South African and Northern Irish Political Prison Writing Reimagining/Reconfiguring the Carceral Space

Abstract

Without overplaying the convergences in the discriminatory and oppressive practices carried out during the twentieth century by the states of South Africa (1948–1994) and Northern Ireland (1921–1998), it is difficult not to see prisons as one of the spaces where the power of the state was hotly contested. Physically isolated either by the countryside or by the ocean, the notorious prisons of Long Kesh/H Blocks and Robben Island housed vast numbers of political prisoners whose resolve and resistance the prison and state regimes attempted to break, deploying a variety of brutal strategies to do so. These violent infringements on prisoners’ human rights also occurred in prisons situated in more central areas, but regardless of the physical situation of the prison, its inhabitants were (and of course still are today) rendered invisible and inaudible. This essay will focus on prose and poetry produced by political prisoners during incarceration and, in some cases, after their release. I would like to explore how the various aesthetics developed by both well-known and anonymous writers participate in a very political reconfiguration of both the carceral space and the wider biopolitics of the state. I suggest it is in the very stylistics of the texts that their implicit political message can be deciphered, and the prisoners’ agency asserted. Paradoxically, then, in spite of attempts to push the prisoners out of sight, their resistance becomes all the more visible and audible, and forces a redistribution of the sensible through dissensus.