Narration of Nation in Grain of wheat

                                 

                               The Grain of wheat

Name – Shital D Italiya                     

Assignment Paper no – 14 (African Literature)

Topic – Narration of Nation in Grain of Wheat 

Roll no – 29

Enrolment no – PG13101012

Submitted to – Smt. S.B. Gardy Department of English

                                    M.K. Bhavnagar University

                                              Bhavnagar

Introduction

                          

                     A grain of Wheat is Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s third novel, and marks a significant turn in his literary production, as a Marxist and Fanonian militant attitude replaces the liberal Christianize of his first works. The action of the novel focuses on the protagonists’ remembrance of the events of the “mau mau” revolt, which Ngugi sees as the only historical moments which allows “the space to imagine the birth of a new Kenya”. The way these events are recounted and reshaped is a collective one, as a shifting focalization and a complex time structure create a polyphonic, choral narrative that shows in detail the physical, psychological and political impact of revolt on individuals living in a small community. The novel is set in Thabai, an imaginary Gikuyu village of Kenya’s white Highlands, in the days preceding and following 12 December 1963, the days Kenya got its independence. The latter is continually evoked in the narration with the Swahili word “uhuru”. Ngugi’s choice not to translate this term is significant, as in the novel the definition of the actual meaning of uhuru is an open political and social question. The new Kenyan bourgeoisie sees it indeed as the possibility to replace the colonizer without changing the existing social, political and economic structure, where as for Gikuyu peasants Uhuru means a profound break with the colonial past, are birth which has to bring about the restitution of the lands usurped by the white settlers and the eradication of poverty.

v Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s use of language.

                              Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s A Grain of wheat is a Kenyan novel written in English, a language traditionally associated with colonialism and oppression in Africa. Despite the fact that the novel is written in English, Ngugi still uses language to speak to the novel’s theme of revolutionary by incorporating his native Gikuyu in the form of proverb and folk songs. Additionally, the novel juxtaposes these Gikuyu proverbs with verses and parables from the Christian Bible, a medium through which missionaries spread English early in its history in Kenya. Though Ngugi wrote a grain of wheat in English, he manipulates and uses language in order to promote Gikuyu and Kenyan culture and to discredit English as a Kenyan language. In portraying English in a negative light in his novel, Ngugi reveals his opposition to English as a language of African literature and his larger national concerns for Kenya after his colonization and for its new status as an independent nation.

                 Another way in which Ngugi criticizes anti nationalist betrayals is through his descriptions of Karanja’s speech interaction with the European official for whom he works. Communication between the two races, represented by Karanja and John Thompson, appears blocked and futile. Ngugi writes:

“Many times karanja had walked towards Thompson determined to ask him a direct question. Cold water lumped in his belly, his heart would thunder violently when he came near the white man. His determination always ended in the same way: he would salute John Thompson and then walks past as if his business lay further ahead”.

                             This passage details karanja’s inability to communicate with the white. Though he is “determined” he never succeeds in verbally communicating with Thompson. Ironically, the colonial official karanja, the character most likely to use English is unable to do so. Rather, the only communication that he achieves is nonverbal, and is a sign of deference. Karanja’s deference and subservience directly contrast Kihika’s “ cult of personality” in the revolutionary movements, Ngugi seems to be paralleling Kihika’s it’s figures like jomo Kenyatta, who charismatically lead resistance movements against the British: “ it is less the institution than the person of the presidence who is able  to organize the people” of Kenya. Ngugi seems to criticize karanja’s resistance and failure to use language at all, never mind in defense of his country, as further evidence of his anti nationalist betrayal and negative role in the novel.

