indictment of the state whose measure of ensuring sanity in human morality goes against
the very grain of this objective. The trauma that such condition breeds lasts longer than the
actual terms of prisoners’ sentences. That this is a matter requiring a deep reflection is
borne out by the rhetorical question that follows the memory of a past prison life:
Why does the stench of porridge
With the maggots and weevils floating
The scotching heat trapped
Within reeking walls,
The irritation of shrilling
Cicadas and centipedes at night,
The hyenas forever hooing
The scorpion’s ugly sting
Splitting down the spine,
Track us wherever we hide? (191)The mediation of the poet on prison conditions, moreover, does more than testify on the
personal because by adopting the historic present tense he touches on a matter that affects
millions of people all the world over. His medium of articulation thus confers on him a
responsibility that, even at its most hamstrung, must be respected. If memory is a major
ground upon which the poet relies to get across to his readers, it is also important to
remark that this memory relies on testifying for the accomplishment of its mission. He
has however done this in a way that defies the compartmentalization to which Lawrence
Langer (1991: 40) subjects oral and written testimonies when he contends that oral
witnesses “are concerned less with the past than with a sense of that past in the present”,
but writers “re-create details and images of the event through written texts”. Instead what
the poem embodies is a fusion of both the vital elements of oral and written testimonies.
Indeed in recalling the past, there is no gainsaying the fact that Mapanje is also particular
about the present, if not the future with regard to the persistent crucial question, “how
does one punish?” The images that are arranged in the course of this written testimony,
rather than seeing them as separable from those perceived values of orality, should be
seen as dissolving into the oral to create a compelling symmetry of testimony. Or how
does one ignore, or treat as merely imaginative the following imagery of horror? “The
groans of prisoners dying next cell/ The pangs of prisoners gone mad,/ The weeping
blisters on our elbows,/ Knees, balls, bums, buttocks, wherever/ And the blizzards
blustering/ The rusty tin roofs/ Where helpless chickens/ Drip in the storm?” (191) The