(Author's notes: A play depicting judicial caning was recently staged in the Republic of Singapore by a local theatrical repertory. The sell-out play forms the basis of the following quasi-fictional account. This is the second part. Readers may find the contents therein offensive and unsuitable for reading.)
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As I sipped my green tea, served in a mug that bore the prison's insignia, Mr Abdoul Rashad opened a file and handed it to me. Having obtained permission to use the photographs for my article, I selected a few from the portfolio.
"These are interesting," I said to Mr. Abdoul. "The frontal exposures are too explicit, I'm afraid. I doubt if my editor would pass their use for our publication. We may be able to use the posterior shots but we would have to crop these. Maybe remove the leg shots and those that show the prisoners upwards from the waist. We could print frames of the buttocks only. I'm sure it's just the welts readers are curious to see."
Continuing the interview with the executioner, I asked Mr. Abdoul to describe the behavior of a prisoner during a caning.
"Well," Mr. Abdoul commenced, "as I have described of Davyn, the very first prisoner I ever caned, a caned prisoner starts to cry on the second lash.
"It's the second lash that makes him aware of the pain. The first lash is, of course, painful, but usually, a prisoner who is experiencing being caned for the first time has no idea what to expect. For him, the first blow must be his moment of truth and the prisoner responds to it, usually with surprise, and accompanies his knowing with a cry of surprise. His experience of the pain is pedantic and ergo, his response is academic rather than emotional.
"But it is the second lash that he starts to experience the pain as a tangible emotion. Then he screams, he yells, sometimes he hurls obscenities and insults that are too vulgar to repeat here.
"Don't believe anyone who tells you that the lashes do not leave scars. They do. They always split the skin, they cause severe bleeding and ugly scars form and become etched as a permanent and deep relief on the prisoners' bottoms.
"And just as it's a myth that the cane does not leave scars, it's also a myth that the prisoner does not suffer. Of course he suffers, for the pain of the infliction is not imaginary. This explains why their bottoms are wiggling. It's involuntary. They want to shake away the pain but are too tightly bound. So they injure their wrists and ankles by straining for release. This is foolish. When I see them do this, I sound off a warning to them. They usually stop but not before their wrists are starting to bleed.
"The prisoners would continue their nerve-grating sobs when their photographs are being taken, right up to their delivery to the infirmary. Then everyday for a week, they would receive their anti-pain shots. The pain lingers for a long time.
"In my seven-year career and fifty-six caning jobs, I have seen many varieties of bottoms. They come in all shapes and shades. I have caned large bottoms and skinny ones. I have caned brown bottoms, yellow bottoms and white bottoms; and all have responded in like manner to the cane. This is the cane's brutal reality: it always reduces grown-up men to cry babies. It makes no distinction between geographical and national boundaries. Its effects bleed across cultural borders, always leaving their mark on the buttocks. The mark is a permanent lesson on every individual's ethical onus to carry his full social weight in order to contribute to the welfare of society.
"On this note, let me tell you the story of a man who decided, quite to his own undoing, to ignore his responsibility to the general society. It's the story of the first foreign bottom I ever caned, and it further illustrates my point about the reality of the cane's pain and scars.
"Jack was American, a native of New York and a self-confessed masochist. Despite knowing the laws of this land and the penalty for flouting them, Jack nevertheless openly toted drugs in his carry-on, allowing the banned substances to be found by the customs officers at the airport. The marijuana he was carrying was enough to warrant his arrest and subsequent five lashes, but not enough for the death penalty, as mandated by our laws for the trafficking of dangerous drugs.
"I was scheduled to execute Jack's caning. Jack was a good-looking man, although somewhat effeminate. He was slender of build and mild of manners. I met him during his physical examination before the caning. Already stripped of all his prison clothing, he was naked and youthful-looking, almost too boyish despite his thirty-something years. He appeared fretful, almost in earnest to occupy the driver's seat and steer his own caning ahead of schedule. He seemed to be on a mission, but a private one, for his eyes were always darting about; all his senses were engaged in observing, studying and absorbing every detail of his experiences.
"Jack was declared fit and then remitted, and two hours later, I met him again. It was time. He appeared before us his clothes removed and completely naked. He was in awe of the very small circle of the usual witnesses present. I think we were in awe of his exposed genitals. His crotch bore stubs of just-growing pubic hair - this man shaved himself there. His penis was large although dormant.
"When he was tied to the trestle, he put up no resistance. In fact, he appeared once more to be in eager anticipation of the event. His bottom was a palette of goose bumps for the cold of the atmosphere was caressing his naked skin. His spread thighs uncovered his over-stretched and enlarged anus.
