Ramiz Choudhry

Professor Martin

Writing 2150-HMWF

13 February 2017

The Illusion of Corruption: Justice is Always Found within Injustice

The necessity of evidence can be very critical when trying to prove someone guilty or innocent. In Brent Hayes Edwards’ memoir “Evidence”, Edwards discusses the lack of evidence that was prepared for his prison sentence while he is on his trip to Dakar. His experience in Dakar, West Africa changed his perspective on the city’s treatment towards tourists as he was taken advantage of and lacked aid from any witnesses that saw the trouble he was faced with. Although his sentencing lacked any evidence, Edwards’ successful attempt to get out of prison also required little to no evidence and was solely based on his word to the commissioner and his relationship with Thierno. Edwards uses the song “Evidence” by Thelonious Monk to point out that even in a place like Dakar, justice is always apparent in some way.  Dakar’s corrupt system of law enforcement that Edwards writes his tangents towards eventually works out for the better as his exit from prison did not demand well founded evidence. How could Dakar lack justice when Edwards ultimately finds an escape from the system that he believed was inevitable? The city of Dakar inhabits justice, but Edwards’ does not realize that his escape from prison was ultimately an indication that justice truly exists there.

The corrupt system of law enforcement within Dakar causes Brent Edwards to perish in prison for most of his visit. Brent Edwards is a visitor of the city of Dakar. He stays with a man named Thierno who works at an ice cream shop. One night, he decides to visit Thierno after Nigeria defeated Argentina in the Olympics. During his venture to the ice cream shop, Edwards gets confronted by suspicious looking men. When Edwards is attacked by four men near a dark and secluded area of Dakar, he is faced with the harsh treatment that is typically associated with vulnerable wandering tourists of the area. As he is getting tossed around and handcuffed by the “policemen”, the crowd of locals that are surrounding him make no effort to assist him. His lack of identification and his status as a visitor enable locals to take advantage of him since he is unfamiliar with most of his surroundings.

The memoir seems to surround itself around the struggles that one might face in Dakar as a tourist, but it is also about Dakar’s corrupt system of justice. After he is imprisoned for “resisting arrest” and his lack of identification, he refers to Thelonious Monk and questions Dakar’s system of justice by saying, “how can one attain “justice” under the law without “evidence”?” (53). Since Edwards’ lives in America, he is accustomed to the ordered structure of American law where the jury system requires proper evidence and a fair trial before sending a criminal off to prison. His “standard” of a just system of law is higher than what exists in Dakar, which causes him to be blind to the fact that Dakar has a system of law like anywhere else.  In his situation in West Africa, he gets sentenced due to his “resist of arrest” even though there was no explanation for the policemen’s initial reason for arresting him. This is something that would not pass as a legitimate basis for solitary confinement within the United States. Dakar’s corrupt system of law impacts Edwards greatly as he gets taken to prison for no legitimate reasoning. His reflection on Thelonious Monk’s song “Evidence” lets him relate to the rough circumstances he faces in prison:

What is inside “Evidence”? If one hears an echo-at a distance-of the U.S. civil rights movement, then Monk’s elisions ask a question about how one might hear justice in a democracy, underneath or within an uneven surface of insinuation. Justice is somewhere there, somewhere inside what holds us together, but only in fragmentary evidence, in the sound of clues that rise at an angle, step by step, and break back down to hint again. (54)

Seeing that Edwards’ is taken in without explanation, he explains that evidence should always go along with justice no matter how critical the evidence might be. He refers to “fragmentary evidence” and says that even when justice is not entirely apparent within certain situations such as the U.S. civil rights movement, some type of evidence is still provided for all of the claims that are trying to be made. Even though he talks about this in his essay, he consistently talks about how Dakar lacks any type of justice and had no belief in the ability to get out of prison. It might not be his vision of justice, but it is enough to prevent himself for rotting there until his death.

