The Panopticon Writes Back: On Plagiarism and AI Simulation

I built a café once, not of stone or steam, nor chairs with bentwood backs. It had no street address, yet it knew exactly where it stood: between memory and exile, between the watcher and the watched.

In my novel I & Eye, I called it the Panopticon Café. It was where silences had dialects, and the walls were mirrors that kept you under your own gaze. Surveillance was not imposed but inherited. Silence was never empty, it was speech in another register. People looked over their shoulders not because someone was behind them, but because memory teaches posture.

That café lived in my fiction, in my essays, in the minor chords I struck on Substack, Awate, and FB, too. It lived because I gave it voice. And then, one day, I saw my voice without my name.

A recent article in Horn Review, titled The Panopticon Republic: Eritrea’s Invisible Chains, triggered something deeper than academic curiosity. It struck the precise register of discomfort: not word-for-word plagiarism, but something harder to trace: pirating the rhythm, beat, and pattern.

In the age of AI, anyone can mimic. Feed it a handful of seed phrases, say, panopticon, exile, silence, memory, diaspora, and it will return not just words, but an imitation of rhythm, moral stance, and breath. Cadence is not style; it is the sound memory makes when it begins to speak. What was lifted was not merely the metaphor of the Panopticon. It was the structure, the moral tension between silence and surveillance. It was the memory-work carved out of bone and ash, transformed into literature, and offered back to the world. When such a voice is approximated without citation, it becomes something worse than plagiarism: displacement by simulation.

This is not just about authorial pride. It is about the ethics of resonance. Writers of witness, especially from colonized geographies, do not write for ornament. We retrieve. We salvage. We set our metaphors down for survival. To mimic that without naming is not homage. It is erasure disguised as flattery.

A Table of Approximations
Read these not for words alone, but for the pulse beneath them.

Horn Review Article | Echo in I & Eye / Essays

• “Power operates not through chains, but through mirrors.” | “The Panopticon Café was built of reflections, not walls. Mirrors where silence sat with surveillance.”
• “Fear has replaced law, and silence has replaced dissent.” | “Silence was the only dissent we were allowed to inherit.”
• “Freedom is not only taken, it is unlearned.” | “We were taught not to remember freedom. Unlearning was the first lesson in obedience.”
• “The mouth is free, but the memory is not.” | “My mouth opened in exile, but my memory stayed censored.”
• “Memory, not rebellion, is the greatest threat.” | “The revolution they fear is not armed, it remembers.”

Each of these may stand alone. Together, they reveal a pattern, not just of borrowing, but of listening without naming. Those of us who write from the margins of nations and languages do not do so with the luxury of disembodied theory. We write from loss. From wars not yet resolved. From tongues split by borders and archives still buried in colonial vaults. We do not write to be sampled. We write to be remembered.

Theft of cadence is historical violence in metaphor’s clothing. It happens quietly, eluding plagiarism checkers, but it moves through the bloodstream of narrative, repeating the same old story: take the song, but not the singer. AI, if prompted carelessly, becomes a cultural colonizer. It gives polished mimicry to those with no memory cost, placing the burden of originality back on those already writing from deficit. To quote Fanon: “We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” Even revolt has its echo now, and too often, the echo gets more applause than the breath that made it.

There is a reason diasporic writers name everything: places, kin, herbs, losses. Naming reclaims what exile dissolves. Citation is a form of naming. To write in another’s cadence without acknowledging them is to claim blood without burial. This is not a callout; it is a mirror angled so the reflection cannot look away.

For now, I choose not to name. I am not in the business of offering alibis to literary vandals. Holding up the mirror is enough. To those who borrow without naming: be warned. Our silences were not your prompts. Our metaphors were not your scrap heap. If you speak in our cadence, say our names.

Because the river remembers. It remembers who spoke first. It remembers the cracked café cup held by the woman who refused to sign her name for fear her family back home would vanish. It remembers the mouth that spoke despite surveillance, the pen that moved even when no archive was promised. And it remembers the cadence of the first voice that spoke, even when the echo tried to claim it as its own.

References

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)