Chris Anyanwu’s The Days of Terror

A Female Political Prisoner as a Witness

  • Sunday Osinloye
Keywords: human captivity, incarceration, witness, existential, human rights

Abstract

This paper examines Chris Anyanwu’s The Days of Terror as an aspect of the literature of witness (temoignage) of the experience of human captivity. Non-fiction memoirs of the experience of incarceration especially by female writers still appear a largely underresearched component of African Literature. Thus, by situating The Days of Terror within the category of Witness Literature, African Prison writing and particularly the literary tradition of women’s prison writing, the research brings to the fore existential motifs of memory, pain and trauma, survival and truth-telling. The research is interdisciplinary as the dominant motifs span across disciplines such as history, psychology, philosophy, penology and human rights. Hence, the approach is literary – critical through content based and flexible. This critique of the African literature of incarceration is important as it inevitably discovers the incursion of literature into critical issues related to human rights and governance in Nigeria. As a female political witness, Chris Anyanwu reveals in The Days of Terror a woman’s condition as a form of double incarceration in a nation’s correctional facilities.

Published
2024-02-07
Section
Articles