Jana Kopelentova Rehak

Joking in the Space of Death: Claiming Moral Existence by Joking Relations, Performing Parodies and

Rustling Silk.

Introduction

This essay is about the claim for moral existence in meaning of humor and joking in the

lives of Czech political prisoners, men and women imprisoned by the former Czechoslovakian

Communist government in 1948. What inspired me to write this essay is the existential and

cognitive significance of humor and joking in relation to pain and suffering among Czech political

prisoners. Jason Troop suggested that “Throughout its various manifestations, a foundational

property of pain’s existential structure is its capacity to enact a transformation in the subject who

experiences it, whether for good or for ill.” (Troop 2010)

The joking patterns I discuss in this essay, as woven into the fabric of prisoners’

interpersonal relationships, emerged from their memories of joking and play in labor camps and

prisons. I began to notice, during my long-term research concerned with life under the Communist

political systems in Central and Eastern Europe, that humor had a prominent place in the

prisoners’ recollections and interactions as a transmitter of the pain structure. In my book Czech

Political Prisoners (Rehak 2013), I tell the story of men and women who were survivors of

Communist concentration camps. I emphasize how their suffering and pain was transformed

thought the particular meanings, values, ideals, and expectations that they bring to bear in facing

limitations of their existence. They call themselves Mukls and Muklyne – muž určen k likvidaci, men

or women selected for liquidation during the 1950s. In their memories of state terror, both

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women and men recall torture and pain when relating how they developed various individual and

communal strategies for coping with the degradation rituals which took place in prisons. The

inflicted pain and concepts of cruelty, as I discussed in my book, are traumatic events, which were

folded into the everyday lives of prisoners at the mercy of a totalitarian political system in

Czechoslovakia. In a post-totalitarian state, former prisoners remain the political other through a

distinct desire to come to terms with state violence. A prisoner’s moment of morning awakening

may be marred by nightmares from the previous night. One's everyday condition is recovery from

facing death and a sense of hope embodied in the mutual relatedness of experiences shared with

others who endured the horrors inflicted on them by the Communist government.

Mary Douglass characterizes a joke as a play on a form of discourse, and in Bergson’s

tradition, maintains that the essence of a joke is not limited to subversive effect on the dominant

structure of ideas, but is a confrontation of one pattern with the other. If we accept Douglass’s and

Bergson’s perspective, then humor and joking practices by Czechoslovak political prisoners have

the potential to show a new and different dimension of Muklhood. They also offer an interesting

possibility as an analytical tools which will allow us to see different levels of the workings of social

relations in Czechoslovakia during the violent events which took place under socialism. Looking

at humor and joking practices among Mukls will allow us further insight into how those qualities

were embedded in their ordinary discourses and are part of their day-to-day living in the post-

socialist reconciliation.

This essay is about humor and joking embodied in the language among Czech political

prisoners as a response to the trauma they experienced in labor camps, prisons and after their

release. I further elaborate on some of my thoughts about Mukls’ sense of humor and acts of

joking, because Mukls’ joking practices, the performing parodies and skits in camps and word

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plays, even in the present, proved to be a very significant aspect of Muklhood. As the Mukls

struggle to convey their trauma, they search for a way to express it to others even as they protect

themselves. Joking, as is evident from my observations and Mukls’ narratives, helps them to heal,

helps them to relate to each other and to non-Mukls, and above all it is joking practice that Mukls

use to claim their moral rights.

They joked when remembering and they remember joking in the camps. Humor was

evident in several forms: in short remembered episodes, in performances described as a joke and

play, or in the general sense of joking language patterns expressed during their social gatherings.

To joke dangerously, a term borrowed from Keith Basso (Basso 1979), was part of their

performances in the labor camps. In the camp setting, as they remember it, some Mukls performed

parodies and skits for others and sometimes even in the presence of guards. In the satirical

drawings I introduce later in this essay, the author, Mukl Karel Stasny, depicts Mukls’ and guards’

joking relations in his cartoons. I further discuss how such joking dangerously was normalized in

Mukls’ social relations and restored their confidence about their moral rights. Their juxtaposing of

painful, dark memories with memories of play and joking not only opened a possibility for me to

see how they negotiated their memories of pain, but also allowed me to witness how they used

humor as a tool for sustaining their existence which they consider to be a just and moral

paradigm. It is through their humor I see their effort to protect their dignity, which the guards

targeted and tried to strip away.