"I began Jack's caning with a harsh blow, but I had exerted the same force to my swing that I was used to applying before. Jack's body jerked about in strained paroxysms and he swore under his breath. I broke his skin with the second lash and re-made his fleshy palettes as desultory patterns of fearsome ridges and a bloody mess with my subsequent lashes. The cane ate into his flesh, swallowing his temerity whole so that his earnestness was quickly replaced by grotesque sounds of terror translated as curses and howls.
"For surely Jack was blubbering like a baby from the time of his second lash to the completion of the caning. The whole truth of his insane scheme to live out his masochistic fantasy, on a drug-use pretext, was intimated to me as he was being untied from the trestle.
"He told me that he had conceived his scheme following the much internationally-publicized case of his predecessor, the now infamous Mr. Michael Fay. At the time, he had wanted to offer up his bottom for the flogging in Fay's place, but failing to even get a word to the local consulate, he made up his mind to get himself caught for committing a crime in a land that practised judicial caning. But he had chosen this land over that in which Fay was flogged.
"At the end of his short tale, Jack had also admitted that the actual experience was much worse than his expectations and what he had read of Fay's experiences represented in the newspapers and magazines.
""The journalists had trivialized the cane's impact and the pain," he whispered into my ears. "Soon as I have served out my time here, I shall tell all my dungeon-obsessed friends back home that whereas it's one thing to be whipped in _s_e_x_, it's quite another to be caned for breaking your laws."
"Jack was a courageous man, but his courage did nothing to ease the pain in his buttocks or weaken my conscience. While he continued to sob, he shook my hand, thanking me for shedding light on the myth nevertheless. As for his sobs and tomfoolery, certainly they confronted my convictions, shaking them at their very foundation, but I could not allow them to detract me from my task. We have all been trained and equipped to handle tears and pleas. We are not permitted to get weak and emotional. So we try to eliminate our propensity for weakening by persuading ourselves of the higher morality of our job, and endorse our sentiments with the reminder that the prisoners' crimes had been most inhumane.
"On the issue of what is humane, certainly, instituting the use of the cane for the punishment of civil offenders has sparked off international debate and controversy. However, I should add that the controversy has basis in the work of foreign human rights groups like Amnesty International. On the other hand, locals are in favor of it. Caning has been a part of our culture for centuries. It is used in our homes and schools, too. My people are not tired of hearing about the latest offender being meted out public caning; they're more tired of reading about crimes on the rise in other countries.
"And the cane has been responsible for the low crime rates here, even for lowering crime rates. Take for example rape. Cases of rape have declined by a yearly fifteen percent since that notorious serial rape incident in the nineteen-eighties. You may not have heard about this, so allow me to tell the story.
"Manet sits in solitary confinement right here in this institution and will be facing his sixth caning next Tuesday. The story of Manet still sends waves of cold shiver down my spine. He was the serial rapist dubbed, 'The Monster', by the press. At the time of his arrest, he had left a trail of disaster in our small community with thirty-eight rapes and indirectly causing two deaths. One was the death of fourteen-year old Hema. Raped in the elevator of her apartment building, she subsequently threw herself off the balcony of her family's ninth-floor apartment, plunging to her untimely death. The other was sixteen-year old Ariana. She was found raped and sodomized, and then left to bleed to death in an abandoned mining site. She was found after a three-day search, with maggots ravaging her naked body.
"Manet had no chance during his trial, not with the media turning the event into a witch-hunt. The media beamed his trial into people's living rooms everyday of the two months. Under pressure, the jury convicted him and in what was touted a landmark decision, the judge handed him a life sentence, castration through surgical amputation of his testicles, and the maximum twelve lashes for each of the thirty-eight counts of rape. That meant a whipping every year for the next forty years of Manet's time in prison.
"Manet's first public caning drew a record crowd of three hundred attendees. No one showed pity but only the utmost scorn for him. Even during the physical examination, the doctors were abrupt and ruthless at handling his genitalia. I was there to execute the caning in his first year inside - I had witnessed the brutality. The people were impatient to see this monster rapist stripped naked and caned twelve times. Even while the restraints that bound his legs and hands were being unlocked, the people were pounding their fists and urging for the towel to be removed quickly to expose his genitals. Although they knew that his castration had been effected, they were nevertheless eager to see the instrument that had terrorized their women for an entire year. Now, Manet was an exceptionally small man with a diminutive penis, and the people loudly and gleefully scoffed at his mutilated private parts while he was stood up naked and exposed to all, just before the caning proceeded.
