(Excerpts of this essay were used when I was the keynote speaker at the International Association for Counselling Conference in July 2016)
In the Los Angeles County Jail there are no bright colours. The benches, walls, doors, are all painted in drab shades of grey, green and black. Colours are only used to distinguish one prisoner from another, thus indicating how one is expected to behave. The ones in dark blue uniforms are the inmates from the general population and could be “less problematic”; the ones in light blue are the gays and transsexuals and should never, under any circumstance, mix with the dark blues; there’s light green for those who clean the premises and run errands; orange for the maximum security ones who are always to be escorted by the guards, brown for those in the jail hospital; yellow for those who are allowed to clean the garden and walkways surrounding the jai. For a time I used to meet inmates wearing a crimson coloured uniform: I was told they were the ones who had already finished their sentence but, because of the sexual nature of their crime, the authorities were wary of them going back to the streets.
Colours give life.
Colours bring joy.
Colours give meaning to life.
No Colours; Only Black
Red warns us of danger; a person can turn red with rage or passion. Green gives us permission to cross the road, it is the symbol of hope, but at the same time is associated with envy. A white flag in war means surrender, maybe because when scared, one loses all the colour from the face and looks white. Blue reminds us of the sea and the sky, while in some cultures black is the colour of death and mourning. But both colours are related to sadness and depression. Cowardice and the colour yellow are complementary.
Colours announce spring.
In jail there is no spring.
In jail there are no seasons.
Both light and air are controlled and manipulated.
In fact there is not even a window to let in God’s light.
Time is measured in terms of “when” —
When the inmates are fed breakfast, lunch and supper.
When the guards twice daily count the “bodies.”
When the inmates appear in court.
When the visits are allowed.
While I was working in jail, black dominated my art. I could not create anything with bright colours. The medium I was using was white charcoal on black paper. The Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky stated: “A totally dead silence . . . a silence with no possibilities has the inner harmony of black. Black is something burnt out, like ashes on a funeral pyre, something motionless like a corpse. The silence of black is the silence of death.” (Wassily Kandinsky, 1977. Concerning the Spiritual in Art)
No colour is darker than black and yet black is not even a colour: like a sponge it absorbs all the colours of the spectrum. There are no darker stories than the ones I witnessed to and heard in prison, but at the same time there existed an intensity, an anxiety, a yearning for imbibing and absorbing all the colours of life in such stories.
Brother Carmel Duca MC
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