Aesthetic solidarities: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Cold War

Abstract

Highlighting the absence of the Cold War from studies of postcolonial literature, this article focuses on the various levels at which the global conflict is reflected in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s work and its reception. Beyond direct and oblique references to the Cold War, Ngũgĩ’s choice of genre in Petals of Blood (historical novel in the socialist realist vein, at the expense of a discredited detective style of novel) speaks to the cultural solidarities Ngũgĩ forged across the Iron Curtain fault lines.

Keywords:

• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
• Cold War genres
• socialist realism
• reception of African literature
• postcolonial writing

Notes

1. For a discussion of diverging trends in Ngũgĩ’s aesthetics, see also Amoko (2010, 71–72) and Sharma (1988, 22).

2. I am grateful to Chalo’a Waya for clarifying this linguistic aspect. According to T. G. Benson’s (1964) Kikuyu-English Dictionary, rũkurukuhĩ, ngurukuhĩ, n (v), is “[a] short piece of stick used as missile” and 2. “cutting put into earth to take root, slip”.

3. Despite official narratives that subsumed socialist realist fiction to direct filiations to Maxim Gorki’s Mother, the authors’ practices and views were quite divergent (Clark 2000, 28).

4. Hammond (2006, 2012) has edited two collections of essays on global perspectives of the Cold War; however, with the exception of one essay in the first volume, African literature is not represented. For a literary treatment of regional aspects of the Cold War in southern Africa, see Popescu (2012) and Baines and Vale (2008).

5. For pioneering approaches, see Pietz (1988) and Brennan (2001).

6. Brennan argued that the brand of “theory” that became fashionable in American academic circles in the late 1970s and 1980s – “revolutionary in posture [ … ] characterized as Marxist by the media” in fact embraced the values of American liberalism (2006, 9).

7. Ngũgĩ emphasized the cold war symbolism of the locations where the novel was completed: “It was, I suppose, my contribution to ‘détente’ since the novel was really started in Evanston, Illinois and completed at Yalta where Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin met after the Second World War” (2006, 57).