Albert Wendt issue  Commonwealth  Postcolonial page

Special Echos du Commonwealth Issue on Ngugi, Petals of Blood

Warning:

Only private use of the information contained in this file (© SEPC) is allowed. For any collective or commercial use, please contact the editor: Marta Dvorak.

This page is gradually being constructed and more essays will be available on line soon. The volume of Echos du Commonwealth was initially published in 1981. Some of the information included is therefore out of date. For more recent information on Ngugi's works please consult the alphabetical index to Commonwealth. Information can also be found in Robert Ross, ed., International Literature in English, Garland (New York, 1991) and in Engene Benson et al., eds., The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Post-Colonial Literature, Routledge (London, 1994).

René Richard, 'History and Literature: Narration and Time in Petals of Blood'

Christine Abdelkrim, 'Petals of Blood: Story, Narrative, Discourse'

Jacqueline Bardolph, 'Fertility in Petals of Blood'

Françoise Albrecht, 'Blood and Fire in Petals of Blood'

Jean-Pierre Durix, 'Politics in Petals of Blood'

Ian Glenn, 'Petals of Blood and the Intellectual Elite in Kenya'

There is much food for reflection and analysis in Ngugi’s rich novel, Petals of Blood but two main aspects seem particularly worth examining: the first is the narrative technique, and the question I will attempt to answer could be expressed as ‘who tells the story?’. The second concerns the conception and use of time, and could be roughly summed up thus: ‘When do the events described take place and why are the time-sequences presented in this specific order?’

Petals of Blood can be considered as a historical novel since the story not only unfolds against a historical background but is intricately interwoven with real events happening in Kenya. And the two aspects we propose to deal with, i.e. narrative technique and use of time, are of course linked to Ngugi’s conception of history as the substance of his novel. What is more Petals of Blood is not an exception in Ngugi’s work. His other three novels are also set against the historical background of the Giguyu tribe and Kenya. This consistent preoccupation shows that Ngugi does not dissociate literature from history, that he considers it his mission to tell Kenyans about the real history of their country (and Africans about their continent) through his novels.

Ngugi’s attitude to African history, to the past, is not very different from that of another famous African novelist, Chinua Achebe. Time and again Ngugi emphasizes, justifies and clarifies his position on the subject; let us give a few instances:

All these statements seem to echo Achebe’s declarations:

Thus both writers assert it is indispensable to give an African vision of African history so as to better interpret the present and prepare the future. Although it may be observed that in Ngugi’s case the ultimate purpose is more definitely the present and the future, and that, similarly, his political commitment is more clear and determined, there remains the fact that, owing to the relationship they establish between history and literature, they have at least two common points as regards the technique of novel writing.

Concerning the problem of time, the two novelists seem to have very similar conceptions. When Achebe declares ‘But I think you can easily see my idea of time, of the past, present and future as one’ (Achebe interviewed by Michel Fabre. See Echos du Commonwealth, N° 5, p. 15), Ngugi remarks: ‘Time was a vast blankness without a beginning, middle and end...’ (Petals of Blood, p. 191). In fact the coincidence is not really surprising since this apprehension of time is related to a specifically African vision of life and the world. This representation of time as a circular, non-linear entity is unusual and sometimes puzzling to non-African minds.

As for the narrative point of view, Ngugi can be said to use what Achebe described as a ‘dancing Mask’ in Arrow of God, as if transposing and applying to novel writing the advice Ezeulu gives his son Oduche: ‘The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place’ (Heinemann 1974 edition, p. 46). We might perhaps add that Ngugi’s is a rather ‘Marxist Mask’.

I- Narrative Point of View: A Dancing Mask

As suggested above, the question as to who tells the story is at times somewhat difficult to answer. This is because there are in fact several points of view, several levels of narration. We shall begin with the most obvious one.

