Museo del Camminare

interferences

Some mornings I walked out into the courtyard and every living thing there, the seagulls and wagtails, the small trees, and even the stray blades of grass, seemed to smile and shine in the sun. It was at such times when I perceived the beauty of even this small, closed-in corner of the world, that I knew that someday my people and I would be free. (Mandela, Nelson, The Long Walk to Freedom, Boston-New York-London, Little, Brown & Co., 1994, digital edition)

Our morning ‘promenade’ round the grounds was far too short and all too often suspended. It was maddening to see the blue sky through the window, to read in the papers – when we got them – that this was the best summer for years. (Rigby, Françoise, In defiance, in Elizabeth Basset (ed.), Each in His Prison. An Anthology, London, SPCK, 1978, p. 220)

It is 25 November 1975, when I am sentenced. I shall not be seeing the stars again for many years. In the beginning I don’t realize this, I don’t miss them. And then suddenly it becomes very important, like chafing sores in the mind – something you’ve taken for granted for so long and that you now miss, the way you’d miss a burial site if you died in space. It is not natural never to see stars, or the moon for that matter – it is as cruel as depriving people of sound. I see the moon again for the first time on 19 April 1976 when, at about twenty-three minutes to four in the afternoon, I am in the largest of the three exercise yards, which has towering walls, making it rather like a well. I looked up and to my astonishment saw in a patch of sky above a shrivelled white shape. Could it be a pearl in my eye? was it the afterbirth of a spaceship? No, it could only be the moon. And they told me that she’d been hanged, that she was dead! (Breytenbach, Breyten, Seasons and Storms in Jack Mapanje (ed.), Gathering Seaweed. African Prison Writing, Oxford, Heinemann, 2002, p. 207)

I look up one morning – my early morning stroll just after opening hour – and there, right on the topmost branch, a territory hardly capable, I had always thought, of supporting more than the weight of the fruits, perched a little boy reaching for the topmost mangoes. His head was higher than the crown of the trees itself; he swayed gently with the motion of the branch. (Soyinka, Wole, The Man Died, in Jack Mapanje (ed.), Gathering Seaweed. African Prison Writing, Oxford, Heinemann, 2002, p. 107)

Prison conditions have a way of tempering polemics, and making individuals see more what unites them than what divides them. When I was taken to the courtyard with the others, we greeted each other warmly. (Mandela, Nelson, Rivonia, in Jack Mapanje (ed.), Gathering Seaweed. African Prison Writing, Oxford, Heinemann, 2002, p. 196)

‘Can get a bit noisy when the boys are walking across the yard,’ said Dawn. ‘Silence is a luxury in this place!’. (HMP Huntercombe, in Brown, Amanda, My Time Inside Britain’s Most Notorious Jails, London, HQ, 2019, digital edition)

Then, one day, I was let out for exercise. The prison [...] was composed of three great parallel blocks of cells. The spaces in between seemed like canyons, and it was here that the exercise yards had been built. Along each side of the canyon was a line of little courtyards, each about ten yards square and surrounded by walls of overgrown red brick. They were like miniature Elizabethan gardens, forgotten and nestling together in company under the towering concrete. They were deep in grass and weeds, and the walls were incrusted with little plants and incrusted with salutations, boasts and threats by earlier outlaws, whose language, if not Elizabethan, stemmed straight from Rabelais. A brick path, buried in the green undergrowth, was laid in a square following the walls, and along the whole row was a catwalk from which sentries, dispelling the illusion, could overlook the inmates. Fifteen of us were let out at one time. As soon as the preceding group was safely back, our doors were opened one by one and, with a good interval between us to keep us from talk, we were driven downstairs with a barrage of shouts. [...] I wanted to enjoy the newly-discovered things about me and would have preferred to be alone to absorb the sky, grass and air, so that I felt a faint resentment at the noise and fear that one of my neighbours would waste some precious minutes by talking to me [...] Meanwhile, my feet were recognizing the strange but well-loved feeling of treading on soft turf, and my eyes and nose were engaged in their own discoveries of life. (Burney, Christopher, Solitary Confinement, in Elizabeth Basset (ed.), Each in His Prison. An Anthology, London, SPCK, 1978, pp. 213-4)

