(On Wednesday, 6 November
2013, I gave the second lecture that week on Ngugi’s memoir, Dreams in a Time of War, for my first-year class at
the University of British Columbia, English 111, which is an introduction
to prose non-fiction, focused this year on the theme of “dislocations.” I have
been developing what I want to think of as an “improvisational pedagogy,” which
aims to foster as sense of engagement by trying to stage an on-your-toes critical
thinking around texts, and their interpretation: the idea is to go into class
well prepared, but to try and let the lecture unfold in situ, allowing the structure to emerge as you speak. When this kind
of teaching works, the results (from my perspective) are really significant,
and what I hope happens, right there in the classroom, is a more vital and
compelling dialogue around the course material. However, this kind of
improvising can also be a bit risky, in as much as it can also potentially fall
apart on you. After my first lecture on Ngugi, I felt that I hadn’t brought the
material together as fully as I had hoped, so I decided to script the second
lecture more completely, which I did the night before, not to work at the last
minute but still to preserve a few vestiges of that critical immediacy, if
possible. The last paragraph of the script, along these lines, isn’t really a
coherent paragraph, but consists of a set of claims about Ngugi’s memoir that I
could then elaborate at that moment, which I did. Here is the script for that
lecture, which I think turned out pretty well; this was intended as introduction
to reading Ngugi for first-year students, not as particularly original criticism
– work for which others are probably much better qualified than I am. But it
does attempt to map out my own engagements with Ngugi’s texts, to model a potential
critical practice for these students.)
Over this past summer, I read
In the House of the Interpreter, a
second recent volume of memoir by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, published in November
2012. That reading prompted me to put the
first volume of Ngugi’s memoirs, Dreams
in a Time of War (2010), on the syllabus for this course. As in the earlier
text, Ngugi offers a first-hand account of growing up in late colonial Kenya
centred on his time as a student, in the latter volume his experience at
Alliance, the first high school in the region aimed specifically at educating
Africans – apparently modeled on Booker
T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The New York Times “Sunday Book Review” (from February 8, 2013) praises
Ngugi’s second memoir for “eloquently
telegraph[ing] the complicated experience of being simultaneously oppressed and
enlightened at the hands of a colonial regime.” The double-bind of an
imperialist cultural pedagogy, empowering the colonized by inculcating in them
a reflexive deference to the literature and values of the colonizers, is a
pervasive theme of both memoirs. The earlier volume also maps Ngugi’s
peripatetic early experiences at several schools, from the fostering of Gikuyu
language and identity at Kamandura elementary to the often violent suppression
of native culture at the “new” Manguo school. In Decolonizing the Mind, Ngugi has recounted the punishments he and
his classmates received at this latter school for speaking their own languages,
or for not speaking English, and he replays that infamous scene for us in Dreams in a Time of War:
In
the new Manguo school, English was still emphasized as the key to modernity,
but, whereas in the Karing’a Manguo English and Gikuyu coexisted, now Gikuyu
was frowned upon. The witch hunt for those speaking African languages in the
compound began, the consequence rising to bodily punishment in some cases. A
teacher would give a piece of metal to the first student he caught speaking an
African language. The culprit would pass it to the next person who repeated the
infraction. This would go on the whole day, and whoever was the last to have
the metal in his possession would be beaten. Sometimes the metal was inscribed
with demeaning words or phrases like “Call me stupid.” I saw teachers draw
blood from students. Despite this we were proud of our English proficiency and
eager to practice the new language outside the school compound. (177)
It’s important for Ngugi to
recognize that the key moment in the colonization of selves and minds happens
in and through linguistic violence, epitomized in the sharp-edged scrawl on
that metallic shard. Ngugi traces his largely innocent and even “eager”
complicity – and the complicity of his classmates – in the British colonial
machine (and who, after all, wants to be beaten, or wants to be labeled
stupid?), but his aim is often more diagnostic than imputing. He tries to
describe and to understand how this fractious doubling of self and place
emerges as a cultural symptom of colonization, and he wants to lay the
groundwork for evolving a set of tactics and practices with which he can
negotiate with that complicity, if not somehow manage to throw it off.
The title page of his 2006 novel Wizard of the Crow
bears a one-line epigraph: “A translation from Gīkūyū by the author.” Ngugi has
been practicing self-translation from Gikuyu into English since the late 1970s.
There is a deeply political commitment in self-translation that emerges when we
know something of Ngugi’s biography, which I am reproducing from his own
website; in 1977,
Kenya’s ruling dictatorship
appears to have made a number of attempts to assassinate Ngugi in the decades
following his release, and his work was often suppressed in Kenya; he has
written and taught in exile, principally in the United States, to the present
day. While in prison, he made a statement about his writing practices that has
gained wide notoriety, remarking on what he felt was a necessary turn in his
work toward indigeneity and autochthony, a reconnection to a genetic sense of
place:
Dreams
in a Time of War begins with Ngugi’s nostalgic imaginative
return to the familial – in fact, largely maternal – “oral universe of
story-telling,” shared around a fire (29). Going to school, and gaining a
education for which he yearns palpably, also fractures that intimate connection
to home, to place: “And then I went to school, a colonial school, and this
harmony was broken. The language of my education was no longer the language of
my culture” (Decolonising the Mind). English,
and soon English literature, produced a seductively modern scission from the
vitality of the oral, from its magic:
English
became the measure of intelligence and ability in the arts, the sciences, and
all the other branches of learning. English became the main determinant of a
child’s progress up the ladder of formal education.