The end of Edwards’ sentence showcases another case of justice without evidence, but with a sense of benefit for his own good. Once he meets someone who knows his friend Thierno, he is able to finally inform him that he was arrested. After this sudden miracle, Edwards finally gets his opportunity to speak for himself to the detective and commissioner of the police station:

The commissioner was curt and bureaucratic: one of the detectives I’d tussled with on Saturday came in and explained that I’d been taken in for “resisting arrest” and then detained because I didn’t have my identification papers on me. With the detective standing silently behind me, the commissioner asked me to recount what had happened, and I stumbled through my tale for ten minutes. Then he dismissed us without a word. (65)

He sees the concept of bootleg democracy as a problem throughout his time in prison. However, the problem bounces back to benefit him since he is not required to have a lawyer for evidential backup and instead he must solely rely on his ability to recount the situation along with his relationship to Thierno. Although justice without evidence brought him to jail, it also let him escape the cruelty that he was put through. The corruption of democracy is first a problem, but it was also what ultimately led him to his freedom. For most of the story, the concept of unfair law appears as a pattern where none of the unfairness goes his way. The pattern breaks later on in the memoir as he only has to explain himself for a matter of ten minutes to get himself out of his deep predicament. This shows that even in situations that seem completely unjust, there will always be an opportunity for justice to guide the way for a proper and fair ending to occur.

With evidence as an important factor of the memoirs purpose, the importance with relations in society also holds a substantial amount of importance to the text. When one of his former prison mates happens to know Thierno, Edwards gets a sudden glimpse of hope for freedom:

He asked me if there was anything he could do for me, and I told him I’d been staying with a guy who lived on Rue Galandou Diouf. When I told him the address, he laughed and said, “Oh yeah, the building with the little courtyard.” He knew someone else who lived there, and he knew who Thierno was. It seemed like a miracle, but I tried not to look too desperate and asked him if he could go by and tell Thierno what had happened. Ah oui, bien sur, he smiled. No problem. (62-63)

When Edwards must explain his situation without concrete evidence, his relation with Thierno seems to be the main reason that he is even able to get a hold of the detective and commissioner of the station house. The same person who ripped his shirt and put him to prison is the same person that ends up letting him free. Edwards changes from a nobody to a somebody solely due to his acquaintance with a Dakar citizen, or Thierno. This exemplifies the advantage of having connections and a solid identity when put in tough circumstances. If Brent Edwards never got the chance to rekindle with Thierno, the likelihood of him seeing an end to his captivity would be very improbable. The justice that Edwards was looking for might have not been in the form that he expected it to be in. The justice that ended up saving him had a small prerequisite of knowing the right people and taking full advantage of having an opportunity to talk himself out of the situation he thought he was stuck in.

Although justice makes its way into Edwards’ gruesome situation, one might argue that his opportunity of escape was not caused by justice. The theory of finding justice within injustice fails to address the possibility of Edwards’ escape out of pure luck. The cellmate that happened to know Thierno can be seen as a one in a million chance that Edwards managed to find while in a state of hopelessness. The people who were holding him captive saw no difference in him compared to the rest of the cellmates until Thierno was able to come and visit him. If the real reason was luck, then no other prisoners would get out without the help of good fortune. However, it is possible that the cellmate that was let out before Edwards left the prison due to just reasoning. The situation is very ambiguous, as Edwards is unsure how he is released, but the several possibilities that can be assumed give readers hope that justice exists in Dakar.

What originally agonized Edwards during his trip to Dakar eventually came back to aid him in his escape. In the memoir, a continuous pattern of justice without evidence is broken when a lack of evidence greatly benefits him. However, the open-ended assumptions that readers can create on whether his escape involved actual justice or pure luck show that it is possible that justice is not apparent in Dakar. Although there were other factors such as his relation with Thierno, the system that he faced is not as tenacious towards him as he expected it to be. The moment of astonishment shared by both Thierno and Brent Edwards after Edwards’ release does a great job of showing his expectations of never escaping his sentence and his disbelief in the existence of justice in Dakar.  Sometimes, several shortcomings can lead to a major succession, which is exactly what is found in Brent Edwards’ adventurous memoir.

 

Works Cited

Edwards, Brent Hayes. Evidence. Indiana University Press, 2001, www.jstor.org/stable/3172441. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.