A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF NGUGI WA THIONG’O’S WEEP NOT, CHILD AND DREAMS IN A TIME OF WAR

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TABLE OF CONTENT

CONTENT                                                                                                                     PAGE

DECLARATION…………………………………………………………………………………………………… i

DEDICATION………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT………………………………………………………………………………………. iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………………………………………… iv

ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. vii

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE: REPRESENTATION OF SOCIETY, HOME AND THE SELF IN WEEP NOT, CHILD AND DREAMS IN A TIME OF WAR

  • Representation of Society in Weep Not, Child and Dreams in a Time of War……………… 28
    • Representation of Home in Weep Not, Child and Dreams in a Time of War……………….. 32
    • Representation of Self in Weep Not, Child and Dreams in a Time of War………………….. 41

CHAPTER TWO: THE GENERIC DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WEEP NOT, CHILD AND DREAMS IN A TIME OF WAR

CHAPTER THREE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DIMENSION OF

DREAMS IN A TIME OF WAR

CHAPTER FOUR: THEME, CHARACTERISATION, AND DICTION IN

WEEP NOT, CHILD AND DREAMS IN A TIME OF WAR

FINDINGS………………………………………………………………………………….. 118

CONCLUSIONS………………………………………………………………………….. 121

RECOMMENDATION……………………………………………………………….. 122

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………… 123

ABSTRACT

The interrelationship between fiction and autobiography provides the grounds for a comparative study of two literary works of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep not, Child and his Dreams in a Time of War. The two texts are therefore placed side by side to draw the intertextual links between them. Ngugi’s works, both fiction and non-fiction, often articulate issues concerning his personal experiences as well as the socio-political concerns of the Kenyan people. Undertaking the comparative study of these two narratives is therefore aimed at unearthing various similar issues addressed in them. It is also aimed at critically examining the generic differences between fiction (Weep Not, Child) and autobiography (Dreams in a Time of War), to determine the extent to which each genre employs artistry. It is further aimed at examining the autobiographical dimensions of Dreams in a Time of War. The conclusions drawn from this study are arrived at through the use of qualitative study based on content analysis. The study thus puts the two texts side by side and looks at issues such as, Ngugi’s representation of society, home, and the self; land ownership, land appropriation and land alienation; and then the Mau Mau revolutionary resistance and the state of emergency in both narratives. It further looks at the narrative techniques in terms of Time, Narrator and Point of View. The study confirms the fact that Ngugi uses the same data/material in different genres – one a fiction and the other an autobiography – to dwell on the same issues hence making the two genres intertextually linked. The study further confirms that although Dreams in a Time of War is also a literary work, Weep Not, Child, being a work of fiction has more flexible narrative freedom than Dreams in a Time of War which is an autobiography and employs more memory. The study is significant because of the years between the two texts, since Dreams in a Time of War was written forty-six years after Weep not Child was written, yet the same data is used in the two different genres to achieve the same purpose.

INTRODUCTION

         Background to the Study

According to Singh (2015), Saint Augustine’s Confessions (c.AD 398-400) is often considered as the trendsetter to writing Western autobiography. The major feature of St Augustine’s Confessions is to construct a history of selfhood, a process which helps the author to discern who he is. Confessions is therefore written to represent a religious experience as an example for others; Singh writes:

Autobiography is traditionally a Western genre drawing on the Catholic ritual of confessions. The classical autobiographical genre based on introspection of the self, confession of sins, expression of remorse and guilt is indeed very theological in letter and spirit (Singh).

In their introduction to “Writing the Self: Essays on Autobiography and Autofiction” Shands et al (2015) remind us that the word ‘autobiography’ comes from “Greek αὐτός-autos self, βίος-bios life, and γράφειν- graphein write.” Based on the definition above, autobiography denotes self-writing – that is, the account of an individual’s life written by him or herself. Autobiography therefore means writing about one’s self (Shands et al 7). Eakin (2004) defines autobiography as “a discourse of identity delivered bit by bit in stories we tell about ourselves day in day out” and that “autobiography structures our living” (Eakin). From the above it is obvious that ‘self’ stands prominent in what autobiography is.

