Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Genève, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [753]-759) and index.

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Genève, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [753]-759) and index.

Prison, a place that no one can call home, a place where all that was familiar no longer exists, a place where a friendly face is nowhere to be seen, a place that is full of hostility. That which becomes ‘home’ is nothing more than a concrete space, a hole in which one is expected to live. Those with whom the prisoners come into contact are hostile, unkind and unfair. Thus, as a means by which to retain sanity and show the world what happens on the ‘inside’, prisoners begin to write – they begin to write in hostile spaces. This study will argue that the body of writings that constitute ‘South African prison literature’ is both substantial and under-researched. For both of these reasons it warrants closer examination. Another argument that this thesis will advance is that specific authors have made major contributions to this collection of works, with Herman Charles Bosman being the foremost of these. Bosman not only pioneered the prison novel in South Africa, but also set the mould within which most of the other prison-authors have patterned their works. Herman Charles Bosman is often referred to as the ‘father’ of South African prison literature. Such a statement of course presupposes that there is a discernible body of writing that can be called ‘prison literature’. This study will attempt to show that within the larger corpus of South African literature there is indeed a body of writing that can usefully be categorized under the broad rubric ‘prison literature’. Undertaking such a categorization, however, requires generating certain criteria, and then applying these criteria to determine whether specific works adhere to them. For the purposes of this study, the most important criterion is that, for a work to be considered as belonging to the corpus of South African prison literature, it must be about the writer’s personal experience of prison. In other words, fictional (imaginative) narratives about prison life will fall beyond the purview of this study. While it must be conceded that this criterion is not unarguable and self-evident, as the study proceeds it will, I believe, be seen that there is good sense in excluding purely fictional works. (Chapter Three advances the argument for this criterion in more detail.) Other variables have been accommodated – for example, from which prison the prisoner is writing, whether the prisoner writes about his or her experience during or after imprisonment, the nature of the crime committed and when the imprisonment took place. In addition, there is no rigidity about the number of criteria a particular work must fulfil in order to be included in this study (Chapter Three also discusses these criteria at length). One of the questions this thesis will attempt to answer is why prisoners write in the first place. Society’s stereotypical view of a criminal – someone lacking in morals and education – is no doubt dominant, and the notion of a ‘criminal’ adding value to the study of literature is not often conceptualized by many. Writing becomes a powerful tool for the authors examined here, often for different reasons and purposes, but a tool nonetheless. Paul Gready says that, “the word is a weapon that both inflicts pain and secures power. Prisoners are relentlessly rewritten within the official ‘power of writing’… Within this process the prisoner’s sense of self and world is undermined, pain is made visible and objectified in writing and converted into state power [but] prisoners write to restore a sense of self and world, to reclaim the ‘truth’ from the apartheid lie, to seek empowerment in an oppositional ‘power of writing’ against the official text of imprisonment” (1993: 489). The thesis will attempt to show that, notwithstanding their considerable diversity, individual works within the corpus of South African prison literature share many common characteristics. Despite this the study will show also that, even though the prison writings have many common threads running through them, there are many differences within individual writings and the body of literature as a whole. It could be argued that, in earlier years, the works that are the subject of this study were quite satisfactorily regarded as part of other genres (for example, autobiography). So is the whole process of reclassification necessary? In other words, is there any point in attempting to argue for a distinct category of writing (‘prison literature’)? One of the points that will be made in detail later is that frequently the prison writings of a particular writer are only a small aspect of his or her larger oeuvre, and these writings have merely been included in more general discussions of the author’s body of work as a whole. Clearly, this does not do justice to the distinct nature of such a writer’s prison writings. It is the purpose of this study to give the works that make up the corpus of South African prison literature their due. The thesis begins with a brief summation of the prison system in South Africa. This chapter puts the experiences that follow into context. Many of the laws under which these writers were held no longer exist and so, in the interest of better understanding, these are explained in the first chapter as well. This is followed by a brief survey of prison literature. Chapter Two attempts to provide a concise and up-to-date list of the primary and secondary sources that make up the category ‘prison literature.’ Chapter Three introduces the term ‘prison literature’. The chapter includes many of the common characteristics found in prison writing, and outlines the essential criteria of this body of writing. This is followed by a brief examination of the various theories of literature that can be found in prison literature. Chapter Four introduces a vital aspect of the thesis and the argument provided within it. An examination of the theories of Foucault takes place in this chapter. He offers a thread that binds all prison literature together when he states that the prison system is put in place to punish an offender. Modern power to punish is based on the supervision and organization of bodies in time and space. The thesis will then argue that it is in this very space that prisoners write. Thus the hostile space of prison and prison life provides the context in which the literature under examination can be created.The second section of the thesis contains the close examinations of the prison writings of various authors. This section begins with a fairly comprehensive chapter on Cold Stone Jug (Chapter Five), and attempts to describe the foundation that Bosman laid in the writing of this novel. The chapters thereafter include comparisons between each individual prisonauthor’s work and Bosman’s seminal novel, noting the similarities and differences. Each of these chapters (Chapters Six to Nine) also provides a justification for the selection of each of the authors discussed and attempts to show why their writing must be considered some of the greatest prison literature produced in South Africa. Chapter Six examines the prison novel as exemplified in the writings of Breyten Breytenbach and Hugh Lewin. Chapter Seven introduces the concept of prison poetry. It is shown how poets like Jeremy Cronin and Dennis Brutus have also followed the example of Bosman, despite the generic difference in their work. This chapter also attempts to show why poetry must be considered an important part of this novel-dominated category of writing. This argument continues in Chapter Eight, in which prison letters and diaries are discussed and shown to be a vital part of prison literature. The main focus of this chapter is the writings of Ahmed Kathrada. Chapter Nine introduces the writing of women prisoners. This writing shares the typical characteristics found in the works of the prisoners’ male counterparts. No one novelist or poet is examined in detail. This section rather examines women’s writing as a topic in terms of the study as a whole. Importantly, however, it shows that prison writing is not gender- or race-specific. The thesis concludes by discussing the notion that these authors wrote and lived in hostile spaces not only during their imprisonment, but also afterwards: life after imprisonment becomes a hostile space too. The conclusion argues that a clear development can be found in this writing – vii from the publication of Cold Stone Jug in 1949 up until the publication of the final documents from Robben Island in the 1990s.

Thesis (PhD (English))--University of Stellenbosch, 2010. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis undertakes a comparative examination of South African and Kenyan auto/biographical narratives of crime and imprisonment. Although some attention is paid to narratives of political imprisonment, the study focuses primarily on autobiographical accounts by criminals, confessional narratives, popular fiction about crime and prison experience, and journalistic accounts of prison life. There is very little critical work at this moment that refers to these forms of prison writing in South Africa and Kenya. Popular prison narratives and to a certain extent the autobiographical in general are characterised by an under-theorised dialecticism. As academic concepts, both the popular and the autobiographical form are characterised by an unstable duality. While the popular has been theorised as being both a field of resistance to power and of consent to its demands, the autobiographical occupies a similar precariously divided position, in this case between fact and fiction, a place where the „I‟ that narrates is simultaneously the subject and object of the narrative. In examining an eclectic body of texts that share the prison as common denominator, my study problematises the tension between self and world, popular and canonical, political and criminal, factual and fictional. In both settings, South Africa and Kenya, the prison as a material and discursive space does not only mirror society but effects shifts and changes in society, and becomes a space of dynamic adaptation and also a locus that disturbs certain hegemonic relations. The way in which the experience of prison opens up to a fundamentally unsettling ambiguity resonates with the ambivalence that characterises both autobiography as genre and the popular as a theoretical concept. My thesis argues that during the entire historical period covered by the narratives that I examine there is a certain excess that attends on the social production of criminality and the practice of imprisonment, both as material