1- The First Level: the Stories within the Story

The first level of narration is represented by the people who take part in the action in a more or less direct way. They are essentially the four heroes, of course, and also the different ‘we-s’, the people who tell stories, lastly Inspector Godfrey. There are four main characters in the novel just like the ‘four tiny red petals’ of the Theng’eta flower (Petals of Blood, p. 110). As far as the space devoted to them is concerned, Munira comes first, then Karega, then Wanja and last Abdulla. All the important episodes of their lives converge on one event, ‘the accident’, and are related insofar as they help the reader to understand what really happened, how and above all why it happened. The four of them, and to a lesser extent the secondary characters, shed light on the one event, which is thus seen and interpreted from different angles. They are actors in the plot, but, although they sometimes use the first-person pronoun, their testimonies are not given directly but are transmitted through the channel of an observer who reports them so to speak between quotation marks. This is true even in the case of Munira who is supposed to tell the whole story; he too is described and quoted by an observer. A few examples will be sufficient to illustrate this point:

Here, as is shown by the double quotation marks, there are obviously two Muniras: the protagonist and the narrator. This remark holds true as regards the other three main characters whose actions are reported by Munira. The second-hand reporting technique is also applied to the other elements of the first level of narration.

There are a number of collective ‘we-s’ but the pronoun does not always represent the same persons. For instance it means at times the children of Ilmorog (pp. 6-64) at other times the inhabitants of the village (pp. 7-8) or the peasants (p. 33). In short the ‘we-s’ represent the men and women who are more or less in the background but whose presence is felt constantly they are the people of the village (‘we of Ilmorog’ [p. 263]), of Kenya, they are the masses of past and present generations. The main protagonists are not included in the collective ‘we-s’; on the contrary, they appear as he, she or they, as in this passage at the beginning of chapter Nine:

In short the different ‘we-s’ represent the people living around the heroes and also the former generations. They stand for the collective presence, the communal spirit in this African novel. But they also bring in their own vision of the truth, the popular voice of numerous witnesses. Thus they play their part in the constant shift of point of view, they are one of the many sides of the dancing Mask.

Another similar though slightly different narrative device consists in ‘the stories within the story’. It is very often the way elder people tell the younger generations the history of their village and group. The role of ‘griot’ is frequently played by Nyakinyua , for instance during the journey:

We are reminded that the story is told to ‘groups sitting around a huge fire’ and we should realize at the same time that this story is part of the account of the journey which itself is contained in Munira’s statement.

Most ‘stories’ are of the second or third-degree types, but in some cases the device is even more sophisticated: such is the case when Wanja tells Abdulla how she told Karega what her grandmother had told her on her death-bed about her grandfather (pp. 323-324). Since this narration is of course included in Munira’s statement, we have here an illustration of how different characters (the main protagonists in particular) appear on different levels. To use a concrete comparison, this technique amounts to putting a ‘box into a larger one, itself contained in an even larger one, etc... We could describe the novel as a series of stories embedded into one another. The journey can be considered as a very apt and meaningful illustration of the way this technique works. In fact the account of the first journey of the freedom fighters is given by Abdulla during the second journey:

Here the passage from one plane to the other takes place through the children’s exclamation ‘catch-catch’ at once meaning catch the antelope (the second journey now) and catch the memory of the past (the first journey then), and thus Abdulla is carried from one reality to another and for a second he has the illusion of a double vision (p. 138).

In this way the novelist manages to convey the elaborate symbolism of this journey in time and space. Moreover the process consisting in ‘nesting’ stories into one another enlarges and deepens the vision, makes it more complete and closer to the truth; in short it gives human and historical depth to the narration.

One character, besides Munira, is the link between the first two narrative levels: the police officer, Inspector Godfrey. On the one hand he too attempts to know the truth about the accident and its causes. He too brings his point of view, the official one, and as such he is another element in the Mask’s dance. On the other hand he is the authority who compels Munira to write the statement and for that reason he also belongs to the second level of narration.

