Put
simply, Dreams In A Time Of War by Ngugi wa Thiong’o is a beautiful book. But
it is also challenging, engaging, shocking, endearing and enraging at the same
time. It also offers truly enlightening insight into the psychology, motivation
and eventual expression of a great writer. Anyone who has admired Ngugi’s A
Grain of Wheat will adore Dreams In A Time Of War, because the fiction that
rendered the novel such a complex and rewarding read is here as reality, in all
its greater rawness of immediacy, contradiction and conflict.
Dreams
In A Time Of War is an autobiography, covering Ngugi’s infant and childhood
memories until the day he left home, as an adolescent primary school graduate,
to join Alliance High School. Thus we journey in Ngugi’s account from a
homestead shared with a father, four wives and numerous siblings to the start
of a Western education with its subject boundaries and prescribed canals of
thinking. It would be easy to suggest that this represented a journey from the
traditional to the modern, but that would be naïve. It would also miss the point.
Tradition,
in Ngugi’s recollections, is extremely important, especially the magic of
language. Words, clearly, were always for him much more than labels. The Kikuyu
language that was his birthright offered a richness of expression and meaning -
not to mention an identity - that fired his imagination from a very young age.
It was also a language that was denied and derided by at least part of an
education system that proselytised on behalf of the colonial, the modern.
Throughout Dreams In A Time Of War we are aware of this potential for conflict,
where the clearly academically gifted young Ngugi yearns to read and learn, but
is regularly reminded that the only acceptable vehicle for that activity was
the English language. For some who emerged through the vicious selection for
entry into the educated elite, this denial of identity led to a rejection of
birthright, origin and perhaps culture, so that they might more completely and
convincingly adopt the new status to which they aspired. In Ngugi’s case, this demanded
denial of his own background led him to appreciate it, its values and its worth
more acutely. It is a mark of the book and equally the man’s complexity,
however, that he not only retained an insider’s appreciation and understanding
of his birthright, but also embraced the English language and education to
become one of the language’s greatest writers.
Ngugi’s
description of tradition is never static. At the same time, his view of
modernity is never uni-dimensional. He recognises that his people’s ceremonies
have changed over the years and that their significance has altered. Old men’s
stories may still enthral the young, but the world described has already
changed. Farmers have been driven from their land. Estates growing crops for
cash and bounded by fences have been established. Factories offering wage
labour have opened. Many of the structures that bound families and communities
together have been transformed, perhaps not broken down, but have at least been
challenged by new allegiances and aspirations.
Equally
the modern is not presented as a monolith. Two different education systems
coexist, one that transmits only Christianity and European values, and one that
admits local language and learning. In the same way that individuals are
influenced by what they are taught, they are also transformed by their
experience of employment, of nurture by institutions and comradeship. In Kenya,
for some this included loyalty to King and country via service in two world
wars, acceptance of Christianity, responsibility to exacting employers and land
owners, as well as, for others, acknowledgement of and adherence to tradition,
family values and kinship transmitted by oral culture. And the reality that
Ngugi portrays so beautifully in this book is that these apparently opposing
poles were often mixed up within the individual, almost every individual.
If
there is still anyone who retains the notion that British Imperialism was
tantamount to spreading pixie dust, then such a person ought to read Ngugi’s
childhood memoir. Here are descriptions of hooded informers - no doubt paid to
say the right names, of indiscriminate detention, concentration camps and
cold-blooded murder. And all this was backed up by a wholly unjustified and
erroneous assumption of racial superiority. By the way, it’s about the same way
they treated the working class back home, even down to denying most of them
access to the educational goodies that legitimise social class identity.
Readers
please do not be put off by the difficulties posed by the Kikuyu names and
words. If they are unfamiliar, then find a way of summarising and merely
recognising them. But do read this beautiful childhood memoir and thus do
understand a little more of the experiences that motivate writers - and others
– to explain. The view is partial, of course, that is why it is both
entertaining and illuminating.
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