Vaclav Havel, the Czech philosopher and playwright, discussed the demoralizing effect

under the totalitarian state as život v pravdě – life in truth (Havel 1995). Compared to the

demoralizing slow erosion of personal dignity in socialist Czechoslovak society during the 1970’s

and 80’s, to which Vaclav Havel makes reference, Mukls’ defacing experiences in the 50’s are both

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vivid and rapid. An analysis of the relationship between pain, humor and morality opened up a

new understanding of Mukls’ future hope, an emotional possibility hard to imagine in the context

of their suffering. Jason Throop argued that pain is a basic existential fact, distinctly human, and

“imbricated throughout a wide spectrum of possible human experiences” (Throop 2010). Further,

he wrote, “Woven into the fabric of our existence, pain is an experience that calls forth questions

of meaning, morality, despair, and hope” (Throop 2010:2). I agree with Throop that, “pain itself

may be transformed through the particular meanings, values, ideals, and expectations that we

humans bring to bear in dealings with the existential possibilities and limitations that it evokes”

(Throop 2010). In this essay I investigate how pain is transformed by humor and playfulness and

how this work of repair creates a sense of self dignity. In the case of Czechoslovak prisoners, it is a

link to their sustaining the concept of a moral life.

As I got to know them, their sense of joking and humor entered into our interactions and

changed the character of my fieldwork. In retrospect, as I reflect on my time spent with Mukls,

their sense of humor and joking interactions helped me to cope with my own witnessing of their

pain and suffering. It made it possible for me to continue with my project, develop friendships

with some of them and understand on a deeper level who they are. Their sense of humor and

joking often allowed for my participation even if only on the level of engaged audience.

While during the semi-structured interviews many testified with smooth and flowing

narratives about their personal life histories, in the context of ordinary events and social times,

Mukls’ memories of trauma were disruptive and recalled as, “a story out of time” (Langer 1991).

Lawrence Langer in The Ruins of Memory distinguished between different kinds of memories of

the Holocaust in relation to the notion of time. When he discussed the process of healing and the

notion of time he made two important points that are relevant to Mukls’ remembering. “Once we

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enter the tentative world of duration, leaving behind the security of chronology, we realize that

life after atrocity is not a call to new unity but only a form of private and communal endurance,

based on mutual toleration rather than mutual love” (Langer 1997:63). He also wrote that to

survive trauma, “is not to heal but to endure” (Langer 1991:56); to Langer a previous experience

cannot be undone by the next. Humor in the context of Muklhood, proved to be an analytical tool

for my understanding of the workings of time and memory, management of pain and also hope.

Veena Das’s writings on violence and social suffering inspired me to think beyond the

experiences of trauma associated with living through or witnessing violent events or episodes. Her

ideas shifted my attention from the limits of certain types of violence, to a different question: one

that asks how traumatic events can affect and spill over to day-to-day long-term experiences of

social suffering. Das and Kleinman make a very powerful analogy about the slow working process

of trauma embodied in various forms of violence. “Sometimes this violence is sudden, as in the

dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At other times it takes the form of a

continuous reign of terror, as with the policies and practices of the brutal regimes of apartheid.

Even when violence is not present in such dramatic forms there can be a slow erosion of

community through the soft knife of policies that severely disrupt the life worlds of people. And

yet in the midst of the worst horrors, people continue to live, to survive, and to cope.” (Das and

Kleinman, 2001)

My narratives are, for the most part, inspired by anthropology of suffering, the field of

study theorizing and advancing a cultural phenomenology (Das, Kleinman, Asad, Reynolds, Daniel,

Farmer, Trnka), classic anthropological and sociological works concerned with humor, joking and

play (Gregory Bateson, Radcliff-Brown, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, Keith Basso

and Irwin Goffman) and psychological theories of humor (Bergson, Levine, Goldstein, McGhee)

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I specially draw parallels with works different in ethnographic context, yet similar in analytical

outcomes. I find Keith Basso’s conclusions about joking among western Apaches applicable to the

joking practices of Czech political prisoners. Begona Aretxaga’s writing about gendered pain

among Irish women prisoners during what she calls the dirty war has been instrumental for my

analysis in relation to not only gendered pain, but politics of body during violence.

Anthropological and sociological traditions in engagement with humor often present joking

practice as a dramatic expression which is not limited to cultural and cognitive properties of

language. Humor and joking can also be a form of play that is performed. Newly invented or

imitative joking performances become dramatic acts charged with symbols and metaphors

performed in a relationship to fulfill a personal need. While much current scholarship on humor

tries to overcome Freudian analysis of jokes, in socio-anthropological contexts acknowledgment of

the psychological dimensions of humor is inevitable. Psychological research in humor is extensive

in compare to other fields, and in its diversity, psychology models are very helpful. In particular,

Jacob Levines’ book Motivation in Humor (Levine 1969) very useful. In the case of the Czech Mukls,

it seems necessary to consider the psychological workings of humor in the context of pain, power

and morality as well as the social aspect of joking. From the philosophy, Henri Bergson’s book

Laughter ( Bergson 2008) prove to be very useful specially in the case of my analysis of Mukls’

visual humor. Bergson discussed the notion of comic in relation to physiognomy, which relates

directly to my analysis of cartons by one of the Mukls Karel Stastny.

