In the classic Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel, ‘Crime and Punishment,’ there is the immortal line, “the darker the night – the brighter the stars; the deeper the grief – the closer is God.” Nowhere is this hope, when one is at the end of one’s rope, necessary as when in prison.
Not long ago, we had gone to prison to serve our sentences to the ‘clients’ (as they respectfully refer to the inmates) of Lang'ata Women’s Prison, as writers of the Amka Creative Writing Space.
Dr Tom Odhiambo, literature lecturer at the University of Nairobi quoted some forgotten author about prison walls being “where you realise that freedom is the most precious thing in life,” and the cemetery where you realise that “the ground that is your floor today, will someday be your roof forever …”
Fortunately, these gloomy reflections by the don were, ironically, dispelled by the sunny disposition of the (often younger) clients in Lang'ata Women’s Prison.
Oh, and what words these chosen 15 studying clients of Langata Women had for us in their social hall; so much so that it was impossible, through their words, not to build a bond.
Ruth Kamande, a life remandee (after the stabbing to death of her boyfriend 10 Septembers ago in Buruburu) cuts both a contrite character and rehabilitated, responsible figure, and some kind of creative mentor with her patriotic poems – devoid of personal content, perhaps as a way of deviance avoidance like Fyodor’s Raskalnikov in the aforementioned “Crime and Punishment.”
An inmate we’ll just call Emmy C took us into her interior world behind those bolted gates with a moving poem called “The Weight of Walls,” every line in the poem taking one into the excruciatingly slow tick of the clock when in prison.
Every stanza carries the weight of time, of endless days, followed by even longer nights. “I have written 20 long poems since I became a client here in 2016,” Emmy C told me later. “But I want to get to a hundred, and publish a prison poetry book.”
I did the maths in my head, and said: “But Emmy, 2056?”
“I have all the time,” she punned, before we agreed to a daily poem; and a manuscript of 100 poems for my next visit on Christmas Day.
A Nigerian creative firebrand called Ada, in her sixth year of a 15-year sentence (for drug trafficking) had a cathartic poem called the ‘Sound of Wings’ that poignantly recalled her days as an air-stewardess; but also the way elemental things like the sound of wind makes you think of the ‘outside world,’ a breeze through jacaranda trees, friends she may never see again in this lifetime, what her home looked like, the cancerous growth in her mom’s chest that required millions, that led her down this path of perdition.
“In prison we live with a lot of regrets,” says middle-aged Waithera, who has a story called “The Price of Vice,” her own moral crime being avarice that led her into defrauding the company she worked for, yet “I had a car and a good salary, but comparing myself (to) with bad friends misled me into wanting more.”
Waithera, in her stories, warns against the vice of greed, like grabbing property.
But that is for wananchi, as we have seen in recent days with the DP’s cases.
‘Wenyenchi’ (shareholders of Kenya) are more like Aristov Svidrigailov in Dostoyevsky’s brilliant ‘The House of the Dead,’ the corrupt aristocrat described as “the most revolting example of the degree to which a man can lower himself to base appetite; the degree he can kill all moral feeling in himself, without moral or remorse, a kind of lump of meat, a beast with teeth and an insatiable stomach …”
When you think of any local politician who can take a tender for Ksh3.5 billion worth of mosquito nets, meant to protect small children against malaria, then provide useless ones (to ‘eat’ the children), then this is the picture of our politicians, unrestrained by any inner norms, unafraid of our outer set of Laws.
Yet, as we drank tea and samosas outside the social hall, mingling with the clients, we would meet one like 26-year-old Virginia*, very eloquent and well-spoken, who went from Moi Girls to Moi University, but her single mom passed away, and she had to take care of her younger sister.
Dawney Lee Abbas, an inmate, is made up before participating in the annual Miss Langata Prison beauty pageant at Langata Women Maximum Security Prison in Langata in Nairobi, Kenya on June 7, 2024.
Photo credit: Reuters
“So, I got into a defraud-and-extort sophisticated network run by foreigners in Kenya,” Virginia says, “and when it was busted, they bribed the “investigators” and I took the fall for the entire cartel and got a four-year sentence, even as a first offender.”
Virginia’s case makes one think of the Marmeladov household in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Drunkards,’ with its alcoholic father, consumptive mother and ultimately orphaned children, and Sonya, the tart from a broken, destroyed home, who has not yet abandoned her faith; her ‘criminality’ forced upon her by the demands of an unjust society, where her ‘innocence’ is that of “child, mother, angel and holy fool …”
Virginia’s younger sister, now 24, took up with one of the swindling foreigners once she was in prison; and this sibling she loved with all her heart has never bothered to visit.
“The characters I create in my stories are my companions,” she says.
‘Tisa’ Tasi, the kindly warden we met, encourages her ‘girls’ both in their school studies and their arts’ workshops.
An older client, Naliaka, narrated how, when she first came to the prison, “I would dream at night, scream, then disturb my sisters with hymns all night …”
The caring warden got her lots of pen and paper to “write down her dreams” and Naliaka* says “sasa hizo shetani zote zilipotea.”
All in all, as as Goethe’s director Cristina Nord later said, it was the ‘most amazing literary experience, ever.’
The visiting group was made up of writer, Peter Ngila, Goethe arts’ programme officer Lily Moraa, librarian Zahara Kasperidus,journalists Hans and Fritz, Barbados High Commissioner William McDonald and spouse, Cultural attach’e Harriette and poet Winston Farrel.