2- The Second Level of Narration: the Statement

The statement is written by Munira ‘to accede to Godfrey’s wishes’ in eleven to twelve days while he is in jail. It is ‘a mixture of an autobiographical confessional and some kind of prison notes’ (p. 190). In a way it can be considered as the speech for the defence, and also as an attempt to recreate, understand and interpret the past. As such it is composed of a series of direct and indirect testimonies, including Munira’s own, interspersed with the narrator’s interventions and reflections. It not only describes external events, it also records interior monologues and this in a manner which is quite close to the stream of consciouness technique; instances of this literary approach to psychological truth are numerous in the novel and one will suffice: in this passage Karega is carried away by his imagination and can no longer distinguish between reality and dream: ‘How can he mistake his pupils for Wanja and Mukami and Nyakinyua? He is in a classroom... And. he is no longer Mwalimu but Chaka...’ (pp. 235-236). Quite frequently no clear-cut distinction is established between dream, daydreaming and reality, in the same way as the past merges into the present and the future, and this for the same purpose, which is to suggest the ‘inward journey’ between several levels of reality and several levels of consciousness.

As the readers might at times forget it, the novelist frequently takes pains to remind them that all episodes are related by Munira in the statement, that everything (or practically everything) is seen through the prism of the narrator:

In this passage, as on page 118 (‘Even now, so many years after the event, he wrote, I can once again feel the dryness of the skin...’) or on page 190 (‘‘Yes, Ilmorog was never quite the same after the journey...’ wrote Munira years later, echoing Nderi’s words’), the writer reveals his intention to make the reader aware that most of the novel is composed of second-degree narrations. Hence the numerous quotations within quotations. It could be said in fact that the novel is contained between quotation marks.

Indeed the writer wants the reader to bear in mind that the story functions on several levels. Thus on p. 241 when Munira the character answers Karega (‘We shall see, we shall see’) and Munira the narrator adds: ‘Munira said, ominously’ we realize that Munira is now (second level) describing and quoting the man he was then (first level). The same kind of conclusion can be drawn about the passage from chapter eleven to chapter twelve:

The transition, or rather lack of transition proper, reveals the writer’s intention to make the reader pass from one level to another and vice-versa without forgetting that the narrations are framed in the statement, because indeed the statement as a narrative device is essential for the novel from the historical, psychological and literary standpoints. It enlarges the vision by connecting the varied evidence and interpretations about ‘the accident’, thus throwing on it as much light as possible; it also brings insight into Munira’s way of thinking and feeling. Above all it gives coherence to the whole; it is the unifying link between the different characters and the different events, both in space and time.

But in fact Munira’s statement does not cover the novel entirely. There are elements, in particular towards the end, which cannot be part of it for the simple reason that Munira is not in a position to be an omniscient observer. We can assume that he has heard the stories he relates and seen the events he describes. But how could he possibly know everything especially what happens while he is locked ‘up in jail? Who could have informed him of what Abdulla told Inspector Godfrey ‘truthfully... without hiding any but the most intimate events’, of what passed between Wanja or Karega and the same officer, of what the latter was thinking while going away on the train? (p. 33). Since the statement does not contain the novel in its entirety we must infer that there is some entity behind and above Munira, in other words that there is a third narrative level.

3 - The Third Level of Narration: the Writer

The author’s presence and role as a third plane in the narration is clearly illustrated in this passage (among others): ‘I keep on asking myself [second level]/ now that it has happened/what it was she was trying to tell us that night [first.level]/Munira scribbled... [third level] (p. 226). To each level corresponds a specific tense; and the clause, ‘Munira scribbled, is obviously not part of the ‘statement’; it comes from the novelist observing Munira writing his statement. Similar conclusions could be drawn from other passages, in particular on pages 139-140 and 243. In fact whenever we read ‘Munira wrote, scribbled on... etc..’ we know that the narrative is placed on the third level. In the series of nested boxes the largest and all-comprising box is that of the novel as a whole and this is the writer’s field.