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Historical Context

Humor and joking has a significant place in Czech political history. The geographical

location of the Czech Republic in the center of Europe, between the Eastern and Western world,

offers an explanation for the country’s political vulnerability. As a result this country, known as

Bohemia, later Czechoslovakia and now the Czech Republic, has experienced a number of a tragic

political takeovers, followed by long periods of occupation by foreign governments. In the Czech

political context, joking takes on an important function in multiple literary forms as well as in

artistic and oral traditions.

Czech literary history reflects a strong inspiration as Czech writers draw from humor in the

context of political power. A good example, from the early 20th century is the literary work of

Jaroslav Hašek, who wrote the famous novel The Good Soldier Švejk . The novel depicts in satirical

style personal and political dynamics from the time when the Czech country was part of the

Austro-Hungarian Empire.

In the beginning of the Nazi occupation, Prague theatres and writers responded to Nazi

political power with critical satirical humor, as is evident in Karel Hašler’s music, Karel Čapek’s

novels and Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich’s literary theater. My father, who survived the

uncertainties of his life under communism thanks to his sense of humor recalled in our

conversations how the Nazis called Czechs smějí se bestie – laughing brutes.

After WWII Czechs and Slovaks experienced a new political order - Soviet Socialism. In a

newly developed political context, between 1945 and 1948, humor gained a new political

significance. Milan Kundera, a Czech writer in exile, reminded us in The Book of Laughter and

Forgetting (Kundera 1978) of the tragic irony in what he perceives as a symbolic event in Czech

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history at Prague Castle in February 1948. He begins his book with a short, focused and intimate

depiction unveiling nearly forgotten acts on the famous Prague castle balcony, when the first

Communist president, Klement Gottwald, gave his first speech. He described how on a snowy

February day on the balcony next to president Gottwald, a government member, Clementis, “took

off his fur cap and set it on Gottwald’s head” (Kundera1978). Kundera also reminds us that this

photograph of Gottwald in the fur cap on the Prague Castle balcony, become a powerful symbol of

the new political ideology in Czechoslovakia for 50 years. Yet, as Kundera wrote further: “Four

years later Clementis was charged with treason and hanged”. Clementis was airbrushed out of

subsequent copies of the photo, but his hat remained. Its unintended symbolism remains part of

Czechs’ memories of that era. Kundera managed in a short paragraph to satirize an act reflecting

socio-political dynamics. That photograph of the first Communist president, Gottwald, wearing

the fur cap is now in the archive of the Museum of Communism in Prague.

In Czechoslovakia in 1948 when political others became political prisoners, Czech and

Slovak men and women disappeared, were arrested, imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, put on

trial, convicted and sentenced to forced labor camps.

Today, in a post-totalitarian state, former prisoners and their families, remain the political others

as a result of their desire to come to terms with experienced violence in the past. One's everyday

condition is recovery from facing death, but also a sense of hope embodied in their mutual

relatedness. When prisoners connect, their silent togetherness, their joking and friendships are

shared moments in their habitus, all they have left now.

During my fieldwork in Prague, I interviewed and searched in different archives including

the archives of former prisoners of the Communist regime. There, I found historical narratives

about the cruelty of totalitarian political power, social suffering inflicted on political others and

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their families and pain from life lost to political fiction. Unexpectedly I also found humor, play and

joking; each available and instrumental in the survival of Czech political prisoners.

Remembering Joking and Joking When Remembering

In the summer of 1996, I found my self on a Prague balcony, a different balcony than the

one in Kundera’s novel, yet connected to 1950’s events. This balcony was hidden among the

Prague red rooftops, in the center of the city on Narodni Street, and just above the infamous

Bartolomejska police station. It was from this balcony, in the 50’s, that Čeněk’s mother was

looking down into the courtyard of that police station and saw her son, a political prisoner from

Gottwald’s political era, taken in chains for interrogation. It was the last time she saw him. Čeněk’s

mother died while he was in prison. It was in 1996, on this balcony, that Čeněk remembered his

mother when he saw me looking down t at the police station. Čeněk recalled his arrest, “This used

to be my mother’s balcony when they arrested me for the first time. They were taking me in

handcuffs and I looked up. There on the balcony was my mother. After that I never saw her again.”

