Prisons inside Prisons: Post-conflict Life Narrative in A Tragedy of Lives (Chiedza Musengezi & Irene Staunton, eds.) and The Book of Memory (Petina Gappah)

Abstract

This article addresses the ways in which the prison experience of women in contemporary Zimbabwe is represented in both fictional and non-fictional texts. I will be arguing that the attempted reconfiguration of the prison space in Gappah’s novel is rendered possible through the prior exposition in the non-fictional life narratives of the external societal, economic, institutional and gendered prisons to which Zimbabwean women find themselves condemned. I will argue that the life narrative form adopted, whether fictional or non-fictional, offers a textual space for resistance in which women prisoners become visible and audible subjects of self-representation.