Cameroonian author, Mary Ngwebong Ngu, has been speaking to the BBC about the extraordinary circumstances which led to her releasing a book of poems about her experiences in a US prison.
She fled marital unhappiness after being offered a six-week scholarship to America.
She then applied for permanent residency but moved house and the acceptance letter was sent to her previous address, she told BBC Focus on Africa’s Veronique Edwards.
She ended up overstaying her visa and was taken to court.
“I thought I had a good case but before I spoke, the prosecutor told me: ‘Shut up, you have overstayed your visit in the country and we cannot tolerate this any more.’
“Before I knew, the police were ordered to come over to me and they were putting handcuffs on me,” she said.
“That prison was a lonely place. We were kept in individual cells. We only met each other in the evenings,” she recalls.
But there was also a positive side to the 49 days she spent behind bars.
“By being locked up, I had something I never had from my childhood – time.”
And she used that time to write poems about her experiences, which she read to her fellow inmates.
“They were all hugging me because someone can still find value in them,” she said.
“Until then, I had been writing poems for the pleasure of it and I realised they meant so much to me and they meant so much to the other inmates – that was the moment for me.”
She was then deported back to Cameroon.
“I was even more lost than before because I had given up my job and I had to start from scratch.”
But once again, there was a silver lining and she released Escape from Prison – an anthology of the poems she wrote in detention.
Source: BBC
