Network Novel: Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s Wizard of the Crow and Dialogues in African Literature

ABSTRACT

This essay reads Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s Wizard of the Crow (2006) as an intervention in the ongoing dialogues in African literature. Through the paradigms of ‘reciprocality’, ‘extensibility’ and ‘reconfigurability’, the essay gauges the impacts of dialoguing on the readings of African letters by focusing on ways in which Ngũgĩ reincarnates old concerns of two exemplars of West African literature; Kojo Laing’s Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars (1992) and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). The article draws on theoretical insights formulated on literary networks to conceptualise the attraction between Armah and Ngũgĩ on one hand and between Laing and Ngũgĩ on the other, with a view to discerning how Ngũgĩ’s network novel interrogates and intensifies thematic concerns of the preceding novels. Emphasised throughout the essay is how Ngũgĩ reworks Armah’s faecal metaphor and Laing’s body transformations in a bid to reflect on the significance of literary networks as both celebrated and productive enterprise that not only circulates interpretations but also regenerates readings of ‘network novels’.

KEYWORDS:

• network
• dialogues
• reciprocality
• reconfigurability
• faecal
• body transformations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I favour the term ‘dialogue’ in place of ‘intertextuality’ on account of two reasons. The first is because of what I consider as intertextuality’s passive approach to literary texts. In his study on intertextuality and contemporary African novel, Ayo Kehinde (2003) claims that ‘influence’ was initially used in reference to any text that has absorbed or replied to another text but because of its inherent flaws, it was dropped. Scholarship on intertextuality still maintains the element of ‘influence’ making it quite passive compared to ‘dialogue’ as I use in this analysis. The second has to do with the key concepts (‘reciprocality’, ‘extensibility’ and ‘reconfigurability’) that this essay engages. These concepts potentially engage an active approach to any imagined or metaphorical exchanges among writers.

2 Even though I echo Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye’s equally optimistic 1986 novel, Coming to Birth, I refer to the text specifically because both texts are hopeful in principle but pessimistic in practice. Both novels envision the possibility of African nations overcoming their challenges, but these texts however short-circuit their visions in that the possibility embodied in Paulina’s pregnancy in Coming to Birth is left hanging throughout, even as the novel ends. In fact, the narrative ends with Paulina’s pregnancy.

3 To better understand the implication of the inevitability of this ‘being’, refer to Stuart Hall’s (1994) analysis of identity as a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as a ‘being’. For Hall, identity as ‘becoming’ is a matter of essence and it belongs both to the future and the past and as a ‘being’, it cannot be changed.

4 For more information on the place of love in restructuring society according to more egalitarian principles, read Ellen McLarney’s The Socialist Romance of the Postcolonial Arabic Novel (2009). McLarney examines two professed authors from Egypt and Algeria to show how they romanticised social harmony despite reigning problems of class conflict.

5 Tajirika’s meditations on the possible black to white transformation of his skin recalls Frantz Fanon’s much-discussed text Black Skin, White Masks (1952). For a fitting understanding of how European cultural myths of blackness alienate the blacks (like Titus Tajirika) from themselves, read ‘The Fact of Blackness’, Chapter Five of Fanon’s text. Using personal experience, a black Fanon describes how he adopts a white mask so as to avoid being identified with a Eurocentric discourse of blackness as ‘evil,’ and unlike Fanon who thought of himself as symbolically white and as participating on an equal footing in society, Tajirika chooses to ‘dispense with’ the images of white and instead opted for the actual skin alteration.