Rising from the Depths of Despair - A Review of Enoh Meyomesse’s Prison Poetry

Reviewed by Dibussi Tande

Enoh Meyomesse. (November 2012). Poème Carcérale… Poésie du pénitencier de Kondengui. Yaounde : Les editions du Kamerun. 56 pages. [e-book version]

"Prison is a place, but it is also an idea, an idea that has engaged writers and thinkers ... because it offers a way of expressing the helplessness we all feel at some point in our lives... The idea of prison gives us a setting in which to imagine our relationship to the world when we are feeling frustrated, limited, hedged in, stymied. We can then go on to identify the forces that have landed us in this situation... and those that can release us." The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems 

Nearly one year after he was imprisoned in the Kondengui prison in Yaounde on charges of “aggravated theft”, Cameroonian writer and political activist Enoh Meyomesse has just published a poetry collection detailing his arrest and life behind bars. In this moving collection, Meyomesse bares it all, vividly describing his moments of hope and despair, his anger and anguish at the fate that has befallen him.

In “Arrestation” (The Arrest, p.23) Meyomesse’s takes the reader back to his fateful return trip from Indonesia and his traumatic arrest at Nsimalen airport in Yaounde:

I was coming back to you
my heart filled with joy
Oh! Yaounde
[..]
I was coming back to you
my heart bursting with joy
Oh! Nsimalen

Just like other times
when from my airplane window
I could see the muddy paths
of the suburbs of Ongola
[..]
But this time
I was coming back to you
To have my heart broken straight away

they had my picture
they had my name
they had my life
they had my soul

THEY CARRIED MY DEATH

Click here ro read the complete review on Scribbles from the Den.