09 Jun 2009 |
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I found the film so impressible that I held it as the best I had seen for some time. The mental kick I had with watching Midnight Express was also heightened with the knowledge that this was a true story made into film, because at the end of it the real man is shown as he arrives in America, welcomed by a lot of media personnel - flashing cameras, the thicket of microphones and so forth. Unless one had been bred under a fascist regime and had imbibed the soulless anaesthesia of the system, there was no way one would not find the Billy Hayes character sympathetic. And there was no way one’s heart would not lift when he escaped - seeing him with the sort of dewy eye with which I saw him. You’d have become enamoured of freedom and, at least subconsciously, considered the Turks callous and even wicked. I watched the film a couple of years ago long after I had first seen it. But before then, I had stumbled on the biography of Billy Hayes. And, less perchance, I had come across Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, a book in which the French philosopher traces the byzantine history and evolution of the ‘Western’ prison system. Although its relevance to the Turkish penal system as depicted in the film is atomic and rather anachronistic, it helped me in seeing the film less sentimentally when I saw it again. Maturer hindsight had pipped Midnight Express’ allure. One does not need to be a cerebral cinephile like Slavoj Zizek to know that the picture was not the best-shot even in its not-long-ago time. And of course the storyline is tarted up, you’d see that the film does its self-conscious best to make Turks out as turpitudinous brutes, uncivilised and devoid of humanity, a people from whom freedom-lovers like American captives should escape. I hope I will find the time to return to the film in the future. But I began this article with Midnight Express because of its especial redolence, its moral relevance to the imprisonment of the Nigerian-born British young woman, Samantha Orobator, who was arrested trying to smuggle drugs out of Laos. When the news of the girl’s trial first broke, I discussed it with someone on the phone, a young man whose short-fused animus against Britain is in inverse proportion to the length of time he’s spent in the country. His arguments do not easily lend themselves to easy, coherent report. He’d asked, Would the British government do anything about Orobator since she is black? And: If the girl was white, I am certain there would be a blackout on the news. Then the totally ludicrous: What right has the British government got to go and try to persuade the Laos government not to kill the girl. The British are it again, playing it big. You see what reverse chauvinism could do to commonsense. The Nigerian collocutor would not mind the young girl killed, so long as this would traverse British intentions of lobbying to secure her release into their hand. He believed the publicity given the arrest and trial of yet another Nigerian-born British girl, Yetunde Diya (along with another not of Nigerian parentage), for drug-pushing in Ghana was a similar instance of highlighting the news of people of African origin doing criminal things. Anyway, being pregnant, Samantha Orobator was able to escape the death sentence. So one would not have known whether Britain would have been able to shunt what some believed would have been a railroading to the stake. In Laos drug-pushing carries the death sentence - a country which sees itself as the real Stalinist Shangri-La, Laos takes the punishment of death for drug-pushing even more serious than a Quranic country like Saudi Arabia. One is bound to ask the question: How did the nineteen-year old girl end up in Laos with drugs? There were reports of how a holiday in Holland had mysteriously climaxed in drug-carrying transit stop in Laos. Samantha is a product of a broken home. The father was said to have returned to Nigeria while the mother had left United Kingdom to live in Ireland, leaving Samantha in the care of an aunt. This may or may not have been contributory to this particularly touch-and-go errancy. Or should we just blame giddy youth for it? Britain’s Channel Five broadcasts an often gripping programme called Banged Up Abroad, a docudrama which traces how British citizens ended up in foreign jails, usually hellholes, purgatorial prisons from which only release could provide respite. Most of the subjects of the episodes are white British citizens, and usually older than the nineteen-year old Orobator or the sixteen-year old Diya. And it is also clear from the series that a number of the Brits banged up abroad had attracted as much press attention as Orobator’s. And none had truly thrown up such puzzlement as Orobator’s story. The young woman was caught in July of last year and as her trial began, some weeks ago, she was some months pregnant. Understandably, the question was asked: How did she conceive? Certainly this was not the upshot of something immaculate or angelic or virginal or parthenogenetic. And what further complicated the story was the image of Laos as a country whose authority would have laid out a measure of moral compass for its lesser myrmidons like prison guards, I really doubt whether