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Gender and the Erotics of Nationalism in Ngu˜Gı˜ Wa Thiong'o's Drama

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Gender and the Erotics of Nationalism in Ngu˜Gı˜ Wa Thiong'o's Drama Gender and the Erotics of Nationalism in Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o’s Drama Evan Maina Mwangi Evan Maina Mwangi is Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University, where he researches the intersection of nationalism, gender, and sexuality in African literatures and popular culture. He is coauthor (with Simon Gikandi) of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature since 1945 (Columbia University Press, 2007) and the author of Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (forthcoming, State University of New York Press). His current book project, “(M)Other Tongue Matters: Translation and Gender in Indigenous African Literatures,” focuses on Ngu˜gı˜’s and other writers’ use of sex as a theme and a metaphor in creative works and polemical essays. TDR: The Drama Review 53:2 (T202) Summer 2009. ©2009 90 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 Introduction Kenyan author Ngügï wa Thiong’o has been a leading voice in African indigenous-language community theatre for over 30 years. In 1977 his first literary work in Gïküyü, Ngaahika Ndeenda (published in 1980 and translated as I Will Marry When I Want in 1982), coauthored with Ngügï wa Mïriï in collaboration with peasants and workers from their hometown of Limuru, led to his detention without trial by the Kenyan government. This kind of politically engaged performance forms the centerpiece of Ngügï’s artistic production. The influence that orature and indigenous theatrical performances have had on Ngügï’s oeuvre and the running theme of the role of art and the artist in society in almost all his work demand that we pay attention to the specific occasions, the particular audiences, and the speakers in the fictional live performances depicted or implied in the narratives.1 However, the gendered ways similar techniques are used in his dramas has not been adequately analyzed, primarily because some of these texts were originally written in Gïküyü, Ngügï’s mother tongue, and most of the nuanced sexual connotations are lost in translation. Ngügï’s writing is packed with phallic symbols that are used to structure overtly political themes. It also presents the theme of performance to register gendered social perceptions. While being alert to the dangers of naïvely Freudian readings that would see Ngügï’s artistic production as an expression of infantile tensions in an idealized family structure, I find an intermingling of sexual and political language in his later drama and poetry.2 The regressive ways that Ngügï represents gender roles in dramas demonstrates that, contrary to the latent Whorfianism3 in discussions of African-language theatre, the use of an indigenous language in African drama is not in itself liberating. The emancipatory potential of writing drama in an African language resides in the way that language is deployed. The language can be used to entrench stereotypes and maintain the status quo as much as to liberate certain oppressed categories. Agency, as Karlyn Kohrs Campbell reminds us, is protean and ambiguous. It is not only “communal, social, cooperative, and participatory” but also “constituted and constrained by the material and symbolic elements of context and culture” (2005:3). The fact that a writer uses a particular language in theatre practice (Gïküyü, Kiswahili, or English, in Ngügï’s case) does not in itself guarantee agency for the African woman. It is how that language is used that matters. Indeed, as we shall see, the same word or technique has different effects in different contexts with regard to women’s agency. 1. Ngügïs’ novels and short stories not only create the impression of fireside stories articulated by nonliterate indi- viduals, they also deploy oral literary devices such as song interludes, proverbs, and myths to elicit the embedded local audience’s participation in the performance of the implied oral narrative. The prose fiction contains dialogue scenes set as dramatic texts, complete with stage directions, to signal the dramatic tension and enhance the text’s affinity with oral traditions. Theatre is also a central theme in Ngügïs’ later fiction, with his novel Mürogi wa Kagogo (2004), translated as Wizard of the Crow (2006), which follows the antics of thespians in their efforts to liberate Africa from patriarchal and authoritarian regimes. In the novel, the central female character Nyawira (whose name connotes “the worker”) is a theatre artist who uses her talent and professional training to educate African women on how to liberate themselves from a dictatorial regime and forge alliances with fellow third world women. 