Today’s guest, novelist, storyteller, essayist, playwright, scholar, translator, and perennial front-runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, is an iconic figure in postcolonial thought. His latest book, The Language of Languages, is the first book dedicated to his writings on translation and the status of African languages, globally and in Africa today, a topic that is quite personal for him, and central to his writing life. During his year in a maximum security prison in the Kenya of the 1970s, he decided to stop writing his novels in English and wrote his fifth novel, Devil on the Cross, on squares of toilet paper in Gikuyu, his mother tongue. Ngũgĩ suspects that he wasn’t jailed simply because he wrote and put on a play that was critical of the Kenyan government (his recent novels in English had been just as critical of the government) but because it had been written and performed in Gikuyu. Thus, every novel he has written since, he has written in Gikuyu, and then later translated into English himself. You would be right to think that writing in one’s mother tongue should be the most natural and obvious thing to do. And yet the obstacles to doing so continue to be immense and speak to larger questions around the status of the African continent today and postcolonial Africa’s relationship to its colonial past. Today we look at the histories and legacies within languages as well as the power dynamics between them, and how collapsing the hierarchies between languages is crucial to doing the same geopolitically, that the beginnings of true sovereignty begin with our languages.
If you enjoy today’s episode consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Every supporter gets the resource-rich email with each episode with things referenced during the conversation in question as well as places to explore once you’ve finished listening, and there are many other potential benefits to choose from. These include the bonus audio archive with readings from everyone from Dionne Brand to Layli Long Soldier; the Tin House early readership program, receiving twelve books over the course of a year months before they are available to the general public; rare collectibles from past guests; and more. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page.
Finally, here is today’s Bookshop, full of the books we mention today.
The post Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o : The Language of Languages appeared first on Tin House.
Tice Cin : Keeping the House
Rosmarie Waldrop : The Nick of Time
Percival Everett : The Trees
Myriam J. A. Chancy : What Storm, What Thunder
Tin House Live : Negotiating the Love and Renouncing the Rest with Destiny O. Birdsong and Donika Kelly
Pádraig Ó Tuama : In the Shelter & Borders and Belonging
Adania Shibli : Minor Detail
Tin House Live : Writing On Your Own Terms with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Kaveh Akbar : Pilgrim Bell
Callum Angus : A Natural History of Transition
Douglas Kearney : Sho
Arthur Sze : The Glass Constellation : New & Collected Poems
Anakana Schofield : Bina
Doireann Ní Ghríofa : A Ghost in the Throat & To Star the Dark
Abdellah Taïa : A Country For Dying
Elissa Washuta : White Magic
Rikki Ducornet : Trafik
Jorie Graham : Runaway
Brandon Hobson : The Removed
Viet Thanh Nguyen : The Committed
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Lit Society: Books and Drama
Ex Libris
Write The Book: Conversations on Craft
The Art of War
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Fresh Air
Myths and Legends