Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir

by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Overview

A New York Times Editors’ Choice

"A welcome addition to the vast literature produced by jailed writers across the centuries . . . [a] thrilling testament to the human spirit."
—Ariel Dorfman, The New York Times Book Review

"Wrestling with the Devil is a powerful testament to the courage of Ngũgĩ and his fellow prisoners and validation of the hope that an independent Kenya would eventually emerge."
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"The Ngũgĩ of Wrestling with the Devil called not just for adding a bit of color to the canon’s sagging shelf, but for abolition and upheaval."
—Bookforum

An unforgettable chronicle of the year the brilliant novelist and memoirist, long favored for the Nobel Prize, was thrown in a Kenyan jail without charge

Wrestling with the Devil, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's powerful prison memoir, begins literally half an hour before his release 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 Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison, one of the largest in Africa. 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, Ngũgĩ—the world-renowned author of Weep Not, Child; Petals of Blood; and Wizard of the Crow—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, Wrestling with the Devil is Ngũgĩ's account of the 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, Wrestling with the Devil is a testimony to the power of imagination to help humans break free of confinement, which is truly the story of all art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620973332
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	03/06/2018
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

One of the leading African writers and scholars at work today, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. He is the author of A Grain of Wheat; Weep Not, Child; Petals of Blood; and Birth of a Dream Weaver. He is currently distinguished professor in the School of Humanities and the director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine. He has been nominated for the Man Booker International Prize.

Table of Contents

Note to this Edition xv

Detention Order 1

1 Free Thoughts on Toilet Paper 3

2 Parasites in Paradise 43

3 Colonial Lazarus Rises from the Dead 67

4 The Culture of Silence and Fear 77

5 Wrestling with Colonial Demons 105

6 Unchain My Hands! 133

7 Meditations! 157

8 Dreams of Freedom 207

9 Sherlock Holmes and the Strange Case of the Missing Novel 231

10 Devil on the Cross 237

Notes 243

Editorial Reviews

A welcome addition to the vast literature produced by jailed writers across the centuries (Boethius, Cervantes, Gramsci, Soyinka, Solzhenitsyn, Peltier)…Ngugi does not wish to enthrone his experience as unique. Instead, he sees his detention as a mere link in a chain of previous internments dating back to the British occupation of Kenya and continuing under the corrupt post-independence regime…This thrilling testament to the human spirit had, for me, a fierce resonance. I read Ngugi's memoir in Chile, not far from where friends and comrades were imprisoned and tortured during the Pinochet dictatorship. I could not help feeling that his luminous words were meant for those victims and many others being persecuted across the world, a way of urging humanity to never surrender to the demons of fear and silence.

The New York Times Book Review - Ariel Dorfman

01/29/2018
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.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Wrestling with the Devil:
A New York Times Editors’ Choice

“This thrilling testament to the human spirit had, for me, a fierce resonance. . . . I could not help feeling that his luminous words were meant for those victims and many others being persecuted across the world, a way of urging humanity to never surrender to the demons of fear and silence.”
—Ariel Dorfman, The New York Times Book Review

"Wrestling with the Devil is a powerful testament to the courage of Ngũgĩ and his fellow prisoners and validation of the hope that an independent Kenya would eventually emerge."
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

★ "[A] masterly work. . . . 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."
—Library Journal (starred review)

"With elegant prose and compelling arguments, this is highly recommended."
—Booklist

"Engrossing … At once exhilarating and defiant, [Ngũgĩ] wa Thiong’o’s memoir is a thought provoking document of a grim time in Kenyan history."
—Publishers Weekly

"The Ngũgĩ of Wrestling with the Devil called not just for adding a bit of color to the canon’s sagging shelf, but for abolition and upheaval."
—Bookforum

"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. . . . Four decades after the imprisonment detailed here, the issues remain fresh."
—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Birth of a Dream Weaver:
One of Oprah.com's "17 Must-Read Books for the New Year" and O Magazine's "10 Titles to Pick up Now."

"Exquisite in its honesty and truth and resilience, and a necessary chronicle from one of the greatest writers of our time. "
—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Guardian, Best Books of 2016.

"It's hard to think of another living writer today—Orhan Pamuk, perhaps—who speaks so inspiringly and convincingly about the value of literature. No serious reader will want to miss this riveting story."
—The Washington Post

"An eloquent, perceptive memoir. . . Evocative, poignant, and thoughtful, Thiong'o's courageous narrative will linger in readers' minds."
—Publishers Weekly (starred)

"A writer's coming-of-age tale featuring an artistic mix of pride and humility."
—Kirkus Reviews

"An autobiographical masterpiece. . . As essential as Achebe's There Was a Country, this is a riveting read in African history and literature."
—Library Journal (starred)

"This is a powerful recollection of a turbulent time that produced leaders from Tom Mboya and Jomo Kenyatta to the tyrannical Idi Amin in response to the brutality of a dying colonialism."
—Booklist

Praise for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's work:
"Evocative, poignant, and thoughtful, Thiong'o's courageous narrative will linger in readers' minds."
—Publishers Weekly (starred)

"In his crowded career and his eventful life, Ngũgĩ has enacted, for all to see, the paradigmatic trials and quandaries of a contemporary African writer, caught in sometimes implacable political, social, racial, and linguistic currents."
—John Updike, The New Yorker

"Ngũgĩ has dedicated his life to describing, satirising and destabilising the corridors of power. . . . Still living in exile and writing primarily in Gikuyu, Ngũgĩ continues to spin captivating tales."
—The Guardian

"Ngũgĩ has flown over the entire African continent and sniffed out all of the foul stenches rising high into the air: complacency toward despotism, repression of women and ethnic minorities, widespread corruption and—undergirding all of these—a neocolonial system in which today's lending banks and multinationals have supplanted yesterday's European overlords."
—The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

2017-12-11
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 naïve 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.

Kirkus Reviews