Wrestling With the Devil

Book 35 of my 2019 Reading Challenge

read from May 7 - 17

Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir

by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Summary (via Goodreads)

published 2018

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s powerful prison memoir begins half an hour before his release on 12 December 1978. A year earlier, he recalls, armed police arrived at his home and took him to Kenya’s Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. There, Ngugi lives in a block alongside other political prisoners, but he refuses to give in to the humiliation. He decides to write a novel in secret, on toilet paper – it is a book that will become his classic, Devil on the Cross.

Wrestling with the Devil is Ngugi’s unforgettable account of the drama and challenges of living under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He captures not only the pain caused by his isolation from his family, but also the spirit of defiance and the imaginative endeavours that allowed him to survive. 

My Opinion

3 stars

A note about the edition I read: this was a reprint of a book originally published in 1982 and he took the time to edit out dated historical references and documents and added information about how the novel was received.

I'm not knocking his story or the telling of it but even with the editing I still felt very removed since so much has happened since the '70's and he became such a prolific author after being released.

I rated it neutrally because I also think the timing of when I read it (as I was recovering from surgery) impacted it as well.

A Few Quotes from the Book

"Yes. No. Ndio. La. Two of the tiniest words in any language. But one had to choose between them. To say yes or no to unfairness, injustice, wrongdoing, oppression, treacherous betrayal, the culture of fear, and the aesthetic of submissive acquiescence, one was choosing a particular world and a future."

"A narration of prison life is nothing more than an account of oppressive measures in varying degrees of intensity and the individual or collective responses to them. Even if one was getting the best possible food, accommodations, and health care, the fact of being wrongfully held in captivity at presidential pleasure, the forcible seizure of a person for an indefinite time entirely determined by somebody else's fears, is in itself torture, and it is continuous torture to the last second of one's detention. All others forms of torture, not excepting the physical, pale beside this cruelest of the state-inflicted wounds upon one's humanity."