Ø Semester
:- 4
Ø Roll
no :- 11
Ø Enrolment
No :- Pg14101021
Ø Year
:- 2015-16
Ø Paper
No :- 14
Ø Paper
Name :- The African Literature
Ø Topic
:- Narration of Nation in Grain of Wheat
Ø Submitted
to :- Department of English
Maharaja
Krishnakumarsinhji BhavnagarUniversity
Introduction:-
A Grain of Wheat is a novel by Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o. He is formally
working in English and now working in
Gikuyu. He wrote many plays, novels, shortstories and also essays. He also
focuses on ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature.
Ngugi was born in Kamiriithu and baptized James Ngugi. His family was caught up
in the Mau Mau war. In his education Ngugi received a B.A. in English from
Makerere University college in Kampala , Uganda in 1963. He wrote his one of
the famous play named " The Black Hermit " during his education.
v
About his works.
Ø Weep not child
Ø Petals of Bloods
Ø The River Betwee
Ø A Grain of Wheat
His first novel,
Weep not , child , was the first English language novel to be published by an
East African and his account of the “Mau Mau “ emergency in A Grain of Wheat
presented for the first time an African perspective on the Kenya armed revolt
against British colonial rule during the 1950s.
v
About the A Grain of Wheat
A Grain of Wheat
is the third and best known novel written by Ngugi wa Thiong'o from Kenya. It
weaves several stories together during the state of emergency in Kenya's
struggle for independence (1952–1959), focusing on the quiet Mugo, whose life
is ruled by a dark secret. The plot revolves around his home village's
preparations for Kenya's Independence Day celebration (Uhuru day). Former resistance
fighters General R and Koinandu plan on publically executing the traitor who
betrayed Kihika (a heroic resistance fighterhailing from the village) on that
day. This book is very different from its predecessor. There is no one main
character, but several. Though they interact, they each have their own issues
and deal with them in different ways. And, though the African/British divide is
still there, it is not a key. Rather the key theme, which is certainly
suggested in his two previous novels, is how the past affects the main
characters and how they can move on to a new
future. It is clearly a much superior novel to its rather simple predecessors
and has become a classic of African Literature. (Italia)
This novel and
whole story of it is little bit difficult and different from any other novel or
any predecessors’ books but it is reality and it generates real thing in person’s
mind. Some common elements like hunger of power, love, betray and etc. also can
see in this novel.
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.
“Africans
writing in English fall victim to a kind of “Europeanized Writing”, he however,
recognize his own complicity in this scheme.Ngugi also talking about anti‐colonialist
betrayals is through his descriptions of Karanja’s speech interactions with his
European official for whom he works. Many times Karanja had walked towards
Thompson determined to ask him a direct question. Cold water lumped in his
belly, his would thunder violently when he came near the Whiteman. This passage
the Karanja’s inability, to communicate with the whites. Karanja’s deference
and subservience directly contrasts Kihika’s “Cult of Personality” and presence
against colonialist oppression. Most of these historical movements were too
heterogeneous to be reduced to unity, but Ngugi as noticed by James Ogude,
intends to show the “Mau Mau” as a unity force with a consistent nationalist standing
and a firm class‐rooted view discards all the aspects of the
movement, which contradict this narrative.
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”.
v 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”.
Mau Mau rebellion has
been known in Africa and worldwide as an anticolonial movement, it has
been recorded in the British memory and history as an atavistic and fanatic movement
which resisted western modernity and civilization.
“What’s this
thing called 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
for gikuyu peasants Uhuru means a profound break with the colonial past, a
rebirth which has to bring about the restitution of the lands usurped by the
white settlers and the eradication of poverty.”
A grain of wheat
can be called a traditional novel for Ngugi as its thematic focuses moves
toward militant nationalism. Mau Mau has long been a controversial historical
topic not only among the Europeans but the Kenyans themselves as they argue
over whether or not it was a primitive and irrational movement lead by the
religiously Gikuyu and how it should be remembered in national history. In a
nationalist reading, a grain of Wheat can be said to be Ngugi’s project to
speak for the Mau Mau movement as he tries to contest the history of the Mau
Mau as written by the British. The contestation is significant in a sense that
it aims at reconsolidating the collective identity of Kenyans in the post
independence era.
Most Kenyans
gradually learn to make accommodations with the new regime, though the seeds of
revolution spread underground in “the Movement,” known to the British as Mau
Mau. This is the movement plays vital role in the main story of this novel. The
Mau Mau Uprising, also known as the Mau Mau Revolt, Mau Mau Rebellion or Kenya
Emergency, was a military conflict that took place in Kenya between 1952 and
1960. It involved Kikuyu dominated groups summarily called Mau Mau and elements
of the British Army, the local Kenya Regiment mostly consisting of the British,
auxiliaries and anti Mau Mau Kikuyu. Here I am also agreeing with the author
that Uhuru is one’s right and he/she must get it without any race of color, country
or anything else. Writer shows his point and his argument in novel like:
“Nearly
everybody was a member of
the
Party, but nobody could say with any
accuracy
when the Party was born: to
most
people, especially those in the
younger
generation, the Party had always
been
there, a rallying centre for action. It
changed
names, leaders came and went,
but
the Party remained, opening new
visions,
gathering greater and greater
strength,,
till on the Eve of Uhuru, its
influence
stretched from one horizon
touching
the sea to the other resting on
the
great Lake. Its origins can, so the
people
say, be traced to the day the
Whiteman
came to the country […].”
“the
Whiteman came to the country,
clutching
the book of God in both hands, a
magic
witness that the Whiteman was a
messenger
from the Lord. His tongue was
coated
with sugar; his humility was
touching.
For a time, people ignored the
voice
of the Gikuyu seer who once said:
there
shall come a people with clothes like
the
butterflies. They gave him, the stranger
with
a scalded skin, a place to erect a
temporary
shelter. Hut complete, the
stranger
put up another building yards
away.
This he called the House of God
where
people could go for worship and
sacrifice.
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”.
v 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 asdirect 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 precolonial 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 epicgarph 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.”
Works Cited
(1) Wikipedia contributors. "A Grain
of Wheat." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 17 Feb. 2016. Web. 17 Mar. 2016.
(2) Italia, Shital. "Shital Italia's Assignment."
2015. Blog. <http://shitalitalia1315.blogspot.in/2015/03/narration-of-nation-in-grain-of-wheat.html>.
"To evaluate my assignment, click here"
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