Prisons inside Prisons: Post-conflict Life Narrative in A Tragedy of Lives (Chiedza Musengezi & Irene Staunton, eds.) and The Book of Memory (Petina Gappah) (original) (raw)
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Inside out: Gender, individualism, and representations of the contemporary South African prison
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2017
This article examines A Human Being Died that Night: A Story of Forgiveness by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Red Ink by Angela Makholwa, which are, respectively, auto/biographical and fictional narrative representations of the contemporary South African prison. Both narratives foreground gender because their female authors consciously posit their own femininity, in the case of Gobodo-Madikizela, and of her protagonist, in the case of Makholwa, as significant to the prison they portray. Although the way non-fiction and fiction operate cannot be conflated, Makholwa’s novel seems to mirror the structure of Gobodo-Madikizela’s auto/biography in obvious ways; an observation that helps justify why I analytically compare these narratives in this article. Most apartheid prison narratives, by authors of all genders, largely adopted an unambiguously political frame in articulating the subject positions of characters. The personal was deliberately subsumed in what appeared to be an urgent politi...
Political Prisoners' Memoirs in Zimbabwe
Cultural & Social History, 2008
Prison narratives are a key genre of African nationalist writing. They offer a unique window onto the relationships between the personal and political, the self and nation. This article focuses on the memoirs of three Zimbabwean political prisoners in order to explore claims to agency in prison, constructions of gender and race, and the complexities of individual passages within the collective narrative of nationalism. The memoirs are revealing of a formative period in Zimbabwean nationalism, and of the individuals and ideas that shaped independent Zimbabwe.
Suffering and Protest in Rhodesian Prisons During the Zimbabwean Liberation Struggle
This article is based on Zimbabwean ex-political prisoners’ testimonies and writings, and argues that, although Rhodesian prisons were spaces of racialised abuse, curtailed freedoms, and heightened repression, they were also spaces of struggle, subversion and negotiation. Indeed, prisoners’ testimonies and their written accounts reveal the depravity and brutality of prison life. They capture vividly some of the gruesome experiences in the state corridors of silence. Yet, as this essay demonstrates, these testimonies also disclose the ways in which prisoners were not simply victims of state-sponsored penal terror: prisoners told stories of how they struggled, coped and creatively adapted to the harsh prison regimes. I also argue that, by transforming the prison into an arena of struggle for political and social rights, African political offenders undermined the disciplinary, rehabilitative, and punitive intent of imprisonment. Political prisoners are important historical subjects in the telling of the struggle for liberation in Zimbabwe – prisoners’ life stories and writings demonstrate the ways in which political prisoners confronted the colonial regime. As political prisoners, they were important symbols of the struggle for liberation, and were also producers of powerful critiques of the colonial regime through their writings.
Law, justice and decoloniality in Petina Gappah's works: an Ubuntu perspective
African Identities, 2024
The emergence of law and literature as a transdiscipline has unravelled fascinating insights into the role of literary imagination in raising pertinent jurisprudential questions and envisioning alternative legal universes. The literary front can expand legal literacy, humanise the law, and offer perspectives that are otherwise overlooked in conventional jurisprudence. This article explores Petina Gappah's representation of law and justice in The Book of Memory (2015) and Rotten Row (2016), focussing on how she innovatively deploys politico-aesthetic means to expose ambiguities, ambivalences and inadequacies in Zimbabwe's legal system. It contends that Gappah uses the literary medium to underline how the exclusion of customary law from the country's common law system undermines the delivery of justice. Considering that the texts are alive to the limitations of both customary and common law systems, the study argues for a legal pluralism that harnesses the progressive aspects of the two legal cultures. By drawing on Zimbabwe's humanist philosophy of Unhu, the study places studied texts within a growing decolonial narrative that critiques the coloniality of legal frameworks in formerly colonised nations.
