MULLINGSEasterine Kire
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] met Jack Mapanje at a conference in Lake Como, Italy. He was so gracious I wanted to be in his company for a long time. I sat at dinner and breakfast and lunch with the very modest Jack Mapanje learning to be a better human being. The impression that most people who have met Jack come away with is the gentleness of his spirit. Here was a person who had suffered long years of imprisonment for speaking the truth with great courage and at risk to his own life. But he is enviably unencumbered by bitterness. That noble quality enriches his poetry and deepens the meaning of the prison poems in particular.Jack is 69 years old today. The years of accumulated experience showed well on him. I had the rare privilege of being in an audience of three while Jack performed the poem below, Skipping without ropes. It is one thing to read through the poem in print; it is quite another thing to have the poet perform it for you. The performance brought to life the words and inner meanings of this poem which was very special to Jack. I loved the inner rhythm of the poem that Jack had achieved with his choice of simple words whose rhymes are repeated in the next line seemingly without design. Jack punctuated the reading of the poem with the rhythm of skipping rope that began to build up from the fourth stanza of the poem.
Skipping without ropes is such a victorious and transcendent poem. It juxtaposes the smallness of denying a prisoner a skipping rope against the mental greatness of the prisoner who finds a form of breaking down all the prison restrictions by choosing to ‘skip’ without ropes. It is a deeply spiritual poem. There is a strong spiritual affirmation in the lines: “I will, you won’t, I see, you don’t” which empowers the poet to carry out all that he proposes to do. Suddenly, skipping without a rope becomes a strong metaphor for all the things he can do spiritually and mentally without the help of the physical rope. Skipping without a rope enables him to do so much more than he can when he skips with a rope. He will skip ‘without your Rope but with my hope,’ and by doing so, he will ‘wipe out at a stroke’ his incarceration and the ‘horrid, stinking Vulgar prison rules’ and simultaneously transcend all the degradation and dehumanization that prison life is about. Whether it is the terrible food, or the poisonous insects that cohabit the cell, or the constant pressure to break the prisoner down, he has made his choice to skip himself into a state of being where all these are no longer able to touch him. This non-violent, non-physical defiance of his oppression is admirable and free of bitterness. When Jack Mapanje talks about the ugliness of prison, he states facts but he does not dwell there in self-pitying sentiments. He rises above it and gives us this mental picture of him skipping a new reality unto himself, a reality where he is immune to all the horrors of prison.
The skipping becomes a buildup of strength upon strength as he recites all the things he will do with it. As a matter of fact, when he reaches the eighth stanza, he is already in that new reality. He declares that he will ‘hop about, hop about my cell, my Home, the mountains, my globe’ and as this new strength builds further and further, the poem ends with the prisoner shouting ‘Guards! Take us for the shower!’ It is a symbol that the reader cannot possibly miss. The tables are turned, the prisoner has taken charge of his life, he has taken over the reins and will henceforth make the decisions. It is such a triumphant note.
I think this poem symbolizes what Jack Mapanje is to me, a spiritual mentor who has gone through what he has and learned the secret of coming out enlightened, not crushed, certainly not broken.
