On : Language, Writing, Community and Ngugi

---Sunil Sharma

Ngugi  wa Thiong’o belongs to an illustrious tradition of story-telling that, for me at least, has got high summits like Cervantes, Shakespeare, Turgenev and Dostoevsky, among others. They all share common traits: concern for community and culture without being parochial or jingoistic; writing in and a preference for the vernacular language; a full life as an explorer of ideas, forms and cultures and an overall global artistic vision that encompasses all the classes of their native countries. Although topical in many aspects, these high-value and extremely gifted writers transcend spatial/temporal barriers and speak to us as contemporaries, despite the materiality of our rootedness in different geographical locations, literary tastes, linguistic contexts, cultures and eras. They are Immortals who have defied time, and, space just cannot restrict them. Serious writing is always like that, otherwise Homer would have been dead a long ago---with physical Homer. Ngugi is an inheritor of a long tradition of writing---in other words, story-telling; of un-stale, youthful master narratives that leave us rejuvenated, post-reading. The great bilingual Kenyan writer is what other post-colonial writers are not: He is local, yet global in his impact and reach. His later works, although composed in his first language for his community, still stir powerful feelings of empathy, affinity and identification; shock of understanding and appreciation; in other words, a host of fellow feelings among us---the forced residents of a globalised society where MNCs with USA bases largely dictate and decide what we have to see, read and eat, think and express, wear and drive and work, in this totalitarian cultural set-up. Big Mac is no longer theirs; it is ours now---a global icon that celebrates a way of eating, living and thinking. Country contexts do not matter in this relentless conquest of mind---the thinking mind converted into a consumer’s mind that gets their orgasmic peak by shopping in a Wal-Mart franchisee in Khartoum or Dhaka. In fact, in a post-colonial but neo-colonial world, Ngugi sets up a contrasting example for other writers desirous of an USA visa or assignment in Ivy-league universities there: Go local. Discover the joys of writing in your language. Return to your beliefs. Explore the folklores and folktales that embody the aspirations and the experiences of an entire community and by becoming one with this world-view, get the right feel of your location, your history---your situatedness in a timeline that has got a past, present and future. This return to your roots, this journey back to your own language and through this language, to your community’s overarching value frameworks, can be very redemptive, fruitful and productive. It is like walking through a dense fog in the jungle and suddenly running into a glittering civilization, out in the open that was there before us but invisible due to opaqueness of vision. For the skeptics, Ngugi shows the way in this reverse migration. He is the typical expert guide in the quest for indigenous cultures and helps facilitate in the recovery of the receding voices and documenting of the things about to be eclipsed by forces of post-modernization and post-colonialism on the rampage in most of the third-world countries. For every bi/tri-lingual middle-class writer/academic dreaming of a home in America, Ngugi leaves a choice: Homeland and native language Vs. English, its enormous fringe benefits and a Western recognition. They call it the debate between Achebe and Ngugi. Critics might say he is good master but poor role-model. He himself is settled in USA, finally. But these are the strong contradictions in every powerful writer’s personality: The paradox of living in a volatile world where ideas and oppressive politics clash and produce unstable social conditions for intellectuals that often degenerate into open hostilities, prison terms and even complete annihilation of the dissidents. Ngugi is many things to many folks but one virtue remains constant: His love for Kenya and Kenyan people. This sincerity of conviction makes him a stand-out figure. And, for me, a colossal among writers from Africa who prefer English to denigrate their own countries of birth. Ngugi is a nomad---like the earlier predecessors. He is bold and courageous. And he is one with the community. The latter is his inspiration and bedrock. He is epic in his sweep and presentation; others from Africa are not. The latter’s vision is fragmentary and micro. Ngugi is macro, comprehensive and majestic. Like Kilimanjaro, he towers above them all.

Besides, he is an activist. The one that makes engagement with politics a must for his life. A writer of commitment. No, it is not a dirty word for him. The year 2011 shows that commitment is new global mantra. De-radicalized age is receding behind---if not a myth, it will become so soon when the disinherited and disillusioned join the swelling ranks of protesters. The Tahrir moment is proving universal and a nightmare for every corrupt ruler. Arab Spring is invading every closed or open political system where 1% is allowed to rule over 99% of the people. In such an unstable scenario, Ngugi shows the moral value of dissident, of serious writing that challenges the status-quo everywhere. The writer as subversive. The writing as authentic. As not an individual search for hybrid and hyphenated identities but as the genuine, well-articulated communal resistance against debasement, oppression and exploitation.