                   The construction of the nation in A Grain of Wheat is explicitly represented as a narration, a linguistic act: indeed most of the events of the revolt are not related directly, but refracted through the conscience of its heroes and heroines: it is their narration which is represented, and it is through their narration that those historical events are relived, following a narrative strategy typical of orature. In the novel “every significant development either consists of or turns on acts of speech of their absence”: the events are evoked and put one besides the other as mosaic tesseras through the heroes’ dialogues, confessions and free indirect style monologues. Most of the action actually consists of “an intricate network of speech acts performed and unperformed, acknowledge and unacknowledged”,

“A great deal of it centers on bringing ergon into proper relation with logos”:

The main problem turns out to be the reliability of these narratives, which are not only fragmentary but quite often contradictory as well,

“Creating instability about what is known and what it means to know”.

Uhuru movement

           

                   The meaning of uhuru is the central question in this novel; it is quite far from being obvious: so much so that Ngugi clarifies what Uhuru should be only in the 1986 version of the novel, when the former “mau mau”

“Guerilla General R. states in his independence speech “we got uhuru today. But what’s the meaning of ‘uhuru’? It is contained in the name of our movement: Land and freedom”.

                     The whole novel can indeed be summarized as a collective act of recalling and reflecting on the events leading to uhuru, in order to understand what actual meaning it should/ could have for Thabai peasants. It is precisely in the act of recalling and reflecting on the past that A Grain of Wheat constructs a narration of the nation: the pedagogic moment materializes in a performative moment disseminate in lots of narrative. Each of which is a speech act. The narration becomes therefore an active construction of the past, an act of writing, in the sense of modeling.

v The choice of Genre

                     The choice of the genre is in this sense significant, as in many European and Latin American countries the novel and especially the historical novel – has been a privileged cultural focus to construct a national conscience. As Benedict Anderson, drawing from Benjamin’s concept of “homogenous, empty time”. Has pointed out,

“The idea of sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue f the idea of the nation”

                 The realistic novel, with its many characters acting simultaneously in a shared time and space, constructed a community in which the existence of individual is articulated in the same geographical and temporal frame. The historical, in its added temporal depth to these communities sharing a localized simultaneity, rendering them historical by the establishment of a link of direct succession between the readers and the generation that had preceded them.

              The central idea is presented through the themes and the deep meaning of the words which enters in the life of characters of the novel. The word “Unity” which means “the idea of independence and freedom.” In the novel what is needed is unity. What Kihika has said,

“Unity is the strength of the people against

The weapons and strength of the British.”

                   The novel explores the idea o unity, extending it to include Community in individual’s personal life as well as political life. Unity takes place to get independence a free nation. Independence “not being slave.”Freedom ability to act freely right to free will. What is needed for getting united an achieving for one aim. The characters have shown that ability to be union as set free the nation. Another aspect which arises is universal experience comes from confession and communication. Confession is the key for individuals to relieve own minds and hearts, and also the key for individuals to make a life gathered and open up communication which is the cornerstone of unity. Culture is what Thompson desperately wants to impose upon Africa and sees British culture as the height of human being. Gandhiji’s words are presented through the characters of the novel “A Grain of Wheat”,

“Our struggle for freedom is to bring peace in the world”.

Anonymous Narrator

                All these fragments are kept together by some connecting passages narrated by an anonymous narrator whose voice is entrusted by Ngugi with relating the collective vicissitude of the country, a strategy which makes the “a national epic” that “affirms the values of community”. It would be misleading though to present these passages as direct interventions of the writer, because here the narrator is himself is represented; he is not an objective word, but an objectified one:  the anonymous narrator of these passages in fact employs the modes of orature and speaks like traditional story teller, a relating the struggle waged by the Gikuyu warriors against the railway introduced by the British, is in this sense a paradigmatic example:

Waiyaki and other – leader took arms. The iron snake spoken of by Mugo wa Kibiro was quickly wriggling towards Nairobi for a through exploitation of the hinterland. Could they move it? The sake held on to the ground, laughing their efforts to scorn. The Whiteman with bamboo poles that vomited fire and smoke, hit back; his menacing laughter remained echoing in the hearts of the people, long after Waiyaki had been arrested and taken to the coast, bound hands and feet. later, so it is said, Waiyaki was buried alive at Kibwezi with his head facing into the centre of the earth, a living warning to those, who, in after years, might challenge the hand of the Christian woman whose protecting shadow now bestrode both land and sea.

