An African writer of distinction

Some months ago, I had the privilege of moderating a session in Honolulu at which the celebrated African writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o (formerly James Ngugi) was the featured speaker. After his talk, which was on literature and globalization, I had the opportunity to discuss with him such questions as literature and bilingualism and cross-writing between languages. Ngugi, along with such outstanding writers as Leopold Sedar Senghor, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Camara Laye, Mongo Beti and Kofi Awoonor have succeeded in gaining great international visibility for African literature.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o is a seventy-one-year-old writer from Kenya. He is a novelist, playwright, literary critic and political activist; he has made a profound impact on Kenya and beyond in these diverse and important capacities. His early trilogy of novels "Weep Not, Child", "A Grain of Wheat", and "Petals of Blood" - which are generally referred to as the Mau Mau trilogy, examines the complex implications of the Mau Mau revolutionary movement in Kenya and its impact on the lives of the people.

One significant aspect of this revolutionary movement was land reform and the re-possession of the land of peasants stolen by the white settlers.

Hence, it is hardly surprising that the restitution land becomes the central topos of the trilogy. As he once remarked, 'we, as writers, as historians, as Kenyan intellectuals, must be able to tell stories, or histories, or a history of heroic resistance to foreign domination by Kenyan people." As a writer, Ngugi has been influenced by Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe and George Lamming and the social thought of Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon. It seems to me that Gramsci's definition of hegemony provides us with a useful framework within which to locate Ngugi's narratives.

He saw hegemony as "a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living; our sense and assignment of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world."

Ngugi originally emerged as a writer in English; however, later he decided to write in his mother tongue Gikuyu. He wrote a play in Gikuyu, highly critical of the state, and this precipitated his imprisonment; he was under house arrest for a year. The tremendous international pressure forced the government to release him. However, since then he had been subject to various forms of harassment and consequently decided to leave Kenya; first he moved to England and later to the United States where he is now the Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine.

In his trilogy of novels, Ngugi places his characters in specific historical conjunctures marked by fluid social formations.

At the same time, he draws on traditional African myths to give form, shape and narrative density to his experiences. He deploys with great skill features associated with African oral literature or orature to invest his writings with a cultural nuances of meaning. In fact, the concept of orature is central to his creative ambitions. Speaking of orature, he once remarked that "orature then is not seen as a branch of literature but as a total aesthetic system, with performance and integration of art forms as two of its defining qualities. He sees orature as transcending the narrow dualities of the oral and the written that condition so much of the literary and anthropological writings on Africa.

"Ngugi wa Thiong" has experimented with narrative strategies in his fictions and has sought to invest his novels with symbolic meaning. For example, "Petals of Blood" is a deeply symbolic novel; the image of the flower transposes the antagonisms between blood and petals, struggle and destiny, into a richly textured narrative.

Ngugi's new magisterial comic novel, "Wizard of the Crow", originally written in Gikuyu, and later translated into English, is a 800 page epic that combines social analysis, satire and humour within a magic realist framework. He combines magic realism and history in the way that Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass and Salman Rushhdie have sought to do.

Intersecting themes of globalization, national corruption, economic exploration are given figurality in this work. As in his earlier work, man's perpetual quest for the gift of freedom animates the narrative discourse.

This novel serves as an object lesson in the way in which historical analysis and imperatives of magic realism could be innovatively combined. For Nguigi, social realism and magical realism are modes of registering experience that are fundamentally evaluative. In this novel, the elites, hamstrung by their own twisted logic, are condemned to a life of perpetual confusion and self-delusion.

Ngugi's critical works such as "Decolonizing the Mind" and "Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams" display his remarkable critical powers that grow out of his deep commitment to African social advancement.

I know for a fact that "Decolonizing the Mind" is widely used as a text in universities in North America. In these works he raises the complex issue of writing in indigenous languages.

Half-way through his career, Ngugi decided to write in his native tongue, Gikuyu. He has built a solid theoretical edifice around this decision and it can be seen in the pages of critical works I referred to earlier. His interest in writing in indigenous languages goes beyond questions of creativity and emotional authenticity.

He remarked that, "We only know how to take to Europe and to the European language speakers in our own countries, never saying to ourselves, what can I give back to my language? What can I do with it, to play my part within it, to extend its possibilities, so that others who come after me will also be able to get from it something which I have helped to bring about".

This line of thinking has a direct relevance to those of us who have chosen to write in Sinhala..

His ceaseless preoccupation with art of the state and state of art has much to offer to us by way of re-igniting and re-directing our literary imagination.