Week 7 Writings from Within

1. Week 7Writings from Within Dr SupriyaAkerkar

2. Outline for this lecture • Discussion of Nuigi and Achebe as post colonial novelists • Key aspects of their literary writing: what do they represent? • Links between sociology and literature or works of art

3. Writers Political activists

4. About the novels and their context • Achebe’s response to Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness: Things Fall Apart; 1958 • Ngugi’s The River Between 1965

5. African culture and Christianity • Seek to define the missionary and colonial experience or its collision with African culture. • Writing in English and lucid prose • Changes encountered in terms of education. English is used to communicate this experience.

6. The Writer and the Society • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCic_RoPhoM&feature=related

7. Social orders: old, new and in making Ngugi’s: The River Between • Setting in Gikuyuland, with villages Kameno, Makuyu, River Honia between ridges • Christian missionaries, administration, conquest and conflict in two villages • Social practices such as circumcision at the centre of conflict • Education as a new way in making?? Achebe’s: Things fall apart Broadly, three parts: • Setting in Umuofia and Okonkwo’s life before the arrival of white man • Okonkwo’s banishment to Mbanta for sins against earth goddess and arrival of white man, church, govt, and land takeover • Death of the old ways and death of Okonkwo

8. About African Society...... • African societies not timeless or without history or mindless. • Have their own poetry, depth, philosophy of life, beauty and dignity. • Stress tensions, conflicts in personal, societal sphere in late 19th or early 20th century

9. Cosmology, myth, and culture in Africa • God Murungu gives land to the founders of the Gikuyu namely Gikuyu and Mumbi “this land I give to you, O man and woman. It is yours to rule and till, you and your posterity”....

10. Reconstructing culture as complex social practices • Achebe: “the past needs to be recreated not only for the enlightenment of our detractors but even more for our own education. Because…..the past with all its imperfections, never lacked dignity…. …..” (source: Killam, G, 1969; The writings of Chinua Achebe; Heinemann, London)

11. Describe and discuss any social practice or institution that the novels describe and engage with...

12. Representations of social practice of circumcision • “Blood trickled freely on the ground, sinking into the soil. Henceforth a religious bond linked Waiyaki to the earth, as if his blood was an offering” .... On Waiyaki’s circumcision • “I want to be a woman made beautiful in the tribe; a husband for my bed; children to play around the hearth” ... Muthoni on why she wants to be circumcised

13. Central characters are shown as strong but fallible human beings. • Characters in the novel also question some of the negative aspects of tradition. Voice of Nwoye is Achebe’s

14. Focus on social conflict: • Nwoye takes up Christianity • “It is not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul – the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul” • Others who take Christianity are ‘outcasts’ • Okonkwo’s thoughts: • “why, cried in his heart, should he… of all people, be cursed with such a son?.... Now that he had time to think of it, his son’s crime stood out in its stark enormity. To abandon the gods of one’s fathers and go about with a lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens was the very depth of abomination. Suppose when he died all his male children decided to follow Nwoye’s steps and abandon their ancestors? Okonkwo felt a cold shudder run through him at the terrible prospect, like the prospect of annihilation”

15. Hybridization? Or coming to terms with changes in one’s culture • Muthoni’s final words after her circumcision: “I am still a Christian, see, a Christian within a tribe….. Look I am a woman, beautiful in the tribe” • Nyambura is uncircumcised but in love with a circumcised Gikuyu man. • Waiyaki: visionary and liberator of the tribe and spreads school education:(a paradoxical activity) the formal learning in school being the opposite of traditional and informal learnings of the tribe. • Wanting to marry Nyambura, the uncircumcised girl, contrary to the tribe’s custom

16. Hybridization: Contradictions that can’t be resolved? • Tragic end of the protagonists: Waiyaki and Muthoni and Nyambura’s future uncertain. • Tragic death of Okonkwo

17. Do you think there could be a different ending to the novels? • What would you suggest? • Describe a different ending to either of the novels.

18. Literature and sociology • Novels as social documents – filled with anthropological and sociological content. Focus on custom, ritual, tribe, meanings of social institutions and practices, folktales. • Yet also literary works – achieve universality by transcending the local by exploring the depth of the ‘human condition’

19. The relation between writing and society • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFvPK5Txxd4&feature=related

20. Next lecture • Land as Private Property

21. Thank you