                      In Lee Haring’s words here “folklore is used as a device of group characterization”. We are before a typical example of orature, more precisely that Isidore who, in his genre classification of orature defines “historical legend”. However, this narrator – storyteller if far from being omniscient, as his voice is embedded among the voices of the heroes: it could have been possible of speak of identification between author and narrator if Ngugi had put all the vicissitudes of his characters within an external narrative frame, endowed with a narrator whose voice was above all the others’, but this is not the case. The narrator’s voice is only one among many voices, even though its connecting function puts it in a central position. In this way Ngugi can at once reconnect himself with traditional storyteller and distance himself from him, showing how he can no longer be such a figure, as the society to which storytellers belonged no longer exists.

                       Nevertheless, it is the storyteller’s narratives that function as keystones I the construction of the nation: on the narrative structure level, they are the axis which gives meaning and keeps together all the narrative fragments; on the other hand, on personal plural and by a consistent referral to a “we”, a community whose geographical extension and temporal depth seem to extend well beyond the Gikuyu people, even though they are centered on Thabai village, at different times referred to as “our village” : it might be said that this narrator is a Gikuyu who speaks for the whole Kenya. Moreover, in some passages the anonymous narrator addresses his audience saying “you”, thus placing himself in the position of someone speaking “for the people and to the people”. It is not a mere stylistic question this modus narration is divides to construct a Kenyan community, imagining it as a nation, i.e. community linked to a geographical space and endowed with temporal depth. This view, centered on the Gikuyu but addressed to the whole nation, reflects perfectly Ngugi’s idea of Kenya as a melting pot of all its various people. In this perspective, the African community is placed at the centre, as witnessed by the reference of Kenya in the novel as the “country of black people” and by the statement of one of its main heroes, Kihika, that “Kenya belongs to black people”. More precisely, at the centre of this “imagined community” there is a rural community; it is the Gikuyu peasants whom Ngugi peasant whom Ngugi choose as heroes of his novel and of his narration of nation.

                        Here he fully endorses Fanon’s thesis on the central role of the peasants in the anticolonial struggle, and accordingly depicts the countryside as an environmental where human being can live in harmony with nature, where as the city is represented as a place of corruption and deceit ruled by that same elite that escape its national duties and keeps at a distance rural masses. This romantic view of the relationship between land and people is a topos of nationalism, but has its roots also in the pre-colonial tradition of Gikuyu culture, wherein the land was seen as “mother”. Indeed, the flexibility of the novel genre allows Ngugi to drew a lot of culture elements from European and African traditions, reshape them and give them new meaning; he employs the narrative modes of African orature, mixes up biblical and Gikuyu mythologies, employs the techniques of detective stories, finds inspiration for the plot, the characters and the time structure in Joseph Conrad’s works and enlivens his novel with the militant nationalism of Gakaara wa Wanjau.

v Title of the novel

              The title of the novel is taken from the New Testament, and refers to a passage from Paul’s first letter to Corinthians which is placed as an epigraph at the very beginning;

“Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die. And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or some other grain”.

              The reference to the “grain of wheat” links this epigraph to a second one, taken from John’s Gospel, which opens the last part of the novel

“verily, verily I say unto you, expect a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it adideth alone ; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit”

                These quotations give a religious and epic tone to the novel and assert the necessity of a the last part construct this rebirth as a mythical and utopical palingenesis;

“And a saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away”.

 The theme of heroism and sacrifice crosses the whole work; this is not surprising, for as Ernest Renan explained in 1882,

“le capital social sur lequel on assied une idée nationale” is made up most of all of “un passé heroique, des grands homes, de la gloire”. In Grain of Wheat the heroic character par excellence is the late Kihika, the courageous guerilla leader full of messianic spirit.”

                 Though in this way we can interpret the narration of Nation in Grain of Wheat. It’s narration through the Narrator and the Movements of Africa in which Kenya has been suffered.