Hello Viewers! This blog is written in response as a part of my last Semester assignment in Paper No. 206 The African Literature. In this blog, I will explore the topic Postmodern Spirit in Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's 'Petals of the Blood'.
- Name: Payal Bambhaniya
- Semester: 4 ( Batch - 2022-2024 )
- Enrollment No.: 4069206420220002
- Roll no.: 14
- Topic: Postmodern Spirit in Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's Petals of the Blood
- E- mail Address: payalbambhaniya92@gmail.com
- Subject/ Paper no.: 206
- Paper Name: The African Literature
- Paper Code: 22413
- Submitted to: Smt. S.B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
- Date of Submission: 8th May, 2024
Postmodern Spirit in Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's 'Petals of the Blood'
Introduction:-
African literature is a rich tapestry of stories reflecting the continent's diverse cultures and experiences. From ancient oral traditions to contemporary novels and poetry, it covers a wide range of topics including history, identity, and societal issues. Renowned authors like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Tsitsi Dangarembga have contributed immensely to this literary tradition. Their works offer profound insights into the complexities of African societies and the human condition. Through its storytelling, African literature not only entertains but also educates and fosters empathy and understanding across diverse cultural contexts.
About Writer : Ngugi Wa Thiong'o:-
Ngugi wa Thiong’o (born January 5, 1938, Limuru, Kenya) is a Kenyan writer who is considered East Africa’s leading novelist. His popular Weep Not, Child (1964) was the first major novel in English by an East African. As he became sensitised to the effects of colonialism in Africa, Ngugi adopted his traditional name and wrote in the Bantu language of Kenya’s Kikuyu people.
Ngugi received bachelor’s degrees from Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, in 1963 and from Leeds University, Yorkshire, England, in 1964. After doing graduate work at Leeds, he served as a lecturer in English at University College, Nairobi, Kenya, and as a visiting professor of English at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, U.S. From 1972 to 1977 he was senior lecturer and chairman of the department of literature at the University of Nairobi.
The prizewinning Weep Not, Child is the story of a Kikuyu family drawn into the struggle for Kenyan independence during the state of emergency and the Mau Mau rebellion. A Grain of Wheat (1967), generally held to be artistically more mature, focuses on the many social, moral, and racial issues of the struggle for independence and its aftermath. A third novel, The River Between (1965), which was actually written before the others, tells of lovers kept apart by the conflict between Christianity and traditional ways and beliefs and suggests that efforts to reunite a culturally divided community by means of Western education are doomed to failure. Petals of Blood (1977) deals with social and economic problems in East Africa after independence, particularly the continued exploitation of peasants and workers by foreign business interests and a greedy indigenous bourgeoisie.
In a novel written in Kikuyu and English versions, Caitaani Mutharaba-ini (1980; Devil on the Cross), Ngugi presented these ideas in an allegorical form. Written in a manner meant to recall traditional ballad singers, the novel is a partly realistic, partly fantastical account of a meeting between the Devil and various villains who exploit the poor. Mũrogi wa Kagogo (2004; Wizard of the Crow) brings the dual lenses of fantasy and satire to bear upon the legacy of colonialism not only as it is perpetuated by a native dictatorship but also as it is ingrained in an ostensibly decolonized culture itself.
The Black Hermit (1968; produced 1962) was the first of several plays, of which The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976; produced 1974), co-written with Micere Githae Mugo, is considered by some critics to be his best. He was also coauthor, with Ngugi wa Mirii, of a play first written in Kikuyu, Ngaahika Ndeenda (1977; I Will Marry When I Want), the performance of which led to his detention for a year without trial by the Kenyan government. (His book Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary, which was published in 1981, describes his ordeal.) The play attacks capitalism, religious hypocrisy, and corruption among the new economic elite of Kenya. Matigari ma Njiruungi (1986; Matigari) is a novel in the same vein.
Ngugi presented his ideas on literature, culture, and politics in numerous essays and lectures, which were collected in Homecoming (1972), Writers in Politics (1981), Barrel of a Pen (1983), Moving the Centre (1993), and Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams (1998). In Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), Ngugi argued for African-language literature as the only authentic voice for Africans and stated his own intention of writing only in Kikuyu or Kiswahili from that point on. Such works earned him a reputation as one of Africa’s most articulate social critics.
About Novel: Petals of the Blood
Wole Soyinka's theatrical debut, ‘A Dance of the Forests’ was presented at the Nigerian Independence celebrations in october 1960. In it, Soyinka reveals the rotten aspects of society and demonstrates that the past is no better than the present when it comes to the seamy side of life. Soyinka lays bare the fabric of Nigerian society and warns people as they are on the brink of a new stage in their history.
