There were no colors
Thursday, January 10th, 2008Southern Cone, last quarter of the 20th century
Prisoners in Uruguay’s Libertad prison were sent to la isla, the island: tiny windowless cells in which one bare bulb was illuminated at all times. High-value prisoners were kept in absolute isolation for more than a decade. “We were beginning to think we were dead, that our cells weren’t cells but rather graves, that the outside world didn’t exist, that the sun was a myth,” one of these prisoners, Mauricio Rosencof, recalled. He saw the sun for a total of eight hours over eleven and a half years. So deprived were his senses during this time that he “forgot colors - there were no colors.”
Excerpt, The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein