I am looking for an anaylysis of the poem "In Detention" by Christopher Van Wyk.This is a South African poem.

href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetzee-chamber.html">J. M.
Coetzee, author of Life & Times of Michael K and
professor at the University of Cape Town, has stated in The New York
Times (1/12/1986) that van Wyk's poem "In Detention" is playing with fire.
Van Wyk has at least one passage that very dramatically speaks of deaths of people that
the South African government passed off following inquests as suicide and accidental
deaths. Coetzee calls them "so-called suicides and accidental deaths" identified by
"cursory post-mortems by Government functionaries" who labeled them from a "barely
serious stock of explanations that the [South African] security police keep on hand for
the news media."

Van Wyk turns and twists phrases in his
poem to put unrelated events in juxtaposition with others, thus arriving at a sense of
intervening outside forces in the deaths he is alluding to without ever making
accusations against any individual or, more importantly, against the government. Van Wyk
and Coetzee both strive to expose the closed-door operations of torture leading to
legally inexplicable deaths carried on in the 1980s by the South African government for
the purposes of dissent suppression. Van Wyk's word
jumbling

He
fell from the ninth floor
He hanged himself while washing
He
slipped from the ninth floor
He hung from the ninth floor
He
slipped on the ninth floor while
washing

intimates the
absurdity behind what Coetzee labels as official government explanations and suggests,
in absurdist fashion, a sinister explanation behind the deaths. Coetzee connects the
deaths that van Wyk alludes to with unofficial, unauthorized, though prevalent, acts of
government torture. Therefore, van Wyk's poem "In Detention" is a protest against out of
control South African control of what is consider by them to be a disruptive element of
society. Coetzee says of van Wyk:

readability="8">

Mr. van Wyk's poem plays with fire, tap-dances at
the portals of hell. It comes off because it is not a poem about death but a parody of
the barely serious stock of explanations that the security police ...
.

Christopher van Wyk was
born in 1957 in Soweto (South Western Township), which was established near Johannesburg
for South African blacks during the era of apartheid and which was a center of apartheid
uprisings.