Amy Mina sends this report from her recent visit to Bethlehem:
The Prison of Bethlehem
July 2004
This weekend I went to prison. Imposing grey towers stare out of their opaque black roving eyes at the transparent sky above, and the prisoners below. I listened to prison stories and prisoner hopelessness told through sacrastic humour.
We drove between the white stone villas of bethlehem with their inviting balconies (where no one sits), their red tiled roofs and their withering gardens. The lanes were narrow and silent under the scorching sun. The distance to the prison wall was short. It stood erect, regular, silent, bisecting the prison from the world outside. The distance between the prison wall and the house did not exceed 5 metres. I imagined a child, inside the house, watching the prison wall rise permanently deleting the view of the child’s fields and flowers from all but the child’s memories. Instead, the guard tower now stares directly into the child’s room. A tall cinderella tower of soul-less grey topped with its grey hat above the evil eye. This is what the child sees from his bedroom every day. This is what the child imagines from his bedroom everyday: is the soldier looking down at me? Is the soldier pointing his gun at me? This is the child’s question when he wakes up: Where did our fields go? When I grow up, where can I work? When I marry, where can I live? There are no answers to any of these questions.
We drove back down the lane and around the houses that silently speak of past wealth to the other side of the lane. Through some twisted logic, the arichtect of the prison wall had decided on curves rather than straight lines. The curves hug the houses creating an artistic fluidity, pushing closer and closer to the centre, re-aligning itself to join the much deeper cut on the other side of the main road, leaving thousands of those olive trees outside the prison. I wondered what price the trees’ freedom was going to cost them? Without their owners, the trees would soon wither and die. Probably the bulldozers will help them first. The prison wall is nearly complete. In the refugee camp, it defied the dying light of day. The children threw stones at it. Prison walls don’t feel the pain. Children do.
Amy Mina