Paper - 206
Name - Nehalba Gohil
Roll no - 15
Enrollment no - 4069206420210009
Email ID - nehalbagohil26@gmail.com
Batch - 2021 - 23
MA - sem 4
Submitted to - S.B. Gardi Department of English M.K Bhavnagar University.
Postmodern spirit in Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood "
Introduction:
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o;born ; 5 January is a Kenyan writer and academic who writes primarily in Gikuyu and who formerly wrote in English. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal Mũtĩiri. His short story The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright, is translated into 100 languages from around the world.
In 1977, Ngũgĩ embarked upon a novel form of theatre in his native Kenya that sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he held to be "the general bourgeois education system", by encouraging spontaneity and audience participation in the performances. His project sought to "demystify" the theatrical process, and to avoid the "process of alienation produces a gallery of active stars and an undifferentiated mass of grateful admirers" which, according to Ngũgĩ, encourages passivity in "ordinary people". Although his landmark play, Ngaahika Ndeenda, co-written with Ngugi wa Mirii, was a commercial success, it was shut down by the authoritarian Kenyan regime six weeks after its opening.
Ngũgĩ was subsequently imprisoned for over a year. Adopted as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, the artist was released from prison, and fled Kenya. In the United States, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine. He has also previously taught at Northwestern University, Yale University, and New York University. Ngũgĩ has frequently been regarded as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He won the 2001 International Nonino Prize in Italy, and the 2016 Park Kyong-ni Prize. Among his children are the authors Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ and Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ.
Petals of Blood :
Petals of Blood is a 1977 novel by Ngugi wa Thiong'o set in post-independence Kenya; its title derives from a line in Derek Walcott’s poem, “The Swamp.” The story centers on four characters whose lives are drastically changed as a result of the rebellion, as they learn how to adapt and survive in a rapidly Westernizing environment.
At the beginning of the novel, Munira, Karega, Abdulla, and Wanja are questioned about the triple murder of three notable Kenyan businessmen, Kimeria, Mzigo, and Chui. As they answer the authorities’ questions, the novel is told primarily in flashbacks going back twelve years to when these four characters first came to the village of Ilmorog.
Munira arrived at Ilmorog to teach schoolchildren. While he came from a wealthy Christian family, he chafed under his father’s strictness and wanted to strike out on his own. Abdulla and his adopted son, Joseph, came to Ilmorog for a new start, and Abdulla opened a bar and shop. Wanja came to the village to stay near her grandmother Nyakinyua, a respected older woman, and began working for Abdulla as a barmaid. She pushed for Joseph to start school, as she had had to leave school before finishing. Karega sought a new opportunity as well, hoping to connect with Munira as the two had a shared past.
The four new arrivals became friends and settle into the village. Munira and Wanja made love one night and he became obsessed with her, though she wanted to remain platonic. Munira and Karega explored part of their shared past, their attending the elite school of Siriana, and how both were expelled due to participation in strikes. They both knew of a man named Chui, who’d been a popular student during Munira’s time but was headmaster during Karega’s time and proved himself to be a tool of the foreigners. Wanja also spoke of her past as a prostitute and how she’d once had a child by Kimeria, a businessman who seduced her, but it was no longer with her. She desperately wanted to be a mother again but did not know if it was possible. Over time, Abdulla also revealed that had been a member of the Mau Mau freedom fighters. Life in the village became increasingly difficult as the rains refused to come and the harvest withered. The local holy man could do nothing for them, so Karega suggested some of them travel to Nairobi to meet with their MP, Nderi wa Riera. The community agreed this would be the only way to get help, and all of them decided to go.
The journey was difficult but there was a profound sense of togetherness and purpose. Abdulla was a veritable hero along the way, telling them stories of his days in the forest. Nyakinyua also spoke of the history of Ilmorog. Listening to her, Karega became more convinced that attention had to be paid to Kenya’s, and Africa’s, glorious past before the colonizers came.
Unfortunately, when the weary travelers reached Nairobi, they encountered several less-than-helpful individuals, including the MP, and began to despair that anything would change. Munira, Abdulla, and Karega were detained for disturbing the peace and brought to trial, and were only saved by the persuasive defense offered by a lawyer whom Wanja knew. Ironically, the media attention brought to these “courageous Good Samaritans' ' resulted in numerous donations, free travel back to the village, and Nderi’s growing interest in developing the village for tourism.
Back in Ilmorog, the outside help coupled with strong rains meant a banner season for the harvest. Wanja grew in beauty as she became immersed in cultivating the land. She and Karega became lovers after a powerful gathering at Nyakinyua where the old woman showed Wanja, Karega, Munira, and Abdulla how to brew the potent drink Theng’eta. That night was full of confessions and ruminations about the past.
Listening to Nyakinyua and meeting with the lawyer spurred on Karega’s increasing radicalization. He learned his brother was a Mau Mau companion of Abdulla’s but had been betrayed and hanged. He took a position teaching school with Munira but felt that the boys were not learning about the things that really mattered.
Munira had Karega dismissed due to his jealousy over Wanja as well as Karega’s revelation that he had been involved with Munira’s sister years back and their love was the reason for her suicide. Karega left the village.
Over time, the village modernized and changed due to the neo-colonial forces of investment, loans, infrastructure, and collusion between foreigners, African politicians, and businessmen. It expanded and became a tourist destination for its Theng’eta. Abdulla and Wanja started a successful bar. Munira became more of an outsider, staying in his teaching job but lusting after Wanja.
