“A FREE MAN, ONLY, RESTAINS IN JAIL”: PRISON DIARY, POEMS FROM HO CHI MINH

Abstract

In general, the study of testimonial literature privilege the analysis of literary texts of survivors of historical catastrophic events in the 20^th century, especially the ones regarding the Second World War – as the Shoah – and also the Latin-America dictatorships. Starting from this perspective, the aim of this paper is to study the book of poems The Prison Diary written by the Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh. This book aesthetically portraits a personal perspective of Ho Chi Minh, who was kept as a prisoner for fourteen months, in 1942, by the Kuomintang – Chinese Nationalist Party. The poems are cutout of scenes experienced by the own revolutionary, but they are also of the violent daily experiences of the ones who were prisoners with him. The importance of this brief study is to present the 20^th century catastrophes as a historical continuum which affected not only Europe, but also to show that they begun long before the World Wars with the colonization process in Africa and Asia. Thus, the testimony of Ho Chi Minh in The Prison Diary provides a historical and geographical enlargement for those who were deprived of telling their own history.

Keywords: Testimonial literature; Ho Chi Minh; Poems; Vietnamese Revolution.