Freud’s insights into fecal matter help us think about the experiences of imprisonment which often entail the return to an earlier, more elementary stage of existence. The State seeks to apprehend, in all senses of that word, the body in and through its incarceration. However, the sheer material reality of the body means that the State cannot totally comprehend its workings. The State cannot, for example, expect the prisoner to stop urinating and defecating unless it also stops feeding it, in which case the prisoner will die. Dead prisoners deprive the State of objects on which to assert its will. After all, domination requires the maintenance, however minimal, of that which is to be dominated. Even in the Nazi death camps, exterminated prisoners had to be replaced by more prisoners in a logic exactly the same as that of an assembly line. Keeping the prisoner alive, however, means acceding to some of his or her needs, such as the need to defecate. Like the child gaining leverage over the parent, the prisoner through her or his feces is able to talk back to the prison guards. In the case of Lacaba and his cellmates, this meant having some way to protest their conditions to the point of having a toilet built for them. In Rodriguez’s story, it meant turning shit into a weapon of revenge, releasing its smells as a way of interrupting the play and leisure of the guards.

This last consideration is extremely significant. The translation of feces from an abject source of embarrassment into a potential weapon of vengeance is perhaps the most telling instance of a kind of rebellion: the refashioning of the body from an object of captivity into an agent of its own liberation. Drawing upon its resources, the body fights back in ways difficult for the State to localize much less contain. For it is not shit itself, but its smell that disorients and disturbs. Odor can neither be conceptualized nor detained. It always escapes, only to linger on. Where shit serves as the evidence of the body surviving and living on, fecal odor is the body’s ghostly emanation. It assails the mind and the senses, penetrating the borders and checkpoints of social conventions and political regimes.[vii]

The stories of Lacaba and Rodriguez remind me of another group of political prisoners. In the late 1970s, incarcerated members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) launched what came to be known as the “Dirty Protest,” refusing to submit to the brutally invasive bodily searches of their British captors. As brilliantly described by the anthropologist Alan Feldman,[viii] the IRA prisoners decided to stop washing, brushing their teeth, and shaving while refusing to put on prison garb. Instead they went about naked, wrapped only in their filthy blankets. They also refused to do their business in toilets where they were routinely beaten up by the guards. They began to shit and urinate in their cells. Even more dramatic, they spread their shit on the walls and floors, creating an unbearable stench which made it extremely difficult for the guards to enter their cells. And they did so continuously for about five years. The fetid nature of their prisons meant that guards risked being swallowed up into what essentially had become the extension of the prisoner’s anal cavity. Fecal matter effectively created a wall protecting inmates from guards. It repelled the latter with a stench that clung to them long after they had left work. Thus was the relationship between inmates and guards reversed, as torturers were held hostage to the intractable remains of those they had tortured. (Bulatlat.com)

Notes

[i] Jose F. Lacaba, “Arestong Ospital,” in Pinoy Times, 25 June 2001, available from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/plaridel_papers/message/473.

[ii] Maria Cristina Rodriguez, posting on June 28, 2001 available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/plaridel_papers/message/492.

[iii] The locus classicus on this topic is Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage Books, 1979. See also the recent book by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

[iv] Michael Salman, “’Nothing Without Labor’: Penology, Discipline and Independence in the Philippines under United States Rule,” in Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures, edited by Vicente L. Rafael, Pasig: Anvil Publishing, 1995, 113-131.

[v] On torture as a performative speech act, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1985. For a comparative history of torture methods that touches on the Philippines from the era of US colonization, see Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.

[vi] See Sigmund Freud, “Infantile Sexuality,” in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, translated by James Strachey, New York: Basic Books, 1962, 39-109.

[vii] For a brilliant discussion of the cultural and political workings of odor, see James T. Siegel, Solo in the New Order: Language and Hierarchy in an Indonesian City, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, 257-276.

[viii] Alan Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

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