I was originally invited to Čeněk place to talk about his radio show. In 1960, when Czechoslovakia

was briefly liberalized, some Mukls initiated the process of legal rehabilitation of prisoners from

the 1950’s era. Čeněk’s radio show, charged with his dry and satirical sense of humor, was based

on his undercover investigative returns to the infamous Bory Prison in the city of Plzen. Čeněk

knew from his own experiences in great detail how brutal the guards were in Bory in the 50’s. In

our conversation he first spoke about his 60’s visits as a joke, the irony of his fate, but further into

his narratives he switched from a joking tone to narratives about the confrontations of cruelty he

witnessed there in the past. It was not hard for me to picture Čeněk’s returns to the prison. I could

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see him, with a gentle smile on his face and pretending as if this was his first time there, walking

into the prison where he had been previously tortured. As Čeněk related, it was during the radio

interview that the guard denied cruel practices towards the political prisoners in 50’s. Than

Čeněk revealed his identity and confronted the guard about the brutality he had himself

experienced. The joke was this unexpected, unveiled personal experience in which the guard’s and

Čeněk’s fates were reversed, exposed by the guard’s lies. For Čeněk this was an opportunity to

reconcile a cruelty, “an expression of particular voice” (Asad1997). Čeněk implied that this was an

important moment for him, helping him to come to terms with the cruelty he and others had

survived in Bory Prison; I have come to think about these returns as Douglas describes similar

encounters, “cleansing and purifying,” ( Douglas 1975). I became interested in Čeněk’s ability to

work jokes into his reconciliation. On my returns to Prague each summer between 1996 and 2006,

Čeněk and some other Mukls became my friends. Our times together were always filed with joking

and humorous anecdotes about their past and Muklhood. In their memories of state terror

prisoners recall torture and pain inflicted when degradation rituals took place in prisons and after

their release. Yet, their conversations were charged with joking.

During my summer visits to the Czech Republic, between 2003 and 2005, Mukls were

among the oldest generation living in the Czech Republic. Their ordinary lives, their day-to-day

conditions, were marked by witnessing or experiencing health problems, serious illness, aging and

death. They were retired from work, and although many still helped their children, grandchildren,

other relatives, or in took care of their Mukl friends, others are alone. Among those whom I know

well, I have observed that the ones who connect with other Mukls have the richest friendships.

It was my last Sunday in Prague in the summer of 2005; I was with a small group of Čeněk

friends – Mukls Franta, Vojta and Roman. Čeněk was in the hospital, in intensive care. His friends

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knew he was dying. After the meeting in the Café, their Sunday ritual, the Mukls and I went to visit

him. In the car on the way to the hospital they joked.

Vojta: I visit him regularly and bring him his medicine - his last pleasure. His body is giving

up on him. (Vojta is joking about a small shot of whisky and one cigarette, the gift he brings

for every visit)

Franta: You will see he lost a lot of weight, but he still enjoys his bourbon and cigarettes.

Vojta: I will go and get him from his room. You wait downstairs and I will tell him that the

police are here, they gave you a death sentence again….he will be surprised.

Franta: He is the one who composed our hymn.

The Mukls are singing their hymn, a song composed by Čeněk in prison. Their voices fill

the interior of the car with a melody symbolic of Muklhood. I am listening to their song, but also

still thinking about their way of joking. Vojta’s plan to joke with Čeněk is, to me, a symbolic re-

enactment of Čeněk’s sentence, a reminder of his closeness to his death. In the 1950s Čeněk was

sentenced to death by the Communist government, but the sentence was commuted to a life

sentence. In the 60’s Čeněk was granted presidential amnesty.

From my interviews with Čeněk I know that he was tortured on many occasions, he

experienced and witnessed brutality in the prisons and labor camps. The Čeněk I know is an

intellectual, kind, poetic and funny person. Our conversations over the years have always been

interwoven with his witty and dry sense of humor. It was a kind of humor he shared with other

Mukls, full of irony in proximity to the tragic fate and conditions of Muklhood. Now his friends

from the past, Mukls who care for him, remind him through wordplay of his closeness to death in

the past.

In my early writing about the Czechoslovak Communist government, I define the state’s

practices as a form of violent rituals. I conceptualized Mukls’ subjectivity as closely linked to their

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passage through the repetitive violent sequence of arrest, interrogations and trial. Allan Feldman

suggests that a ritual, in the context of political life, is a kind of simulation of death (Feldman

1991). The Mukls’ plan to joke with Čeněk about the death sentence, now in the light of

reconciliation, is what Vena Das identified as “a relationship with death”(Das1997:78). Mukls’

joking is surprising; it is a sudden language switch, just like the conversation in the car on the way

to hospital visit, a sudden return to a space of death.

To understand Mukls’ joking in the car and with Čeněk in the hospital, one must take a

closer look at joking practices in the camps – the space of death or a place of Hell in reference to

Jachymov labor camps.