Eventually, Karega returned after a year of traveling, looking for work, and refining his communist views. He learned Nyakinyua had died a few days after hearing her land would be sold off since she could not pay the loans she was bamboozled into taking out. Wanja and Abdulla sold their rights to the bar to Mzigo, an education official and businessman, so she could buy her grandmother’s land; Mzigo promptly kicked them out. Wanja then started a whorehouse, the Sunshine Lodge, which attracted elite clientele like Mzigo, Chui, and Kimeria, all of whom were African directors of the new Theng’eta brewery.
Munira was restless and unhappy, and turned to Christian fanaticism. He was convinced he needed to save Karega from Wanja and from his dangerous ideals. Abdulla languished after the bar closed and Wanja started her whorehouse. His only joy was that Joseph was doing well in school. Soon, he and Wanja became lovers, and she finally conceived a child.
Karega had planned a massive strike and Mzigo, Chui, and Kimeria met to consider the demands. They then went to Wanja’s whorehouse, where she installed them each in different rooms. She killed Kimeria with a weapon, but no one knew since Munira decided to set the whorehouse on fire that night. Abdulla was also there, planning to seek revenge on the men who had wronged him and Wanja; he got there in time only to save someone from the burning building.
At the end of the novel, the Inspector conducting the interviews discovers it is Munira, and he is set for a trial. Karega is still detained but hopeful that the strikes and resistance against the forces keeping regular Kenyans down will endure. Wanja is also filled with hope because she can feel Abdulla’s child in her womb.
Postmodern spirit in Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s 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.” With this fragmented and collapsed selfhood, the story of revolution is lost. 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.”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 claims 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.” 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 colonized 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.”
This New, fragmented Ilmorog, allows hybridity of their cultural identity, the colonizer’s identity. But Ngugi placed all his protagonists to seek an answer for their transformation and also in collective struggle. This duality creates according to Bhabha an ambivalent state as he mentioned in Location of Culture that after the "traumatic scenario of colonial difference, cultural or racial, returns the eye of power to some prior archaic image or identity. Paradoxically, however, such an image can neither be 'original'—by virtue of the act of repetition that constructs it—nor identical—by virtue of the difference that defines it." In Petals of Blood, Ngugi demonstrates ambivalence by placing Ilmorog’s older residents, Wanja’s grandmother Nyankinyua, who puts forward the remaining memories of the village’s former glory against the thriving capitalism. Ngugi also portrays Mwathi wa Mugo, the unseen and mysterious occult priest “With a rare double-edged irony, ambivalence and scepticism which call into question the validity of the fundamental metaphysical beliefs of the Ilmorog villagers, perhaps of Africa at large.” The foundation of national identity and the cultural past of Kenya now are in question.With these two characters from the past, Ngugi renovates the tradition and redefines their roles in the development of revolutionary consciousness. The character of Wanja is very postmodern that effectively subverts the potential for female agency. Wanja is being instrumentalized. All of the men want her, and many of their actions are motivated by their desire for her.
She is intelligent and very desirable. She is not only desired by all of the main characters but also was seduced by Hawkins Kimeria, a wealthy man, and became pregnant. She abandoned the baby in a drain, carrying this guilt with her always. She moves to Ilmorog to be with her grandmother and starts a successful business as a distiller, but she's not allowed to keep it. She then becomes a high-paid prostitute. Wanja tries to find her place in the new society of Kenya after its independence from the British. And she is the main female character in the novel, one of the four protagonists accused of murder. The way Ngugi presents Wanja is very central for the objection to masculine logic and seeks to subvert the homogeneity of representation. “Her reproductive functions are being pressed into the service of a narrative that equates political resistance and revolutionary heroism with masculine virility.” And this radical political effectiveness of Wanja subverts the hegemonic male power. And Ngugi, with a curious turn to postmodernism, subordinates reason to uncertainty.
He finished his novel with Woman and Tomorrow. Wanja is placed in hybrid society; she also mimics the power and the ambivalence take back again to her own way of struggle. She parallels Kenya, who has to fight to stay alive and destruction is never too far away 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, displaced social idealist, later political activist; and Wanja, former barmaid and prostitute and a victim of social exploitation". 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 epitomizes 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”. But Munira was in doubt about the “another world, a new world. Could it really be true?”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 categorizes 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 colonized binary is something that Bhabha discovers from his postmodern location. Postmodern arguments stress the importance of micro-narratives, concerning the assimilation of minorities and marginalized 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.”. 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 the culturally privileged”.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?” Such questions and his concepts of mimicry, ambivalence and hybridity expound postmodernism from newer ground.
Works Cited:
Brown, K. “The Petals of Blood as a Colonial Novel.” K Brown, 15 May 2017, www.ijstr.org/final-print/sep2013/Ngugi-And-Post-Colonial-Africa-History-Politics-And-Morality-In-Petals-Of-Blood-And-Matigari.pdf.
Adam, Ezinwanyi. “Postcolonialism and Socio-Political Development in Africa: Learning Through the Literary Eyes of Ngugi Wa Thiong’O.” Ezinwanyi Adam, David Publishing, 4 Dec. 2016, www.davidpublisher.com/Public/uploads/Contribute/559e11d5825d0.pdf.
