Depictions of Mourning and Personhood in Stella Nyanzi’s Prison Poetry

Abstract

This paper examines how Stella Nyanzi eulogizes the baby she miscarried while in incarceration at Luzira Women’s Prison. Closely reading two poems on this subject from her prison-authored poetry collection entitled No Roses from My Mouth (2020), I argue that Nyanzi deploys poetry to write the injustices meted out on her by the prison officers, whom she blames for the loss of her baby. Unable to bury her child because the officers insist that a miscarriage has not happened, she resorts to poetry as a kind of tomb in which to lay what remains of the baby (blood congealed in toilet tissue) and to claim its personhood. I draw from several theorists to read Nyanzi’s work, for instance Judith Butler (her notion of grievable lives), Katherine Verdery (her view that dead bodies possess significant symbolic capital) and Sigmund Freud (his discussion of the distinction between mourning and melancholia).