And oh, what a lovely recollection I have from Alexanderplatz! Do you know, Hänschen, what Alexanderplatz is? The month-and-a-half stay that I had there left gray hairs on my head and rent my nerves in such a way that I will never get over it. And yet I have a small recollection from there that pops up like a flower in my memory. Night began there as early as 5:30 – it was late autumn, October, and the cell had no lighting at all. There was nothing left for me to do in that eleven square meter space than to stretch out on the plank bed, which was stuck in between indescribably ugly pieces of furniture, and amidst the hellish music of the municipal transit trains continually thundering by, making the cell shake as bits of red light flashed on the vibrating window pane, I recited my Mörike in a low voice to myself. After 10 p.m. the diabolic concert of the city trains would grow somewhat softer, and soon after that the following little episode from the life of the streets would become audible. First you could hear dimly a hoarse male voice, which had something demanding and admonishing about it, then in reply, a young girl singing, probably around eight years old; she sang a children's ditty while hopping and jumping and at the same time letting go with silvery peals of laughter which had a bell-like purity of tone. The man's voice must have been that of a tired, bad-tempered janitor, who was calling his little daughter home to go to sleep. But the little rascal didn't want to obey, let the deep gruff voice of her father go in one ear and out the other, kept flitting around in the streets like a butterfly, and countered the oncoming strictures and threats with a merry children's rhyme. One could vividly picture the short skirt flapping and the thin legs flying in dance steps. In the hoppity-hop rhythm of a children's song, in the rippling laughter, there was so much carefree and triumphant joy of life that the whole dark and musty building of the central police headquarters was enveloped as though by a silver cloak of mist and in my foul-smelling prison cell the air was suddenly scented with the perfume of dark-red roses falling through the air …

Wouldn't it be a relief and delight to stroll through a lush green field and touch the blades of shining grass and feel the fresh texture of a leaf on a tree or sit on a hill and gaze upon a valley filled with the buzzing life of spring, smelling the fresh, clean, healthy scent with nothing but miles of space around me.

Freedom: that was it. Freedom to live again. I turned from the window to continue my relentless pacing, disheartened a little by the thoughts of freedom. I looked at the stinking, dirt-covered walls, the piles of disease-ridden rubbish and decaying waste food that lay scattered in the corners on the damp floor. The mutilated, filthy mattress, torn to shreds by a thousand searches. The tea-stained ceiling, to cut the glare reflecting off the bright light, the scraped and scarred door, and the disease-ridden chamber pot that lay beside the door. It was getting harder and harder to conjure up the picture of that beautiful lush green field. Every minute my nightmarish surroundings screamed at me. There was no escaping this nightmare unless I gave up! A few – a very few – had already given up. They had put on prison clothes and conformed. Not that they had wished to do this. They just couldn't bear the unrelenting burden of torture, the continued boredom, tension and fear, the deprivation of basic necessities like exercise and fresh air, no association with other human beings except through a shout from behind a closed heavy steel door.

The depression, the beatings, the cold – what is there? I said to myself. Look out the window and concentration camp screams at you. Look around you in the tomb that you survive in and you are engulfed in hell, with little black devils in the forms of A—, B— and C— ready to pounce on you each minute of each stinking nightmareridden day.

I was to spend the hour in the bricked-in quadrangle of the women's section of the brick and bar monster that is Marshall Square. Part of the building goes back to pre-Boer War days. The plumbing pipes are all external and they lace the walls of the quadrangles like a corset of iron trellis. Water and sewage pipes gurgle and splutter and flush up and down the two storeys and this little exercise yard is an excellent point from which to plot an ablutions graph for the white prisoners’ cells. The few steps out of the cell were like a hurtle through space on a funfair figure of eight, and my stomach leapt as my legs moved across the concrete threshold. But the exercise yard was too like a cell. The sky was trapped by brick walls extending upwards and, like the warders regulating my stay in the courtyard, the brick walls officiously limited the shine of the sun. There was nothing for it but to walk round and round the courtyard.

On chill days I loped but tried to put out of my mind the thought of generations of prisoners doing the same. On sunny days I basked in the patch of sun, moving with it, if I could stay long enough, as it inched westwards across the courtyard and then out of reach.

There was another exercise yard for the women but it was used for men detainees until the women wardresses reasserted their, or our, claim. This was a sandy yard, four times the size of the women's quadrangle, deep in the bowels of the station and closed in by fourteen-feet-high brick walls, with mesh on top. To see what lay beyond the walls I stood in the pit of the quadrangle with my head thrown back. Then like a victim in the gladiators’ den I could see and be seen by the elevated spectators, in this case the skyscrapers of Johannesburg's mining and finance houses. Marshall Square lies in the heart of the multimillionaire concerns mining South Africa's gold and diamonds: The new Chamber of Mines building is a stone's throw away.

Over the ground, my fingers sketch letters and interlacing circles. My hand trembles with anger, and my heartbeat quickens. If my fingers had not come to know the pen, perhaps they would have known the hoe. The pen is the most valuable thing in my life. My words on paper are more valuable to me than my life itself. More valuable than my children, more than my husband, more than my freedom.

I prefer my place in prison to writing something which has not originated in my mind. The sincere word demands a courage akin to that needed to kill – and perhaps more.

My fingers chisel the letters in the dirt. I contemplate the words which are circling round in my head. What appeared to me as certain a moment ago I see now as surrounded in the fog of doubt. To this moment, I don't know why I am in prison. I have seen no investigator or prosecuting attorney or lawyer. I heard the shawisha say that she heard they were saying I entered prison because of my writings … my crime, therefore, comes under the rubric of crimes of opinion.

