Wrestling with the devil: a prison memoir

✍ Scribed by Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo

• Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC;The New Press
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Detention order -- Free thoughts on toilet paper -- Parasites in paradise -- Colonial Lazarus rises from the dead -- The culture of silence and fear -- Wrestling with colonial daemons -- Unchain my hands! -- Meditations! -- Dreams of freedom -- Sherlock Holmes and the strange case of the missing novel -- Devil on the cross.;"[This book] ... begins literally half an hour before [the author's release from prison] on December 12, 1978. In one extended flashback he recalls the night, a year earlier, when armed police pulled him from his home and jailed him in Kenya's ... [maximum security prisons]. There, he lives in a prison block with eighteen other political prisoners, quarantined from the general prison population. In a conscious effort to fight back the humiliation and the intended degradation of the spirit, [the author] ... decides to write a novel on toilet paper, the only paper to which he has access, a book that will become his classic, Devil on the cross. Written in the early 1980s and never before published in America, [this book is an account of the author's] drama and the challenges of writing the novel under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He captures not only the excruciating pain that comes from being cut off from his wife and children, but also the spirit of defiance that defines hope. Ultimately, [this book] is a testimony to the power of imagination to help humans break free of confinement, which is truly the story of all art."--

✦ Table of Contents

Detention order --
Free thoughts on toilet paper --
Parasites in paradise --
Colonial Lazarus rises from the dead --
The culture of silence and fear --
Wrestling with colonial daemons --
Unchain my hands! --
Meditations! --
Dreams of freedom --
Sherlock Holmes and the strange case of the missing novel --
Devil on the cross.

✦ Subjects

Authors, Kenyan;Authors, Kenyan--20th century;BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY--Political;HISTORY--Africa--East;Political prisoners;Political prisoners--Kenya;Political prisoners' writings, Kenyan;POLITICAL SCIENCE--Colonialism & Post-Colonialism;Autobiographies;Nonfiction;Biographies;Biography;Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, -- 1938-;Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, -- 1938- -- Caitaani mũtharaba-inĩ;Authors, Kenyan -- 20th century -- Biography;Political prisoners -- Kenya -- Biography;Kenya -- Politics and government --