It is a well-known fact that African self-writing existed long before the three main literary genres began on the continent; but not many people write autobiographies. Ngwenya (2001) in his “The Historical Dimensions of South African Autobiography” observes that South African autobiographies like Kingsley Fairbridge’s The Autobiography of Kingley Fairbridge (1927) and Francis Carey’s Slater’s Settler’s Heritage (1954) date as far back as “the colonial era” (Ngwenya). In Ghana, Caseley Hayford’s autobiographical fiction Ethiopia Unbound

(1911) and Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (1957) are examples of autobiographical writings of Africans.

It is thus clear that Africans carry out self-writing long before writing the novel, drama and poetry took centre stage on the continent from the late 1950s. Self-writing in Africa can thus be said to be as old as, if not older than, the three major genres. However, scholars have rather made significant contributions on the development of the novel, drama and poetry. Not much attention is paid to self-writing, let alone scholarly contribution to it, until the early 1980s when writers like Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achibe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o began writing their life stories.

Wole Soyinka’s Ake: The Years of Childhood, Chinua Achebe’s There was a Country, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Dreams in a Time of War and In the House of the Interpreter are examples of some of the autobiographies that have been written by well-known and well-grounded authors in the African Literary world.

At present, Africans from all walks of life have taken to self-writing. For example, apart from the autobiographies of the established African writers, now educationists, physicians and politicians are also coming out with their autobiographies. Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom and recently John Dramani Mahama’s My First Coup D’état are examples. Most of these African autobiographies which attract critical discourse are analysed in terms of their thematic underpinnings. aMnbdeRmebnedall’s contention that:

Three fundamental elements of slavery, colonisation, and apartheid…serve as unifying centre of Africans’ desire to know themselves, to recapture their destiny, and to belong to themselves in the world…show how current African imagination of self is born out of desperate but often intersecting practices, the goal of which is not only to settle factual and moral dispute about the world but also to open the way for self- styling. (Mbembe 2002).

is true and cannot be ignored. What Mbembe and Rendall are saying in the above extract is that the experiences Africans undergo have a bearing on how they write about themselves in their novels and autobiographies. Thus, Africans fundamentally write fiction and nonfiction to address various issues ranging from colonial subjugation, politics, economics and culture. Few examples can be seen in the autobiographies mentioned above. These thematic underpinnings are so dominant in African fictional works and autobiographies that they always skew critics’ attention more to the themes than other concepts. For example, the concept of intertextuality in critiquing these African narratives is noticeably absent.

The two texts chosen for this study are Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s fiction, Weep not, Child and his autobiography, Dreams in a Time of War. These two texts are narratives which recall the author’s life experiences. The two texts chronicle the experiences of the author from his childhood to his secondary school days and the circumstances surrounding these experiences. Ngugi was born in 1938 and he wrote Weep not, Child in 1964 when he was twenty-six years old. Dreams in a Time of War was written in 2010 when Ngugi was seventy-two years old. Although the time gap between Weep not, Child and Dreams in a Time of War is forty-six years, in narrating his experiences, the issues tackled by Ngugi in these two texts reveal the same pattern of circumstances. The same data is therefore used in two different genres; that is the issues raised by Ngugi in Weep not, Child, which is a fiction and for that matter a work of art, is the same as the issues raised in Dreams in a Time of War, which is nonfiction/autobiography. This research therefore seeks to critically study Weep not Child and Dreams in a Time of War to determine the relationship between fiction and fact/autobiography in order to see how far they are intertextually linked.

         Statement of the Problem

Although a few intertextual critical discourse on contemporary African novels can be found, the same cannot be said about the intertextual links between fictions and autobiogarphies in African literature. Critical discourse on intertextuality between fictions and autobiographies  is therefore practically non-existent.

