Beyond the threshold of silence

A bar is raised and lowered by hand. A sleepy guard checks my passport. A long courtyard divides the world from everything else. Threshold, border, limit.

No noise apart from the barrier creaking shut behind me. We cross the courtyard. The sun is scorching here, sculpting the shadows, the temperature unbearable. A hundred steps and we arrive at the entrance that leads to the cells of the male prisoners, the female part is not accessible to foreigners.

The t-shirt I'm wearing is now patchy, my forehead beaded with sweat. A guard precedes me, another follows me. Inside the building the heat is more tolerable, due to the large fans. Light rustle of blades moving the air. It's not the first time I've entered a prison, but today is different.

Kashimpur prison, north of Dhaka, Bangladesh is a maximum security prison, a place where seemingly everything moves without haste. Here people come in, sometimes they leave, sometimes they die.

What am I doing in a place like this? I don't have an answer. If I think about it now it all seems absurd, people distance themselves from places like this. These are labyrinths for the soul, where you could get lost and never get out. I don't talk to anyone, no one would understand me anyway, I look straight ahead, I walk and I don't turn around. On my skin I feel whatever purpose I entered for disappearing.

I had asked for special permission to photograph, but this took a back seat. When I see the faces behind bars everything fades into the background, the heat, the light noise of the fans, the deafening silence. My life that I thought was courageous suddenly becomes ridiculous. Cause and effect follow each other, not necessarily in this order. I think about how lucky I am to have been born in the right part of the world.

Today I am not ready to cross this threshold. An invisible border that many times allowed me the luxury of pressing the button on my camera and taking home fragments of indelible memories. Not today. Today one photograph, just one, is enough.

«And in the naked light I saw ten thousand people maybe more people who spoke without saying anything people who felt without listening people who wrote songs who had never shared their voices no one dared disturb the sound of silence», The sound of silence, Simon & Garfunkel

Roberto Cristaudo

NP Febbraio 2024