Weep Not Child (2 page)

Ngugi came to the writing life in an unintended, even magical way. As a young man at Makerere University, he encountered someone who was editing a magazine. Ngugi mentioned that he had written some short stories; interest was shown in them, and Ngugi, who had not in fact written anything, had to write the stories. It is a classic case of bluffing oneself into one’s destiny. Ngugi wrote a story, it was published, and so began his writing life.

It is instructive that Ngugi began with the short story, the perfect practicing ground for longer fiction. The short story, containing the matrix of the art of fiction in miniature, trains a writer in the craft of narration. It is a form that demands rigor, and its rigor and clarity and brevity show in
Weep Not, Child.
The novel leads with its assurance, its poise, its mastery of its intentions, its firm and quiet tone, and its unswerving purpose. It is rare that a first novel is so perfectly pitched—and Ngugi was only twenty-eight years old when he published it.
Weep Not, Child
shows Ngugi’s birth as a writer, his leap into literature, fully formed, like Athena from the skull of Zeus.

But
Weep Not, Child
was not in fact Ngugi’s first novel. It was his second, but it was published first—and yet it is emblematic of his body of work in the way we believe first novels to be. Before he wrote
Weep Not, Child
, Ngugi had already written many short stories and had met the challenge
of writing a novel: It is called
The River Between
, and it gave
Weep Not, Child
the assurance of a rehearsed performance.
Weep Not, Child
was the perfect way for Ngugi to begin his career as a novelist. It combines the story of adolescence with a tale of political violence and an implied love story, and it brings together, at a stroke, the key themes in the literature of the times.

Weep Not, Child
is also the novel Ngugi wrote before he became Ngugi wa Thiong'o. He wrote it as James Ngugi. It is not clear how long after its publication he changed his name, but the spirit of change was already in it. In writing
Weep Not, Child,
it is possible that he was writing himself into Ngugi wa Thiong'o. In fact he was James Ngugi for two novels, and only with the publication of
A Grain of Wheat
would he become Ngugi wa Thiong'o to the world, renewed in conviction and stature. But he was always Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and
Weep Not, Child
is now read under the rubric of that new nomenclature.

In
Weep Not, Child
, Ngugi’s art is at its purest. To my mind it is classic Ngugi, his
Romeo and Juliet
, his tale of young love set against the backdrop of opposing families and a world seething with violence and injustice. It is young Ngugi, closer to the mood of youth itself. The years would bring other Ngugis—the Marxist convert, the radical, the campaigner against political injustice, and the political prisoner. They would also bring a rich body of work, novels of great scale and political importance—like
A Grain of Wheat
, which many consider his masterpiece, or
Petals of Blood
, in which, inspired by his visit to Russia, he absorbs the tradition of the Russian novel, bringing to the African novel a new urgency and political fury. In his novel
Wizard of the Crow,
he extends his range, fusing magical realism with his signature artistic and social concerns. Ngugi also wrote many plays and significant volumes of essays, influential in their call for a new radicalism in African literature and a return to African languages as the principal mode of creative expression. And in 2010 he brought out the first volume of his autobiography,
Dreams in a Time of War
.

The years would also bring Ngugi exile following his release from prison. He would live for a time in London and settle in America, as professor of literature at the University of California, Irvine.

But
Weep Not, Child
precedes all this. In a sense, all the future Ngugis are embryonic in this novel—the seeds of his radicalism, his communism, his campaign for African languages.

Weep Not, Child
is the story of a young boy, Njoroge, growing up in the time of the Mau Mau insurgency that swept Kenya in the fifties and early sixties as an underground resistance to colonial repression, and of his quest for education and his love for Mwihaki, the daughter of his family’s tormenter. It is unique in modern literature in its fusing of genres. It is a novel of education and one about the Mau Mau. It is also a novel about the crossroads of tradition and modernity, about ancient myths confronted by modern realities. Many dichotomies thread through it—fathers and sons, rich and poor, black and white, education and apprenticeship, village and township, home and abroad, exile and rootedness, innocence and experience—and give it its multilayered complexity.

The novel is disarmingly simple and direct. Barely 150 pages, it has short chapters too, and within the chapters short subsections. If you listen carefully you will hear a certain musical element to the flow of the short subsections; they function as contrasts and counterpoints, moving from scenes of quietness to ones of distress.

The brevity is also in the sentences. The writing is clear, unpretentious, but shaped with the noble cadences of traditional speech. Language has long been an issue in African literature: Should the African writer use a European language to express his reality, a reality reflecting a consciousness saturated in traditional African languages? Achebe’s solution was the use of Igbo proverbs, songs, parables, and a certain unconscious Igbo cadence in his novels. To some degree, deliberately or not, Ngugi adopted this approach and was later famously to go further, declaring that African literature should be written
in African languages, the better not only to keep African languages alive but also to develop them as languages capable of expressing profound and elevated thought. Kikuyu, Igbo, Urhobo, Yoruba, Swahili, and Bantu, to name a few, await their Pushkins.

