IN PENPOINTS, GUNPOINTS AND DREAMS, NGŨGĨ CONCLUDES HIS SURVEY of dissident African writers with a customary flourish: ‘prison then is a metaphor for the postcolonial space, for even in a country where there are no military regimes, the vast majority can be condemned to conditions of perpetual physical, social and psychic confinement’ (Ngũgĩ 1998: 60). This is the dominant motif of a chapter entitled ‘Enactments of Power’, in which Ngũgĩ draws heavily from Discipline and Punish. His attempt to forge epistemological connections between modes of power in feudal Europe and those of post/neo-colonial Africa supplements the philosophical inquiries of V.Y. Mudimbe, amongst many others. This chapter builds on the foundations established in the analysis of Sweet and Sour Milk, arguing that the central Variations novel signals an intensification of Farah's primary concern with the complex interplay between the microphysics of power and resistance. From the Foucauldian perspective of this study, however, Sardines stands alone for several reasons. Critical debates have raged over the complex and at times contradictory figure of Medina, the only female member of the ‘Group of 10’, as well as her wider role within Farah's fictional oeuvre. For Wright, the ‘problem remains …