in European languages, and is fundamentally imbricated in, and the subjectivity of its authors overdetermined by, to borrow the words of Biodun Jeyifo, the colonial “sublime” (Jeyifo 2004, xv), that is, the internalized experiences of trauma and inherent contradictions that define even literature that claims to transcend coloniality. In a controversial essay, “The Extroverted African Novel,” Eileen Julien emphatically states that “no African novels erase the history of colonialism and the repression of contemporary regimes” (Julien 2006, 668).
This sublime, according to Jeyifo, is what has fundamentally transformed and shaped “the collective identity of an entire generation … of writers” (2004, xv). To the extent that colonialism still permeates every aspect of life in the continent – state formation, cultural institutions, and identitarian frameworks – Jeyifo’s formulation raises a number of theoretical problems, most notably questions regarding temporality, linguistics, and even coloniality itself: When does the modern begin in the culture of letters in East Africa? Does the modern equal the period corresponding to European encounter with Africa?3 What are we to make of the colonization of the East African coast by Arabs long before the arrival of Europeans and the thriving culture of literary activities, most notably poetry, in Arabic script? Then there is the more intractable cartographical question: What are the geographical delimitations of what is now known as Eastern Africa?4 The geographical region designated as Eastern Africa is somewhat peculiar in this sense: It is the one area of the continent where a vibrant writing tradition predates European colonialism and a literature in African languages thrives alongside literature in the former colonial languages. Swahili literature, for example, owes its existence not just to western influence but also to the Islamic and African influences.
Although the foregoing discussion raises important questions regarding literary histories, what I propose to do in this chapter is to redirect readers’ attention to a much‐neglected critical dimension of East African literature: the correlative between genre and ideology. I do this by focusing on the relationship between the Bildungsroman (as autobiographized fiction/fictionalized autobiography)5 and ideology (anticolonial resistance) at their point of intersection with the mandates and imperatives for anticolonial texts: their insistence on the recognition of the cultural autonomy on the one hand, and the bodily integrity of the colonized on the other, as integral to their human rights. I take the cue from Joseph R. Slaughter’s assertion that literature is a discursive regime “that can constitute and regulate, imagine and test, kinds of subjects, subjectivities, and social formations” (2007, 8). Slaughter further argues that “[O]ne of the primary carriers of human rights culture, the Bildungsroman has been a conspicuous literary companion on those itineraries, traveling with missionaries, merchants, militaries, colonial administrators, and technical advisors” (123).
Rather than rehash the obvious connections between East African literature and colonialism or read it through its ideological manifestations as many critics have done,6 I want to suggest a somewhat different but burgeoning approach which builds upon, rather than displaces, the old vistas of literary and critical engagement by focusing on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child (henceforth WNC) as an exemplar of the way literature responds in the wake of political violence.7
My first point of departure is by looking at the ideologies and the normative narrative architecture which gives the Bildungsroman its form and subsequently its ambiguous position in a colonial context. There is, to my mind, a palpable tension between the evolutionary and positivist ethos of the classical Bildungsroman in its eighteenth‐century settings and subsequent developments and the revolutionary imperatives of decolonization in a colonial context.8 In other words, colonial ideology (with its dim view of the colonized) and the traditional Bildungsroman are mutually enabling to the extent that colonial ideology conceives history “in teleological and evolutionary terms,”9 terms whose rhetorical logic finds expression in the narrative of progressive individual development. Yet, as Tobias Boes reminds us, “the diachronic Bildungsroman plot is [not] too inflexible to accommodate avant‐garde experimentation” (Boes 2006, 239). Thus, if in its traditional form the Bildungsroman represents society as a normative construct, its anticolonial counterpart must of necessity narrate the process of (un)becoming as resistance, self‐reconstruction, and self‐affirmation since the colonized subject cannot change to accommodate the colonial order and the colonial order can only be overthrown rather than reformed. Indeed, this very imperative of decolonization is what serves as the essential context for Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child, a novel “written in the shadow of colonial rule in its most violent form – the state of emergency,” during which period, as Gikandi asserts, “relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, social classes, families, and institutions, were conducted through modes of unprecedented violence” (Gikandi 2000, 71).
A second point of departure is Jonathan Culler’s formulation of the relationship between readerly habits and meaning‐making in a text. According to Culler, reading
is not simply a matter of critical strategy but has an important bearing on the thematic properties of the novel. For if genre is … an interpretation of experience, an attempt to make sense of the world, then we are confronted from the outset with the problem of relating the procedures which we use in interpreting the novel to those that narrators and protagonists attempt to use in ordering their experience. Both are instances of imagination trying to invest its objects with significance, and whether the processes are made to accord or whether they resist close identification, the relationship between them will be of considerable thematic importance.
(Culler 1974, xvi)
Culler raises two fundamental issues with regard to readership: the elusive but distinctive shifts in the discursive control that readers and/as critics exercise over a text on the one hand, and the symbolic investments in the experience and fate of the protagonist on the other.
A third consideration is what Fredric Jameson in The Antinomies of Realism calls “tendencies” of the Bildungsroman, that is its ability to interweave many plots and destinies and to act as a kind of “social Bill of Rights (or Droits de l’Homme) for the novel as a form” (2013, 222). The Bildungsroman, often seen as the narration of the process of subject formation of an individual and the elaboration of their individuality in the process of becoming, often ends up being a novel about the social collective; a depository of the anxieties and symbolic investments of a society in turmoil. The fate of the individual mirrors the fate of society. As Jameson further contends, the endings of such novels should be seen as literary categories whose outcomes have “to be more openly justified by some larger ideological concept” (2013, 195).
Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child has often been read as a Bildungsroman which is also a fictionalized autobiography. Many scholars have noted, for example, the close affinity between Ngugi’s own life as a young man and that of his extremely naïve protagonist Njoroge. According to Gikandi, the tremendous significance of Weep Not, Child in the burgeoning “culture of letters in East Africa” in the 1960s lies in its autobiographical character: “Njoroge’s life and education so closely parallel that of the author that it was sometimes difficult to tell where to draw the line between fact and fiction” (Gikandi 2000, 81). Most notorious in this overly reductive reading of the novel is David Cook and Michael Okenimkpe’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o: An Exploration of His Writings (1997), which not only reduces the novel to a simple didactic propaganda but also sees it as nothing more than Ngugi’s life reproduced in the story of Njoroge. Yet, it is necessary to pay attention to Gikandi’s