Performing in the Place of Hell

I first noticed joking relations among Mukls during their annual memorial returns to a long

deserted uranium mine, the site of the labor camps in Jachymov, a city in Western Bohemia.

Jachymov was a collection of several labor camps and it was a place so unbearable that the Mukls

call it Jachymov Hell. Every year in May they gather in the town square of Jachymov. In their

struggle for truth, Mukls’ returns to Jachymov provide them with the opportunities to publically

confront the silence of others, non-Mukls, and overcome it. Such gatherings are one of the

opportunities for Mukls to restore their public face after life-long social invisibility. Mukls’ annual

memorial gatherings are public events confronting many other Czechs whose silence about the

past has been buried by collective amnesia.

The city of Jachymov was once surrounded by eighteen forced labor camps and uranium mines,

and for most Czechs it now belongs to the past. But for Mukls it is, “the hidden matrix and nomos of

the political space in which we still live” (Agamben 2003:36). Mukls share an ambivalent dilemma of

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narratives. They are caught between two paradigms: disbelief in claims of victimhood and a desire to

tell the story, a desire to be understood and to reconcile. Joking while remembering and remembering

joking is an often available psychological and linguistic form for Mukls to overcome such a dilemma.

I spent a lot of time with Mukl Franta who hardly ever revealed anything about his life in

the camps. On our walk in Jachymov forest, suddenly he recalled one comic performance in the

Jachymov hills from past. “One time in lager, Jíří came with his friend leaning on his shoulders

dressed in my nightgown decorated with medals on his chest made from a tin can. They pretended

to be soldiers from the Soviet Army. The camp’s leaders gave them a week of hard prison, but the

best joke was when they announced from the loudspeaker that the punishment is for insulting the

Soviet Army. Jíří joked all his life. When he was dying of cancer I took him to the hospital and on

the way his eyes looked sad, but he tried to joke until the end.” I knew Jíří well from my first

fieldwork years in Prague, but I had never met Jíří and Franta together. Because Jíří never stopped

joking it was not easy to interview him, but when he came with me to visit different camp sites, he

turned jokes into stories about life in the camps. His sense of humor permeated his stories and

made it possible for me to see how humor and joking could take place in labor camps. Jíří told me

on our walk to an old mining area, “It is an irony, it is an absurdity, but we were the only free

group in this country. We could do and say what we liked. In camps we had nothing to lose. We

already lost everything.” What he meant was that they were free to joke and that performing jokes

was worth the punishment. The effects of humor and joking, as Susanna Trnka suggested, enable

people to transform fear to momentary pleasure and restore their sense of freedom (Trnka 2008).

Jíří was the joker; a kind of mystic who in Mary Douglas’s words can pass beyond the bounds of

reason. (Douglas 1975). Spending time with him, in my early days of this research, I could see that

he never stops with joking.

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Years later, when I met Franta’s son Peter, he spoke about his fathers’ joking in the camps

as part of his reflection on his childhood experiences as the son of political prisoners (his mother

was also a Mukl). Peter recalled, “My father was a strong personality. One time a camp guard

asked him for his ID number and my father told him 114. My father joked, the number he gave him

was an airplane number. Later the guard found out that my father was making fun of him and sent

my father to correction, the hole, as it was known by Mukls. It was a small underground room with

low ceiling, which served the camp as a detention room. My father was in the hole several times;

he had a sense of humor. That is what they, prisoners, had to have in order to survive the camps”.

As the Mukls, Jiri, Karel and Lubos and I walked to places in the Jachymov hills where the

uranium mines were hidden and where labor camp barracks once stood over radioactive earth,

they reconstructed the winter time in camp.

Karel: Here was the gate, the entrance to the camp.

Jiri: When I close my eyes I see it all: the camp’s kitchen, laundry room all built on a

concrete frame and then barracks where we lived were built on wooden pilings. You could

see underneath these buildings. The temperature never rose above zero.

Karel: And over there the most beautiful view, but we could never see it all. From one

window you could see only half a mountain and from other parts of the building others

could see the other half.

Jiri: That was intentional architectural planning (Jiri joked and Mukls are laughing)

Lubos: It was called killer valley…(silence), but we had fun. One day one of the guards said,

“You think we don’t know that you are talking about how stupid we are, but we do know.

You will stop laughing one day when we march in front of White House in New York. We

couldn’t stop laughing at him.”

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Their joking and memories of joking brought light to our memorial return trips to Jachymov. As

Mukls’ stories entered deeper into my life, I found comfort in their sense of humor. I noticed that a

sudden wave of humor would overpower the shared memory of hell and make the next

conversation possible. Some Mukls could not speak about their pain or the pain of others, but

talked about joking in the camps. They told the stories about comic performances and parodies

Mukls performed without fear of punishment.