Reading Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep not, Child and Dreams in a Time of War, it is clear that both texts, although fiction and nonfiction/autobiography respectively, appear to explore issues that follow the same trend. Ngugi thus uses different literary approaches in addressing the same thematic foundations.

This researcher therefore sees the concept of intertextuality as relevant to critical discourse on African fiction and autobiography hence seeks to feel the hiatus by engaging Weep not, Child, a fiction, and Dreams in a Time of War, an autobiography, to draw the relationship between the two.

         Objective of the Study

This study intends to examine Weep not, Child and Dreams in a Time of War with the aim of unearthing their intertextual links through the eyes of fiction and autobiography.

To achieve this, the research will:

  • Unearth the various issues addressed by Ngugi in the two narratives
  • Critically examine the intertextual links between fiction and autobiography as portrayed in Weep not, Child and Dreams in a Time of War

         Literature Review

1.4I Literature Review of Autobiography and Fiction

Klein et al in “A Theory of Autobiographical Memory: Necessary Components and Disorders Resulting from their Loss” (2004) aver that “One’s sense of self depends…on memories of one’s past experiences and the capacity to call those experiences to mind.” Here, Klein et al hold that the nous of self, results from how one’s memory recalls the incidents that occur in one’s life. ‘Memory’, ‘experience’, and the ‘capacity to recall’ are therefore fundamental in self-representation. For Klein et al, the nous of ‘self’, arising “from memory alone may be too extreme.” They therefore propose what they refer to as “an initial step toward mapping…psychological processes needed to transform a memory trace into an autobiographical memorial experience” (Klein et al).

Accordingly, two forms of knowledge, namely declarative and procedural knowledge are identified as stored in the memory. The procedural knowledge which “is our repertoire of rules and skills by which we navigate the world” (Klein et al) has not received much attention from Klein et al as does the declarative knowledge. The declarative knowledge is the “factual information about the world” (ibid).

The declarative knowledge is looked at from two perspectives, namely semantic memory and episodic memory. The semantic memory expresses facts such us I am affable; I am a Ghanaian; I was born in Hohoe; I was a student of University of Ghana (examples mine) about the self which can be “remembered but not re-experienced” (ibid). The information from the semantic memory is therefore recognized in the same manner as one would say sea water is salty; (example mine) a fact that cannot be altered.

Episodic memory has to do with “knowledge of a previously experienced event along with an awareness that the event occurred in one’s past” (ibid). This means that everyone  has capacity to remember or recall a particular incident or incidents that occurred in his/her life in the past and the sense of reliving the occurrence and knowing that it really happened. They opine that episodic memory enables an individual to psychologically journey back in time to revive events previously experienced by that individual; hence

Our knowledge of self is…tied up with the ‘story’ of how what we have experienced has made us who we are, and how who we are has led us to do what we have done. Autobiographical self-knowledge…requires a capacity to represent the self as a psychologically coherent entity persisting through time, whose past experiences are remembered as belonging to its present self (ibid).

They further opine that once an individual lacks the ability to reminisce the “past and present states as aspects of the same personal identity,” that individual would not be able “to know that a current mental state represents an episode or state previously experienced” (ibid). What they are saying here is that one must be able to remember and revive the past to shape today for the future.

Klein et al thus propose three capabilities the individual must possess in order to experience memory as autobiographical self-knowledge. These are: first, the “capacity for self- reflection”, which they explain as the ability to reflect on one’s own mental states, to know about “my own knowing.” This means that the individual must be able to revisit his or her memory and find out what s/he can remember about his/her past experience. Secondly, one must have “a sense of personal agency” and “personal ownership.” This means that each individual believes that “I am the cause of my thoughts and actions and the feeling that my thoughts and acts belong to me” (Klein et al). Finally, “the ability to think about time” as recounting of personal undertakings “centred about the self” (ibid).

