Narrating Imprisonment in Petina Gappah's the Book of Memory And Ngugi Wa Thiongo's Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary

Abstract

Prison narratives have emerged as a distinct genre within global literature, offering profound insights into the lived realities of confinement. Although imprisonment has existed for centuries, the narrated experiences of detained writer’s have not been subjected to sufficient literary scholarly inquiry. This study investigates the challenges associated with incarceration of writer inmates and strategies adopted by them to cope with their circumstances. The objectives of this research are to examine the artistic representation of prison life in the selected texts, to discuss the characters’ psychological frame as reflected by prison life in the selected texts, and to explore themes projecting the dehumanizing nature of prison life in the selected texts. The study adopts Karl Marx’s Marxist Literary Criticism, advanced by Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), as a lens through which to interrogate the socio-economic and ideological dimensions of incarceration in the selected texts. It also employs Psychoanalytic Literary Theory, proposed by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), to explore the psychological depths of the characters and decode their mental and emotional responses to imprisonment. Utilizing a qualitative descriptive research design, the study emphasizes description, interpretation, and the in-depth understanding of meanings embedded within the chosen literary works. The findings strife to make a modest contribution to the existing scholarship on prison narratives. The study illuminates the authors’ depiction of the core elements of prison life, examines the psychological toll of incarceration on the characters, and ultimately reveals cognitive freedom as a powerful means of transcending the constraints of mental imprisonment.