Wrestling with the Devil - Ngugi wa Thiong'o - Bog

"[This book] ... begins literally half an hour before [the author's release from prison] on December 12, 1978. In one extended flashback he recalls the night, a year earlier, when armed police pulled him from his home and jailed him in Kenya's ... [maximum security prisons]. There, he lives in a prison block with eighteen other political prisoners, quarantined from the general prison population. In a conscious effort to fight back the humiliation and the intended degradation of the spirit, [the author] ... decides to write a novel on toilet paper, the only paper to which he has access, a book that will become his classic, Devil on the cross. Written in the early 1980s and never before published in America, [this book is an account of the author's] drama and the challenges of writing the novel under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He captures not only the excruciating pain that comes from being cut off from his wife and children, but also the spirit of defiance that defines hope. Ultimately, [this book] is a testimony to the power of imagination to help humans break free of confinement, which is truly the story of all art"--