the guards would go around raping, or even consensually sleeping with, female prisoners. Even when it was made known that being pregnant, the girl might be spared the death penalty, no one could still fathom how she conceived. The girl was taken to court last week and was summarily sentenced to life imprisonment. Then the story had come out that to avoid the death sentence, Samantha had been able to collect semen from a fellow prisoner and had syringed it into herself. This would have been a jaw-dropping revelation if it had not been a matter of life and death. If this is truly what happened, it is indeed a remarkable dodge, an ingenious coup. At least it foreclosed the assumption of rape, or of unusual nymphomaniacal lapse in a girl who had the Damoclean sword of death hanging over her. Of course it came as a surprise to many that male and female prisoners shared the same prison and were even able to exchange bodily fluid, the end had clearly justified the means – Eve had made use of serpentine logic to employ somewhat fruity knowledge to her advantage. And, on balance, certainly the ploy should bear fruits in more ways than one. This reminds me of how another Nigerian-born Briton, Dotun Adebayo, went on about sperm-stealing some five years ago or so, he believed an old girlfriend might have purloined his sperm, by way of condom, to self-pollinate and have a child. He wrote a book entitled Sperm Bandits on the cover of which he carries a placard imploring women to stop appropriating male sperm. He even made a clever TV programme of the same title. One of the arguments Dotun tried to make was bringing out in high-relief the robust contours of the power of the modern woman - supple, even fleshly, power, the sort of power that might enlist ‘charm offensive’ as a synonym. While Orobator’s uterine stratagem might be admired by every pro-life person who would not like the life of a twenty-year old girl snuffed, it might still find its way into the larger feminist narrative. For one thing, there was no way a man could contrive to conceive – I mean man, as in man, not the sort of down-faced, self-created androgyne who carried and had a baby in America. Samantha’s little feminine victory is pretty significant, as it has turned out to make the difference between life and death. For a man this would have spelled certain death. In that tremendously potent feminist novel, The Women’s Room, Marilyn French ramifies the word ‘womb,’ minting the apposites of ‘wombed’ and ‘wombless.’ The novel’s narrator describes the machoist Norman Mailer as a “poor, wombless” male. Anyhow, I guess Samantha is more likely to appear in a programme like Banged Up Abroad instead of Sperm Bandits, the way she used progenitive wiles to escape death being the programme’s pièce de résistance. But, in a discretionary sense, this sort of programme might be difficult to make now, considering Samantha’s age and the length of prison term she was given. But then British officials believe the sentence is too harsh and are still in talks with Laos authorities about cutting it down or even about the possibility of getting the girl transferred to Britain to serve her reduced prison term. This might yet be. A female subject in a series of Banged Up Abroad had had her death sentence commuted to life, and after a few years in the prison of the South East Asian country where she was caught with drugs at just about Samantha’s age, she was transferred to Britain to finish her term. One hopes the same thing would happen to Orobator and that she would better her life like the young woman in the documentary who returned to school and got a degree. It is easy for someone from a place like Nigeria to be snide about the stress on the term ‘Freedom’ in a country like Britain, but often its dividends, if you like, counterbalance its deficits. I can see the likelihood of Samantha Orobator’s story enlarging to the big screen just like that of the young Billy Hayes, her cunning sleight of womb to escape death being far more thought-out and dramatic than the opportune - although no less stirring - way Hayes escaped prison, far more adaptable to visceral escapological drama. I see a Hollywood director chewing over this in his hotel room. Nollywood? Who knows? A certain species of Nigerian pigs might begin to fly.
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I saw the picture Midnight Express in 1984, a teenager who was still dreamily sold on acts of derring-do. Let me give a précis of the film. Billy Hayes, a young American student, is caught in Turkey trying to smuggle hashish out of the country. In a sweltering courtroom he is jailed for life, obviously kangaroo justice. He suffers massively in the prehistoric prison - well, compared to the prisons in his native America - he languishes, anguishes. Then after some three years of hopeless acedia, he escapes when a blimpish and particularly ruthless prison official is about to violate him. He kills the turnkey and wears his uniform. He walks out of the prison, heart in his mouth, against touchable odds of being caught. Not being able to wait to be out of the prison, he leaps into freedom. The final frame of the long movie, when the young man takes the first upsprung step to run, is frozen. 
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