Later, when Karel showed me his drawings of satirical cartoons, I saw visual memories of

joking from Jachymov camp. Karel’s drawings depict Mukls joking relations with guards in the

camps. Jokes imitate the taborak - a guard, who is less intelligent and educated than prisoners and

the prisoners’ subordination. A Mukl is always portrayed in cartoons as powerless in relation to a

guard in power. The guard is the agent representing the ideology and political power of the Soviet

Union. The main joking pattern is in the portrait of the guard – the agent that is incompetent,

simple and stupid and misinformed. The guard is an armed agent of the political system, a symbol

of political power which defaces its citizens – destroys their lives. These representations of

guards’ behavior display the absurdity of this political power. In this sense joking performances,

what Keith Basso calls plays (Basso1979), are not only interpersonal joking relations restricted to

Mukls’ communication among themselves, but are also highly symbolic intertextual re-enactments

of a political power and its ideology.

Keith Basso discussed a similar effect in the context of joking and social relations among

the western Apaches. During his 1965 field work Basso witnessed, “a joking imitation of the white

man.” His investigation of ethnographic evidence in search of the cultural meanings of Apache

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joking peformances, lead him to develop an interesting cognitive framework for his interpretation

of the function of joking. By analyzing the behaivor, with emphasis on the dynamic character of

joking, Basso identifies the Apaches’ joking as one means for what he calls stretching social

relations (Basso 1979:69). The joking imitations, the practice of stretching and softening

relationships, are available among individuals who have established mutual confidence and

affection in mature relationships. Very similar stretching and softening relations can be seen in

Mukls’ joking practices, both among Mukls themselves and with their guards.

Basso’s interpretetions of joking among western Apaches are relavant for my analysis on

multiple levels. His discussion of the paradoxical relationship between western Apaches and

Anglo-Americans is especially relevant. Anglo-Americans, Basso points out, are frequently

caricatured by the Apache joker as patronizing, incompetent and pretentious, yet in the position

of political overlord over powerless Indian people. Mukls often in their joking expressed a similar

paradox in their interactions with guards, whom they perceived as incompetent and ill informed,

yet maintaining total power over the Mukls’ lives in the camps. The guards are the agents of the

political fiction they are all forced to live. Joking imitations, in Basso’s ethnograpic context, are

statements about dignity and self-preservation. For Czech prisoners, men and women, playful

parodies and imitation rutines, as they claime, were forms of restoring their dignity and self

preservation. Joking, Basso suggested, the subject to modification and change, is expresion of

systems and symbols of morality.

An analysis of Karel’s carton drawings led me to see the consistent themes in joking

patterns with a dominant focus on the reassurance about the weakness of the political system.

These dramatic forms, dangerous in their implications, were drawn and circulated by Mukls in

camps. It highlight the absurdity of camp conditions and further reinforce the idea that, because

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of its fictive weaknesses, the existence of the camps may be short lived. In our conversations about

their life in the camps, they often emphasized how strongly they believed in a rapid praskne, break

or rupture, when remembering their hope for the upcoming end of the regime. Basso refers to

such cartoon drawings as morality plays, which dramatize what is wrong, and in his words affirm

what is right (Basso1979). In the context of Mukls’ own sense of fate entangled by a cruel

absurdity, parodies and joking performances in camps became a symbolic hidden matrix of their

moral truth.

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1

1 The Library. Studies didn't mean much to me, but as you see our party and government under the leadership of the Soviet… 2. It was discovered that you have all kinds of things on your shelves, but if you put more there, then you will have it all.3. In the end of our cultural afternoon an orchestra will perform a song from comrade Tupolev Gershvin.4. What are you staring at? It’s good to learn foreign languages. I also study American; an American workingman is a poor man.

The rich man…Guns and ku plux plán (ku klux klan). When we take over America I maybe commander. 5. Post-censorship. You are writing all kinds of nonsense and yet you are all doctors and engineers …and many of you have even

high school diploma.6. Dvorak, don't be smart, do you won’t to be smarter than me? And don't talk when you are talking to me!7. They say we are stupid, but we know.8. Guys, it’s not our fault that you are here and it’s not your fault, it’s the fault of capitalists….Like Bata….we pushed him out. Or in

England it is Ford, but those are not facts, but reality, you must learn and again learn. 