"The people's mood was very bad, and turned the proceedings into a circus with their constant incitement that I whipped Manet harder. One man had smuggled eggs in his body, and when Manet was being photographed, cannonaded his caned bottom with the eggs. This prompted the decision to tighten surveillance of what was brought into the caning arena and hence, these days, bodies are frisked before anyone is admitted into the arena.
"Well, most people do have a rather low level of sustaining their interest in anything for long. In the following years, the number of spectators at Manet's caning started to dwindle, but the crime of rape had dwindled, too. No one forgot what happened to Manet, for the press had sordidly dissected the event. Not many wanted to undergo a similar inhumanity of the magnitude Manet had suffered. But judge for yourself who was more inhumane - the people or Manet?
"Manet was also the most hated man in the prison, and in the first year inside, was gang raped daily. We had to transfer him to solitary confinement for his own good. He's still not safe with the others in the shower rooms, mess hall and exercise yard, and remains to this day in solitary confinement, only to be brought out for his yearly caning.
"Our training mentors had advised us a long time ago to expect anything to happen. They were referring to the 'accidents of nature' which attest to why some institutions insist that a prisoner's anus be plugged for his caning.
"Three years ago, I registered as an itinerant. In addition to serving at this base, I am often summoned to the reform schools. It was at one of my itinerant duties that I was rostered to cane the bottoms of two boys on the same day.
"Aikenn and Erkenn were brothers, aged 17 and 19 respectively. They were innocents, and pretty ones, too, but theirs was not a pretty story: raised in a broken home, abandoned by their mother, by 13 and 15, they had dropped out of school. Street urchins, they were diurnal sleepers but at sunset, they made a livelihood from modeling themselves after the Artful Dodger. Three years later, anti-vice personnel in mufti arrested them. At that time they had herpes.
"Their caning was one of the longest I'd ever experienced. The warders had stripped the older boy naked and were tying him to the trestle. The younger Aikenn's prison shorts were already pooled around his ankles but he refused or was afraid to step out of them. He stood there exposing his hairless body to us, and tearfully started begging us not to cane him, pinching his penis absent-mindedly. I was tempted to put him across my knees and spank his bottom there and then. Prison psychology is by nature coercive, and this was how we persuaded the boy to cooperate. Then while the warders were placing him on his trestle, he started to throw up. There was an hour's delay while he was allowed to recover his composure.
"Afterwards, while I was just beginning to deliver the older boy's first of three lashes, Erkenn had an accident of nature. He urinated right there before the witnesses. That provoked his younger brother's impromptu leaking also, so both boys were arcing noisily from their little penises, impaled against the trestles, right onto the parquet floor. Both ended up bawling in shame, and the cane hadn't even touched them. It was embarrassing for all parties. What had been scheduled as an hour-long proceeding consumed half my day.
"But this is a behavior of adult prisoners also. It doesn't matter if you're 16 or 60, the anticipation of a caning invokes so much fear that for the moment you relinquish control of your body's functions. When that happens, I wait until the prisoner has passed his urine completely before I resume the caning. This is why we cannot accurately predict how long a caning may last.
"Do I personally believe I have an important job? Yes, certainly. I'm certainly convinced of the importance of judicial caning. I have yet to flog the bottom of a repeat offender and this must testify volumes for caning as a deterrent for those with intentions to flout the law like a promiscuous prostitute. Furthermore, this country has been in the list of the world's ten safest countries for the last fifteen years. The demographics are not wrong and we have yet to fall behind the curve, thanks to our punishment mandate.
"No, I don't think that the question of right and wrong or that of humanitarianism is a pertinent one. I confine my observation only to the question of ideals, and certainly the pros of caning far outnumber the cons.
"Spanking a child is as basic to his psychological development as milk to his physical development. If a parent fails to spank his child for misbehaving at home, and the child grows up a teenager or an adult that misbehaves in society, then the state must take over where the parent has failed. It's up to the state to reverse the damage; it's never too late for the buttocks to learn. This is the ideal I understand to symbolize the cane."
I had not expected Abdoul to go the way of spin-doctors, but he had concluded his spiel.
And with that also concluded my viva voce with the executioner. Mr. Abdoul and I simultaneously checked our wristwatches. It was thirty minutes past the top of the hour, almost time for an eyewitness examination of the veracity of Mr. Abdoul's accounts. I should soon be taking the witness's chair in the caning room above me.