Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading

Brendon Nicholls

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754658252
• eBook ISBN: 9781317087571
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first comprehensive book-length study of gender politics in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's fiction. Brendon Nicholls argues that mechanisms of gender subordination are strategically crucial to Ngugi's ideological project from his first novel to his most recent one. Nicholls describes the historical pressures that lead Ngugi to represent women as he does, and shows that the novels themselves are symptomatic of the cultural conditions that they address. Reading Ngugi's fiction in terms of its Gikuyu allusions and references, a gendered narrative of history emerges that creates transgressive spaces for women. Nicholls bases his discussion on moments during the Mau Mau rebellion when women's contributions to the anticolonial struggle could not be reduced to a patriarchal narrative of Kenyan history, and this interpretive maneuver permits a reading of Ngugi's fiction that accommodates female political and sexual agency. Nicholls contributes to postcolonial theory by proposing a methodology for reading cultural difference. This methodology critiques cultural practices like clitoridectomy in an ethical manner that seeks to avoid both cultural imperialism and cultural relativisim. His strategy of 'performative reading,' that is, making the conditions of one text (such as folklore, history, or translation) active in another (for example, fiction, literary narrative, or nationalism), makes possible an ethical reading of gender and of the conditions of reading in translation.

Chapter 1
A Topography of ‘Woman’

Weep Not, Child, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s first published novel,1 takes its title from a line in Walt Whitman’s poem, ‘On the Beach at Night’.2 There are a number of ways in which ‘On the Beach at Night’ contributes to the framing of Ngugi’s novel.3 Written in the autumn of 1870,4 during a period of spiritual convalescence after the emotionally devastating American Civil War (1861–65), Whitman’s poem gestures towards the consolations provided by an emerging American national unity.5 Ngugi’s novel – a loosely autobiographical account of childhood during the Mau Mau period (1952–57) and written on the cusp of Kenyan national independence (1963) – is similarly positioned in its meditations upon national conflict and national reconciliation. Ngugi’s very title, Weep Not, Child, is a consolatory statement. But whatever its implicit consolations, the novel’s title is fraught with underlying anxieties that it is scarcely able to contain.

Firstly, ‘Weep Not, Child’ is a gendered mode of address. In this, it emulates its source material in Whitman’s poem, where a child holds the hand of ‘her’ father and is comforted by him with these words. In Weep Not, Child, this gendered mode of address works conveniently alongside the ubiquitous infantilization of women. For example, we are told that ‘Njoroge always longed for the day when he would be a man, for then he would have the freedom to sit with big circumcised girls and touch them as he saw the young men do’.6 Here, circumcised women are ‘big girls’ – and therefore remain children – despite the fact that it is exactly clitoridectomy that traditionally confers adult status upon Gikuyu women.7 Hence, the distinction between ‘big circumcised girls’ (not ‘women’) and ‘young men’ reveals a mechanism of gender diminution that is arguably also at work in the novel’s title. Unsurprisingly, the character who cries most abundantly in the novel is Njoroge’s female childhood friend, Mwihaki,8 who is usually rendered in childlike imagery, even as an adolescent. Njoroge’s inadequate political vision – which at one point aspires to the ‘task of comforting people’9 – translates as his inability to console Mwihaki. This inability contributes to the larger crisis in Njoroge’s masculinity that culminates in his attempt to commit suicide.

Secondly, ‘Weep Not, Child’ is an injunction to silence. It is a consolation, but it forbids the expression of grief or pain.10 The expression of pain in this novel is designated by a specific, and significant, utterance. We see this when Njoroge is first familiarized with the vowels of the English alphabet at school:

Teacher (making another mark on the board) Say Eee.

Class Eeeeeeee.

That sounded nice and familiar. When a child cried he said, Eeeee, Eeeee.11

It is, of course, singularly ironic that ‘Weep Not, Child’ would itself be unutterable were it not to contain exactly those repetitious utterances of pain (the ‘Eeeee, Eeeee’ in ‘Weep Not, Child’) that it expressly attempts to silence. The novel’s consolatory title ultimately pronounces itself imprisoned within the alienating and violent English linguistic structures that have produced it. Equally, the narrative of Weep Not, Child – Njoroge’s story – would be impossible to tell without the failures of consolation. One of the failures of consolation in the novel’s title is that it is indebted to a literary forbear, Walt Whitman, who is the subject of a gentle critique elsewhere in Ngugi’s oeuvre.12 The title, ostensibly a text’s declaration of singularity and identity, is in this instance internally conflicted. Additionally, given that ‘Weep Not, Child’ is an injunction to silence, and given that this silence is designated by a specific utterance (‘e’) which evokes the alienating English linguistic structures that support an ethnocentric system of value, the anxiety of cultural influence associated with the ‘father-poet’ suggests a latent racial inscription: ‘Whit[e]man’.13 This is perhaps an unavoidable consequence of critiquing a Western cultural legacy while working within its traditions.