Helps you pass the time, that’s the main thing; stops you looking at the wall. The way I am, I never dare to look at it. anytime I’m crossing the exercise-yard I keep my eyes down on the ground, otherwise I’d start getting ideas. I know I could get out any day I wanted, I’ve got plenty of pals outside, they could have me fifty miles away within an hour. (Archie, in Tony Parker (ed.), The Frying Pan. A Prison and Its Prisoners, London, Faber and Faber, 2013, digital edition)

My hobbies are reading, exercising and walking in the outside yard regardless of the weather, and my own form of meditation. I have never been instructed in the art of mental and spiritual meditation by any master. However, on my own I have done well, I believe. My technique is to find a quiet, isolated spot in the yard after my exercise period and sit down. Then I let my mind drift off to various places, places associated with the happy experiences of my past. (Letter from David to Bo, in Bo Lozoff, We’re All Doing Time. A Guide to Getting Free, Durham, Human Kindness Foundation, 1985, pp. 184-5)

trajectories

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I walk clockwise around the yard. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, I walk counterclockwise around the yard, like the yin and yang of life, of the universe. I walk whether it’s hot or cold, sunny or rain... except on Sunday, because the Lord, God Almighty has declared Sunday as a day of rest. (G. E., a long-term inmate in a maximum-security prison in the US, quoted in Cowles, Ernest L., Creating the Elements of a Humane Prison System, in David Jones (ed.), Humane Prisons, Boca Raton, CRC, 2006, digital edition)

In the afternoon, we were permitted to exercise for half an hour under strict supervision. We walked briskly around the courtyard in single file. (Mandela, Nelson, The Long Walk to Freedom, Boston-New York-London, Little, Brown & Co., 1994, digital edition)

Exercise is a welcome change. You get to walk round in a concrete yard the size of two tennis courts. Like a demented hamster or a lab rat going round and round anti-clockwise (don’t ask why anti-clockwise, no idea, seems like we were going backwards in time) and it’s hilarious to think that this relieves the boredom, but I’m telling you it does. (Owens, Frankie, The Little Book of Prison. A Beginners Guide, Sherfield on Loddon, Waterside, 2012, p. 58)

Before two o’ clock all the women are dressed for exercises; at which hour exactly they – the old prison women – pass into the airing-ground, three wards at a time (only one ward is allowed out on week days), and walk in pairs round the ground. [...] This exercise continues till three o’clock, when the women return to their wards. (Brixton Prison, Robinson, F. W., Female Life in Prison. By a Prison Matron, London, Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1864, p. 135)

In Cheliabinsk it was raining, and everybody in the prison refused to go out for a walk because it was wet outside. I liked exercise and hated to miss a walk. So I decided to walk in the rain, and I was the only prisoner in the prison yard. The common criminals were forced to walk in a circle; but we fought to have the right not to walk in a circle, and we simply did not do it. This time, the guard was very young and probably had only begun his service. He had a rifle with a bayonet. He said, “In a circle!” I said, “I won’t!” I explained to him that I was a political prisoner and I wouldn’t walk in a circle. He said “I warn you!” and aimed his rifle at me, its bayonet. I went up to the very edge of the weapon, and he moved it aside. He was scared, and I was scared, but still I did not walk in a circle. (Issakharovna Basevich, Aida, How I became an Anarchist, in Veronica Shapovalov (ed.), Remembering the Darkness. Women in Soviet Prisons, Lanham- Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, p. 138)

The regulations prescribe a twenty-minute exercise walk each day; you have the right to refuse. I have refused it times out of dread of the wads of phlegm in the exercise yard. The yards are twelve to fifteen feet wide by twenty-five to thirty feet long. [...] For twenty minutes you walk in circles in the cages among the spittle. [...] My turn in the exercise yard often came early in the morning, around eight o’clock. Pacing briskly up and down–caged, but under an open sky in the cold air, in the half-light of dawn. A closed horizon: the quadrangle of square, massive, black buildings; the rows of oblong barred windows glowed against this background of dark masonry. It made you think of some bizarre furnace seen from the outside. Once in a while a gasping cry might be heard somewhere, clinging to those bars. [...] We pass from the idle immobility of the workshop to the rhythmic round of the exercise yard. The round goes on and on, sometimes in the heat (our old tunics, buttoned to the neck according to regulations, clinging to our damp flesh), sometimes in the cold (nipping our fingers with invisible pincers). Happy enough if the three trees in the prison yard, frosted with silver dust, remind us of the enchantment of a park in winter. (Serge, Victor, Men in Prison, Oakland, PM, 2014, pp. 57, 68, 142, or. ed. Les hommes dans la prison, Paris, Rieder, 1931)

