Bibliograph

Wrestling with the devil, a prison memoir, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Type

Label

Wrestling with the devil, a prison memoir, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references

resource.biographical

autobiography

Index

no index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Wrestling with the devil

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

990850151

Responsibility statement

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Sub title

a prison memoir

Summary

"[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."--, Dust jacket

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

Classification