Remnants of carcerality and fascism in contemporary literature from Equatorial Guinea

Abstract

From 1939 to 1968, the Spanish territory in the Gulf of Guinea suffered from a double, imperial and fascist oppression under the Franco regime. While colonialism officially ended in 1968, the promise of independence perished as newly elected Francisco Macías Nguema —inspired by Francoism—became increasingly violent and repressive of political dissent. Colonial Black Beach prison became the site for incarceration, torture, and executions as Macías ruthlessly retaliated against political dissent. I analyze two contemporary novels, Poderes de la tempested (2004) by Donato Ndongo Bidyogo and Autorretrato con un infiel (2007) by José Fernando Siale Djangany, to show the prison—the edifice and its carceral reverberations in society—as the nexus of the double, fascist and imperial violence that persists and is renegotiated in the aftermath colonialism. From the metaphor of the prison, I explore the legacy of Francoist violence in post-colonial Equatorial Guinea that has been variedly characterized as colonialism's residual legacy or the perpetuation of afro-fascism or a self-inflicted colonialism. I wish to complicate the historical cause-and-effect. I reread these texts from a historical and literary perspective focusing on representations of prisons and carceral societies, while engaging with the co-implications of fascism and imperialism in Spanish and Equatorial Guinean history.