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Discovering/rediscovering “home” through Ngũgĩ’s early novels

Abstract Ngũgĩ’s early novels evoke three kinds of home for me: the hilly landscapes of The River Between, the repressive Emergency years in my home region of central Kenya in the 1950s, and the nationalist imaginary celebrated at the end of the liberation struggle. The River Between worked for me by evoking familiar landscapes and foregrounding the issues the inhabitants had to negotiate in the early years of colonial contact. The specter of darkness descending in Weep not, Child captured the relatable trauma that still troubled the inhabitants of my village that had only recently emerged from the Emergency-era terror in the 1950s. I connect the major characters’ stoical belief in the sun rising again to a traditional Gĩkũyũ worldview that I also plumb further in the discussion of A Grain of Wheat where traditional notions of trauma witnessing complicate the traitor/hero binarism that has clouded the analysis of Mugo. I probe the coercive nationalism into which Kihika sucks him and then discuss the invented traditions that attempt to naturalize the idea of Kenya before concluding with reflections on a “Prospero moment” that highlights the value of the Nairobi attempt at decolonizing the mind.