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‘For My Torturer’: An African Woman’S Transformative Art Of Truth, Justice And Peace-Making During Colonialism, Priya Narismulu

Journal of International Women's Studies

Against a range of injustices African women have made powerful challenges to structural, gender and repressive violence through their interventions in questions of justice, dialogue, creativity and transformation. This article addresses an activist’s interventions against colonial oppression by examining gender as the central variable in the relationship between justice and activism in African women’s creative literature. The poem “For my Torturer, Lieutenant D…” was written in prison by the Algerian activist Leila Djabali who navigated the silences and challenges of gender, age and national identity (postcolonial). It challenges the violence of colonial and patriarchal silencing to expose torture and rape …