4 - The Criminalised Other as Storyteller: The Promise and Peril of Bringing ‘Lived Experience’ into the Classroom

Summary

The old lecture theatre bristles with attention. Students perch on wooden seats looking down towards the speaker at the front of the room. The storyteller was once a student here himself, an Arts/Law undergraduate, many years ago. He remembers sitting in lecture theatres just like this one, names scratched into soft wood surfaces, now Tippexed. He doesn’t look like a ‘typical crim’, does he, he asks rhetorically, no visible scars, tattoos or missing teeth. The ‘respectable’ outer layer, though, belies deep emotional and psychological scars. And anger – such roiling, raging anger – it has nearly consumed him at times. Anger and shame at what happened to him, at what he did, at how he suffered and how others suffered because of him.

He was imprisoned at the age of 21 – just a kid, really – released at 27. In court, his father had pleaded to serve the time in his stead. It was decades ago now. But it is still so real, so palpable, so much part of him, despite everything he’s done to try and put it behind him.

He tells of what it feels like to come very close to taking a man’s life with his own gun, the adrenalin-blurred moments surrounding arrest, the way time pauses and rushes at supersonic speed, stretching and condensing experience into fragments of memory that lodge under the skin like splinters. He tells of how this paradox of time foreshadows the experience of being locked behind iron bars, steel doors, stone walls. Locked in emotional darkness, where the sounds and smells of suffering and torment permeate your dreams and waking hours. Outside, as your father ages, sickens and dies, family lives on.

Sounds are traveling vibrations in the form of pressure waves in an elastic medium. Objects move at supersonic speed when the objects move faster than the speed at which sound propagates through the medium.

Like sound, time moves forward in the elastic medium of the outside world. On the inside, in the rigid unyielding medium of the prison, it gets stuck, snagged on razor wire and splinters. The storyteller captures students’ attention with tales of horror, abjection, base human experiences. Their faces open, their eyes wide, they listen. They try to understand. They try to make sense of the way prison time follows you outside, through the gates, slinking behind you like a shadow that won’t be shaken.