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• W924433312 abstract "Introduction: Arena of Struggle1RUTH FIRST WAS DETAINED IN THE MARSHALL SQUARE POLICE STATION in Johannesburg under South Africa's Ninety-Day Detention Act, in 1963, during time of Rivonia Trial of Nelson Mandela and other members of outlawed African National Congress. This essay revisits her prison memoir, 117 Days: An Account of Confinement and Interrogation under South African Ninety-Day Detention Law,2 originally published in 1965. Like Yvonne Vera, Werner Sedlak, Susan Nuttall, Susan VanZanten Gallagher and others, I read 117 Days as instance of what Barbara Harlow has called the literature of resistance. As Harlow points out, such literature presents itself as an arena of struggle. Testifying to this struggle, autobiographical prison writings like 117 Days at once embody and express dislocations between general and particular inscriptions of loyalty and treason, between state terror and deeply held convictions of political dissident. Here, however, in effort to understand how incarceration can so often come to represent freedom, I want to trace more carefully character of 117 Days, specifically contradictions of space, time, and solitude.Contradictions of SpaceWerner Sedlak has argued that First's 117 Days embodies what Henri Lefebvre calls contradictory space: i.e. the prison becomes a 'space inbetween' - here, between domination and appropriation.3 Political detainees are rarely prepared for conditions of prison cell. The opening paragraphs of 117 Days convey such impression in starkest terms:Yet, not hour after I lodged in cell, I found myself forced to do what prisoners do: pace length and breadth of cell. The bed took up almost entire length of cell, and in space remaining between it and wall a small protruding shelf. I could not walk round cell, I could not even cross it. To measure its eight feet by six, I had to walk length alongside bed and shelf, and then, holding my shoes in my hand, crawl under bed to measure out breadth. It seemed important to be accurate. (10)Here we find a record of literal reckoning, a measuring-out and mapping of physical restrictions, a surveying and staking of territorial claims. The cliched banality of what First calls storybook character of this description testifies all more acutely to immediate unreality of incarceration.At one point in 117 Days, First tells us that she had been arrested before, in 1956. But geography of station, she writes, was still bewildering (13). And yet, very centre of this confinement furnishes First with a kind of sanctuary:Yet bed my privacy, my retreat, and could be my secret life. On bed I felt in control of cell. I did not need to survey it; I could ignore it, and concentrate on making myself comfortable. I would sleep as long as I liked, without fear of interruption. I would think, without diversion. I would wait to see what happened, from comfort of my bed. (9)Finding her physical bearings in this way helps First to create inner spaces within which to formulate strategies of resistance to interrogation which lay ahead. In interplay between these locations lies contradiction of prison space. Often, political prisoner loses sight of line between life and death, which shifts and blurs under pressures of confinement. Isolation in a Vacuum, title of a chapter in 117 Days, captures this sense of undifferentiated space, while final chapter of First's memoir, No Place for You, threatens to obliterate all location and includes a description of her suicide attempt (60, 131). If, as loan Davies has asserted in a study of writers in prison, Gaston Bachelard' s habitable spaces of poetic image are spaces that attract, spaces that have been lived in 'with all partiality of imagination', prison writer's experience of space, is of a different order. …" @default.
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• W924433312 date "2012-01-01" @default.
• W924433312 modified "2023-10-17" @default.
• W924433312 title "Space, Time, Solitude: The Liberating Contradictions of Ruth First’s 117 Days" @default.
• W924433312 doi "https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401207843_007" @default.
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