Prison wall epigraphs: The transience of prisoners’ memoirs in Abbas Khider’s ‘Die Orangen des Präsidenten (original) (raw)

Abbas Khider Anthology

Abstract

The peculiarity of prisons lies in the ambivalence of walls as spaces of both disappearance and appearance. While the overt purpose of these boundaries is to limit individuals in their ability to practice the freedoms of movement and speech, epigraphs can be understood as prisoners’ way of disrupting the politics of the prison panopticon. This paper focuses on what can be learned from epigraphs in carceral narratives to understand the significance and difficulties of writing memory in in-between places. Using Hanna Arendt’s concept of the ‘space of appearance’, I provide a reading of Die Orangen des Präsidenten, a 2011 novel by Iraqi diaspora author, Abbas Khider, to trace how writing on walls can function as an act of claiming space. I discuss the ambiguity of the wall as a metaphor of both boundary and passage. The young protagonist Mahdi Muhsin consults the architectural space for clues about prison experiences. While the walls transmit knowledge about the space’s inhabitants, Mahdi discovers that the architectural modifications hint to the power struggles undergone to make them visible. The presence of individual testimonies on the walls is contrasted with the impact of the wardens’ efforts to erase these stories and the prisoners’ bodies, and with that any traces of the writers’ presence. I argue that the constant mark-making in the carceral complex leaves traces of the silenced prisoner voices, and can be seen as an act of claiming space. The deeply engraved notes are their way to appear in a space whose sole function is to erase their existence.

Carolin Mueller hasn't uploaded this paper.

Let Carolin know you want this paper to be uploaded.

Ask for this paper to be uploaded.