Literary
education was now determined by the dominant language while also reinforcing
that dominance. Orature (oral literature) in Kenyan languages stopped. In
primary school I now read simplified Dickens and Stevenson alongside Rider
Haggard . . . .
Thus
language and literature were taking us further and further from ourselves to
other selves, from our world to other worlds. (taken from Decolonising
the Mind)
Understanding Ngugi’s complex
relationship to those “other worlds,” to globalization, is crucial to beginning
to evolve a reading of his memoir that remains responsive and alert to the
negotiations he undertakes with decolonization. It’s not a question, after all,
of simply returning to Gikuyu; in many ways, Ngugi simply can’t go back, at
least not unproblematically. His writing operates self-consciously from a
position of exile, of geographic otherness. On the second page of Dreams in a Time of War, for example, he
frames his hunger – as a child of poverty, he couldn’t afford lunch at school –
analogically, thinking his life echoes a famous scene from Oliver Twist (“Please, sir, can I have some more?”), which, he
says, he had read in an “abridged version” at school: “I identified with that
question; only for me it was often directed at my mother, my sole benefactor,
who always gave me more whenever she could” (4). The literature of forced
displacement is also the literature of analogic return to the maternal hearth,
to earthy genetics. The book opens, in fact, with a reflection on reading
(“years later”) the opening line of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but Ngugi hears not only an arbitrary mimicry of
the name of a colonial Kenyan governor, Sir Charles Eliot, but also the
impossible echoes of a day in April 1954 in his hometown of Limuru, when his
elder brother Good Wallace, a Mau Mau partisan, escapes police custody.
Highbrow, canonical Anglo-American literature is reappropriated by Ngugi’s
personal Gikuyu imaginary, and converted into raw material for popular local
story. In his Wellek Library lectures published in 2012 as Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, Ngugi describes
this re-appropriation of canon (itself framed by a reference to an exiled
maverick of African-American literature, the novelist James Baldwin) as a
necessary step for re-entering the debate – the dialectics, as he suggests
(compare Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,
Marji’s comic book “Dialectic Materialism”) – that not only surrounds but
actually informs the decolonizing self, a self not so much translated as
continuously translating, negotiating its own terms:
This post-colonial
catholicity – a kind of troubled but widely various universalism, perhaps a
“humanism of the other” as
one philosopher (Emmanuel Levinas) suggestively puts it – manifests itself
in Dreams in a Time of War as young
Ngugi’s enthusiasm for the poetic magic of words, both Gikuyu and English; “one
day,” he writes, “I am able to read on my own the Gikuyu primer we used in
class”:
I can
hear the music. The choice and arrangement of the words, the cadence, I can’t
pick any one thing that makes it so beautiful and long-lived in my memory. I
realized that even written words can carry the music I loved in stories [. . .]
(64-65)
Gikuyu transcribed in
Latin-European orthography promises a return to that enlivening maternal
hearth, but that return is only enabled by the acquisition of a literacy
proffered by colonial culture. Biblical passages – re-purposed chunks of
Christian liturgy – are also almost as resonant for him: “I committed . . .
whole passages to memory. They were poetic. They were music” (69). Ngugi seems
to unpack an Afrological
cadence, a rhythmic sense, even from Western European literatures; they sing in
his ear, in a manner that recalls Karen Blixen’s seduction by the landscape and
culture of Kenya in the early pages of Out
of Africa: “When
you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find that it is the same in all her
music” (24). But for Ngugi, the point isn’t to parody the kind of cultural
safari in which Blixen engages, trying to catch a vitality from that world that
promises her some “magnificent enlargement of all [her] world” (25). The
enlargement entailed by colonial modernity certainly catches up young Ngugi in
its whelming sweep, but the cadences he uncovers in his languages, in
translation, wants to reverse that flow, to push back at it, and to open other
spaces.
More often than not, that oral creativity finds itself
beaten down or overwritten by imperialist literacies; space for articulating
shared connections to place, to ground oneself, is not always made within the
written, but is instead undone by it, as in the case of the double-sale of
Ngugi’s father’s land. (See page 19.) The Gikuyu, by Ngugi’s account, are
forced to re-appropriate resources, to squat, to inhabit their own spaces
simultaneously as outsiders and native and to make subversive use of the scraps
and shards of economic modernization, of globalization. Consider Ngugi’s
description of how he and his brother constructed their own skewed version of a
wheelbarrow, which they then market back to those in power – metonymically, the
landlord’s children. (See pages 52-55.) His description of his circumcision (pages
196-203) counterpoints cultural inscription on the body – a Gikuyu ritual of
initiation into the community of manhood – with the modern work of education,
of self-writing. How are bodies tied to place, and how are they sites of
displacement, of translation, of debate? Conflicting accounts of the Lari
massacre (pages 180-81) seem aptly to frame, for Ngugi, the ironies – which
he’ll later start to spin into dialectics, generative conflicts – of colonial
discourse. And finally, Mzee Ngandi’s recounting of Jomo Kenyatta’s 1952
courtroom speech offers us, through the added filter of Ngugi’s memory, an
instance of the creative misprisions and re-appropriations of story-telling, as
the oral and the written collide and reshape one another. (See page 187 on.)
This section concludes by giving the memoir its title, and suggesting something
of the expansive power not simply of myth but of myth-making that Ngugi wants
to take on in his own creative writing (195).
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