WOMEN PRISONERS EMBODY THE LAW’S HALLUCINATIONS as these cut deep into their bodies and souls year after time in captivity. Gulfisha Fatima defies these hallucinations of the law through her verses, by providing a language to capture the suffering inflicted on pre-trial prisoners, as they wait for their trials to begin and languish in prisons for years. Now in prison for five years, as the bail hearings in the Delhi High Court continue unfold over three years, Gulfisha’s extraordinarily powerful poetry beckons us to bear witness as also to imbibe her courage. Gulfisha gives each one of us courage to speak truth to power.
She writes searingly about the deep ethical loneliness in the long night of imprisonment when the pain in her heart just does not stop, not once: Dil hai Ki Dukhta Hi Chala Jata Hai. The prisoner poet finds courage in the hope that ‘perhaps (I) might reach home, before the light of the lamp (diya) goes out’.
Poetry in captivity insistently reminds law of its lost quest for humanity. Doing time in prison, waiting for a trial, is arbitrary. It dissolves, it divides, it captures, it seeks to destroy the self.
In prison it feels like she has to climb time and ‘days become like a ladder’ . In her poem titled ‘Forgetting’, Gulfisha describes the force of law in these words by recalling how she would learn everything by heart for the history exam but she would forget the dates. And now, she writes ‘I forget now almost everything but remember only the dates.’ For biography and history disappears in face of court dates and numbers of hearings. The court dates inscribe themselves, forcing forgetting, reducing human beings to files and dates. Surely, endless and devastating custodial waiting is one of the most cruel forms of pre-trial punishment.