Indeed, as previously mentioned, Munira’s statement does not contain all the novel. First it is possible to consider some passages as being outside of it. For instance, as is suggested by this remark concerning Abdulla, who is ‘made to record one statement after another’ (p. 309), the confessions of the other three protagonists may be viewed as other limited ‘statements’ not included in the larger one (Petals of Blood, pp. 300-309 [Karega], pp. 309-320 [Abdulla] and pp. 320-327 [Wanja]). When Munira is not supposed to know certain facts or to be able to read in other people’s minds, the writer steps in and takes his place. This holds true, for instance, of the information on the police officer (pp. 43-44): Munira could not have obtained it since he was in jail, and it is likely that he could not have got it even if he had been free. Evidence of the writer’s intervention here is brought when, just after the paragraphs devoted to the particulars about Godfrey, the latter declares on meeting Munira: ‘I should start by introducing myself’ (p. 44). Lastly the writer has to take over from Munira when the statement proper comes to an end, that is to say when Munira, having made a clean breast of his crime, no longer acts as a narrator and remains only as a character (pp. 330-333). At the end of the novel, the second level of narration disappears. The writer is alone on the stage to tell of what followed Munira’s confession, of the characters’ reactions and of the hope in the future that Karega’s action has brought.

There is another reason why the scope of the novel should be wider than that of the statement. It is of a thematic order and has to do with the writer’s identification with one of his characters. We can assume that the work is partly autobiographical but it is rather obvious that Munira is not Ngugi’s mouthpiece, at least in the field of politics, which is of paramount importance to the author. This role is devoted to Karega who is meant to express, explain, embody and illustrate what we can consider as Ngugi’s political beliefs. Indeed Munira is less attractive a character than Karega, and the readers react this way because they feel a distance is deliberately maintained on the thematic plane between Munira’s statement and the writer himself. For instance Ngugi passes judgment on Munira’s ideas, as in this passage ‘There was an element of truth in Munira’s interpretation of events that followed their journey to the city’ (p. 195). He thus wants to make the reader aware that Munira’s confused ideology is not to be taken for his own.

From a technical point of view, this distance is represented by the difference between the second and the third levels of narration, and it reveals Ngugi’s intention to go beyond and even to transcend a simple narration.

Any novelist is of course the supreme authority which creates, selects and organizes all the elements of the work. But the way he conceives his novel is significant of his purpose and his art. In Petals of Blood, the writer himself, and not Munira, is the omniscient observer. He is all-powerful and keeps control of his characters and their symbolical values through the careful organization of his material and also through direct interventions in the narration. As we have tried to demonstrate, his narrative technique is very elaborate. This is also illustrated by the use of other devices in which narration and time are combined: they are the flashbacks (very numerous since the novel practically moves backward), the echoes (characters like Chui appear, disappear, then reappear as needs be; the beginning of a story is related, it is continued later, then the thread is taken up again; symbolical events will recur such as fires in Wanja’s life, etc ... ) and suspense (we are told only on page 307 what the accident really consists in, and on p. 333 who the murderer is. All these elements are organized carefully to shed light not on the murder itself but on the reasons behind it. ‘Everything is ordained by God’ (p. 195), says Munira meditating on history and the Law; on the plane of the novel, the writer is the God who ordains and orders everything and who attempts to explain the law of history for the benefit of his readers. He is at pains to make his message very clear. He wants ‘to restore the truth of a past sequence of events’ (p. 191) and thus, to rouse or develop political awareness in his African audience. To serve this purpose, he devises a very sophisticated narrative technique functioning on three levels on which he presents a number of characters who, through their numerous and varied points of view, throw as much light, as much truth as possible on the ‘accident’. The novelist coordinates all; he is the unifying factor between all the elements; he is the one who carries the dancing mask around the central event to make it appear in its true historical light.

