Wrestling with the devil : a prison memoir /

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Storied novelist and theorist Ngugi (Birth of a Dream Weaver, 2016) adds to his series of memoirs by revisiting a work first published in 1981 in the UK as Detained: A Prison Writer's Diary. He has revised and updated this meditation upon the year he spent as a political prisoner in Kenya in 1978, adding clarifications and notes and deleting sections that detailed now-arcane conflicts surrounding his detention. The changes foreground the book's moral and philosophical positions and clarify the issues for American readers. Professor and community activist Ngugi was jailed for writing a play that was banned by the Kenyan state. While imprisoned, he focused his energy on writing a novel, a process which in its ingenuity is central to this memoir. However, the book's power comes from its treatment of broader subjects: the circumscribed nature of life in prison and the temptation posed by the promise of reward for acquiescence to state demands; why Kenya resorted to political imprisonment; and the underlying cultural toxicity inherited from colonial rule. With elegant prose and compelling arguments, this is highly recommended.--Jorgensen, Sara Copyright 2018 Booklist

Kenyan activist-intellectual wa Thiong'o (Petals of Blood) recreates the hellish months of his confinement in Kenya's Kamiti Maximum Security Prison before his release on December 12, 1978. This engrossing memoir is gleaned from a previous book, Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary, originally published in 1982, but only now published in the U.S. in expanded form. Following the humiliation of being arrested at his home on Dec. 30, 1977, wa Thiong'o writes of his detention in isolation with 18 other political prisoners who suffered from beatings, starvation, sleeping on cold cement floors, and who were denied all outside contact. He refused to surrender his humanity and wrote a novel, Devil on the Cross, on hoarded toilet paper, explaining, "The writing of the novel has been one way of keeping my mind and heart together." Presenting an African view of old colonial life in Kenya, he comments on the significance of anticolonial activist Jomo Kenyatta, preventive detention, and the crushing terror of torture used to instill fear and silence. At once exhilarating and defiant, wa Thiong'o's memoir is a thought provoking document of a grim time in Kenyan history. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

This masterly work by Ngugi (literature, Univ. of California, Irvine; Weep Not, Child) recounts his year in a Kenyan prison. Ngugi was heavily involved in the writing and production of a play, working with local residents, which may have been one of the highest points of his active literary career, only to find what came next. While living in Uhuru Kenyatta's postcolonial Kenya, the police came to Ngugi's home and then imprisoned him without a fair trial. This full account of his life as a political prisoner during the late 1970s rivals many better known-prison memoirs. Determined from the beginning of his confinement not to let his brain "turn to mush," the author begins a novel, after being told by a jailer not to write, often penning his words on accumulated pieces of toilet paper. His goal is to compose a story about Kenya and its political corruption, in his native language of Kikuyu. VERDICT Through this incredibly vivid account, one can learn much about Kenyan colonial and postcolonial history. For all readers who want to understand better issues of injustice.-Amy Lewontin, -Northeastern Univ. Lib., Boston © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A prison memoir of sorts from an activist author who maintains he has little interest in writing a prison memoir.A prolific novelist, essayist, and academic, Kenya-born Ngugi (English and Comparative Literature/Univ. of California, Irvine; Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Memoir of a Writer's Awakening, 2016, etc.) published the original version of this material in 1982, and it focused on his imprisonment under the totalitarian regime of Jomo Kenyatta. Now, long after the Kenyatta tyranny, the author refocuses the narrative so that it is less about the specifics of abuses suffered under that regime and more about sustaining the spirit of resistance while subjected to years of incarceration. Specifically, it is about the writing of one novel, Devil on the Cross (1980), while in prison, a forbidden activity undertaken without resources and with a minimum of outside inspiration. The author wrote the book on scraps of toilet paper, drawing brief interactions with guards and fellow prisoners, typically kept isolated as another form of punishment. He had never been charged with any specific crime, but he had written plays that were deemed subversive, particularly as performed by locals within the community who had no acting experience. In his cell, he pondered the decades of struggle of African natives against colonial imperialists, "parasites in paradise," whose inhuman mistreatment of the subjugated became the law of the land and the culture. "It was the culture of hedonism without morality," writes the author, "a culture of legalized brutality, a racist ruling-class culture of fear, the culture of an oppressing minority desperately trying to impose total silence on a restive oppressed minority." Within that context, he details the transformation of Kenyatta, another political prisoner, who was once hailed as the voice of the oppressed before becoming the oppressor. Newsweek dubbed the author "a nave ideologue" while he was still in prison, but "principled" would be a more appropriate characterization.Four decades after the imprisonment detailed here, the issues remain fresh. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.