The Political Prisoner as Antihero: The Prison Poetry of Wole Soyinka and 'Ahmad Fu'ad Nigm

Introduction

The latter decades of the twentieth century have witnessed an unprecedented surge in writing on the history and nature of prison and incarceration, which is not surprising, considering the interest (both theoretical and practical) of that period in issues of power, resistance, postcolonial negotiations, hegemony, and subversion, which have occupied center-stage in postmodern thought and in postcolonial and cultural studies.¹ In what is commonly referred to as the Third World, the twentieth century has also witnessed an unprecedented escalation in armed and political resistance and in violent confrontations with colonial powers and post-independence regimes, often resulting in what Ngūgīwa Thiong'o refers to as "the physical removal of patriots from the peoples' organized struggles."² Imprisonment is one of the most secure means of achieving such "physical" removal, and has thus been one of the marks of the struggle in that part of the world. The political prisoner in particular, especially when he or she is also a public intellectual and/or a writer, is often preoccupied with continuing the struggle inside the prison and with sustaining communication with the world outside. Prison here is part of an unfinished journey, and the prison experience is usually utilized as a means of reinforcing the cause for which the political prisoner is imprisoned. However, regardless of its motives, this endeavor to communicate, which primarily appears in various varieties of the written word, is marred by a number of paradoxes inherent in the context of incarceration, which in their turn play a significant role in (re)shaping the act of communication.

One of these paradoxes appears in the fact that the political activist who writes in prison is in most cases imprisoned partly because of the very act of writing, and thus the activity of writing in prison is usually heavily censored. Attempts at communication are often marred by the writer's awareness that the writing might after all never reach an audience, and that it would remain at best a "shot in the dark at posterity."³ In addition to the fact that that act of communication might be blurred by the absence of a reader, there is also the crisis of how to devise potent communication with an audience under the altered conditions of immobility and physical limitations. This points to yet another paradox at the heart of prison writing. The very individual nature of the prison experience that would, under different circumstances, produce writing of a highly subjective nature, is here qualified by the desire to transcend subjectivity and to assume the position of advocacy central to the writing of political activists.⁴ The presupposed objectivity of that stand is likewise constantly qualified by the choice of incidents, the qualification of the speaking voice, and by how far the imagined audience is let in.

A more powerful paradox underlines prison writing. In trying to understand both himself and the reality of imprisonment, the imprisoned writer is also expectedly writing against a dominant "code," and thus against what the audience is familiar with as characterizing mainstream discourse. The desire to connect with an audience outside of the prison cell is further complicated by this opposition between the dominant language shared by the audience and the specific marginal language the prisoner works through, which, Ioan Davies argues, ultimately produces the uneven character of the exchange with an audience (162). This latter view is also evident in E. San Juan's notion of the "counter-master-discourse" produced in the writing of political prisoners and in other "testimonies" of "local minority" groups. San Juan posits the idea of a "'divine comedy' of sorts" as characterizing the writings of such marginal groups.⁵ In Bakhtinian terms, the language of this "divine comedy" serves as both an unofficial and a conscious means of communication,⁶ enacting the position of the imprisoned writer in relation to dominant cultural and political assumptions.

I argue in this paper that those paradoxes influencing the act of communication in prison, in their turn, contribute to the creation of the central consciousness...