Obviously this narrative technique is consistent with Ngugi’s conception of History. But since this conception is also closely linked to his vision and use of Time in the novel, we shall analyze this other aspect before trying to draw general conclusions on the relation between history and literature in Petals of Blood.

II- The Other Dimension: Crossing the River of Time

What is obvious in Petals of Blood is that, from a chronological point of view, the novel begins at the end. Its general movement is backward, from now to then, from the ‘accident’ to its past causes; more precisely it runs back and forth between now and then and finishes on a brief incursion into the future; hence the numerous flashbacks, ‘flash-forwards’, echoes, and the use of suspense not only for its sake but mainly as the consequence of a specific vision of time and history. This complex structure makes it sometimes difficult to re-establish the logical sequence of events, to apprehend action in a chronological order, except at the very end when everything becomes clear, when we are told who was murdered, how, why and by whom. There is no doubt, as we shall see later, that this apparent confusion is deliberate on the writer’s part.

We separated the analysis of narrative technique from that of time mostly for the sake of clarity, but these two aspects are really two interdependent dimensions of the historical reconstitution in the novel. The relation between narration and time might be visualized as the vertical and horizontal planes of the same events, each plane being divided into several levels and periods of reference. Without going too far into the comparison, the structure being so intricate, it is possible to consider that to the three levels of narration roughly correspond three levels in the use of time. The similarity can be established in this manner: first, the facts taking place in a more or less distant past, it is the THEN; second, the point of reference represented by Munira’s statement which covers the past and the present but is written in twelve days at the end of this period; it is the NOW; third, the writer’s own time which is at once on one hand THEN, NOW and TOMORROW and on the other hand the period during which the novel was being written. Since most of the narrative refers to the past, the then, now and tomorrow are to be considered in relation to one another and not absolutely. And what we described as the first narrative level is in fact more remote in time from the readers than the other two; from the chronological standpoint, the order should be reversed thus: the writer’s time, the statement, the second-degree stories.

1) Historical facts - The Past: From Now to Then

The general movement of the novel is from a recent past to a more remote one with constant comings and goings between the two, the travelling distance being progressively reduced to finally come to nothing at the moment of the accident. The period covered goes far into the past, down to colonial conquest, pre-colonial days, even to historical legends and myths. But the historical recreation really focuses on a rather definite period extending from the beginning of Emergency to one month after the accident. The whole structure revolves around the central episode, and that ‘fatal Saturday,’ definitely appears as the chronological point of reference. The writer takes care to situate the different events in relation to each other; for instance we learn that five years have elapsed between chapter nine and chapter ten, and two years between chapter eleven and chapter twelve. It is thus possible, starting from the reference point, to put the different episodes in chronological order by setting down a series of equations such as:

Or we could combine these equations into other ones:

As regards some of the major events, we have the following order: Abdulla’s betrayal/fouryears/Munira’s arrival/ (two years before the journey) /Wanja’s, then Karega’s arrivals/a few months/the Journey/ten years/the accident.

The problem then is to locate the reference point on the line of historical, universal time, but this is not such an easy task. Indeed the novelist does not want the correspondence between narrative and historical times to be too obvious. In one instance at least he even deliberately refuses to date precisely: this occurs on page 341: ‘And yet in 196-, after Independence, you took an oath...’ In some instances historical allusions are rather vague. In other occasions they are accurate: for instance, Karega moved ‘to the new Emergency village in 1955’ (p. 50); Munira took ‘his first big initiative [going to ‘Tea’] ... just before and a little while after independence (p. 91), the freedom fighters ‘took the oath in 1952’ (p. 330), Chui and Munira were ‘expelled from Siriana in 1946’, etc...

