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The Broken Word

The Broken Word is a narrative poem set during the Mau Mau uprising in British Kenya in the mid 1950s. It is an attempt at immersion in the particulars of a historical trauma, an exploration of the nature of violence and the limits of self-determination in a conflict zone. It draws particularly on the ground-breaking research of David Anderson and Caroline Elkins in Histories Of The Hanged and Britain’s Gulag, respectively. It is intended as a naïve contribution to post-colonial writing, simple in its story-telling, extensive in its ramifications. The poem provides an innovative conceptual framework in the way it marries classical models of trauma writing – Homer and Euripides, particularly –with the contemporary poetics of Anne Carson and Christopher Logue. It won the Costa Poetry Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. A radio play adaptation was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Friday 20 September 2013.