Critical Interrogations of the Interrelation of Creativity and Captivity

Freedom deprivation, be it brief or prolonged, has creatively inspired a long list of historical and contemporary figures, among whom are John Bunyan, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Primo Levi, Rosa Luxemburg, Marco Polo, Marquis de Sade, Nawal El Saadawi, Ngugi wa Thiongo’ and Oscar Wilde, to name but a few. The extraordinary yet not uncommon concurrence of the seemingly opposite conditions of creativity and confinement is central to this special collection of articles, which offers contributions by six scholars who apply their expertise in cultural studies and social sciences to life writing in the broad sense of the term. The essays explore the intersections of human creativity and captivity in a variety of life narratives originating in different historical and social contexts, testifying to the consequences of different modes of liberty deprivation, whether at governmental penal institutions, in war-time concentration camps, or on slave plantations. These diverse experiences of captivity suffered by men, women and children have generated a wide variety of creative expression, including testimonial documents, literary texts, and imaginative writings of the self, which invariably demonstrate a profound and complex relation with concrete existential realities of captivity.

The articles in this collection focus on text-based life writing as a means to reflect upon, deal with, escape and/or survive conditions of confinement. The textual creativity under scrutiny testifies to the potential of life narratives to preserve or find a degree of humanity in dehumanising situations. In all cases at hand, this humanity reveals itself in the expression of the writerly self as a creative human being, as a social self in dialogue with others, and as an imaginative self, engaging both with a life before and a world after the confinement. Even in those cases in which the writing materially remains within the prison walls, it still negotiates the mechanisms of control, invisibility, silencing, exclusion and isolation that are inherent to situations of confinement, regardless of their historical or political contexts. In such situations, the writing develops its creative potential, as it brings into view, makes heard and generally gives life to those who were (formerly) restricted to forms of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998) in captivity. Life writing here serves the ethico-political aim of counteracting the status and experience of these silenced subjects and ‘overlooked objects’ (Colvin 2011, 2). In a general sense, life writing thus contributes to the cultural memory of diverse existential experiences of captivity; it possibly even constitutes ‘an act or process of simultaneous self-creation and self-emancipation’ (Gilroy 1993, 69) that enables the narrating individuals and/or their communities to resist oppression.

As textual writing, life writing also partakes in the tension between testimonial and creative writing, between the documentary and the fictional. The ethico-political urge to spell out and remember the experiences of confinement intertwines with the aesthetical-creative question of how to document the experiences. Thus, the texts under review implicitly or explicitly encourage discussions of literacy, authorship, genre, subjectivity, genesis, reception and canon, and they contribute to the activation and adaptation of literary models and metaphors of confinement and incarceration (Fludernik 2004).

An exemplary case in regard to the ambivalent nexus of testimony and fictionality is the subject of ‘Transitional Justice and Cultural Memory: The Prison Diaries of Ernest Claes and their Literary Adaptation (1944–1951)’. Eva Schandevyl considers the diaries of the Flemish writer Ernest Claes, written in captivity and in a context of transitional justice, and their subsequent adaptation by the author into a fictional testimony, i.e. a literary narrative of his arrest and brief imprisonment for his alleged collaboration with the German occupiers. Schandevyl’s discussion illustrates how ‘life writing’ is to be understood as a practice in which the distinction between autobiography and fiction are deliberately blurred, destabilising conventional binaries such as perpetrators/victims, justice/injustice, violence/reconciliation, inside/outside. She furthermore evaluates the personal impact of these prison writings on the author and their contribution to the nation’s collective memory.

An entirely different aspect of the collective memory of the Second World War is addressed by the life writing under review in Chiara Nannicini Streitberger’s article ‘Chronicle, autobiography or literary text? Italian testimonies of Flossenbürg concentration camp’. In her reading of fifteen written accounts by Italian political prisoners who survived the Bavarian concentration camp, Streitberger explores how supposedly similar experiences of imprisonment and torture are written down and distributed in very different ways. The heterogeneous genesis and nature of the texts result from fundamental experiential differences, related, for instance, to the gender or level of education of the authors, the duration of their imprisonment or the degree of their antifascist resistance. As Streitberger demonstrates, the heterogeneity of these camp testimonies also encourages a reappraisal of the genre of the chronicle. The survivors’ specific choice of stylistic and narrative features (e.g. flashbacks, philosophical digressions on existentialism, metaphors) turns the descriptive testimonial chronicle, which in general concentrates on exemplary episodes, into a literary text that enriches the broader genre of ‘literature of deportation’.

Experiences of imprisonment do not only drive the authentic life narratives of Claes and the Flussenbürg survivors, but may also be foundational to the fictional life stories presented by literary authors belonging to different eras, as Lucy Powell and Elisabeth Bekers demonstrate in their respective contributions. In ‘Doing Time: Temporality and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century British Prison Experience’ Powell examines the centrality of the prison in the lives imagined by a large number of influential early British novelists, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith and Horace Walpole. Guided by Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and its unique insistence on the perceptual confluence of space and time, her reading of these literary accounts of imprisonment challenges existing theoretical understandings of time and the prison narrative formulated by Michel Foucault, John Bender and Monika Fludernik. Powell relates the prevalence of the prison experience in eighteenth-century fictional life narratives to the increasingly rigid notion of time in capitalist and industrialist Britain and the reality of the threat of imminent imprisonment hanging over many of the early British authors, which prompted them to equate the figure of the writer with that of the prisoner in their writing.

