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 “Por morfina
y cocaína”
The first time this corrido speaks of the prisoner’s feelings
is in the third stanza:
con su corazón muy triste,
y su destino en la mano.
We also see strong emotion in the fifth stanza:
Sabas estaba muy triste,
Acababa de llorar,
Pues había que ir a la pinta
Ocho años iba a pasar.
In the seventh, eighth and ninth stanza we see again the idea of the sorrowing
(mother) parents who try to prevent their children’s disaster and their
committing crime. This also shows the impact the action of their children has
on the parents:
No les valen los consejos
Que sus padres les han dado,
Sabiendo bien que esos viejos
Ya por todito han pasado.
Unos dejan a sus madres
Rogándole al Dios del Cielo
Que se duela de sus hijos
Y que les mande algún consuelo.
Otros dejan a sus hijos
Esperando a su papá,
Y sus padres a la finca,
Sabe Dios, hijo verás.
Once again we can observe that the smuggler does not accept advices even from
his family as long as he is not caught and things in life are good for him.
We see another allusion to the prisoners’ feeling and emotion in the 11th
stanza where the prisoners are about to cry again:
Que triste es ir pa’ el tren
Cuando ya se iba a arrancar
Que tristes iban los presos
Daban ganas de llorar.
In the sixth stanza the narrator expresses an indirect appeal to the public
how bad the contraband is and how easily the prisoners would have given it up,
if they had known how bad life inside a jail is. The good sides of the success
of the contraband made them blind and not realize how quickly they end up in
jail:
Todos van a Leavenworth
Por no saberse tantear,
El whiskey y la marijuana
Que algo bueno han de dejar.
We can see another indirect appeal in the 16th stanza, in which the narrator
states that no one can imagine how bad life in prison is and how much the prisoners
suffer, if someone has not experienced it. So this has to be read then as a
warning to the people outside the world of jail.
Solamente el que ha vivido
Algún tiempo en la prisión
Sabe lo que son congojas
Y penas del corazón.
This corrido is also a true corrido de contrabando which contains a Prisoner’s
Lament, but this time it is not only the prisoner who sings about the suffering,
but furthermore the corridista himself sings about it in a first person narration.
It is also remarkable how often words like "llorar," "triste," "pena," "penitencia"
and "sufrir" appear in those texts. This shows again the state of desperation the
prisoners find themselves in.
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.