HAZEL FRIEDMAN attends three remarkable plays in which juvenile offenders express themselves with the aid of Puppets in Prison
SEAN MCKINLEY admits to being proud of nothing in his young life. Except his digestive system. “Shit man, I’m good at swallowing anything — cell-phones, watches … you name it, I chow it.”
From a distance, he has the face of an innocent. Up close, his frail frame is swallowed by eyes hardened with pain. To McKinley and the other long-term juvenile prisoners at Diepkloof Prison, childhood is obviously an unaffordable indulgence.
We are sitting in the “damsaal” at Diepkloof prison, where McKinley is serving an eight- year sentence for armed robbery, alongside “Sharon Stone”, “Dr Snuggles” and the other characters that make up the pantheon of Puppets in Prison. Initiated by Gary Friedman and Nyanga Tshabalala, of Puppets Against Aids fame, Puppets in Prison is the culmination of an eight-week pilot project — soon to to be implemented in prisons countrywide — during which inmates learn to script and perform plays on issues surrounding the spread of Aids in prison.
During the workshops, they discuss sexual issues, make puppets and perform scenes from cells and shower rooms, telling familiar — but, until now, silent — stories of sodomy, rape and prostitution. And through the artefacts of innocence, McKinley and 11 hardened teenagers have learnt to articulate and mediate sexual experiences which, while horrifying (to outsiders, anyway), function within the brutal hierarchy dominating prison life as a routine method of intimacy, power or payment.
Performed by the prisoners in a marakalas stew of African languages, English and tsotsitaal, each play revolves around a specific sexual scenario. In the first, Sharon Stone — the dreadlocked and delightfully camp prison pomp, “smartie” or “squeeza” — dismisses the threat of Aids, despite the fact that his lovers are dropping like flies around him. When he hears that his favourite “naai” has died from the disease, he is too frightened to speak out in case he loses his livelihood. “Anyway,” he says, “I am reponsible for my own life — no one else’s.”
The second play is the most disturbing of the three, for it deals with the problem of prison gangs and the obligatory sexual initiation of new prisoners. The third is the most optimistic, showing a monogamous prison couple “living happily ever after” once they have learnt the benefits of “one condom, one round”. Funny, poignant and deeply disconcerting — it is obvious from the visceral realism of the performances that the actors do not rely on the imagination to convey their message — the plays strike in the place where a laugh and a gasp are indistinguishable.
Yet the simplified messages behind each vignette mask the complexity of the sexual network behind bars. Within the Puppets in Prison ethos, jail warders do not even make a guest appearance, either as characters or as part of the plot. As the most concrete and ubiquitous symbols of prison authority, their exclusion is perhaps one of the loudest statements prisoners can make about temporarily reclaiming power through theatre in a place where they have been stripped of it completely.
Exiled from “civilised society”and its norms, the prisoners have built their own ecosystem or state of otherness, with special rules, religions and currency. Life behind bars revolves primarily around the issue of power, and power is articulated most forcefully through sexual domination. “You go in and, wham, you’ve got to obey the law of the jungle,” explains McKinley. “And you can’t say: ‘Hey man, screw me up the bum but use a condom first.'”
Yet cultural expression — in this instance, the use of puppetry — gives rise to another kind of power: that of knowledge and, ironically in this context, freedom — enabling the prisoners to stand temporarily outside the prevailing power relations. At Diepkloof, with its 3 000 prisoners, at least 50 of whom are HIV positive, the risks of infection are inevitably high. Yet the puppets seem to be doing more for Aids awareness than lectures on the dangers of unprotected sex and mass distribution of condoms could ever hope to achieve.
“Puppets are a way of mediating and distancing the pain and humiliation of certain sexual acts,” explains Friedman. “They provide catharsis though humour and allow victims to act out their experiences without fear of personal embarrassment,” adds Tshabalala.
Yet the most moving part of Puppets in Prison lies not in the message but in the way bleak eyes suddenly brighten, and shoulders hunched in defeat straighten out. After each play during the inaugural Puppets in Prison performance — attended by Carl Niehaus, chairman of the correctional services portfolio, Aids expert Dr Clive Evian and many parliamentarians — the actors bow coyly, as though hesitant to leave their puppet personae behind. But by the end, shy smiles have been replaced by an almost swaggering confidence.
“Maybe if I looked closer at people in the audience, I could see people I ripped off,” says Sipho Mzimba, a pint-sized 18-year-old whose cherubic features are marred by a scar stretching across his face and a glassy eye, after receiving his Puppets in Prison graduation diploma.
“My mom is proud of me, for the first time in her life,” says McKinley. “But the others must be jealous of us getting all this attention, eating real food, unlike the crap they usually give us, and being treated like human beings instead of animals.”
“We don’t know what happens afterwards, whether or not they go back to jail and continue unsafe sexual practices regardless,” says Anna Leveson, a social worker who works closely with juvenile offenders. “But puppetry is a wonderful creative outlet and a means of channelling aggression and pain in a constructive way. The prisoners seem able to discuss their vulnerability and even their need for sexual power with much greater openness than before.
“And a few hours of affirmation from members of a society that has marginalised them has provided these puppeteers in prison with a greater sense of self than years of rehabilitation.”