ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the (re)presentation of repression in Jared Angira’s two major works Tides of Time: Selected Poems (1996) and Lament of the Silence & Other Poems (2004). It argues that Angira’s poetry mirrors Kenya’s history of repression from the 1960s to the present. The chapter focuses on the people’s socio-economic and political endeavours made barren by the ruling elite, which has culminated in their collective silence to repression. The economic exploitation of the people (read the silenced voices) by the ruling elite forms the basis of this chapter, perhaps resonating well with the fact that Angira himself, as an economist, captures the people’s economic woes with point-blank accuracy. The chapter establishes how the silenced voices of the ‘workers’ of the nation, memories of the sons and daughters of the nation who are ordinarily voiceless, help unveil atrocities meted out to the silent masses. Unfortunately, the voice of the masses is drowned by state apparatuses which are armed with both the means of violence and lucre, the two most powerful elements oppressors use to silence their subjects.