Conway (2000) and Nelson (2003) hold similar views on autobiographical memory in their respective works, “The Construction of Autobiographical Memories in the Self-Memory System” and “Self and Social Functions: Individual Autobiographical Memory and Collective Narrative.” as Klein et al. Conway in his work posits that “autobiographical memory is of fundamental” importance for the self, emotions and “the experience of personhood” which brings “the experience of enduring as an individual, in a culture, over time” (Conway 2000). He observes that one outstanding characteristic of autobiographical memory is that it always contains “knowledge at different levels of specificity.” He identifies this knowledge at different levels of specificity as “Lifetime Periods”, “General Events” and “Event-Specific Knowledge” (ibid).

Lifetime Period, according to Conway, has to do with distinctive periods of time with “identifiable beginnings and endings.” The content of lifetime period therefore symbolizes “thematic (italics as in original) knowledge about common features of that period” (ibid). He gives such examples as when I was a boy, when I was in India, when I lived with my uncle (examples mine) and so on, as representing lifetime period. On General Events, Conway posits that they include both repeated events and single events and these “events are more specific and at the same time more heterogeneous than lifetime events” (ibid). He gives examples of repeated events as early morning health walks and single events as my journey to Paga (examples in italics mine). Event Specific knowledge is taken as a crucial characteristic of memory vividness since it encompasses lifetime event and general events. For Conway, the three broad levels of specificity are very important in helping to establish “the nature of the self” (ibid). Nelson holds that autobiographical memory is individual knowledge based on self-experience that may be shared with others.

Autobiographical memory is as imaginative as future projection of the self…based on past experience re-imagined (or re-constructed) to fit the present or future circumstances, although typically we believe memory to be more mimetic with

respect to ‘reality’ and future plans to be freer of constraints of what has already taken place…These…reveal the closeness of the connection between autobiographical memory and fiction (Nelson).

From the above, it is obvious that memory is very significant as far as autobiography is concerned. Memory is an important element because it, with time, encumbers and dispels in order to recreate. Memory does not always keep hold of its purity hence an individual’s experiences gradually becomes fictive with time. In narrating the autobiographical self, strong emotions experienced in the past may lose significance or may be over exaggerated since “retrospective perceptions of the past can vastly differ from the lived experience” (Kennedy 2013) hence making it fictive. Lucyna Wille (2014) in her “Literary Confession: Autobiography” agrees with Kennedy and posits that:

Most declared autobiographies are partly fictional, since it seems impossible to deliver a completely truthful report about the past. No matter how hard and honest the attempt may be, it is bound to entail (intentional or unconscious) modifications, additions and omissions, which are actually tantamount to fiction (Wille 2014).

The question then arises as to what a work of fiction is. Fiction refers to a story an author creates from his or her imagination. According to Edgar (1992) “the essence of fiction is narration, the recounting or telling of a sequence of events or actions.” Edgar posits that fiction imitates works such as “historical accounts, reports, biographies, autobiographies, letters, personal memoirs and meditations” (italics as in original). But he makes a distinction between fiction and these works by observing that although fiction bears a resemblance to these works it has a separate distinctiveness since it emanates from the “creative” and “imaginative” prowess of the author. Thus “fiction may include historically accurate details” but its main objective is to “tell a story and say something significant about life” (Edgar 53). Accordingly, fiction dwells on the complex human nature and motives, like, as Cooper (1709) puts it, “passion, humour, caprice, zeal, faction, and a thousand other springs” (qtd in Edgar 1992: 54).

Edgar identifies various elements of fiction that help the reader to “understand and assimilate the work as a whole” (65). Notable among these elements are verisimilitude, character, plot, structure and themes. Others are narration, style, point of view, description and dialogue. The rest are tone, symbolism and allegory. On verisimilitude he opines that fiction is strong because it is very “real” and “personal.” He observes that although the circumstances or characters in fictions are the creation of the author, they exhibit similar traits as seen in real life. Consequently, most characters in fiction “have both first and last names; the countries and cities in which they live are modelled on real places.” He additionally observes that the “actions and interactions” of the characters, coupled with “the social, economic, and political conditions that affect” their “lives” in fiction, are just like those that “readers themselves have experienced, could experience, or could easily imagine themselves experiencing” (54).

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