The interrelation between confinement and authorship is also addressed in the texts discussed in ‘Creative Challenges to Captivity: Slave Authorship in Black British Neo-Slave Narratives’. In this article Bekers scrutinises a contemporary genre of fictional life writing that is nevertheless steeped in history. The genre of the neo-slave narrative creatively revisits the testimonials with which escaped and freed slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sought to lend their support to abolitionist movements on both sides of the Atlantic. No less politically engaged than their precursors, the contemporary authors imagine the day-to-day life experiences of slaves in order to confront today’s readers with the racial biases in Western historiography and literary canonisation. Bekers demonstrates how Black British authors such as Caryl Phillips, Jackie Kay and Andrea Levy develop the originally African American genre in a two-fold manner. Shifting the setting from North America to Britain and the British Caribbean, they draw explicit attention to Britain’s centuries-long involvement in the slave trade and slavery. They also highlight the significance of slave authorship to the historical emancipation process and to the present-day remembrance of slavery by focusing on the autobiographical endeavours of their (formerly) enslaved narrators.

Although their experiences of captivity are generated by entirely different social conditions, the exploited slave characters and the penalised young delinquents discussed by Mary Christianakis and Richard Mora are using their life narratives to construct their own past and present identities with a view to creating better futures. In their article ‘(Re)Writing Identities: Past, Present, and Future Narratives of Young People in Juvenile Detention Facilities’ Christianakis and Mora offer a combined sociological and literary approach to youth detention and life writing in prison. Their examination of published work by incarcerated youth in the USA reveals how the latter use their creativity to reflect on their physical confinement and through their life narratives (re)write their past, present and possible future selves. They illustrate how writing transgresses the physical boundaries of confinement, while simultaneously reifying the centrality of incarceration as a life-changing experience.

The documentary and fictional examples of life writing discussed here demonstrate some of the manifold ways in which creation and confinement interrelate with one another and testify to the significance that creativity may have in conditions of captivity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Inge Arteel is senior lecturer in German literature at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. Her main research interests include experimental literature by women authors from Germany and Austria, ‘postdramatic’ German theatre, autofictionality, the radio play, gender studies and intersectionality. She is the author of an introduction into the life and work of Friederike Mayröcker (Wehrhahn Verlag 2012) and of several articles and edited volumes on literature in German (Mayröcker, Elfriede Jelinek, Marieluise Fleißer, Josef Winkler, etc.). Most recent publications: Arteel, Inge. 2017. ‘Non-Sovereign Voices in Friederike Mayröcker’s Aural Texts’. Partial Answers 15 (1): 135–150; Arteel, Inge, and Stefan Krammer, eds. 2016. In-Differenzen: Alterität im Schreiben Josef Winklers. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag; Pewny, Katharina, and Inge Arteel. 2016. ‘Ritual Failure Remains? The Inaccessibility of the Dead (Corpse) in Antigone and in Contemporary Post-Conflict Art.’ Forum Modernes Theater: 177–188.

Elisabeth Bekers is senior lecturer in British & Postcolonial Literature at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. Her research focuses on literature from the African continent and diaspora, with a particular interest in image and knowledge production, canon formation and intersectionality. Currently she is working on neo-slave narratives by Black British women writers and, as part of an international network, on the ways in which Europe has been imagined by authors from afar. She is the author of Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision, 1960–2000 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010) and has co-edited several volumes and special issues, including Brussel schrijven/Ecrire Bruxelles (ASP-Vrije Universiteit Brussel Press, 2016), Imaginary Europes (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Taylor and Francis, 2015), Imaginary Europes: Literary and Filmic Representations of Europe from Afar (Routledge, 2017), and Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe (Matatu, Rodopi 2009). She is a member of the steering committee of the international Transnational Life Writing Network, co-director of the international Platform for Postcolonial Readings for junior researchers in the field, and editor of an academic website with biographical and bibliographical information on Black British Women Writers (www.vub.ac.be/TALK/BBWW).

Eva Schandevyl is a historian affiliated with Vrije Universiteit Brussels. Her research interests include intellectual history, migration, and the social and political history of justice administration. Her current research focuses in particular on gender and legal history. She has written and edited Women in Law and Law-Making in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe (London: Ashgate, 2014), Tussen revolutie en conformisme: Het engagement en de netwerken van linkse intellectuelen in België, 1918–1956 (Brussels: ASP, 2011), In haar recht? Vrouwe Justitia feministisch bekeken (Brussels: ASP, 2009) and published many book chapters and journal articles (in European Review of History, Journal of Belgian History, National Identities, Historica, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, Cahiers d’histoire du temps présent, Res Publica, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis and European Journal of Cross-Cultural Competence and Management).