Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o presents Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir

Date: 

Tuesday, April 17, 2018, 6:00pm

Location: 

Brattle Theatre 40 Brattle St., Cambridge, MA 02138

Harvard Book Store and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research welcome renowned Kenyan writer and scholar NGŨGĨ WA THIONG'O—author of the acclaimed novel Wizard of the Crow—for a discussion of his latest book, Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir. This event includes a book signing.

About Wrestling with the Devil

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s powerful prison memoir begins literally half an hour before his release 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 Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison, one of the largest in Africa. 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, Ngũgĩ—the world-renowned author of Weep Not, ChildPetals of Blood; and Wizard of the Crow—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, Wrestling with the Devil is Ngũgĩ’s account of the drama and the challenges of writing fiction 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, Wrestling with the Devil is a testimony to the power of imagination to help humans break free of confinement, which is truly the story of all art.

ORGANIZER(S): Harvard Book Store and the Hutchins Center 

TICKETS: http://www.harvard.com/event/ngugi_wa_thiongo/