Ngugi wa Thiong'o in/and 2006

• This is an essay of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's sustained performative exile in the US as it  was materialized (by reviews, interviews, lectures) during the single year of 2006. It is organized along the intersecting parameters of the two-language publication (Gikuyu and English) of his novel Wizard of the Crow and the trial procedures concerning the 11 August 2004 assault on him and his wife Njeeri in a hotel room in Nairobi. I discuss the reviews as conglomerates where the participatory contributions to them are prompted by Ngugi's public readings, his interactions with the audience and the succeeding inter­views. The writer emerges as an authorial reader of his own novel and an administrator of the interpretations of it. The essay, alternatively, positions the reader/critic/listener in the company of a storyteller and trickster on one hand and a political analyst and émigré biographer on the other. The author is more than a writer.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Literary Studies (hsv//eng)

Keyword

exile

Kenya

writer as trickster

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)