When I was seven years old, I was sent to prison. My brother was already inside – it was clear he had committed a crime: guilty. I already felt guilty about his guilt, but now, I too, was sent through those gates to be trapped behind iron bars.
When I was seven years old, I passed that gate and the gates slammed shut behind me.
Where did we get the arrogance to believe our children need educating?
It wasn’t too bad. We had each other to help observe prison rules. We had time out on the tarmac and only sometimes there was collective punishment. We learned to line up and to avert our eyes. We learned where the secret corners were, where we couldn’t be seen. We learned to breath and play in an underworld behind the shed.
What had I done wrong that I was sent there?
It was something with the mind. My mind was wrong. There wasn’t enough in it. It was necessary to close it up, or break it open in a way that it would contain only this stuff. Stuff that had to be known, that needed to be there. Not clear why.
We really cared. We didn’t need to learn how to care (but perhaps we needed to learn how to fear).
We were born without this stuff in our minds – these letters and numbers and spellings and times tables. They weren’t there but it was decided they should be. Otherwise we would not be OK, really not. We had to know this stuff in order to belong.
What else was wrong, to get this sentence of 10 years inside?
Well, it seemed that laughter was out, and honesty too. It seemed imagination was anarchy and not to be allowed. To argue that 1 + 1 = 3, that would be disruptive, bad, bad, bad.
Thinking had to give way to knowing stuff. Questions were wrong, there were only answers. One each. They asked, we answered. To question was to rebel. To think this was boring, and to say so – that was a crime against prison laws, yes, you got solitary confinement for that.
And words, they stood for things and things stood for words. One thing. One word. Never break up that marriage – between word and thing. A dog is a dog is a dog. Even if it flies with rainbow wings and dies in flames.
Someone once whispered: “sometimes a word can mean TWO things.” Shhhh.
And the teacher would scream at inmates. And we learned to be ashamed. And we sat stiff, not thinking any more, because thinking could lead to talking and talking could lead to punishment and that daunting feeling in the gut of “wrong, wrong, wrong”. So we froze, when she shouted, even the muscles of our faces, as if we were each accused, because she shouted at us all.
And sometimes, freedom was found, in suddenly needing to pee. That ecstatic moment, shocked and alone, reading the graffiti of silent rebellion.
It was not her fault. She had been in prison too, for many years, and her mother and father before. She had forgotten what we already knew, from beyond the iron bars. She had been programmed to program.
But sitting there, in prison, with the shouting and the freeze, I realized one morning that I was free. In a moment, I knew that even if she shouted, even if she broke my bones, even if she killed me and I would be dead, she could never, ever force me to do against my will. I knew this, and I was no longer afraid.
1 + 1 did also equal 3. Because you have one, and another one, and then a third one which is the two ones mixed together. Why not? Isn’t that how Mummy and Daddy made us?
It’s taking years to leave the prison in my head, even decades after physical release. I still grab hold of knowing stuff, and right and wrong as if it were good, as if it were natural, as if were smart, as if it were safe.
And other kids, I see they’re older now, but still leaning on prison walls, never venturing too far, often glancing back at the school clock tower as if it were watching and might still punish, or finally tell them the answer to who they are – that question which was never asked out loud by anyone, and never taught.
I still let my mind fill up with random thoughts about no-one and nothing, unrelated to the air on the face or the laughter of the sunlight, still estranged from the love where the once naked feet sank into the earth. I only do it to belong. It’s grip weakens when I’m alone.
Oh my children, remember you are free. Although I abandon you at that iron gate, and you struggle with school bag weighted with books of lead. Remember it’s nonsense, and cherish the space – that glorious, infinite space inside yourselves. This is your birthright, and it is very, very right.
Strive, oh children born of harmony and light, to allow the freedom of your beautiful minds and the sensuous harmony of your growing forms, to honour that space of being in whose freedom you were conceived and are conceived each moment, again and again.
