Anfractuous Narratives, Human Rights and Precarity in Fatima Meer’s Prison Diary

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of South African writer and political activist Fatima Meer’s Prison Diary: One Hundred and Thirteen Days and addresses the ways in which her creative imagination has been triggered by feelings of vulnerability and precarity within the context of racism and injustice. The analysis leans on Bryan Turner’s notion of vulnerability and human rights and Judith Butler’s thoughts on precarious lives. Meer’s narrative is anfractuous given the many roles she played in society, resulting in a memoir that is replete with windings and intricate turnings. Her plots and paths as an academic, artist, sociologist, writer, prisoner, Mandela’s biographer, political activist and human rights campaigner are anfractuous—they twist and turn but do not break. Turner notes that without an ethical commitment realistically to follow one’s vocation or one’s fate, a human being cannot achieve “personality.” In Weber’s ethical system, being a “personality” means having devotion to a cause or acting passionately in terms of a career or course of action that one has rationally chosen. Meer’s politics, activism and commitment to social justice were never divided from her academic inquiry. Her memoir describes her 113 days’ incarceration in the Johannesburg jail in 1976 during the Soweto uprising. The memoir is easily interpreted as a classic postcolonial text, yet this diary of imprisonment may well reflect random moments in the lives of different people—social connectedness of a less obvious nature, yet of significance in glimpsing a common global humanity.