‘A Dance of the Forests’ is considered one of Soyinka's early and significant works. The Play is known for its complex and Symbolic narrative, which explores themes related to Nigerian identity, the impact of colonisation, and tension between tradition and modernity. It delves into the rich cultural heritage of Nigeria, drawing on Yoruba mythology and symbolism. The entire Play revolves around a community and gathers in the forest to perform a ritual dance. Throughout the Performance, various characters embody different aspects of Nigerian society, and the narrative unfolds through a series of symbolic encounters and dialogues. Wole Soyinka uses traditional African elements such as Dance, and music to convey the deeper meanings of messages.
As With many of Soyinka's works, ‘A Dance of the Forests’ reflects the complexities of post colonial African identity and the challenges faced by a nation transforming from colonial rule to independence. It is a layered and thought provoking Play that invites readers and viewers to engage with its themes and interpretations.
Postmodern Spirit in Petals of the Blood:-
One of the major themes in Ngugi’s novel is the deceptiveness of any notion of an epistemological rupture between colonial and post-colonial society. And the wider significance of the postmodernism condition lies according to Homi K. Bhabha “in the awareness that epistemological ‘limits’ of those ethnocentric ideas’ which is also ‘the enunciative boundaries of a range of other dissonant, even dissident histories and voices-women, the colonised, minority groups, the bearers of policed sexualities”. (The Location of Culture 6) In Petals of Blood, Ngugi reverses the colonial binarism in order to combat the hegemonic interpellations of the neo-colonial regime by calling for historical and cultural repositioning. Ngugi shifts away from the Eurocentric notion of society that subordinates the ethics and politics of cultural and social meaning of Ilmorog. This play of binary in the colonial system is always very crucial to its exercise of power because as Bhabha said ‘colonial discourse produces the colonised as a social reality which is at once another’ and yet entirely knowable and visible’. (The Other Question 101)
Bhabha reveals this implicit paradox of binary and critiques imperial politics as a ploy to situate the West in a position of binary superiority. The initial necessity for the master was to create a ‘reformed’ colonial subject who will be an important aid to stabilise the power politics. From this viewpoint, Bhabha’s concept of hybridity is very important. “Bhabha’s concept of hybridity fits the poststructuralist attack on totalities and essentialisms, and dovetails with some of the postmodernist characteristics: surface instead of depth, the flattening of the sign, the simultaneous doubleness of perspective, and the critical effects of parody.” (Woods 45) Doubleness of perspective positions individuals to ambivalence and the critical effects of parody might be well explained by mimicry. These concepts of Bhabha initiate to bring out the postmodern aspects in Petals of Blood. In Petals of Blood, Ngugi shows the anxiety about hybridity’s imagined threat to cultural purity and integrity through the transformation of a village, Ilmorog into a proto-capitalist society with the problems of prostitution, social inequalities, misery, uncertainty and inadequate housing. The capitalist social system with its associated class struggles fundamentally influences the social, cultural, philosophical, economical and political ideals of the society. Bhabha contends that a new hybrid identity or subject-position emerges from the interweaving of elements of the coloniser and colonised, challenging the validity and authenticity of any essentialist cultural identity which is very obviously seen in the fragmented identity of New Ilmorogs. “There were several Ilmorogs. One was the residential area of the farm managers, County Council officials, public service officers, the managers of Barclays, Standard and African Economic Banks, and other servants of state and money power.
This was called Cape Town. The other—called New Jerusalem—was a shanty town of migrant and floating workers, the unemployed, the prostitutes and small traders in tin and scrap metal.” (333) With this fragmented and collapsed selfhood, the story of revolution is lost (the resistance against the British imposition and the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s). They became “abstracted from the vision of oneness, of a collective struggle of the African peoples, the road brought only the unity of earth’s surface: every corner of the continent was now within easy reach of international capitalist robbery and exploitation. That was practical unity.”(311-312) Even the protagonists of the novel were in a fragmented and ambivalent state of pre-colonial faithfulness and the postcolonial betrayals under the new, hybrid reality of Ilmorog. Both Munira and Karega who were united in raising their voice against the authoritarian British Headmaster became jealous of each other.
