Abstract
Political prison narratives express an extremely delicate and totally distinctive experience that has an unforgettable effect on the heart. Yenna Wu defines political prisoners as the prisoners who are incarcerated due to their active and passive involvement in political [and] prisoners of conscience associated with non-political activities (Introduction 1). Political prisoners' mechanisms of resistance and strategies of survival differ from one to another, yet they exhibit some affinities because of the remarkable commonalities of global political prison experience. The aim of this paper is to present a comparison of the aesthetics of resistance and survival employed by female political prisoners as presented in Malika Oufkir's Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail (1999) and Alicia Kozameh's Steps under Water (1996). To investigate the ways in which female political prisoners maintain their sanity and humanity, this paper is based on Elaine Scarry's analysis of torture and Judith Herman's study of trauma.
Highlights
Political prison narratives express an extremely delicate and totally distinctive experience that has an unforgettable effect on the heart, yet there is a contest whether political prison literature is a genre or subgenre
And thematically, Kozameh depicts physical pain, denounces physical and psychological torture and presents how female prisoners can reconstruct themselves after trauma; she does not tell her personal story, yet she tells the story of all women "who defied the [intimate] enemy" and concentrated on resistance so as to survive the "imminent death" (Kozameh 43)
'body search' and physical violence" exerted on female prisoners accentuate that female political prisoners have experienced "a gendered trauma and violence" as a severe punishment for "transcend[ing] the socially established borders of politics, dissidence and activism" (45)
Summary
THE HUMANITIES ranscultural Journal for Humanities and Social Sciences (TJHSS) is a journal. Tcommitted to disseminate a new range of interdisciplinary and transcultural topics in Huminites and social sciences. It is an open access, peer reviewed and refereed journal, published by Badr University in Cairo, BUC, to provide original and updated knowledge platform of international scholars interested in multi-inter disciplinary researches in all languages and from the widest range of world cultures. It’s an online academic journal that offers print on demand services. TJHSS Aims and Objectives: To promote interdisciplinary studies in the fields of Languages, Humanities and Social Sciences and provide a reliable academically trusted and approved venue of publishing Language and culture research
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