As a citation, as a gendered utterance, as an injunction to silence and as a consolation freighted with anxieties of influence, ‘Weep Not, Child’ is reconciled in the ideological device ‘woman’.14 The female characters in this novel inhabit fictions of substantiality: they carry the burden of exemplification. Expressed otherwise, they are figures that embody or incarnate an imported mythos. They demonstrate historical effects and enable masculine anti-colonial critique. Accordingly, their spaces of articulation are frequently also sites of censure or repudiation. This is consistent with the forms of gendered silencing that Ngugi’s title conducts.

At its most general level, my argument will take its cue from a statement made by Cixous in ‘Exchange’ (with Catherine Clément): ‘Everything on the order of culture and cultural objects has a prohibition placed on it, which causes class positions in relation to culture. Likewise, woman is uneasy in relation to a certain sort of production – the production of signs …’15 Although Cixous and Clément’s statement clearly does not have colonial and post-Independence Kenya in mind, I would like to examine the way in which something like this unease operates in the first novel that Ngugi published. Weep Not, Child was written in 1962 and published in 1964, and this corresponds with Kenya’s transition from colony to independent nation – beginning with Kenyatta’s release from incarceration (1961) and ending with the declaration of the Republic (1964).

The ideologically conflicted Kenya-in-transition that forms the backdrop to the writing of Weep Not, Child may have helped to determine its generic organization – a semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman that details an intellectual consciousness whose evolution and whose contradictory affinities (traditionalism, liberal-progressive colonial education, nationalism, Christianity) follow trajectories that are occasionally at odds with its political conscientization. This patterning in turn points to the fact that fictional texts may mirror, at some level, the social matrix in which they are produced, because they partake of the discourses which construct and contest that matrix. As is well known, Ngugi’s conversion to Marxism occurred at the University of Leeds after his first two novels had been written.16 However, in a foreword to Homecoming, Ime Ikkideh mentions that Marxism ‘provided an ideological framework for opinions [Ngugi] already vaguely held’.17 As if to confirm Ikkideh’s assertion, Weep Not, Child shows that Njoroge’s scholarliness is occasioned by class anxieties: ‘As [Njoroge] could not find companionship with Jacobo’s children (except Mwihaki), for these belonged to the middle class that was rising and beginning to be conscious of itself as such, he turned to reading.’18 Of course, the solitary activity of reading is one form of middle-class insularity into which Njoroge himself is becoming assimilated.

Unsurprisingly, then, there is already evidence of a nascent class analysis in Weep Not, Child (and in The River Between). This class analysis is especially noticeable in the different economic strata occupied by the tenant farmer Ngotho and the landowner Jacobo. In addition, the novel is sensitive to the ways in which educational achievements confer an upward social mobility upon Njoroge while simultaneously alienating his sensibility, so that Njoroge’s sense of responsibility to his community is compromised. I am not suggesting that the first two novels are examples of a fully-fledged ‘socialist realism’, but merely that they indicate Ngugi’s early predisposition towards the Marxist world view that he would later adopt. In this sense, the first two novels are revealing in their relation to the later fictions.

Of course, ‘vaguely held’ proto-Marxist opinions do not translate into complex social representations at this point in Ngugi’s career. His early fiction isolates certain social types in Kenyan society and it involves these figures in interpersonal dramas played out on a political and economic stage. This isolation of social types has a quadruple import. Firstly, it enables a young intellectual consciousness to confront the complexities of a society in transition towards independence and to render these complexities in a reduced, and hence manageable, form.19 Secondly, the isolation of social types amounts to a privileging of individual consciousness over collective consciousness. The type aggregates and simplifies the social and its relations, personifying complexity in a single figure. Thirdly, the isolation of social types and the sorts of consciousness it privileges amounts to what we might term a ‘privatization of the sensibility’. In sociological terms, this privatization to some extent emerges out of the intellectual élite’s exaggerated sense of its own responsibility in shaping a society in transition to independence – creating obvious contradictions in its class solidarity with the peasant constituency it seeks to address.20 Fourthly, the privatization of the sensibility requires a vehicle to domesticate the larger national drama confronted by the native intellectual. In Weep Not, Child, this vehicle is ‘woman’, a device that staves off ideological contradiction. My reading will engage Weep Not, Child at the various points at which Ngugi constructs the female subject. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that the female characters are uneasily implicated in the social vision of the novel.21

Myths of Substantiality and the Landscape as a Consensual Trope

In Weep Not, Child, mechanisms of gender subordination enable an interplay of the male-dominated discourses of Christianity, Gikuyu nationalism, anti-colonial resistance and liberal-progressive education. The most obvious gender disparity in the novel lies in the different values ascribed to the sexual conquests of the male and female characters. When the barber recounts his reminiscences of the Second World War to his incredulous customers, his self-construction as a military adventurer is...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A Topography of ‘Woman’
• 2 Clitoridectomy and Gikuyu Nationalism
• 3 The Landscape of Insurgency
• 4 Reading against the Grain (of Wheat)
• 5 Paternity, Illegitimacy and Intertextuality
• 6 The Neocolony as a Prostituted Economy
• Conclusion – Prostituting Translation: An Ethics of Postcolonial Reading
• Bibliography
• Index