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Joking with, or about, guards in the camps permitted a temporary readjustment of the

power structure. Joking in the camps, the space of death, became for Mukls an available break

from everyday cruelty and degradation. As Douglas put it, it was, for a joker, “a purifying and

cleansing” moment (Douglas1975). It became evident to me that humor is deeply embedded in

what Agar calls languaculture (Agar 1994). For the Mukls’ joking is a significant reaction to pain

linked to the very conditions of Muklhood. I came to think of Mukls’ humor and joking as language

patterns particular to their community or family. The ability to make a joke is the ability to turn

the language of pain into a different form of communication. Humor, permitted and available in

Mukls’ relations, became an integral part of their speech, inseparable from Muklhood then and

now. I agree with James P. Spradley and Brenda J. Mann (Spradley and Mann 1975) in that

Radcliffe-Brown’s formulation of Joking Relations (1965) is applicable beyond non-Western

societies, and that his model offers analytical possibility applied in complex societies. I found in

Mukls’ joking relations similar characteristics of the relationships as they are found in non-

Western societies. They include restriction to certain participants and settings seeas well as

ritualized insults publicly performed. Joking among themselves was permitted in Mukls’ kinship-

like relationships. I see Mukls’ relatedness as a form of alternative kinship (Rehak 2013: 100),

which resonates with joking relations as discussed by Radcliffe – Brown in the Durkheim and

Mauss tradition. Joking relations, permitted or required by custom, function as a mechanism for

readjustment of the social structure. For Mukls joking became an available form of speech in the

camps, which were new social structures.

Rustling Silk

20

The women prisoners respond differently to torture and degradation, more subtly than the

men. They used their sense of humor to blunt the impact of the brutality they endured. The

women prisoners developed their own strategies, quite different from those of the men, for

maintaining their sense of moral right (to survive) in the labor camps. They performed the rituals

of cleansing and purifying with a sense of play and imagination, but their symbols are different.

Some of the womens’ symbolic dramas and playfulness in the labor camps, are captured in two

journals I found in the Museum of Political Prisoners in the city of Přibram.

Hilda, one of the women in the drawings, recognized the journals immediately when I

showed her a copy. I asked her to explain the symbolism and meanings to me. She identified the

author and explained page by page. The drawings were both illusive and realistic. Some drawings,

done in a realistic style, show a different type of work that women prisoners had to do when in

labor camps. On one page a number of women are doing laundry. Standing by clothes lines, they

are holding on to the lines as if they are riding on a tram. Next to this drawing is a rhyme, Nemame

to zadny raj hrajeme si na tramvaj (We are not in paradise, we are pretending that we are riding on

a tram). And below we see jen nekterí (any one). On a different page, Muklyne Anezka imitates

filming with a pretend movie camera made from an old sink. Below, on the same page, are two

Muklyne, Hilda and M. playing chess. The caption reads, Jime fleky, kroupy, hrách - nevadí jen když

hrajem šach, (We are eating gruel, barley, peas, it doesn’t bother us as long we can play chess).

Drawing their imagined food or flavors as a frame for drawings of prison space is a common

theme in two of the journals. On the page where women are working in the hop fields, the drawing

of their labor is framed by fruit, bread and milk.

21

From the early stages of my research in Prague I have been uncomfortable asking

prisoners, Mukls, about the particular torture practices they endured. During our recorded

22

interviews, the moment we reached the subject of the torture they experienced, many Mukls

became emotionally distressed. The memory of interrogations caused pain. Sometimes the pain

overshadowed the voice. Some cried, others remained silent. Yet, when they broke the silence

many spoke about isolation, humiliation and degradation brought on by physical and

psychological pain.

Veena Das wrote about the targeting of women’s bodies as a part of the political project

during communal violence in India at the time of partition. She wrote: “The bodies of women were

a surface on which texts were to be written and read – icons of the new nation” (Das 1997).

Gendered pain holds a significant place in the women’s interrogation narratives. In her Shattering

Silence, Begona Aretxaga discusses how Irish women prisoners used their bodies during what is

known as the dirty protest. Like the men they were protesting against the British attempt to

criminalize them.

Based on her interviews with former prisoners, Aretxaga’s narratives reveal similar forms

of punishments that resonate with Czechoslovak women prisoners’ experiences. The women

prisoners were locked in their cells without access to toilet and washing facilities. They reversed

cultural notions of the clean feminine body in a radical protest against the British attempts to

criminalize them. She wrote, “For more than one year thirty-two women lived in tiny cells without

washing themselves, amid their own menstrual blood and bodily waste” (Aretxaga 1997: 122).

Aretxaga argues that the significance of the women’s dirty protest cannot be separated from its

connection with the “play of gender and sexual difference in the production and deployment of

power” (Aretxaga 1997). She also suggests that at the cultural and personal levels meaning have

women’s protests differed from the men’s and that menstrual blood “as both a symbol of the

protest and signifier of a reality jettisoned from public discourse” (1997:127).

