Twenty years ago, if you had asked me, I would have said Ngũgĩ was my favorite writer. At the time, I had read just three of his books; all early works. I don't know that I've written about it here -- or much elsewhere for that matter -- but I wasn't much of a reader growing up, and even when I started college. I date the beginning of my reading life to the semester in 1996 that I spent in Harare, Zimbabwe. (Suddenly, I feel maybe I have written about this before?) I had a lot of free time, and not much of a social life. The Syracuse University outpost where I took most of my classes had a small library (basically a bookshelf from which we were free to borrow books). The books I remember reading from that library are
Sula,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and two books by Ngũgĩ:
Weep Not, Child and
The River Between. The semester before I went to Zimbabwe, I was a student at Oberlin College and
Weep Not, Child had been assigned reading in a class I took on African religion, but I didn't read it. (As I said, at that time, I was not yet a reader.) But when I did finally pick up
Weep Not, Child it stunned me. What I found so stunning about it - and also about
A Grain of Wheat, which I read later and also loved, was the complexity of the characters and the empathy Ngũgĩ showed for them in his writing. No one was all good or all bad.
Weep Not, Child, to tell it very simply, is a love story in the midst of a revolution between two people whose moments never align. First one puts the revolution before all else while the other just wants to go one with life, and then their roles reverse -- and you understand why in each case. It's poignant and beautiful. In any case, after reading those three books, I didn't go back to Ngũgĩ for some time. It wasn't really a conscious decision - I continued to think of him as one of my favorite writers and every year at Nobel time when his name showed up high on the lists of the English oddsmakers, I would always hope (and still do) that this would be his year. When, in 2008, I happened to stumble across a new(ish) novel of his at a bookstore, I was thrilled. I bought and read
Wizard of the Crow right away. It was quite different from his earlier work -- more satirical and allegorical -- but I loved it too.
I can't speak with complete authority, because there's one book (
Petals of Blood) and a few plays that I have not read between the three early books I read in my youth and
Devil on the Cross, but I suspect that
Devil on the Cross marks the change in style. It is the first novel Ngũgĩ wrote in Gikuyu, and he wrote it on toilet paper while imprisoned after his arrest for the political message in the play he cowrote,
I Will Marry When I Want.
Devil on the Cross centers around five characters who meet in a matatu (a private van sort of like a long distance version of a NYC dollar van) from Narobi to Ilmorog, plus the driver. At Ilmorog, they all attend a competition in "Modern Theft and Robbery." The narrative is structured almost entirely as a series of personal narratives. In the matatu on the way to Ilmorog, each character shares his or her own story with the other passengers. When they arrive at the competition, the each competitor shares his own story of thieving and robbing. The first competitor, who steals to feed himself, is thrown out as a common criminal. The subsequent competitors all try to outdo one another in their capitalist exploitations to impress the members of the Organization of Modern Theft and Robbery, headquartered in New York, USA. The allegories are heavy handed: this is clearly the writing of someone disillusioned by the state of affairs in post-independence Kenya. (The book is dedicated "To all Kenyans struggling against the neo-colonial stage of imperialism.) But even with the blunt force messaging, there are moments of beauty and of hilarity. And the end! I saw the twist that was coming maybe 30 pages from the end, but I didn't know how it would play out. The end is like the most perfect blaxploitation ending; it should be a movie.