There was no grass to speak of in the “yard” at 7 Block, yet that’s what the officer called it over the bullhorn at 8:00 a.m., when our doors broke open. Ah, yard, I thought: grass, the apple tree, walks on wood-chipped paths. My mind was not yet turned to the Prison Channel. “About two hundred men were herded past the chow hall to a large, fenced-in basketball court catty-cornered from my secret jungle room. We were shaded by another cellblock and it was cold with the late August chill. I had the feeling we were in a dimly lit cooler. Ray, Micky, and I walked in a circle around the border of the basketball court. Ten men played ball, pausing to blow through their cold fingers every chance they got. “So this is yard,” Ray said. (Dawkins, Curtis, The Graybar Hotel, New York, Scribner, 2017, digital edition)

Only a hundred of us went out to the yard that day. Usually there were three times that. We all just gathered in a loose group—like those strange flocks of birds that come together and become one—and we walked very slowly around the quarter-mile asphalt track. There was much whispering going on above the soft rustle of our state-issued shoes on the blacktop. (Dawkins, Curtis, The Graybar Hotel, New York, Scribner, 2017, digital edition)

I used to walk the west yard a lot. I walked it for several years; walked it in the scorching summer, the icy snow, the drenching rain, and walked it in the mellow days of May. I could make 350 laps a day easily. Sometimes made a thousand. (Letter from Mickey to Bo, in Bo Lozoff, We’re All Doing Time. A Guide to Getting Free, Durham, Human Kindness Foundation, 1985, p. 214)

Before my arrival the foreigners had campaigned long and hard to increase the frequency of the exercise periods, and eventually the guards had decided we’d be permitted to have ninety-minute session once every ten days. This involved going downstairs after breakfast and running around a concrete yard while a guard watched over us. Sometimes we’d get a football game going with the Chinese and walk around the yard playing a harmonica. The guards would look from their watchtowers with bemusement as I traipsed from one end of the yard to the other, blowing bluesy riffs into the air. If it rained the guards would refuse to go outside, so in the winter months these exercise periods were often cancelled and weeks would go by without leaving the cell block. (Stevenson, Dominic, Monkey House Blues. A Shanghai Prison Memoir, Edinburgh-London, Mainstream, 2010, digital edition)

Hope was gone, and I almost felt I was gone too. I would walk in circles in the yard feeling myself apart, like my actual arms and legs and head were coming loose and someone would find me in a little heap. (Tolkeef prison, Langdon, Rob, The Seventh Circle. My Seven Years of Hell in Afghanistan’s Most Notorious Prison, Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 2017, digital edition)

One hour each day at Millbank is allowed for exercise in the airing yards, where the silent system is still enforced. A ward of women is exercised at a time, with a prison matron in attendance. The prisoners walk in Indian file round and round the yard, the matron keeping a careful watch on her flock of black sheep. (Robinson, F. W., Female Life in Prison, London, Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1864, p. 18)

I hear footsteps over my head all night. They come and they go. Again they come and they go all night. They come one eternity in four paces and they go one eternity in four paces, and between the coming and the going there is Silence and the Night and the Infinite. For infinite are the nine feet of a prison cell, and endless is the march of him who walks between the yellow brick wall and the red iron gate, thinking things that cannot be chained and cannot be locked, but that wander far away in the sunlit world, each in a wild pilgrimage after a destined goal. (Giovannitti, Arturo, The Walker and the Cage (1912), in Elizabeth Basset, Each in His Prison. An Anthology, London, SPCK, 1978, p. 128)

walking in prison

Yard Time

Walking as a liberating practice

introduction

interferences

trajectories

introduction

interferences

trajectories

note