Opinion: Freedom to have conscience
In contrast to the prisoner of conscience, we have today prisoners of no-conscience whose thoughts are given to them by the regime
By Pramod K Nayar
Hyderabad: Our age of totalitarianism produces two kinds of prisoners, and poetry.
Forty years ago in 1983, the magazine Crisis, published a handful of poems by the Cuban Armando Valladares. Valladares, in prison for 22 years under the Castro regime, wheel-chair-bound with peripheral neuropathy, wrote of his prison experiences, but also served a cautionary note to audiences because it could be their future too:
Don’t hide behind warm lights.
Feel my pain too for it is yours
Valladares was declared a “Prisoner of Conscience” by Amnesty in 1975. The poetry from such prisoners captures an era that is, tragically, a longue durée.
Categorising Prisoners
Peter Benenson coined the term “Prisoner of Conscience” in a 1961 essay in the Observer. Benenson cited the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ Articles 18 and 19 which guaranteed “the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion” to everyone and “the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
Benenson wrote: “we define [Prisoners of Conscience] thus: ‘Any person who is physically restrained … from expressing … an opinion which he honestly holds and which does not advocate or condone personal violence.’”
Amnesty International defined the category as: “someone who has not used or advocated violence or hatred in the circumstances leading to their imprisonment but is imprisoned solely because of who they are (sexual orientation, ethnic, national or social origin, language, birth, colour, sex or economic status) or what they believe (religious, political or other conscientiously held beliefs).”
A Penguin publication titled Persecution 1961 with essays by nine such prisoners appeared simultaneously. In the Introduction, Peter Benenson writes: “The other six essays concern people who are … all people — doctors lawyers, and writers — who have sought, and been denied, the right to express their views …”
Thus a category of prisoners — we know contemporary instances of doctors, academics, poets who are prisoners of conscience — was born: people with opinions at odds with the current regime.
Poetry and Prisoners
In a 1990 issue of the Journal of Law and Religion, readers encountered an odd inclusion: poetry. Irina Ratushinskaya, a Russian dissident poet and one of “the third generation of the Soviet prisoner of conscience”, writes:
And we remain in place on dreadful chessboard squares
All of us prisoners, our coffee smells like burned letters
And post offices smell like opened letters…
The lines align the routines of everyday life with censorship and captivity. But more frightening is the response, or lack of it, from the witnesses and bystanders:
there is no one there to shout DON’T!
And the chiseled faces on facades have their eyes shut.
The percepticide of the masses who see but do not observe the oppression, who stay silent, is what finally indicts the objectors. In another poem she writes:
in Russia, poets are expected to come under firing
To win spots on lists which are final
Ratushinskaya is describing a Prisoner of Conscience: they express their opinion, and hence “come under firing”. The “final” lists are of those taken away. The “win” is not a triumph, it is a death sentence. Ratushinskaya is speaking of poetry-as-opinion-making. Prisoners of Conscience are those who read and write differently, whose vision encompasses all humanity, and is planetary in scale.
A set of five poems by Armando Valladares appeared in Index on Censorship (1982). In one titled “Planted in My Chair” Armando Valladares employs a heliotrope to speak of the contrast between prison and freedom:
I want to reach
beyond these prison bars
where the Sun belongs to everyone
The heliotrope communicates a planetary scale of hope: it is for all humanity, just as the sun is for all life on earth. In “Over the Wires” too, Valladares employs a heliotrope, with an entirely different effect:
The Sun red
like dawn’s fusillade…
My companions say
that a cloud was approaching the Sun
that it was already getting lost below the wires
The sun reminds the poet of violence, but in the last lines, he turns the trope around: for a prisoner even a sunset can only be seen through the wires, as though the wires are imprisoning the sun as it sets. He concludes:
I felt closed in infinite night
with the sun sunken into my legs
and the evening suffocated in my wheels.
Valladres’ obsession with the open space — understandable in his context — repeats in “The Situation”. It opens with “You who can choose/the path your steps will take” and speaks of those outside:
You who forgot
or do not know
that there are men and women…
who can only look upwards
at a slice of sky sometimes.
He emphasises that even such a short step is impossible for him:
You have no idea how
I envy them, my comrades, who can at least take one step
at the bottom of this concrete hole.
Prisoners of Conscience thus speak of freedom of / to have a conscience.
Another Prison, Another poetry
In the longue durée, poetry of/by Prisoners of Conscience can be profitably read against poems that gesture at a different kind of prisoner: prisoners whose thoughts are given to them by the regime. They are prisoners of no-conscience because they are unthinking, their opinions forged within propaganda’s malignant half-truths. They are imprisoned within hand-me-down views.
In contrast to the poets who served time because their views were at odds with prevalent climates, we have the unnamed citizen in WH Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen”:
he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views…
his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way…
he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He holds appropriate opinions, like a prisoner instructed to obey. In a theme resonant with current worries of community reproduction, Auden’s citizen-prisoner even breeds to state specifications: he had five children, “which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation”.
Auden’s critique of the prisoner of no-conscience describes much of the ideologically malleable population of today who speak in — pardon the gendered construction — His Master’s Voice — and is compressed into the concluding lines:
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
He is not free (hence the first question), being circumscribed by totalitarianism’s thought-police, and the unthinking automaton he has become.
Our longue durée of totalitarianism exhibits two kinds of prisoners, and both appear in the poetry.