His lineage is grand. The colonial world brings literary treasures to the colonized and transmits the finest values of revolutionary bourgeoisie through its literature.  Despite the dangers of casting the rest of the world in their image of superior civilization by manipulating such writings, the fact remains that the colonized become alert to the existence a better, democratic, liberal world and possibility of a completely humane world. Ngugi’s literary ancestors---and ours also---question the political system that promotes the welfare of the elite at the cost of the majority and talk of a sense of history that restlessly demolishes all the totalitarian social structures in its evolution and growth as a world force. In his long career, Ngugi, as a professor of English and indigenous writer, resists the temptations of English and its global domination---from the position of an insider---and ably demonstrates that as a post-colonial subject, still embedded in Anglo-American grid, he can, through his writings in Gikuyu, can resist the transmission of the hegemonic cultural values of an evangelical and imperialistic West and in this long and painful process of sheer evolution, undermine the monochromatic western vision, especially UK and USA, as leading power brokers and power elites of a USA-centered world teetering perilously on an economic collapse caused by the recession and sub-prime crisis and huge bail-outs. It liberates him from the shackles of imperialistic ideology and sets him back on a return journey to original Africa, largely unseen to Western tourists and writers so far.

In a way, Ngugi resists colonial languages for their purely political and commercial manipulations by the elites in the spread of the consumerist, cultural and hegemonic values and their capacity for colonizing mindscapes of post-independent nations in Africa and elsewhere through the literary and media routes, by extension. His return to his own language by abandoning the use of English for creating his version of Kenyan society is remarkable, honest and sincere. It has enabled him to capture the dreams of his community in their first language; their cadence, vitality and idiom, most authentically, realistically and poetically. In English, it was not possible. The daily struggles, hopes, existentialist despair, angst and frustration in living in a society ruled by corrupt new black or brown masters are vividly painted by him in Gikuyu rather than in English. This strategy has paid him off well. His reputation and integrity as a writer has globally increased and stature uplifted, and, writing in a medium understood not by many outside Kenyan borders and within has not diminished his position as a writer of eminence. He has achieved what other writers preferring to write in English in Africa or elsewhere have failed to achieve: Authenticity of local flavour and an immediate connect with his own people. His work resonates with them. It is like catching their dreams for them in full details.  

You catch your dreams in your first, your own language, not in the language of your colonial oppressors and greedy masters, for whom your grandpa was a dark-skinned coolie and your nation as a looting ground. The souls of these heathens were to be saved from rotting in hell and the dark place was to be saved from utter damnation and anarchy. Order, enlightenment and progress were to be brought onto such dark folks and a dark continent by the marching missionaries and merchants and their ruthless armies.

Writing in your first language brings a certain proximity denied to writers who write in English outside the West. It is gaining access to the collective dreams of your peers and compatriots. It is like portraying your own community and nation through a language spoken by a majority and thus recovering a healthy sense of historical moment via it. It is communicating with your people in their language, not in an alien language. It is dealing with contemporary realities through the prism of a common medium of perception and communication. Great writers have done this only. They have gone to the so-called vernacular rather than Latin or courtly French in the past for identifying the national sense and mood.

Cervantes, Shakespeare, Turgenev and Dostoevsky did that only---elevating the languages spoken by their compatriots and peers alike in their respective countries and time. Cervantes wrote in vernacular Spanish; Shakespeare in English in complete contrast to the prevalent style of the University wits, Turgenev wrote in Russian, despite his love for French and Dostoevsky was steeped in Russian language only.

Then, there are other affinities as well; uniting them across the temporal-spatial divides. Their nomadic nature; quest for national spirit; championing of the underdog and the subversive nature.

