Self-Determination and Resistance in Adversarial Contexts

A Reading of Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s "Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary"

Abstract

I will.

I will skip without your rope, since you say I should not.

I cannot borrow your son’s skipping rope to exercise my limbs.

Watch. Watch me skip without your rope.

Watch me skip with my hope.

I will.

A seven. I do—will skip—a ten;

Eleven. I’ll skip without, skip within,

And skip I do, without your rope,

But with my hope. I’ll fight your rope,

Your rules, your hope,

As your sparrow does under your supervision.

Guards, take us for the shower!

Jack Mapanje (Skipping Without Rope)

The prison must be the microcosm of a perfect society in which individuals are isolated in their moral existence, but in which they come together in a strict hierarchical framework, with no lateral relation, communication being possible only in a vertical direction.

Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish)

This paper is a reading of Ngũgĩ waThiong’o’s Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (1981), demonstrating how the genre of the prison diary can be employed as a direct documentation of self-experiences versus national politics. Through the prison diary, I argue, the writer resists attempts by the state apparatuses to suppress freedom of expression. Representing a large corpus of prison autobiographical writings that deal with narratives of political activism in Kenya, Detained vividly captures Ngũgĩ’s one-year-long experience of incarceration, between December 1977 and December 1978. Besides giving the motive and purpose of autobiographic writing in post-independence Kenya, Ngũgĩ clearly shows how the genre of the prison diary has thrived within the adversarial context of the prison. Consequently, our analysis in this paper illuminates how the prison setting ends up fostering instead of stifling creativity (Olaniyan &Quayson, 2007, p.  139). Indeed, the adversarial context of detention is seen as an example of external constraints meant to suppress the writer’s self-realisation. It is through writing that Ngũgĩ is able to reveal his self-worth; he uses his innermost dispensation and creativity to overcome these external barriers. Writing, therefore, enables him to transcend all forms of deprivation within this environment, demonstrating that the state can incarcerate the writer’s body but not his mind.

Using Michel Foucault’s concept of the Panopticon, I explore how the writer-turned-nameless-political-prisoner, subverts the authority imposed by this limiting and dehumanizing space of the prison, thereby contributing to the production of a new literary form—the prison memoir. The concept of the Panopticon can help in the interrogation of the power of institutions, such as the prison, over the lives of people in society. The Panopticon was constructed in such a way that it had a central tower where the unseen warders kept guard over prisoners. Prisoners were locked up in several storeys of cells where they could not see either the warders or the other fellow inmates. These were arranged in a circle around the surveillance tower. In that way this structure ensures total control is exercised over the inmates.