While reading any text, every reader yearns for understanding the same way a hungry person yearns for satisfaction while eating. There is no doubt that every reader will have a peculiar experience in the way they perceive the story at the end. A thought process, modeled by Little Red Schoolhouse follows the conceptualization of the intellectual problem; its costs and benefits and finally the solution to the problem. In a similar fashion, this critical analysis parses “Evidence” by Brent Edwards. The critical analysis dwells on the fact that the “Evidence” begins with a narration depicting a prison environment and only tells the reader why he is in prison in the first place at the end of the passage. Why the narrator is in prison forms an intellectual problem of this analysis and the costs and benefits of starting this way as well as the solution to the intellectual problem is adeptly analyzed.
It is said that the first sentence going into the first paragraph of any story speaks volumes to the reader; probably since, it can be projected what the story will be about. It is within this initial part of Evidence that I sought to retrieve the intellectual problem to be explored. An intellectual problem relates to the ambiguity in the text and yes, being in prison is a tension or ambiguity that not everyone will feel comfortable understanding why, in the first place, the author was apprehended.
Is it murder, robbery with violence, rape, civil case, treason or even a huge capital offense that the author was apprehended for? Thinking in this line not only motivates the reader to inquire more into the story by reading on and as they do so, answers start flowing in bit by bit until their intellectual problem is solved. Basically, answering the question why the author is in jail. The ambiguity of the story is rooted in the fact that everyone loves freedom and this freedom is only taken away in instances that contravened the law. The initial picture/image that gets painted in the mind of the reader is that, the author is a bad person and an effort to prove this or disapprove it all together is what drives the energy of reading and analyzing the text. Edwards disorients the reader in order to make them more intrigued in his story and to keep reading until they find out what caused him to be apprehended. Edwards brilliantly only allows the reader to understand why he was arrested in the last few paragraphs on the essay so that the reader has no choice, but to keep reading until their intellectual problem is solved.
The intellectual problem, in this case, relates to the title of the text, Evidence, which points to a possible scenario of evidence lapse, which led to the author’s apprehension. There is no doubt that prison and evidence belong to a similar class of jargon. While making an inquiry into this, the primary passage at the front for close reading is:
“The cell is four meters long and two meters wide. The walls and floor are lined with white tile, gleaming in the half- light. There is no furniture, but the far half of the floor is elevated, about a meter high-an abstraction of a bed, a chair, a table. The Judas hole in the steel cell door squints up at the barred window high on the opposite wall. There are eight of us. We lie down to sleep as best we can, four on the raised platform and four below, in an uncomfortable tangle of intimacy. Through the window, a hint of illumination: the gentle wash of moonlight over the streets of Dakar.” (P. 42)
In the above passage, the author descriptively shares from the first-hand experience how the prison cell looks like in Dakar. While sharing these descriptions, the reader’s mind is taken into a trance trying to imagine how, physically, the cell looks like. Before the reader can arrive at a more concrete vision of the prison cell, the intellectual problem begins to settle in the mind once again, thus the question: why is the author in prison? Within this passage, the author does not state or even hint as to what took him to prison cells. Failure to state the reason why he is in prison begs for a further probe in the reader’s mind thus formulating itself as the intellectual problem.
Even in the next few beginning paragraphs, the author still does not state the reason for being in prison. Edwards begins to simply talk about music and a guitarist. His main reason of discussing the musician is to explain that in the eyes of Dakar police, anything seems like a weapon, even something as harmless as a guitar. Dakar officers will without remorse beat and imprison anyone that might, even in the slightest, look like they could be a potential danger on the streets of Dakar. They do not seem to care about having any evidence or justification to make an arrest, and while doing so, harming the victim. While grasping for some words to understand why prison and how it is related with the musical descriptions in the subsequent paragraphs, the story wonders away as though prison was never mentioned in the first place and Evidence is not the title. The author introduces his relationship with Thierno and slowly the feeling of getting the solution starts to fade away as the descriptions of Thierno’s apartment begins to fill the vacuum of the staring intellectual problem. The passages that follow build up to describe how the author was arrested and taken into custody, but without providing an early clear reason as to why.
The organization of the story ends in a fashion that leaves the reader to decide whether the solution to the intellectual problem has been hit or not. In my case, the intellectual solution to the problem is given in the concluding paragraphs where prison is revisited and a more subtle explanation of why the author is in prison is outlined. The author was arrested in the dark streets of Dakar without any evidence that he was guilty. He was falsely convicted because he fought back against men who had no true identification that they were police. In the eyes of these men, Edwards was resisting authority, which in Dakar and anywhere else in the world is seen as a felony.
While the claim by the police that he lacked evidence to prove his harmlessness, the police equally lacked evidence to prove that he was harmful in whatever way. While in prison, the author experiences a different feeling of life and starts to imagine that he would die and nobody would ever know what happened to him or even why. He begins to believe that no one will ever help him get justice and that people will forever see him as someone that has caused harm onto anyone in Dakar. These imaginations takes him back to the main reason why he is in prison; walking in Dakar streets at night in his foreign skin without proof that he was harmless and may be just “a tourist.”
Edwards’ narration aimed at achieving several ends, depicting the prison life in Dakar and probably how Africans viewed the white. In his narrations, we see him visit the fort and perceive that depending on the audience, the curator gives talks to suit the moment. It is in the prison that he begins to realize the importance of freedom and even goes ahead to discover that other Americans are also jailed in the same prison, probably for the same reason.
My reading of this text is illuminating because it starts and leads into literary inquiry after which the solution to the intellectual problem is availed. After being held, almost throughout the half of the text, the solution to the intellectual problem does not only offer a reprieve that indeed the author did not commit any capital crime but also depicts the inefficiency on the part of the police. He also goes into great detail about how the prisoners are treated while they are in prison and the constant fear that courses through the bodies of the prisoners at all times. On page 51, Edwards describes to us how while he was imprisoned he constantly heard terrible screams and listening to those piercing sounds all night long. While having to hear these agonizing screams, all he was ever able t think about was when he will be next. The police hold Edwards in Prison and there is no effort to let anyone close to him know of his predicament. He beings to believe that he will die in that little cell, as the “ same words caress him to sleep: Die here” (Evidence, 54). On page 54, Edwards begins to believe that he is starting to show symptoms of Malaria, and still he doesn’t think that that is the worst thing that could be going on in his life at the moment. He continues to tell us that the authorities had no reason to arrest him, so why should they have any reason to let him go? It is through his personal efforts that see Thierno contacted.
The motive of this text does not just end at telling it is wrong to walk without identification in the streets of Dakar, but equally illuminates the tribulations that prisoners in Dakar, generally go through. While tourists are common in such African countries, the arrest of Edwards shows that the government of Senegal has a low hospitality appetite. The rampant corruption in the prison where an individual needs to buy the basic items as food reveals that deplorable state of affairs in the entire system. To make the matters even worse, the police guarding the cells are the trade masters instead of discouraging the same. The fact that Edwards was not taken to court or was not charged and no one confirmed his charges is proof enough that Dakar’s law favors the momentous master. Therefore, Edwards’ start with the prison description motivates a line of thought that later gets developed along the concepts of fairness, evidence, good governance and dignity for all as revealed through the prison life and the life on the streets of Dakar.