Autobiography and the ‘power of writing’: political prison writing in the apartheid era

Abstract

This article argues that to be a political prisoner is to be variously written, to be contested through writing. The word is a weapon that both inflicts pain and secures power. Prisoners are relentlessly rewritten within the official ‘power of writing’, from interrogation and the making of a statement, through legislation and the political trial, to the regulations governing imprisonment. 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. Language becomes subject to the dominant characteristics of the state: the lawlessness of absolute power renders the word a lie. However, the ‘power of writing’ is a contested arena. 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’ by writing against the official text of imprisonment. Autobiographical prison writing is the most comprehensive articulation of this oppositional ‘power of writing’. However, there is no monopoly over the political function of writing. While the written word retains both a dominant intention and a dominant operational ‘truth’, it is simultaneously ambiguous, an approximation, open to interpretation, manipulation and appropriation. In the context of imprisonment these are the contours of the contested arena of the ‘power of writing’, at stake is the question of on whose terms imprisonment will be both written and read.