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COPYRIGHT 2007 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
In this paper, I consider the narrative in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Devil on the Cross against a largely ignored preface in the Gikuyu edition of the novel Caitaani Mutharaba-ini, and against the conventions of the gicaandi art that the novel invokes. Focusing on the interimplication of gender and orality in the story, I employ cultural narratology as my framework to examine the dialogic relationship between the novel's formal features and their cultural contexts, especially the gendered implications of the oral narrative strategies that Ngugi deploys to frame the narrative. I argue that, contrary to most readings of the novel, the "gicaandi" oral artist who frames the story is unreliable, and the text provokes the reader to see his presentation as incomplete and contradictory. When the preface is considered, and the narrator subjected to tests of reliability, the oral narrator's account comes through not only as totalized and teleological but also as shot through with imperatives of hegemonic masculinity that call for a challenging voice as required by the protocols of the gicaandi art form that this frame narrator conjures up. Although the preface is paratextual, untranslated, and consigned to the margins of the narrative, its consideration in the analysis of the text offers new ways of unpacking the gendered dimensions of Ngugi's use of oral techniques.
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An examination of an untranslated preface in the Gilcuyu edition of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Devil on the Cross (Caitaani Mutharaba-ini) vis-a-vis the narrative staged in the novel reveals an interimplication of gender and orality that has been lost on many readings of the novel. Although belonging in the margins of the text to such an extent that Ngugi's autotranslation ignores it, the preface echoes through its use of oral devices some of the statements reiterated and deconstructed later in the novel in a way that helps the reader put into perspective the unreliability of the male frame narrator that the novel deploys to structure its fictional events. Ngugi has commented a few times on the oral and gendered imperatives in which the novel is ordered, (1) and although there have been substantive studies on Ngugi's treatment of gender issues and on his use of orature as a method of decolonizing the African novel, critics have largely overlooked the interimplication of gender and orality in Devil on the Cross (2) In what follows, I examine the inherent contradictions that Ngugi's conflation of gender and orality produces in the novel, especially in the use of a male oral narrator to enunciate the experiences of a female heroine. Following Gabriele Helms's cultural narratology, which emphasizes that "narrative techniques are not neutral and transparent forms to be filled with content, and that dialogic relations in narrative structures are ideologically informed" (14), I focus particularly on the gendered dimensions of the novel's use of orature by reading into the ideological positions that the use of oral techniques signal. I see all the stylistic choices in the novel as political because, as Fredric Jameson emphasizes in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, in the study of the ideological imperatives in stylistics and in semanticizing narrative techniques "a dialectical reversal has taken place in which it has become possible to grasp such formal processes as sedimented content in their own right, as carrying ideological messages of their own, distinct from the ostensible or manifest content of the works" (99). This is to say that the narrative techniques that Ngugi uses in the novel can be read as ideological content of his work, opening up possibilities of appreciating the heterogeneity of formal and ideological processes in his narrative.
The story in Devil on the Cross is presented as an oral narration by a self-declared traditional artist who also designates to himself the grand titles "Gicaandi Player" and "Prophet of Justice." But his account is incomplete, and the novel calls upon the reader to offer a counternarrative to the way the male "gicaandi" artist frames the stories of women and the nation in his text; there is an implied rejoinder to the novel as required by the very gicaandi poetic enterprise within which the narrator situates himself. For the purposes of this paper, I mark his designation as a "gicaandi" performer with scare quotes because the text indicates an implied better contestant to oppose some of the narrator's claims. I find that he is incompetent in language use and acquires a clownish disposition as the story unfolds. Notwithstanding his invocation of precolonial and postcolonial texts that approximate the rich dialogism of a gicaandi performance, the narrator in Devil on the Cross falls short of an ideal gicaandi performer, a role that readers are left to complete. To understand how the narrator deviates from the expected performer, it is apposite to consider the various ways gicaandi as a poetic and political cultural activity is defined. A highly specialized and stylized art-form, gicaandi is a genre of Gikuyu poetry that encodes all aspects of Gikuyu life in sublime riddling that is performed in public by contesting poets. An artist's inability to encode messages in sophisticated metaphors or to decode the performances of fellow poets disqualifies him or her from performing in public. Gicaandi is also the instrument (a gourd engraved with hieroglyphs) that the oral artist rattles as he or she dances and riddles with other poets and the audiences. (3) Members of the audience are expected to be active participants who engage in decoding the poet and contesting with him or her. The hieroglyphs on the gicaandi gourd indicate the individual poet's mastery of the encoding techniques through which he or she would make political statements but in metaphorical language that requires an intelligent audience to decode. Scholarship on gicaandi underscores that the genre's hallmark is cryptic coding and competition between the poet and fellow poets and the audience. (4)
No doubt, Ngugi is, like the traditional gicaandi artist, a Prophet of Justice who celebrates Africa's long history of resistance in metaphorically rich language. He is one of the African writers who have persistently pitched their tent with the underprivileged sections of the society through the linguistic and paralinguistic choices they make in their writings. Through the use of oral devices and through collapsing the dichotomy between written and oral discourse, Ngugi has attempted to give voice to communities that have been disarticulated by colonialism and neocolonialism in Africa. By reconfiguring Western notions of the ideal artistic form, Ngugi has more than any other African writer supported in his narratives and theater the struggles of women and other marginalized members of the society in their attempts overcome the harsh realities in which they dwell. He has not spared the remnants of feudalistic practices of the precolonial Africa as practiced in modern society, sometimes changing popular cultural expressions such as oral narratives to underline the possibilities of a united struggle against capitalism and foreign domination of African cultures and economies. His Devil on the Cross has strong female characters, especially Wariinga through whom Ngugi decries the class-based marginalization, exploitation, and abuse of women in African societies and at the same time celebrates the possibilities of their liberation and eventual leadership roles in destroying exploitative Western capitalism and its local agents.
Originally written in Cell 16 at the Kamiti Maximum Prison where Ngugi was detained by the Kenyan government between 31 December 1977 and 12 December 1978 because of his involvement in indigenous community theater at Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Centre, Devil on the Cross expresses by its very stylistic choices a strong desire for freedom by aligning itself within the popular expressive economy of the oppressed majorities. Also the first novel that Ngugi originally wrote in his mother tongue, Gikuyu, after completion of successful theatrical productions in that language, Devil on the Cross reverberates with performative orality; the characters who speak to us are performing to one another, and these theatrical possibilities are extended to the real-life reception of the novel in popular social venues where the novel was, immediately on its publication, consumed and reproduced as a piece of oral performance (Lovesey 61-62; Ngug% Decolonising 83; Williams 118). (5) But Ngug% like Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, understands that postcolonial national culture is "not a folklore, not an abstract populism" stuck up in the past (233). A master ironist, Ngugi uses orature to produce an...
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