realities and as discursive concepts, which allows them to have a haunting effect both on individuals‟ notions of „the self‟ and the constitution of national identities and nationhoods. I argue that the distinction between the colonial and the postcolonial prison is hazy. Therefore a comparative study of Kenyan and South African prison literature helps us understand how modern prisons and notions of criminality in contemporary Africa are intertwined with the broad European colonial project, reflecting larger issues of state power and control over the populace. In relation to South Africa, my study begins with Ruth First‟s 117 Days (1963), and makes a selection of other prisons narratives throughout the apartheid era up to the post-apartheid period which was ushered in by Mandela‟s Long Walk to Freedom (1994). Moving beyond Mandela, I examine other forms of South African crime and prison narratives which have emerged since the publication of Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela‟s A Human Being Died that Night (2003) and Jonny Steinberg‟s The Number (2004). In Kenya, I begin with Ngugi wa Thiongo‟s Detained (1981). I then focus on popular narratives of crime and imprisonment which began with the publication of John Kiriamiti‟s My Life in Crime (1984) up to the first decade of the 21st century, marked yet again by the publication of Kiriamiti‟s My Life in Prison (2004). Besides Kiriamiti‟s two narratives, the other Kenyan texts which I examine are John Kiggia Kimani‟s Life and Times of a Bank Robber (1988) and Prison is not a Holiday Camp (1994), Benjamin Garth Bundeh‟s Birds of Kamiti (1991), and Charles Githae‟s, Comrade Inmate (1994). / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: My proefskrif onderneem ‟n vergelykende studie van Suid-Afrikaanse en Keniaanse auto/biografiese narratiewe van misdaad en gevangeneskap. Hoewel aandag tot ‟n mate geskenk word aan verhale van politieke gevangeneskap, is die primêre fokus van die studie eerder op autobiografiese narratiewe deur misdadigers, konfessionele narratiewe, populêre fiksie met betrekking tot misdaad en gevangenis-ondervindinge, sowel as joernalistieke verslae oor gevangenes se lewens agter tralies. Min kritiese werk is tot dusver in verband met hierdie vorme van gevangenis-narratiewe in Suid-Afrika en Kenia gedoen. Populêre prisoniers-narratiewe, en tot ‟n mate autobiografieë oor die algemeen, word deur ‟n onder-geteoriseerde dialektisisme gekenmerk. As akademiese konsepte word beide die populêre en die autobiografiese vorme deur ‟n onstabiele dualisme gekenmerk. Terwyl die populêre tipe geteoretiseer word as sowel ‟n vorm van weerstand teen mag as van toegee daaraan, word aan die autobiografiese tipe ‟n soortgelyke onstabiele, verdeelde rol toegeskryf – in hierdie geval, tussen feitelikheid en fiksie, ‟n plek waar die “ek” wat vertel terselfdertyd die subjek en objek van die verhaal is. Deur middel van ‟n eklektiese versameling van tekste wat die gevangenis as verwysingspunt deel, problematiseer my verhandeling die spanning tussen self en wêreld, die populêre en die gekanoniseerde, die politieke en die kriminele, die feitelike en die fiktiewe. In beide kontekste, Suid-Afrika en Kenia, weerspieël die gevangenis as diskursiewe spasie nie alleenlik die gemeenskapsomgewing nie, maar veroorsaak dit ook veranderings en verskuiwings in die gemeenskap – sodoende word die gevangenis self ‟n ruimte van dinamiese verandering en ‟n plek wat sekere hegemoniese verhoudings versteur. Die manier waarop die ondervinding van gevangeneskap lei tot ‟n fundamentele versteurende dubbelsinningheid resoneer met die dubbelsinnigheid wat beide die autobiografiese as genre en die populêre as teoretiese konsep karakteriseer. My tesis voer aan dat, gedurende die ganse historiese tydperk wat gedek word deur die narratiewe wat ek hier betrag, daar ‟n sekere oormaat is wat die sosiale produksie van misdaad en die toepassing van gevangesetting begelei, beide as stoflike werklikhede en as diskursiewe konsepte, wat hulle toelaat om ‟n kwellende effek uit te oefen beide of individuele mense se sin van „self‟ en die samestelling van nasionale identiteite en nasionaliteite. Ek voer aan dat die onderskeid tussen die koloniale en die postkoloniale gevangenis onduidelik is, en dat ‟n vergelykende studie van Keniaanse en Suid-Afrikaanse gevangenes-narratiewe ons dus help om te verstaan hoe moderne tronke en idees oor misdaad in Afrika deureengevleg is met die breë Europese koloniale projek, en groter kwessies van staatsmag en beheer oor die bevolking weerspieël. In Suid Afrika begin my studie met Ruth First se 117 Days (1963), en maak dan ‟n seleksie van ander gevangenes-narratiewe van die apartheid-era tot en met die post-apartheid oomblik wat deur Mandela se Long Walk to Freedom ingelui word. Ek vestig dan my aandag op ander vorme van Suid-Afrikaanse misdaad- en gevangenes-narratiewe wat sedert die publikasie van Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela se A Human Being Died that Night (2003) en Jonny Steinberg se The Number (2004) verskyn het. In Kenia begin ek met Ngugi wa Thiongo se Detained (1981), en kyk dan ten slotte na populêre narratiewe van misdaad en gevangeneskap wat hulle aanvang vind met die publikasie van John Kiriamiti se My Life in Crime (1984) tot en met die eerste dekade van die 21ste eeu, nogmaals gemerk deur die publikasie van Kiriamiti se My Life in Prison (2004).