Writing Prison and Political Struggle

Abstract

“To be detained or imprisoned,” writes Paul Gready, “is to be buried alive” (2003b, p. 99). Gready’s assertion accurately highlights the anomalous condition of prison, where to be imprisoned is to be neither alive nor dead, but to be in a state inbetween—to be buried alive or alternatively a dead person walking. Prison, broadly speaking, is a place of invisibility, what, in a different context, Jonny Steinberg calls a “world of shadows” (2004, p. 29).¹ Detached from routinized social space, it is decidedly liminal, but in South Africa during apartheid it was acutely thus. It was, as a consequence, Ruth First notes, “the hardest place to fight” against the apartheid regime, but it was also conducive to both violence and communitas. Ruth First’s account of her detention under the 90-day detention law,² aptly titled 117 Days: An Account of Confinement and Interrogation under the South African 90-Day Detention Law, originally published in 1965, is an important intervention into the densely populated field of apartheid prison memoirs and fiction because her narrative adeptly illustrates both the function of prison in apartheid South Africa and possibilities for resistance.³ If the field of apartheid prison writing (both fiction and memoir) is densely populated, there is too a range of excellent critical work on the topic. A great deal of the critical literature focuses on First and also Breyten Breytenbach, Jeremy Cronin, and Caesarina Makhoere (see also Gready, 2003b; Schalkwyk, 1994; 2000). Although there is a plethora of research on South African prison writing, including women’s prison writing, scant attention has been paid to how the apartheid prison was experienced as specifically gendered and sexualized.

Prison is the hardest place to fight a battle.

—Ruth First, 117 Days