But in 1964, when he published
Weep Not, Child
, Ngugi had not hit upon this solution. He would later write his novels in Kikuyu and translate them himself, but he wrote
Weep Not, Child
in English, and in it you can hear an undercurrent of the Kikuyu language, its cadence, its directness in the formal prose—a kind of manifestation in English of the reality, the tone, the coloration of Kikuyu life, a seeping through of one language into another, giving the novel its rich African feeling.

There are many instances in
Weep Not, Child
of the African world seeping through by way of an alien language. “A group of men and women and children were standing in the courtyard. Some eyes were turned to his father’s hut. The others were turned towards the market place. But where was his mother? He found her inside her hut. She sat on a low stool and two women of the village sat close to her. They kept dumb. Their eyes were turned to the courtyard” (
pages 59
–
60
). If you listen you’ll hear the rhythm of the directions that the different eyes are turned toward. There is a ritual implication here. It is almost like drama, like the stylization of a still moment in tragic theater. It is also like a moment in a woodcut. Art and theater, united by the sense of ritual, a hieratic mode of being, is suggested in those apparently simple lines. It is more than the translation of a mode; it is an ancestral pentimento, a mood or worldview showing through the surface of Ngugi’s English.

Weep Not, Child
is a novel about loss. It moves through many losses, beginning with the loss of land. But land here is more than just the earth or soil, for farming and harvest. It is also the compact with an ancestral deity. It is a foundation place in the long narrative of a people from the cosmos to their place on earth. The land is in fact the myth of the people—the
promised contract, what anchors them on earth and in heaven. In fact the land is the body of the ancestral deity. To lose it is to lose connection with the gods of the people, to be unmoored and unhoused in time. Land here has profoundly different meanings to the colonist and to the colonized: To one it is a source of power, compared to the body of a woman—a haven, an escape from home, a new homeland, and an act of conquest. But to the other it is life itself, life as it streams through the pathways of myth, life as it is embodied in all that makes one human. The loss of land, therefore, is the sign of the broken axis of a people. Land comes to stand for language, dignity, selfhood, independence, and freedom. It is this mystical sense of the land that is at the symbolic heart of
Weep Not, Child
, that gives the novel its rootedness, its poignancy, its depth of feeling.

The power of one’s attachment to the land is expressed in the novel by the Mau Mau. While they were called terrorists by the British, who used the most appalling forms of torture to put them down, they were always perceived as freedom fighters. The extent of the repression that cost countless innocent lives became clearer only in 2011, when the London
Times
released official documents detailing the torture and incarceration of hundreds of innocent people, and Britain made the first move in more than fifty years that could possibly lead to some kind of compensation. It is in the light of such disclosures that the depth of Ngugi’s grasp of the situation at the time becomes apparent.

The Mau Mau element in
Weep Not, Child
insinuates its way into the narration with the quietness with which the love story between Njoroge and Mwihaki begins. With a kind of tragic inevitability, the Mau Mau resistance eats its way into Njoroge’s family. This freedom struggle, with its brutal reprisals against the colonial structure, is all the more forcefully felt in the novel in its contrast with the hero’s innocent and Christian piety. The innocence is the solvent in which the background violence is borne—the innocence of the tone alongside the tough directness of the writing.

The Mau Mau situation has receded into the past, but
Weep Not, Child
carries on, independent of its historical context. Kenya has won its independence. African leaders have come and gone. But some things abide: The story of Njoroge lives.

Time changes books in wonderful ways, if they are written with the ink of art. It is a mark of how accomplished Ngugi is as a writer that
Weep Not, Child
re-creates in the mind the atmosphere, the mood, the tension, and the feeling of the Mau Mau era. It has also created its own time and has the power to make us feel abiding realities: the hopes of the young, the impossibility of the world, the way in which politics affects our intimate lives, the necessity of resistance, and the meaning of family.

If Ngugi had published nothing other than
Weep Not, Child
, he still would have earned a distinctive place in the African literary canon. He belongs to the tradition of the protest novelist—in fact, the Jomo Kenyatta who is the black Moses of the novel is the very same who in 1977 committed Ngugi to a year’s imprisonment and solitary confinement. As such,
Weep Not, Child
should be read alongside Richard Wright’s
Black Boy
, James Baldwin’s
Go Tell It on the Mountain
, Alan Paton’s
Cry, the Beloved Country
, John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath
, and Maxim Gorky’s
My Childhood
.