Discovering/rediscovering “home” through Ngũgĩ’s early novels

Abstract

Ngũgĩ’s early novels evoke three kinds of home for me: the hilly landscapes of The River Between, the repressive Emergency years in my home region of central Kenya in the 1950s, and the nationalist imaginary celebrated at the end of the liberation struggle. The River Between worked for me by evoking familiar landscapes and foregrounding the issues the inhabitants had to negotiate in the early years of colonial contact. The specter of darkness descending in Weep not, Child captured the relatable trauma that still troubled the inhabitants of my village that had only recently emerged from the Emergency-era terror in the 1950s. I connect the major characters’ stoical belief in the sun rising again to a traditional Gĩkũyũ worldview that I also plumb further in the discussion of A Grain of Wheat where traditional notions of trauma witnessing complicate the traitor/hero binarism that has clouded the analysis of Mugo. I probe the coercive nationalism into which Kihika sucks him and then discuss the invented traditions that attempt to naturalize the idea of Kenya before concluding with reflections on a “Prospero moment” that highlights the value of the Nairobi attempt at decolonizing the mind.

Keywords:

• Nairobi canon reform
• Ngũgĩ
• Emergency terror
• home
• invented traditions
• Prospero
• Caliban

Acknowledgement

This article evolved out of the tribute presentation I made at the 2018 African Literature Association Conference Ngũgĩ@80 panel. I wish to thank the pariticipants for their feedback, especially Wangũi wa Goro who organized the panel and Abdilatif Abdalla who chaired it.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ is an associate professor of English at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has published widely on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's fiction and drama. His most recent work has been published in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: Reflections on his Life of Writing (2018), Journal of African Cultural Studies (2018), A Companion to Chimamanda Adichie (2017), Popular Music and Society (2017), Research in African Literatures (2016), Ufahamu (2015), Unmasking the African Dictator: Essays on Postcolonial African Literature (University of Tennessee Press 2014), African Theatre Journal (2014), and the Modern Language Association's Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (2012).