I work in and with an art form which is famously ‘white’: opera. And why shouldn’t it be? It was created in 1600 in a white, western Europe. I may not have a milligram of genetic whiteness, but opera is my life.
I haven’t changed the art form, but I have done one thing with it that hadn’t been done before and it has had an impact: I took opera into prison. And then I used that as a pretext to get the public to go into prison to think about what happens in this dustbin of society, and about how prisons might better serve society. Prison is the Dr Jekyll side of my opera life; as Mr Hyde, I entertain life’s winners at Grange Park Opera.
Opera is what it is and I don’t change it to make it more appealing to anyone: not poor people, those from ethnic minority groups or the young. I know some people do projects with that in mind, but often the result just isn't the art form. We didn't change any part of the opera we produced in prisons, and prisoners of all types just ‘saw that it was good’, to coin a phrase. People respond to quality. Even if they are in prison.
How did I get to be able to do any of this? Well, this is what happened to me. My Muslim parents left India at Partition and, after a brief spell in newlyformed Pakistan, came to England, where there was free education. I was born in 1956 in that cradle of race riots, Cable Street in Stepney (now Tower Hamlets). Five children and my mother lived in two rooms at the top of a dodgy Georgian house – dodgy because the house next door had been bombed and we were held up by wooden buttresses. One room was where we slept and played and where my mother operated a sewing machine to earn money. The other room was known as ‘the other room’: in fact it was a kitchen. Once a week we each stood in the kitchen sink and had water poured over us and our hair washed. I didn’t have a bath until I was six.
The next 20 years were those that led to the founding of the Commission for Racial Equality. The state seemed very generous: it gave me free schooling, piano and violin lessons, an Oxford education. It was also during those 20 years that Enoch Powell made his famous speech, and overnight my white, working-class playmates decided to call me ‘Paki’ and told me they didn’t want to be my friend.
By the mid-1980s, I was finishing a stint in the City and had realised that if I didn’t involve myself with music I would, at the end of my life, regret it.
A bit of a dreamer, I had a few ideas about taking opera to places other than regular theatres and I started a little company which wandered about the place. Our clientele consisted of the usual suspects and, to break away from the expected, we broke into a prison – Wormwood Scrubs. At first, we just performed to the prisoners. We took with us an orchestra, lights, a set, costumes and, though we performed The Marriage of Figaro in Italian (without surtitles), it went down a storm. Why shouldn’t ‘they’ whom society has found wanting enjoy opera? Step two was to get the prisoners – murderers in the first project – to participate and perform. I chose Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd . Apart from the obvious team-building, educational and rehabilitative elements of the project, we’d realised that it was also necessary for the public to come into prisons to see that prisoners are just ordinary people whom prison must return as good and useful members of society. Systematic humiliation seemed an unlikely route, and I thought that this was worth a try.
I was certain our project wouldn’t last, and that definitely by the year 2000 it would be dead: prisons were bound to improve, prisoner numbers would fall and there wouldn’t be enough baritones for the chorus of Les Mis´erables . Well, prisons might have got better, but prisoner numbers continue to increase. Somewhere, something is not going right. As I write, there is another hoo-ha about using police cells because prisons are full.
I am amazed that home secretaries of all complexions don’t see prisons as a priority. Headlines of ‘let’s be tough on crime’ and ‘keep crime off the streets’ are more likely to win votes than, say, a proclamation like ‘let’s turn offenders into useful members of society’. It seems very obvious that people are in prison largely because of a poor education. Short of legitimate means of acquiring all those lovely things that we are told are desirable, they step outside what is legal.
Since 1991, our little company, Pimlico Opera, has taken more than 30,000 members of the public into prison, and the project is now quite famous as an annual event. Would this work have been possible 30 years ago? In many respects, I feel society was in fact more open back then. Or perhaps I was naïve, and just didn’t notice that at the opera one is now, and was then, usually one of a handful of non-whites in the audience.
This summer, I was stopped at the opera by a woman who had come across me before. She admired my fake tan and asked me if it was the new Johnson’s product. But that isn’t opera’s fault. Opera is here to tell us about ourselves and the world we live in. That day, it carried the message both on and off the stage.
Wasfi Kani OBE read music at Oxford, worked with computers in the City, and then decided to pursue a career in music
© Commission for Racial Equality, 2006