SOURCE: "The Song of the Caged Bird: Contemporary African Prison Poetry," in Ariel, Vol. 13, No. 4, October, 1982, pp. 65-84.

In the following excerpt, Ogunyemi charts how Brutus transformed his prison experiences into a "humanistic" poetry that grapples with the problems of existence.

Writing in the nineteenth century, in his poem "Sympathy," Paul Laurence Dunbar equated the incarcerated nature of black life in America to the life of a caged bird. As a black man with only the foretaste of genuine freedom that the Reconstruction Period in American society could provide, he could fully sympathize with the plight of the bird, and records it dolefully:

Although Dunbar was writing specifically about a disillusioned Afro-American population ostensibly freed from the bonds of slavery, his words would apply specifically and at higher levels of intensity, as Ralph Ellison might say, to a majority of the black prison population, which from all reports...