Re-historicizing the conflicted figure of woman in Ngugi's Petals of Blood.

Publication: Research in African Literatures

Publication Date: 22-JUN-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University Press

The 1972 novel Petals of Blood marks Ngugi wa Thiong'o's growing interest in strong women characters like Wanja. Wanja succeeds in areas where women literary figures traditionally do not. In her relationship to the land, her strength as a mother/nurturer figure for the entire village, and her ability to forge her own destiny, Wanja is a female figure rife with agency and power. She steadfastly resolves to accompany others in their return to the city despite the unpleasant memories it holds for her, and she continues the trek even after she is raped. She improves Abdulla's business with her knowledge of advertising and marketing and eventually makes a significant profit for them both through her appropriation of the theng'eta drink. Her final turn to prostitution, though certainly a tragic and cynical decision on her part, is also a reasoned and logical solution to the problems she faces.

As the only primary woman figure, Wanja's character at first glance carries auspicious--if tenuous--hopes for African women and for their depiction in the works of a growing body of the African canon and postcolonial literature more generally. This agency is precisely the part of Wanja's characterization that is so uncritically appealing to many feminists. We find Wanja a refreshing change from traditional, passive, melodramatic, male-dependent, lackluster heroines. As a result, Ngugi has a long list of feminist supporters. For example, Judith Cochrane argues that it is the Gikuyu women "rather than their menfolk who seem to have the better understanding of the needs of their own people and of the new Kenya, and who seem better able to reconcile those needs with traditional values and customs" (90). Deirdre LaPin writes that Wanja is an "admirable, indeed heroic, character" (116). And Eustace Palmer confirms that Wanja is "brave, resilient, resourceful and determined" (278-79).

Yet these critics have overlooked the use of Wanja as trope, or the archetypal nature of her characterization. Indeed, where they have identified it, feminist critics applaud this use of trope. Palmer, for example, who writes in such glowing terms of Wanja, nonetheless identifies Ngugi's use of her as an allegory for Kenya and Africa:

The drought is also political, spiritual, economic and emotional, as with Wanja who, yearning after a release from barrenness, becomes restless and moody in proportion to the aridity of the environment. The drought generally refers to the people's deprivation of all those things that should make life meaningful. (273)

And this reading is certainly not confined to feminist critics. As Govind Narain Sharma suggests, Wanja "is the spirit and earth of Kenya, humiliated, exploited and ill-used" (302). This all-affirming acceptance of Ngugi's use of Wanja as trope has left him open to other important and little discussed criticism that has gone unanswered; or perhaps the lack of discussion is answer in itself. For whenever a male author--regardless of his race, sexual preference, or intentions--sets out to characterize a female figure, he invites particular criticism and speculation. This is true even for an author like Ngugi, who regularly demonstrates his support of women and women's rights in interviews and lectures. (1) In her article "The Mother Africa Trope," Florence Stratton takes Ngugi to task not only for using Wanja as a trope for Africa and Kenya, but also for restricting her to cliched Western representations of woman as mother, virgin, or whore, all equally defined and reflected through male desire. In fact, Stratton admits, the launching of such a scathing attack on Ngugi is necessitated precisely because he is "the male [African] writer who has been most lionized by feminist critics" (54).

This paper intends to respond to Stratton's criticism in part with a historical analysis of Kenyan women, particularly mothers and prostitutes. In my understanding of Petals, there is no denying that Ngugi relies heavily upon trope and archetype in his representation of woman. But I want to suggest that there is a strategy to the trope, rooted in Ngugi's Marxist philosophies, and that he also complicates this characterization with the use of Kenyan women's historical specificity. The fact of and meaning behind this specificity eludes Stratton's criticism precisely because her critique is Western feminist before it is postcolonial. In bringing to light the historical position of Kenyan women at the time the book takes place, I hope to illuminate Wanja's character in such a way that we can see her, like Munira, Karega, and Abdulla, as a very real representative of the Kenyan nation.

Wanja is one of four main characters depicted by Ngugi to dramatize the theories of Marxist philosopher Frantz Fanon. Fanon's theories, like Ngugi's Petals of Blood, chronicle the process of colonization to decolonization and the subsequent neocolonization of Africa. Fanon concludes that the violence done by colonization cannot be entirely eradicated until a people's revolution demands a socialist government, through violence as necessary. (2) Specifically, both Fanon and Ngugi blame the new native middle class for effectively perpetuating the colonial regime, especially through their encouragement of tourist industries. They idealize the revolution of the agricultural working masses as the people of the nation; they see the people's resulting kinship to the soil as instrumental in its successful provision for all the needs of the population.

It is this vision of "nation," understood by Stratton as primarily masses of working men, led by activists who are once again men, that lies at the base of her criticism. She argues that Ngugi creates

a gendered theory of nationhood and of writing, one that excludes women from the creative production of the national polity or identity and of literary texts. Instead, woman herself is produced or constructed by the male writer as an embodiment of his literary/political vision [...]. So constructed, woman is defined as her body, as her sexuality: she is an ideal virgin-mother figure and/or a prostitute, `Madammadonna', `a barmaid farmer'. (51)

I take issue with Stratton's criticism here on three grounds. First, I would argue that Wanja is not always defined by her body, as her work in the fields, her entrepreneurial skills, her own expressions of artistry, and her depth of character go to show. Second, in assuming that Ngugi does no more than tell an allegory of his own "literary/political vision," Stratton underestimates Ngugi's brilliance as a writer, as a storyteller. She falls into the trend discussed by Carol Sicherman of many "establishment critics" who find in Ngugi's more recent works, since A Grain of Wheat, a "lack of artistry" replaced by "mere `propaganda'" (359). In so doing, Stratton fails to acknowledge Ngugi's rich layers of symbolic motifs, the beauty of his prose style that mixes tradition with modern language, or his ability to expand upon philosophy with a compelling, human narrative thread. But I want to take particular issue with Stratton's claim that Ngugi's sense of nation is gendered. Her critique might be valid for Marxist politics in general and for Fanon's Marxism more specifically, but Ngugi puts his own spin on these theories. It is precisely with his use of Wanja as earthy mother, prostitute, and sexual being that he is able to portray a nation that addresses the issues of women as well as those of men.

Even given Wanja's complexity, certainly she is, as are the other main protagonists, archetypal; she is archetypal to the extent that any character intended to dramatize an abstract philosophy, like Fanon's, must be archetypal. The unusual, eccentric figure cannot function to represent a large portion or "type" of society and a truly individual character would run counter to Ngugi's "collective" Marxist philosophies. It is for this reason that there are collective--rather than singular--heroes and villains of the novel: Munira, Karega, Abdulla, and Wanja form a heroic worker foursome; Kimeria, Chui, and Mzigo form a similar antagonistic force of oppression. Like her male counterparts--the political activist, the teacher, the small entrepreneur--Wanja is "typed" to...

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