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Prison as a Liberated Zone: The Murals of Long Kesh, Northern Ireland
Abstract
In Northern Ireland's Long Kesh prison in the late 1980s and 1990s, prisoners from each of the loyalist and republican groups painted highly politicized murals on the walls in their respective wings. This article seeks to examine these murals as both a symbol and a means whereby the politically motivated prisoners sought to appropriate the space of the prison for their own purposes. Their resistance, expressed in this and other ways, was not merely to the pains of imprisonment, the stripping of individuality and identity which was at the heart of the prison system. Rather imprisonment was seized as an opportunity to advance political understanding and build revolutionary structures whereby the prison was seen as one more front in their respective wars — that of republicans against the British state, and that of loyalists against republican insurgence. Each in their own way, republican and loyalist prisoners created virtual “liberated zones” within the prison and in doing so prepared for political power and conflict transformation on the other side of imprisonment.
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These “liberated zones” proved fertile ground for fiction writers – Isbell (2009), Bennett (1992) – and film makers – such as La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo (The Shining Trench of Chairman Gonzalo) by Argentinian director Jim Finn (Kuehner 2007). A decade later FARC prisoners in Modela Jail, Bogota controlled the north wing “where the cellblocks are decorated with giant murals depicting fallen comrades and rebel commanders” (Hodgson 2001). The “liberated zones” were not to last. In 1992, newly-elected President Alberto Fujimori moved to take control of the prisons. Forty-two prisoners in Miguel Castro Castro prison died as a result (Kirk 1996).
The murals of H7 survived until 2002 when they were recorded by Purbrick (2011).
Art therapy in prison is intended as “a tool for rehabilitation and management” (Johnson 2008) which allows the sublimation of libidinal and aggressive tendencies (Gussak 2004), perhaps particularly in women (Delshadian 2003). It can alleviate emotional stress for disturbed, violent criminals (Gibbons 1997) and in doing so ensure that prisoners are easier to control (Djurichkovic 2011). Whether by intention or design such programmes do not encourage resistance.
Consequently, instances such as the Last Supper mural painted in Folsom Prison's Greystone Chapel by Ralph Pecor in the 1930s (Brown 2008), the six murals painted in San Quentin prison in the 1950s by Alfred Santos which portray the history of California from indigenous times (Hall 2007), or the religious murals painted between 1942 and 1943 by Stanley Warren, a prisoner-of-war in the Japanese Changi prison in Singapore (Cornelius and Wee 2008) will not be considered. Similarly, there are examples of subversion through art which are being excluded by focusing on a politically articulate collective, such as the five murals painted secretively by Auschwitz prisoner Jean Bartichand on the walls of the Goleszów cement factory which depict slave labour in the factory (“The People of Goleszów Remember the Prisoners of Golleschau, an Auschwitz Sub-Camp”, http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/m/index.php?Itemid=8&id=122&option=com_content&task=view – accessed 8 January 2013), and the needlework by Tony Casdagli, a British inmate of a German prisoner of war camp in the 1940s, which contains Morse code insults against Hitler (Barkham 2011). Even the paintings of jailed artists and political activists like Burma's Htein Lin will be excluded. Against all the odds, he managed to smuggle paints into prison and, using fingers, syringes, etc. in the absence of access to brushes, completed 200 paintings during a seven year sentence; http://www.hteinlin.com/ (accessed 8 January 2013).
http://www.inminds.com/khiam-prison.html. Prisoners in Chile did the same with avocado stones (Adams 2009: 2). Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have been able to engage in the production of more political artefacts, which are displayed in Abu Dis, the Palestinian Museum of Prisoners (Mendel and Steinberg 2011). The collective may be putative rather than immediate: a prime case is that of Aboriginal art in Australian prisons. Even though “the prison provides the prehistory of urban Aboriginal art” (Kleinert 2001: 6), this art work has never managed to seriously challenge the prison system.
https://sites.google.com/site/longkeshdocuments/jail-history (accessed 8 January 2013).
“Fuiseog” is the Irish word for a lark. When in prison Bobby Sands wrote a short story about a captive lark called “The Lark and the Freedom Fighter”.
Outside the prison in the early years of the new century, about a dozen murals were painted on this same theme in loyalist areas. The prison mural was the first of the series.
Not least because many of them were very young. One study (Shirlow and McEvoy 2008) found that almost 70 per cent of the republican ex-prisoners they interviewed had been jailed first between the ages of 16 and 20; for loyalists the figure was 30 per cent.