2. It is within this simplistic Freudian framework that Joseph Mbele (1992) chides Ngügï, claiming that writing in his mother tongue reveals a longing for his mother and his desire to kill colonialism—the father. Gender in Gender 3. I use the term “Whorfianism” to refer to that relativistic philosophy in linguistics that holds that some thoughts can only be represented in a particular language. Ngügï (1986) argues that an African culture can only be expressed in an African language. Ngügï Figure 1. (facing page) Ngügï’s Kamïrïïthü collaborators identify themselves with song and a copy of Dramas ’s Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) as they wait to receive Ngügï from exile in August 2004. (Courtesy of the Nation Media Group, Nairobi) 91 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.90 by guest on 27 September 2021 For the purposes of this discussion, I use the term “performance” to signal not only a dramatic show onstage or the representation of a dramatic character, such as those in Ngügï’s theatre, but also to signify the way an utterance acts, especially the way it acts to transform perceptions. As part of a program of political activism, Ngügï’s performance in this sense can be gauged by the effects his theatrical and poetic works have had on our perceptions, and the changes they incite in the real world. This is especially true in his later theatre, which was influenced by Bertolt Brecht and, later, Paulo Freire. It is because of his theatre’s ability to inspire change in the real world that the Kenyan neocolonial government became jittery about Ngügï’s indigenous-language theatre and detained him without trial. In 1982, government agents razed to the ground Ngügï’s open-air educational theatre at Kamïrïïthü. I’m also drawing on J.L. Austin’s (1962) and Judith Butler’s (1997) idea of the performative, in which some linguistic statements are seen as not only constative and reflective, but also perfor- mative in the sense that they take up different meanings in the receptive context. In critiquing the limits of “speech acts” instituted by Austin in his seminal How to Do Things with Words, Shoshana Felman (1983) has shown that some constative or reflective speech acts also have perlocutionary and performative effects—therefore almost all language is performative. Jacques Derrida (1980) too emphasizes the citationality of speech, allowing that no linguistic statement can be completely autonomous from the power relations in the context within which it is used. I find Felman and Derrida particularly appealing for my purposes because Ngügï’s language— even those seemingly innocent statements that appear on the surface to be stating simple facts— are enmeshed in a performative, iterative process that both entrenches and disrupts power relations in society. Limitations There are a number of limitations to this discussion. Because of space considerations, I focus on two of Ngügï’s most sophisticated plays: The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) and Ngaahika Ndeenda (1980; I Will Marry When I Want 1982). The works present the history of Kenyan struggles against colonialism and neocolonialism, but they incorporate gender as a subtheme in a way that allows us to appreciate Ngügï’s gendered presentation of nationalism. Second, although I speak Gïküyü as my mother tongue, I approach Ngügï from a particularly disadvan- taged position. I was trained at the University of Nairobi in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when anti-Ngügï sentiments were well entrenched in Kenyan departments of literature. It was an open secret that some of the professors at the time were hired and promoted with specific terms of reference to reduce the popularity of Ngügï’s creed in the country and to teach students to be loyal to the government; scholars who had not fully joined the anti-Ngügï bandwagon kept his works at bay or talked about them in the abstract to avoid offending the dictatorship of Daniel arap Moi (1978–2002), who would plant spies in lecture halls. Well-known theatre personalities who had collaborated with Ngügï when he was a professor at the university—such as Kimani Gachaü, Ngügï wa Mïriï, and Micere Githae Mugo—had been sent to exile, and students seen to be leaning toward Ngügï’s community aesthetics—such as Wahome Mütahi and Magayü wa Magayü—had already been hounded out of the program to try their luck in journalism and linguistics amid relentless police harassment.4 By the time I was in college, the government had already converted Ngügï’s open-air theatre at Kamïrïïthü, near Limuru, into a youth polytechnic where girls were taught domestic skills with training in “feminine” trades like sewing. Coming from a place where students were systematically brainwashed to disapprove of and dislike Ngügï, I am aware that it is possible to be uncritically dismissive of his work. Yet I resist 4. Although successful journalists at the time I was a student, Magayü and Mütahi were still held up as examples of what a good literature student should not be—political demagogues with little respect for art.
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