Focusing on Kenyan freedom fighter Wambui Otieno's narrative Mau Mau's Daughter 1998), this article discusses the interplay between incarceration and the female condition. It bears clarifying that Otieno's narrative of confinement was written and published forty years after the fact of her detention. The time of its writing may be relatively recent, the events it evokes are not. The prison life narrative offers useful insights into the treatment of the figurative and literal incarceration in contemporary African literature by and about women, particularly with regard to life writing genres. Given the passage of time between the narration and the occurrence of the narrated events, there are several possibilities to be deduced here: (1) She could have been too far removed from the actual events to render an accurate account of what really transpired; (2) or the passage of time would have enabled her to see things more lucidly; (3) and more importantly, her perceptions could have been tremendously influenced by the subsequent events and experiences in the intervening decades, shaping and moulding her memory and her interpretation of her detention story. It may well be that the passage of time enabled and enhanced her capacity to tell a story whose telling is like opening an old wound.
Introduction: Gender in Prison WritingWriting on women's prison writing in the late twentieth century, Judith Scheffler observed: "[t]he tradition of men's prison writing is rich and established, while works by women prisoners remain scattered and largely unidentified as a body of literature with a tradition of its own" (1984, 57). Scheffler demonstrates genuine concern for the dereliction that women prison writing has endured globally. Her call for the need to explore women prison writing echoes Ama Ata Aidoo's plaintive cry that works of women writers are, "voices unheard, rarely discussed and seldom accorded space in anthologies and predictably male-oriented studies in the field" (515). Whereas Scheffler decries the failure to identify a tradition of women prison writing globally, Aidoo is preoccupied with the "absence of critical attention" regarding the works of Africa women writers in general (516).What really ails African women prison writing is not necessarily lack of a tradition. It is not even that the women prison writers are too few and too far between. Scheffl er's insistence on a tradition is germane since it lends itself towards encouraging the quest for what is sui generis about women prison writing, somehow setting it apart from any other kind of writing. In the introduction to her edited volume, Wall Tappings: An International Anthology of Women's Prison Writings 200 to Present (2002), Scheffl er asserts that women prison writers are motivated by personal, social and political imperatives to write because of (1) their belief in the merit of their experiences as worth expressing, (2) the desire to vindicate themselves, (3) commitment to a political, social, or religious cause and, (4) for some of them, the sudden re...
