“The Six Pointed Star”by Manuel Tiago / Alvaro Cunhal, 2020 (Eng. Translation)
Cunhal was a Communist militant in Portugal jailed by the fascist dictatorship between 1949 and 1960, when he finally escaped. This is the story of a massive prison in Lisbon used by the regime, shaped like a six-pointed star, a panopticon surrounded by massive walls, moats and trenches that looked from the outside like a palace. It was not.
The stories of a prison are of the men inside. Cunhal describes some of the 500 in this jail – murderers, rapists, thieves, con artists and swindlers, thugs, smugglers, black marketeers – as human beings. Some were justified in their crimes, some not. The prison had kind and cruel guards, inept and efficient doctors, intelligent and moronic prisoners, general terrors and scared figures and a general administrative incompetence. The inmates are known by nicknames or numbers.
The most poorly treated by the prison administration were communists - ‘the politicals’ – kept in isolation on the 3rd floor of Ward C, always watched by a member of the PIDE – the vicious Portuguese secret police. Some inmates feel sorry for their terrible isolation and smuggle items into the last political's cell, as two of them disappear. Cunhal himself was a political, so it is odd that he retails stories about prisoners he would not have met if he’d been kept in isolation in this prison. He was in another prison that did not have isolation, and from which he and some comrades escaped, so it is possible these stories are combined.
Nor does Cunhal apply a socialist template to the jail, but approaches it more as a humanist. There is a lover who has a crush on his cell-mates’ sister. A metals expert who fixes motorbikes and a bronze casting. A thug who attacks other prisoners who stand up to him and is thrown in isolation. A new, young prison director who attempts to improve the prison food, clothing and exercise times and later fails. A romance and sex expert who gives lectures in the exercise yard. A religious nut mumbling about God and Jesus all the time. A war profiteer who swindled the government. A man who tries to escape and ruins his leg due to a bone-shattering fall. Enraptured prisoners showing off for a distant woman in a window. A prisoner theorizing on evolution and relativity. And one man, the Lizard, who committed such a horrible crime, no one would talk to him. While another, a doctor, was too arrogant to talk to anyone else.
The prison has a furniture shop, cardboard manufacture and a
motorbike repair facility, where the workers are paid almost nothing to learn a
‘skill.’ The food consists of the same
rancid fare. An occasional escape, a
bloody fight where guards pound prisoners into a pulp; a suicide, a murder –
these events break the crushing predictability and routine of each day in
prison, every year after every year after every year. Given it’s a high security fortress with long
sentences, it seems as if almost no one ever gets out – though one escapes using
a very long work ladder. The other way
to get ‘conditional release’ was to claim a pious Christianity in order to impress the prison officials.
The story is not just 500 men times many years, but a
building, a massive prison, a tomb for the living.
The author, Alvaro Cunhal, was the Secretary General of the Portuguese
Communist Party for many years. This included
the period of the overthrow of the Portuguese capitalist/fascist dictatorship
in 1974, which came with the liberation of Angola from colonialism. After this he was a Minister Without
Portfolio in the transitional governments for a time. He published a number of other books. If you are oddly attracted to prison stories
or films as I am, this book is for you.
Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper
left, to investigate our 14 year archive with these terms: “Are
Prisons Obsolete?”(Davis); “The Unseen” (Belestrini); “Slavery by Another Name”
(Blackmon); “Prison Strike,” “The Heart Goes Last” (Atwood); “The New Jim Crow”
(Alexander); “The Marijuana Manifesto” (Ventura); “Washington Bullets”
(Prashad); “The Bachelor,” “Nazare.”
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
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