Take the wandering Cervantes first. He served in the army, got wounded fatally, lost his left arm, was captured as a slave by the pirates on the high seas and got ransomed and finally released; got jailed for fraud and later on settled down to write his vision of Spain in transit. Don is a living vital literary document---as alive and kicking to-day, as it was in the 17^th century. Its vitality is never diminished. He drew a complete picture of manners and mores, in a language spoken by the common people. Democracy had arrived in a big way. The vast canvas and the epic scale of Don are just staggering. You cannot have such broad and in-depth vision today. He talks of a society in transit. Aristocracy dying; the revolutionary bourgeoisie arriving in Spain, and, Cervantes caught at the intersecting junction.

Shakespeare, escaping from Stratford-upon-Avon---found sanctuary in London. He created unforgetful dramas for the Elizabethans in their lingo. His theater is live and inclusive. All classes meet here. History, robust and on the go, is witnessed in the mix of classes. A complete society emerges in his rich plays, a society in transit.

Turgenev, escaping from his past as a landed gentry and oppressive nature of such an unequal Russia of serfs and lords, roamed the countryside and came up with his famous Hunter’s Sketches, a sensitive, almost poetic evocation of Russian countryside and the domination of the serfs by the cruel landowning gentry. Again a society in transition. Anticipating broadly the revolution of the 20^th century Russia in its unrest and turmoil that such unequal social conditions are bound to crate sooner or later. Turgenev creates a claustrophobic Russia where future generation were to be active in order to breathe freely.

Dostoevsky was involved with radical causes, got death sentence that was commuted at the last minute and his religious conversion that helped him deal with the crises of such a violent world. All these writers were actively involved in the social life of their time and came to develop an epic world-vision by their identification with the historical moment in all its flaws and beauty. They condemned the brutalities and championed the cause of the poor. You might like their solutions or not but they are very sincere in their commitment towards their craft and society at large, elevating them above the ordinary.

Writing is a means of protest, of resistance, of change---in short, activism on behalf of the voiceless.

Ngugi inherits the same illustrious tradition of writing as a challenge to the ruling elite/s and dominant ideologies, if not consciously, but as a subconscious influence through a western education and exposure. His return to his first language and folktales---the repository of collective beliefs----signals his commitment to a social cause: Of radicalizing the consciousness of the recipient reader/viewer through serious writing and using literary forms as empowering sites of protest, resistance, awakening and change. His theatre does that for his people what Brechtian theatre did for the Germans and later on, to all of us.

It awakened us from our slumber.

Ngugi family suffered a lot during the early Mau Mau revolution. He came back to teach in Kenya, got arrested for his questioning attitude, suffered a lot, his home there got burgled; he moved to America by accepting a dual teaching assignment and was racially abused recently in a hotel---showing things have not improved much for him either in homeland or his adopted country. Issues like poverty, exploitation of the poor and political oppression in free African nations and racialism in advanced nations still preoccupy his artistic attention. The dream of a free and fully democratic and liberal society still eludes him---and rest of us, located in different historical moments and contexts world-wide. His nation is still in transition. Most societies are dynamic and in constant flux. From being an organic intellectual to a dissident, Ngugui has become a global beacon for the successive generations of the post-colonial writers and readers. He shows the way to us: Either follow the dictates of the Western academia and publishing MNCs and write about Africa/India the way they like you to be or abandon the language of the former masters, resist the colonization of mind and go back to your own roots by celebrating that lifestyle in your own language. Most of the post-colonial writings in Africa or Asia are either mildly critical or supportive of the colonial experience. Most of the time, it is organic to the project of colonialism. They treat the former white masters as benevolent ones and criticize the administration in mild terms. The writers still pander to certain myths and stereotypes in English or French or Spanish to please their new masters. A certain India or Africa---mostly caricatured, chaotic, unruly and despotic---is allowed to emerge in these carefully-calibrated and dispersed writings by writers writing in London, Paris or New York. Ngugi, through his radical views on writing, language and its politics, the experience of post-colonial societies, has demonstrated that for a full recovery of selfhood, racial memory and historical sense of location and situatedness, of community feeling, a writer, a true writer, has to abandon the language of former colonial masters and write in his nation’s language. The rest is as real as the fake roses in the dentist’s clinic---to cheer you up before your appointment in the reclining chair for that painful dental procedure called root-canaling.