Narrating prison experience : human rights, self, society, and political incarceration in Africa

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Walibora, Ken, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political prisoners--Kenya.

Political prisoners.

Political prisoners' writings, Kenyan--Kenya.

Political prisoners' writings, Kenyan.

Prisoners as authors.

Place of Publication:

[Place of publication not identified] Common Ground 2013

Language Note:

English

Contents:

Africa and political incarceration

Human rights and narratives of incarceration in the colonial Kenya

Political incarceration and the postcolonial period in Kenya

Chapter 1: A tale of two prison tales

Who are the Babukusu?

The Sela and Mwambu tale and incarceration

Power dynamics and belly politics

Gender prison and gender politics

Songs as subversion

The Waswahili people

The Liyongo epic as a prison narrative

The question of gender

The I-pronoun, truth, and trauma

Chapter 2: Articulating human rights violations in the pioneer prison memoir

A martyr in the making

The narrative imperative

Torture as human rights violation

The 'I' and the 'we'

Truth claims

Issues of style

Chapter 3: The tenor and genre of Ngugi's prison narrative

Narrator as harbinger of truth

Torture and trauma

Political manifesto and art manifesto

Foreshortened history of oppression

List of grievances

Calling audience to action

Chapter 4: Doing things with words in prison poetry

The multiple is and speaking in tongues

Why write?

Swahili prosody and poetry as autobiography

Resistance and truth

Masking the message

A range of miscellaneous voices

The journey motif

Voice of the unborn

Chapter 5: The quest for the right to be human in prison poetry

Where and why?

Dissipation and disappearance of hope

The female and parental selves

Disavowal of ideology

Trauma and tragedy

Comparing Mazrui's and Abdalla's prison poetry.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

ISBN:

1-61229-217-8