Ngũgĩ wa thiong’o’s texts demysted the world and insisted on action
One of the world literature Big names have been out of time. The Kenyan writer, playwright and thinker Ngũgĩ wa thiong’o was often mentioned in the Nobel Prize context, but never received the prize. I think I know why. He wrote too straight ahead! He has not swept his social criticism of sentimentalism or hid it behind metaphors and contradictions such as such as IzhiguroThe Pamuk or Gurnah. No, with NGũGĩ, on the contrary: his new art is for the bare naked core.
In “The Devil on the Cross” (1980) the protagonist Jacinta Wariinga takes the wrong bus and happens to end up at a meeting for “thieves and robbers of the modern type”. That means: weapons companies, large banks and multinational raw materials. Their suits are made from banknotes from every country and the Swedish Krona is not missing. After the Hells Angels band has played, the participants compete for whom the Kenyan people can rob the best. A pocket thief happened to go into the meeting, but is quickly ejected: here only saturated thieves are released that Rob in the hundreds of thousands!
Those are the novels of NGũGĩ. Merciless in their criticism of imperialism and new colonialism, and somehow antimetasphoric; The Spirit takes clothes and really becomes.
‘The devil on the cross” is written In the Kamiti maximum security prison, toilet paper. (“It was not difficult – the paper was rough and hard, meant to torture the prisoners, but what was bad for the body was good for the pen.”) It was the first modern novel written on Kikuyu. Among the African writers, the general view since the Makery Conference in 1962 that French and English needed “Afrikanized”. But in cell 16 where NGũGĩ was to have written a crucial piece against Jomo Kenyattas Government, he changed thoughts. In the essay book “Decolonizing the Mind” he explains that the language is central to the liberation: only in the people’s own language, with one’s own statements and forms of expression – for example, choir singing – can one create a truly released literature.
He had already written a number of novels in English under the name James Ngũgĩ: “Up through the Darkness”, “If not the wheat grain”, “A Flower of Blood”, All masterpieces about the anti -colonial struggle of Kenya. In the latter he attacked the new rulers who took over it after independence only to enrich himself.
Ngũgĩ wa thiong’o means ngũgĩ, the son of Thiongo, although he identified himself more with his mother, Wanjikũ. He was born in 1938, in a Kenya who was under British rule. It is the same country and the same era that is shown so hot and picturesque by Karen BlixenBut a completely different landscape appears in the memoirs of Ngũgĩ. A true his father, like many other Kenyans, was robbed of his country because the British court decided that oral similarities were not applicable and where the now landless father began to drink and abuse three of his four women. Ngũgĩ’s mother was one of them, and together with the children she returned to her parents’ house. The fighting between the colonial force and the Mau-Mau-Man are intensified. The mother’s house was burned down by the British and Ngũgĩ’s Döve -Half -Brother was killed by a British officer because he did not stay on the order.
All this changed fundamental NGũGĩ. From an admirer of the British and a top student in their schools, he started to develop critical thinking. In the sixties he also became Marxist, and the literature of NGũGĩ is also Marxist in the right sense of the word: it dismantles the world, exposes production conditions and calls for action. As the protagonist of “Modigari” says: “The world is up and down. The robber mentions the robbery for robbers, the murderer calls the murderer for murderers.” Read it!
We will miss you, ngũgĩ wa thiong’o, ngũgĩ wa Wanjikũ.
Cool performing arts and crying critics
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