Writing in and about Prison, Childhood Albinism and Human Temporality in The Book of Memory

Abstract

SummaryIn its depiction of childhood albinism in a Zimbabwean township in the early 1990s and the imprisonment of females during the height of Zimbabwe’s political paralysis and economic collapse of the early 21st century, Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory (2015) makes one imagine ways in which human time is constructed and perceived. As a child, Memory, the protagonist, suffers social exclusion because she has albinism, and as a young adult she is falsely accused of murder and is sentenced to death. These circumstances influence Memory’s perception of human temporality as she resorts to the internal resources of memory of the past and future triggered by imprisonment to reflect on the abuse and indignities that she has suffered. The non-linearity of Gappah’s novel is an attempt to escape or at least disrupt the main characters’ feelings of being bound within the contingencies of linear human time. The remembering of the past captured in the novel’s title and the novel’s presentation of the present are all future-oriented, although the future of the protagonist is largely presented as bleak.