is not directly expressed
in the stanza, but one gets the feeling that the prisoner gives her a hug, so
that she does not have to worry about him.
Considering the points Klein and Paredes make, one has to admit that this corrido
clearly illustrates a Prisoner’s lament in first person narration and that
it belongs to a tradition of Prisoner’s songs in Greater Mexico, according
to Paredes.
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.