A promising student, Wanja who became pregnant by the industrialist and had a strong passion towards the road of liberation changed with the commercial society. She lost the values of human relationship. She demands hundred shillings from Munira for the bed and the light and time and drink. Even the human relationship turns into a commodity. “It was New Kenya. It was New Ilmorog. Nothing was free.” (332) And another protagonist Abdullah, a Mau Mau fighter, copes by reinventing himself as circumstances demand, shifting his principles within a narrow range. This hybrid culture or the new fragmented reality is nothing but a threat to take back their colonised state with a new form. And for this reason Ngugi remarks: “Imperialism can never develop a country or a people. This was what I was trying to show in Petals of Blood; that imperialism can never develop us, Kenyans.”(Writers in Politics, 37)
Redrawing and rewriting how individual and collective experience might be struggles is an essential element of postmodernism which is very prominent in Petals of Blood. It rewrites the story of the originally isolated rural community of Ilmorog and of four individuals who come to it from outside: “Munira, the new school teacher who is shown as passive and at ambivalent state of mind; Abdullah, the former Mau Mau fighter, disabled in the war and now a shopkeeper who carries the very important the of denial and dispossession; Karega (rebel), displaced social idealist, later political activist; and Wanja, former barmaid and prostitute and a victim of social exploitation”(Williams 74).
Their unresolved problems from the past bring them to Ilmorog. Their presence changes the community and even with the hybrid cultural collage and liminality they are being shattered, fragmented and also being changed. With the misuse and commodification of Theng’eta flower epitomises the growing invasion of capitalism. Then the real struggle begins. The situation becomes “you eat or you are eaten”. Karega visions about their society which they were building since Independence, “a society in which a black few, allied to other interests from Europe, would continue the colonial game of robbing others of their sweat, denying them the right to grow to full flowers in air and sunlight”. (348-349) But Munira was in doubt about the “another world, a new world. Could it really be true?” (350) The images of past, present and future in this novel repeats the several changes the characters denied to experience. And the novel ends with the theme that struggle continues by denying one unified meaning or narrative or centre categorises the novel as postmodern.
In the context of changing social, political, and linguistic relations, Ngugi problematizes concepts of authority and submission, individual and community, dependence and freedom. This continuous slippage from the pattern of the coloniser-colonised binary is something that Bhabha discovers from his postmodern location. Postmodern arguments stress the importance of micro-narratives, concerning the assimilation of minorities and marginalised groups into an organic wholeness which is undoubtedly present in Ngugi Wa Thiong’ O’s novel Petals of Blood. Bhabha with his unique idea of mimicry, ambivalence and hybridity has attempted to reconfigure the postmodern from the perspective of the postcolonial. Bhabha attempts to do so “by deconstructing the old dichotomies of East/West, Self/Other, and Centre/Margin, and explores the increasing hybridity and liminality of cultural experience.” (Woods, 44).
By consistently disrupting these binary opposition in his narrative, Ngugi allows us to see relations that are unstable and not firmly attached to an ideology of unique self and the unified narrative. This deconstruction is the very notion of postmodernism. In the chapter named ‘The Commitment to Theory’, Homi K. Bhabha shows his doubts about the ideological politics regarding the formation of ‘Theory’. Bhabha says, “There is a damaging and self-defeating assumption that theory is necessarily the elite language of the society and culturally privileged”. (The Location of Culture 28) From this very notion of theory, Bhabha takes a curious turn towards the postmodern challenges that questions “ Are we trapped in the politics of struggle?” and “Can the aim of freedom of knowledge be the simple inversion of the relation of oppressor and oppressed, centre and periphery, negative image and positive image?” (ibid) Such questions and his concepts of mimicry, ambivalence and hybridity expound postmodernism from newer ground.
Conclusion:-
In conclusion, the exploration of post-colonialism and postmodernism through the lenses of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s "Petals of Blood" and Homi K. Bhabha’s theoretical concepts reveals a dynamic interplay between these two intellectual frameworks. The article has underscored the shared foundational principles of dismantling binary oppositions and challenging dominant narratives inherent in both postcolonial and postmodern thought. By focusing on the postmodern aspects within "Petals of Blood'' and Bhabha’s theoretical structures, the essay has illuminated the ways in which these ideas intersect and enrich one another. Through Bhabha’s innovative concepts like ambivalence, hybridity, and mimicry, a nuanced understanding of resistance within the postcolonial context emerges, ultimately leading to a deeper exploration of the postmodern spirit inherent in Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s work. This interdisciplinary approach not only highlights the complexity of cultural interactions but also underscores the potential for transformative critique and liberation within the realms of literature and theory.
Word Count: 2,605
Images: 02
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