23

Czechoslovak women prisoners, just like the Irish women, used feminine symbolism to

identify distinct, gendered ways they were, in contrast to men, punished, tortured and humiliated.

They were routinely subjected to humiliation, not only as political prisoners, but also as women. I

wrote in my book, “Muklyněs across the boundaries of different prisons and labor camps spoke

about mutual care, gentle language and grace in manners. Others spoke about their daily rituals of

washing their bodies, clothes and cells or weekly beautification plays, that they called rustling silk,

šustění hedvabím (Rehak 2012).

In her memoir, Muklyně Dagmar Šimková repetitively returns to the concept of gendered

pain. She emphasized it in relation to different forms of humiliation used to degrade her during

interrogations. She wrote about one long-lasting interrogation in which her failure to control her

bladder was characterized as a female failure. “I was turning red, the tears were running down my

cheeks, I asked them over and over if I could go to the bathroom. After another hour my body

gave up, I soiled the carpet. The agent screamed: ‘throw her out - that wet bitch’. Interrogators’

favorite games were directed to make us hate ourselves. Women had to be shamed for their

femininity, she has to be deprived of her femininity.” (Šimková 1990)

Such assaults on incarcerated women were, I agree with Aretxaga, “ a humiliating

affirmation of institutional power, one in which notions of sexual abuse and male dominance were

deeply implicated” (Aretxaga 1997:128). In Foucault’s tradition she reminds us of the importance

of disciplinary techniques of the body in the production and deployment of power. Foucault in his

extensive discussion about total institutions like the prison, emphasized that the body and

sexuality in relation to power are one of the greatest instrumentalities. (Foucault 1979)

Foucault’s analysis leads us to conclude, after consideration of subjectivity, that it is not

our body in the end, but the soul that is target of disciplinary power.

24

In the Czechoslovak context, other women testify about the intentional de-feminizing of

their bodies: making them wear oversized, male prisoners’ clothing not allowing them to use the

toilet, making them feel as if they were bezpohlavní, (asexual). In response to gendered

humiliation, pain inflicted on her and others through de-feminizing, Šimková described various

ways women resisted the interrogators’ efforts: “For agents we are bitches, smelly discharge,

whores, beasts. Our anti-poison was mutual kindness and attachment. We called ourselves by

diminutives. We are ‘Marušky,’ ‘Pepičky,’ ‘Aničky,’ regardless of age and body shapes...We are

ladies. We are watching our moves, expressions, intonations, self-control, that gives us the

strength to keep a sense of respect. We call this šustění hedvabím, rustling silk.” (Simkova 1990)

Simkova explained how rustling silk rituals not only restored their sense of beauty, but also

created a symbolic space in which they felt human dignity and morality that was essential for

further survival of cruel life in camps.

Dagmar Šimková tells another related story about the woman M.L. and her gentle humor.

She remembers how M.L. defended her rights in camp so often and with such persistence that they

transferred her to a mental hospital. There she was subjected to even more harshness and cruelty

than in the camps. When she returned a from hospital to labor camps, after five years, Šimková

recalls, “ She returned with he a healthy mind, quiet and brave, just like before with a gentle sense

of humor that was hardly defeated. When they finally let her go, she was not so interested,

perhaps she knew that prisoners are the only free people in this country, because they already lost

all” (Šimková 1991).

Muklyně inverted the degradation rituals performed by guards into their own rustling silk

rituals of cleansing and purifying, a playful labor of “self-gradation” (Goffman 1974) and restoring

their dignity. Dignifying rituals had also a bonding effect on Muklyněs’ solidarity and mutual

25

relatedness and provided comfort in maintaining the self-respect the prison guards tried to take

way from them. Joking and plays were instrumental in the process of recovering their feelings of

dignity with the confidence that they, just like men, claimed their moral right. It is evident from

their memories, both narrative and visual, that humor was one of the key elements in retaining

confidence in their moral rightness. Based on their narratives about the interrogations and the

labor camps, they nurtured joking relations throughout the passage from arrest to the labor

camps. I agree with Susanna Trnka, that in the context of political violence, jokes will puncture the

space of terror and break people’s fear, even offer a momentary sense of freedom among the

politically oppressed, although the effect is only temporary and will not resolve the violence. The

prisoners’ joking relations and playful performances: the rustling silk, the dangerous imitations of

guards’ incompetence and ideological parodies, are a hidden matrix of cultural meanings in the

archive of the socialist past. When prisoners connect, their silent togetherness, their joking and

friendships are shared moments in their habitus, all they have left now.  Humor – inseparable

from Muklhood is another register of Mukls’ togetherness, reconciliation and moral claim.

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