Bloodaxe Books | Jack Mapanje: prison poems @BloodaxeBooks | Uploaded January 2019 | Updated October 2024, 2 hours ago.
Because he was a radical poet whose poems were thought to be subversive, Malawi’s Jack Mapanje was thrown into prison on the orders of dictator Hastings Banda, who ruled the country with an iron hand for three decades. The themes of his poetry range from the search for a sense of dignity and integrity under a repressive regime, incarceration, release from prison, exile and return to Africa, and reconciliation with torturers, to the writer in Africa and the continuing African liberation struggle in a hostile world. While often deadly serious, Mapanje’s poems are lifted by the generosity of spirit and irrepressible humour which helped sustain him through his prison ordeal.
He was head of the Department of English at the University of Malawi where the Malawi authorities arrested him in 1987 after his first book of poems, Of Chameleons and Gods, had been banned, and he was released in 1991 after spending three years, seven months and sixteen days in prison, following an international outcry against his incarceration. He has since published five poetry books, The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison (1993) from Heinemann, and Skipping Without Ropes (1998), The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New & Selected Poems (2004), Beasts of Nalunga (2007) and Greetings from Grandpa (2016) from Bloodaxe, as well as his prison memoir And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night (Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2011). For more details see: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/jack-mapanje
After his release he was able to travel to Britain, where he has since lived in exile with his family in York. In our film he reads three poems relating to his arrest and incarceration in Mikuyu Prison while recounting his prison experiences, telling how he and his fellow political prisoners were completely cut off from the outside world, denied visitors for long periods, with their loved ones knowing nothing of their fate. He describes the appalling conditions they had to survive while maintaining their sanity, humanity, self-belief and resolve not to be broken, and how much of that was down to solidarity, singing and grim humour. The poems are: ‘Scrubbing the Furious Walls of Mikuyu Prison’, ‘Skipping Without Ropes’ and ‘Your Tears Still Burning at My Handcuffs, 1991’. Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed him at his home in York in November 2014. This film is from the DVD-anthology In Person: World Poets, filmed and edited by Pamela Robertson-Pearce and Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2017).
Because he was a radical poet whose poems were thought to be subversive, Malawi’s Jack Mapanje was thrown into prison on the orders of dictator Hastings Banda, who ruled the country with an iron hand for three decades. The themes of his poetry range from the search for a sense of dignity and integrity under a repressive regime, incarceration, release from prison, exile and return to Africa, and reconciliation with torturers, to the writer in Africa and the continuing African liberation struggle in a hostile world. While often deadly serious, Mapanje’s poems are lifted by the generosity of spirit and irrepressible humour which helped sustain him through his prison ordeal.
He was head of the Department of English at the University of Malawi where the Malawi authorities arrested him in 1987 after his first book of poems, Of Chameleons and Gods, had been banned, and he was released in 1991 after spending three years, seven months and sixteen days in prison, following an international outcry against his incarceration. He has since published five poetry books, The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison (1993) from Heinemann, and Skipping Without Ropes (1998), The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New & Selected Poems (2004), Beasts of Nalunga (2007) and Greetings from Grandpa (2016) from Bloodaxe, as well as his prison memoir And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night (Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2011). For more details see: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/jack-mapanje
After his release he was able to travel to Britain, where he has since lived in exile with his family in York. In our film he reads three poems relating to his arrest and incarceration in Mikuyu Prison while recounting his prison experiences, telling how he and his fellow political prisoners were completely cut off from the outside world, denied visitors for long periods, with their loved ones knowing nothing of their fate. He describes the appalling conditions they had to survive while maintaining their sanity, humanity, self-belief and resolve not to be broken, and how much of that was down to solidarity, singing and grim humour. The poems are: ‘Scrubbing the Furious Walls of Mikuyu Prison’, ‘Skipping Without Ropes’ and ‘Your Tears Still Burning at My Handcuffs, 1991’. Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed him at his home in York in November 2014. This film is from the DVD-anthology In Person: World Poets, filmed and edited by Pamela Robertson-Pearce and Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2017).