Is free opinion a crime? Then let prison be my only refuge and my final fate!

But we all shared a common feeling: something beautiful, something like the promise of a new dawn had been betrayed, and our presence and situation at Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison was a logical outcome of that historical betrayal.

Irretrievable loss! Had we really come to this? Was prison our destiny as a Kenyan people? Fated always to plunge back to the days of the colony only hours after being tantalized with glimpses of new dawns? What of the million dead and maimed? Was it only to enable a depraved few to carry on the colonial philosophy for which the lives of countless poor men, women, and children had been sacrificed?

In the cell, each political prisoner would struggle against mounting despair – the inevitable outcome of bitter reflections churned over and over in the mind. For here one had no helper except one's own experiences and history. That, I would say, was the real loneliness of prison life. In the silence of one's cell, one had to fight, all alone, against a thousand demons struggling for the mastery of one's soul. Their dominant method was to show continually that there was only one way of looking at things, that there was only one history and culture, which moved in circles, so that the beginning and the end were the same. You moved only to find yourself back on the same spot. What was the point of making the effort? We were all the chil-dren of Sisyphus fated forever to roll the heavy stone of tyranny up the steep hill of struggle, only to see it roll back to the bottom.

One month has passed since I was exiled to Manus. I am a piece of meat thrown into an unknown land; a prison of filth and heat. I dwell among a sea of people with faces stained and shaped by anger, faces scarred with hostility. Every week, one or two planes land in the island's wreck of an airport and throngs of people disembark. Hours later, they are tossed into the prison among the deafening ruckus of displaced people, like sheep to a slaughterhouse.

With the arrival of newcomers, the prison reaches peak tension; people stare at them like invaders. They are mainly taken to Fox Prison because it is large and tents for the newcomers can be assembled in that isolated corner. On the western side, two prisons stand opposite each other: Delta and Oscar. But from Fox Prison only Delta Prison is visible. It looks like a cage, like a hive full of bees. There isn't the slightest room to move within these two adjacent prisons. The prisons are a confrontation of bodies, a confrontation of human flesh. Friction from their breathing, breath that smells like the sea, smells like the deadly journey.

In Fox Prison nearly four hundred people are kept in an area smaller than a football field. The spaces between the rows of rooms and the corridors are streams flowing with disenfranchised men, coming and going from all directions. The atmosphere in the prison is made up of scenes of famished people, provocative and deafeningly boisterous. No-one knows anyone else. It is like a city in which a plague has sent everyone into a frenzy. The crowd is frantic. It seems that if one stood still, one would be carried away by the motion.

To sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp. Experience showed that only exceptionally could one survive more than three months in this way. All the musselmans who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea. On their entry into the camp, through basic incapacity, or by misfortune, or through some banal incident, they are overcome before they can adapt themselves; they are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German, to disentangle the infernal knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already in decay, and nothing can save them from selections or from death by exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.

They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen.

Although the most unbridled expressions of the fascist menace are still tied to the racist domination of Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Indians, it lurks under the surface wherever there is potential resistance to the power of monopoly capital, the parasitic interests which control this society.

All this took place in the early part of November of the year before last. A great river of life flows between you and a date so distant. Hardly, if at all, can you see across so wide a waste. But to me it seems to have occurred, I will not say yesterday, but today. Suffering is one long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life, every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and walk and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape-gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms, or strewn with fallen fruit, we know nothing, and can know nothing. For us there is only one season, the season of Sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always midnight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again tomorrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing to you, and in this manner writing.

When it was a bit warmer, they all talked on the march, however much they were yelled at. But today they kept their heads down, every man trying to shelter behind the man in front, thinking his own thoughts.

A convict's thoughts are no freer than he is: they come back to the same place, worry over the same thing continually. Will they poke around in my mattress and find my bread ration? Can I get off work if I report sick tonight? Will the captain be put in the hole, or won't he? How did Tsezar get his hands on his warm vest? Must have greased somebody's palm in the storeroom, what else?

Because he had eaten only cold food, and gone without his bread ration at breakfast, Shukhov felt emptier than usual. To stop his belly whining and begging for something to eat, he put the camp out of his mind and started thinking about the letter he was shortly going to write home.

The column went past a woodworking plant (built by zeks), past a housing estate (zeks again had assembled these huts, but free workers lived in them), past the new recreation center (all their own work, from the foundations to the murals – but it was the free workers who watched films there), and out onto the open steppe, walking into the wind and the reddening sunrise. Not so much as a sapling to be seen out on the steppe, nothing but bare white snow to the left or right.

The darkness of despondency gathers day by day; the hand of despair weighs heavier. At night the screeching of a crow across the river ominously voices the black raven keeping vigil in my heart. The windows in the hallway quake and tremble in the furious wind. Bleak and desolate wakes the day – another day, then another –

Weak and apathetic I lie on the bed. Ever further recedes the world of the living. Still day follows night, and life is in the making, but I have no part in the pain and travail. Like a spark from the glowing furnace, flashing through the gloom, and swallowed in the darkness, I have been cast upon the shores of the forgotten. No sound reaches me from the island prison where beats the fervent heart of the Girl, no ray of hope falls across the bars of desolation. But on the threshold of Nirvana life recoils; in the very bowels of torment it cries out to be! Persecution feeds the fires of defiance, and nerves my resolution. Were I an ordinary prisoner, I should not care to suffer all these agonies. To what purpose, with my impossible sentence? But my Anarchist ideals and traditions rise in revolt against the vampire gloating over its prey. No, I shall not disgrace the Cause, I shall not grieve my comrades by weak surrender! I will fight and struggle, and not be daunted by threat or torture.