Torture and Psychic Breakdown: Writing for the Incarcerated Bodies of Steve Biko and Assata Shakur

This article places Steve Bantu Biko, a South African anti-apartheid activist, and Assata Shakur, an Amerikan civil rights activist in conversation within their incarcerated experiences of torture and psychic breakdown. The focal point of this discussion is the examination of how torture and psychic breakdown become an application of power by racist oppressive states. Their incarcerated bodies are sites of the legitimate torture and psychic breakdown by racialised oppressive systems. The form of torture and psychic breakdown experienced within their incarcerated bodies denies the body existence. However, Biko and Shakur persist and seek to be examined through the lens of defiance. The defiance occurs through the bodily experience within incarceration while simultaneously forcing them to put their bodies on the line in the name of defiance. In essence, Biko and Shakur write and exist in a space that denies them existence, thus their writing emerges as testimonial writing. This article aims to reveal how Biko and Shakur write from the position of critique and affirmation against racialised oppressive systems that operate in the anti-Black world. The article is divided into five sections: the introduction, secondly prisons and racial power relations, thirdly inscriptions of tortured beings, fourth is the psychic breakdown and the hold, and fifth is the conclusion.