Arrest!

I've never been arrested.

But I can recognize similar accounts of it when I hear them - from two quite different political dissidents, of different genders, in two quite different times and places.

Tonight on the public radio program The Story, Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi told of her experience of being suddenly arrested by Egypt's authoritarian regime. It was thirty years ago, but the experience was clearly a seering one - yanking her out of her illusionary comfort zone and thrusting her into the bracing reality of prison.

In prison, she was confined next to prostitutes who lent her the rudimentary writing materials (such as toilet paper) she used to keep writing.

I was struck by the eerie congruence between her description of being arrested and the one given by Aleksandr Solshenitsyn in the very first chapter of his monumental Gulag Archipelago.
"Need it be said," Solzhenitsyn asked, "that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you?"

Solzhenitsyn's answer to his own rhetorical question would surely resonate with El Saadawi and others who have been arrested unexpectedly. He describes arrest as "an unassimable spiritual earthquake" with consequences so severe that some people go insane.

The natural reaction, then, is to hold on, as long as possible, to the previous reality - as summed up in Solzhenitsyn's patheticly innocent question, "Me? What for?"

They do all this when the arrest is on video?

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. had it easy compared to Derryl Jenkins.

Gates, the Harvard professor arrested for disorderly conduct after forgetting the keys to his house and berating a police officer responding to a 9-1-1 report of a break-in at Gates’ house, ended up sharing a beer with President Obama and arresting officer James Crowley.

Derryl Jenkins, a 42-year-old African American man on his way to a riend's house in north Minneapolis last February, was beaten by six Minneapolis police officers after he was pulled over for allegedly going fifteen miles over the speed limit. When he raised questions about the stop, the officers punched and kicked Jenkins repeatedly while he was facedown in a snow bank, breaking two of his teeth and opening a wound above his left eye that required seven stitches to close. They also tasered him three times before placing two sets of handcuffs on him and jailing him for four days.

Neither of the charges brought against Jenkins stuck. Prosecutors dropped assault charges in March, and in July a Hennepin County judge dismissed the charge of refusing to submit to a chemical test.

In August, after obtaining police video of the incident from the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, Jenkins and his attorney released the video to the press.



Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan has sent the video to the FBI for review and ordered that all videotaped use of force incidents resulting in injuries be reviewed by internal affairs. “Punching or kicking for passive resistance is not appropriate,” the chief said. Like President Obama, it seems that Chief Dolan wants to at least make this “a teachable moment.”

Meanwhile, Derryl Jenkins continues to have frequent nightmares and has become fearful of the police. No beer summit here; Jenkins has not brought suit against the Minneapolis Police Department, but he has not ruled out the possibility, either

Billie Holiday, 1915-1959

Billie Holiday, the great blues singer, died the year I was born. My sister, Sonja, indirectly introduced me to Holiday as a cultural icon when she gave me an album by the Irish singer/songwriter Van Morrison as a college graduation present. In several of his songs, Morrison invokes Holiday with a respect that verges into reverence. He calls out her name with awe and wonder, as if it were an apostolic greeting.

I had not known the tragic story of Billie Holiday’s life, however, until yesterday. On a Twin Cities radio station, 89.3 The Current, the announcer said that she died fifty years ago, of heart disease and cirrhosis in a New York hospital. A police offer was outside her door, as she was under arrest for heroin possession at the time she died. How sad, I thought − and what a strange use of law enforcement resources.



Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit,” recorded in 1939, takes on the lynching of African Americans. Seventy years later, it’s still worth a listen.