Several studies have established inmates chronicle their lived experiences in the works of art they produce such as poetry. Studying artworks produced by inmates therefore provides critical information that can help inform policies, programmes, and activities for rehabilitation. The Zambia Correctional Service provided arts platform for inmates to write and perform poetry. However, there were neither known studies that took interest to study this poetry nor a deliberate policy by the service to use this poetry to appreciate the lived experiences of inmates especially that the service was transforming from custodial prison system to a correctional service. Using a mixed methods inquiry anchored on the stylistic, social constructionism and structuralism study analysed selected poems written by inmates from the Mwembeshi Maximum Correctional Facility. The analyses of these poems focused on their stylistic and thematic content and how these had a bearing on the Zambia Correctional Service. The study established that inmate poets used a wide range of stylistic content to bring out themes in a creative and appealing manner that gives a reader a vicarious experience of their lived experiences in the Zambia correctional facilities. The themes in the poems reflected the lived experiences of inmates in terms of the circumstances that led them to prison, the crimes they committed, what prison life had been like, their coping strategies and perception about the correctional activities as well as their fears and hopes for a post-prison future. Like studies that have been conducted elsewhere, this demonstrates that poetry in Zambia can be one of the most beneficial treatments in rehabilitation as it aids the understanding of the lived experiences of inmates. It can equip inmates, correctional officers, social workers, health care providers, educators and parents or guardians with tools of how they can create strategies of v helping inmates rehabilitate and how inmates can be integrated into society after release without a preconceived approach to the individual self that committed the crime. Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to both my parents Tobias Mwanza and my goddess Ndlovukazi Nyundiwe Banda who were eager to see me reach this far and have always been the pillar of my hard work. vi Acknowledgements I have been helped by more people within the rank and file of my family and social networks than I can possibly list here. I thank them all. However, it would be an injustice if I do not particularise certain institutions and individuals. My supervisor Dr Cheela Himutwe Chilala has been a patient source of constructive criticism and scaffolding support. I would be lost without the love of my earthly gods, my father Tobias Mwanza and my goddess Ndlovukazi Nyundiwe Banda. I adore them! I would like to thank my siblings: Gift Banda,
The purpose of this study is to examine how two distinct authors, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Orhan Kemal, express their experiences in prison as a result of being imprisoned by their own states due to their opinions, as well as how they portray the conditions of the prison and prisoners. Ignoring the fact that both works are written in different literary forms, the events recounted by both authors are completely encountered and witnessed by themselves. Ngugi’s work focuses on the plight of political prisoners, detailing how the prison administration treated them horribly through government indoctrination, as well as how the inmates coped with these circumstances. On the other hand, Orhan Kemal portrays the prison life he witnessed while imprisoned for political reasons, focusing particularly on the lives of the impoverished, poor, and outcast prisoners. In his story, he discusses not only the life of the prisoners, but also the prison atmosphere and the warders’ degrading attitude toward them. In light of these considerations, Kenyan writer and scholar Ngugi wa Thiong’o ’s work, which he composed in the form of a diary, and Orhan Kemal’s story 72nd Ward, in which he tells the events he witnessed, were compared and contrasted, accordingly, the parallels and differences between the two writers were explored.
Memories of the 'inside': Conditions in South African women's prisons
The inadequate conditions of South Africa’s correctional facilities are well known. Health care, sanitation, food provision, access to education and reading materials, and, in particular, overcrowding are considerable challenges faced by the Department of Correctional Services (DCS). Based on interviews with former prisoners, this article retrospectively examines the conditions under which female inmates are incarcerated in South Africa. Findings show that prison conditions in some female correctional facilities are poor and impact negatively on prisoners during, and sometimes after, their incarceration. (‘Prisons’ and ‘correctional facilities’ are used interchangeably in this article.)
Memory, Imagination, and Resistance in Canada's Prison for Women
Space and Culture , 2021
A group of women who were incarcerated at Canada's first federal Prison for Women (P4W) have been fighting to create a memorial garden since the prison closed in 2000. In 2017, the prison was sold to a private developer who plans to convert the historic building and grounds into condos, retail, and office space. What does it mean to remember the dead, and to fight for the living, at a time when neoliberal common sense demands the efficient conversion of a place of suffering and death into a "heritage building" on "prime real estate"? How might a collective practice of radical imagination help to resist the commodification of memory into a tourist attraction or an aesthetic improvement of private property? And what is the relation between memory, healing, and accountability in a place where state violence, gender domination, and settler colonialism intersect?
Women Imprisoned – History and (Her)story
Caietele Echinox, 2008
Abstract: The present paper investigates some aspects that particularize women detention accounts of Romanian political prisons. Besides the four testimonies listed in the bibliography, of Lena Constante, Elisabeta Rizea and Lucretia Jurj, I have also included the account of Anita Nandris-Cudla on her years of deportation to Siberia, because of the thematic and narrative similarities. My concerns are both analyzing the motivations and mechanisms that made women resistance possible, and identifying – when accessible – gender-specific themes or narrative strategies. Differences of education and culture, of religious belief and moral stand, of political affiliation or sympathy, of family or group cohesion leave their indelible marks in these particular kind of literature, which finds itself at the border of historical documentation and subjective memoirs. Keywords: political detention, Romanian political prisons, gender-identity, women studies, partisans, anti-communist resistance in the mountains, detention literature, imprisoned women, erasure of gender identity, dehumanization, depersonalization, Anita Nandris-Cudla, Lena Constante, Lucretia Jurj, Elisabeta Rizea