Nanda Dyssou interviews Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

[Afroza Akhter Tina]

NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O is a world-renowned Kenyan writer, scholar, and social activist. Ngũgĩ’s diverse body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, articles, essays, and poems, which have been translated into over 60 languages. A Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, he has received numerous awards and 11 honorary doctorates. Ngũgĩ refers to himself as a “language warrior” because of his fight for the recognition of his native Gĩkũyũ and other marginalized languages. He graciously agreed to this interview on the occasion of receiving yet another major honor: the second annual LARB/UCR Creative Writing Lifetime Achievement Award.

Nanda Dyssou is a Congolese-Hungarian journalist and fiction writer living in Los Angeles.

NANDA DYSSOU: Did you ever think when you were growing up that you would be an internationally renowned author and that your stories of Kenya would be translated into 60 different languages?

NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O: No, never, not even that I would ever become a writer. The struggle to ensure that one seized whatever educational opportunities came one’s way was hard enough. The competition for places in the few schools and colleges available was fierce. From elementary schools to colleges, every two years were terminal exams. There were hardly any second chances. Once you got off the train, for whatever reason, you hardly ever got on it again. But I always wanted to read. As I narrated in my memoir, In the House of the Interpreter, my ambition, on entering a library for the first time in my life, was to one day be able to read all the books in the world. Reality would soon clip the wings of that ambition, but the desire to read remains.
What do you see as your role in the writing community at this point in your career?
I have become a language warrior. I want to join all those others in the world who are fighting for marginalized languages. No language is ever marginal to the community that created it. Languages are like musical instruments. You don’t say, let there be a few global instruments, or let there be only one type of voice all singers can sing.

NANDA DYSSOU:You found publishing success early in life. Your first play, The Black Hermit, was produced in 1962 and published in 1963. You wrote your first two novels — The River Between (1965) and Weep Not, Child (1964) — to critical acclaim while a second-year student in college. Were you ever worried that you could not replicate the successes of your early 20s?

NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O: Actually, for many years, I thought of my early novels as my apprentice work. So despite the novels and play you mention, as well as eight or so short stories and over 60 pieces of journalism, I found it difficult to call myself a writer. I thought that I had yet to write the novel I wanted to write to earn the right to call myself a writer. A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Petals of Blood (1975) were attempts to write that novel. But by the time I completed these two works, I had changed my position on English as the primary language of my creativity and embraced Gĩkũyũ. But even with Gĩkũyũ, I try to write that novel that I have striven to write but have not yet written. Caitaani Mũtharabainĩ (1980; translated as Devil on the Cross) and Mũrogi wa Kagogo (2006; translated as Wizard of the Crow) were the result of my new commitment. Now I have come to realize that, for writing, there is no moment of arrival — or, rather, the moment of arrival is the beginning of a new phase of the journey. It is a continual challenge.


Afroza Akhter Tina
Senior Lecturer
Department of English, DIU

[Afroza Akhter Tina]

NANDA DYSSOU: Your early play The Wound in the Heart was blocked from production because it mentions that a British officer raped an LFU (Mau Mau) soldier’s wife. You struggled to come to terms with this act of political censorship, as evidenced in your memoir, Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening (2016).

It was the big lie given as the reason for its ban from the Kampala National Theatre that made me pause and think about the atrocities committed by the British colonial state against Kenyans. One of the lies of every colonizing nation was that their rule was gentler and more kindly than that of the other competing colonial powers. The logic was like: Theirs is worse than ours, so ours is better; better is a higher degree of good; therefore, ours is good. It was an important moment in my life because, in a strange way, it motivated me to write. That is why I open the memoir with the incident. But on looking back, it prefigured what would happen to me years later, and all because of theater, like my being held in a maximum security prison in Kenya in 1977–’78.

NANDA DYSSOU: Much of your success has been achieved outside of Kenya, as you have been in exile from your native land for over three decades. Does the sense of alienation stemming from that reality ever recede?

No, not quite, but I have tried to counter that with the knowledge that exile has impacted history in strange and even fascinating ways. Think of Moses and Jesus in Egypt, Muhammad and his followers finding refuge in Christian Ethiopia, Marx in France and London. The experience of exile germinated thoughts that later impacted home. I suppose this is what the Afro-Caribbean writer George Lamming meant by his famous title, The Pleasures of Exile (1960). Also, I have developed an outlook that I call the “globalectical imagination,” in my book Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (2012). It is really an expansion of the Blakean vision of seeing the world in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour. We are connected.

NANDA DYSSOU: Has being physically away from Kenya been an issue for you, or does all you need to write live on in your memories? What are some special difficulties you have experienced while writing from afar?

Kenya is always in my mind. I miss the everyday of Kenyan life. Gĩkũyũ is mostly spoken in Kenya. It is one of several other African languages. A mosaic of languages, that is Kenya. But since I now write primarily in Gĩkũyũ, I would like to be part of the linguistic landscape of its changes.

NANDA DYSSOU: I’m wondering if you have ever worried about not having enough of a readership because you are writing about a nation and a time in history that most people do not hear and read enough about. Has universality ever been a concern of yours?

I believe that universality is the child of particularity. Remember that grain of sand? It contains the world. A writer has to be faithful to that grain in order to envision the universe.

NANDA DYSSOU: Do you feel that a Western audience can fully understand your books? Are there parts of your writing that you feel only certain audiences — specifically Kenyans — will understand?

I don’t think that there is any work that only a certain community can understand. Or if there is, it is bad art. But every reader brings into a work of art a worldview shaped by their experiences of history. For instance, critics from a colonial experience can see gaps and even silences in works from imperial centers.


Afroza Akhter Tina
Senior Lecturer
Department of English, DIU