Wole Soyinka, The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (1972)

“Throughout his memoir, Soyinka explicitly figures his prison experience, which represents his own traumatic encounter with the Nigerian state, as a journey through hell. He draws in part on Dante’s Inferno; his narrative is framed as a descent into evil, and as in Dante, hell is conceived as having many layers, each defined by a different form of punishment. Soyinka descends from his interrogation in Lagos to the prolonged torture of his solitary confinement in Kaduna. His prison cell, filled with the howling of the harmattan wind, distinctly recalls the icy punishment of the lowest circle of Dante’s hell. However, if those in Dante’s hell receive the punishments that they deserve and that have been determined for them within a scheme of divine justice, Soyinka suffers a capricious and arbitrary punishment which he has done nothing to merit and to which he has been consigned without any form of trial.”    —Anne Whitehall, “Journeying Through Hell: Wole Soyinka, Trauma, and Postcolonial Nigeria”, Postcolonial Trauma Novels (Spring/Summer 2018)