Moreover the writer provides us with a few landmarks which, although dates are not mentioned and have to be found outside the novel, allow us to transpose the events in the narrative on the scale of historical time. The fact that these landmarks are the different stages of space exploration may be accounted for by Ngugi’s wish to give Kenyan history a universal value, to link it with the history of the whole world. In any case we can use these clues, together with those mentioned above, to try and date the main events. Let us bear: in mind the chronology of the main facts of Kenya and world history referred to in the work: the state of Emergency began in 1951-52 and was more or less maintained until about 1960; Kenyan independence was proclaimed on 12 December 1963; Sputnik II carrying a dog, Laika, was launched on 3 November 1957 and Armstrong landed on the moon with Apollo 11 on 21 July 1969. We can establish a chronological correspondence with some of the events in the novel: two years after Munira’s arrival the Americans and Russians were thinking of ‘sending travellers to the moon (p. 79); this means that Munira did not arrive after 1967 (1969-2); Karega’s strike at the school took place after Laika’s trip to the moon, that is after 1957; the plane crash happened five years after Karega’s departure and after the landing on the moon, that is after 1969 (p. 266); three years elapsed between the thengeta drinking and the accident and, as the drinking took place after the landing on the moon, it was later than 1969, which means that the accident could not have taken place before 1972 (1969 + 3) (pp. 273-274). We cannot go into too many details for lack of space, but by cross-checking the different kinds of chronological information we can give approximate solutions to some of the equations above and deduce the others:

a) If the date of the accident is at least 1972 it means that Kimeria betrayed Abdulla around 1956 (1972-16).

b) Munira must have come to Ilmorog between 1960 (1972-12) and 1963-64.

c) The journey began in 1963-1964, etc... All things considered, the most probable date for the accident is 1973-1974, the extreme limits being 1968 at one end’ and 1975 at the other. As far as we know, approximation is inevitable here, all the more so since it seems ‘to have been Ngugi’s intentions to avoid providing the readers with too precise clues to real events and people. Moreover there are two major reasons behind the relative inaccuracy in time notations: we could call one literary, the other cultural.

Ngugi transposes in fiction the difference between real time and psychological time. The way his characters feel the passing of time varies according to their states of mind. This is what Karega’s answer to the question ‘when was this?’ means ‘I left there ... I was expelled ... about a year and a half back... almost two years ... about three years. Time flies’ (p. 167).

The same confusion prevails in Munira’s mind when he remarks eighteen months or so back – though it felt like ages past’ (p. 103), or when he comments on the wide difference between knowing and feeling as regards time: ‘he felt as if he had been away for three years instead of three days’ (p. 106).

While making it sometimes difficult to date events accurately, the use of this elastic time aptly conveys the way the human mind works and thus gives psychological depth to the novel. Another device makes use of the elasticity of time. We have previously noted that the whole narrative converges on the ‘fatal Saturday’ and that the back and forth movements between then and now tend to diminish in range and to slow down as they come closer to the accident. Whereas time is counted in years in the more remote past, it is progressively divided into months, weeks (‘a week before the fire’ [p. 300]), then days (Friday, Saturday [p. 314]) and even hours (p. 315: ‘at noon’, p. 317: ‘at about seven’, p. 318: ‘It was nine o’clock’). The slowing down movement comes to a standstill at the precise moment of the accident and immediately after, the reverse process is set in motion, time progressively accelerates, the detention is divided into days (for instance on page 319), then we meet Wanja ‘a whole month’ after (p. 337), and finally the novel ends on the word ‘tomorrow’, that is to say an unlimited period of time. The use of the slowing-down then of the accelerating processes is strikingly effective as it focuses all the attention, in the same way as the narrative technique does, on the central event.

Throughout the novel Ngugi seems reluctant to establish too close a correspondence between the African and the European visions of times. This may be accounted for by cultural motivations. If the reconstitution of the African past is to be authentic and valid, it must include, in content as well as in form, the traditional African conception of time. In tradition, time was not divided into years or months but was linked to seasons, age-group initiations, generations. Thus it is sometimes difficult to pass from one chronological system to the other since the scientific precision of Western time has no equivalent in traditional Africa. Transposition therefore is bound to be approximate, as Munira’s hesitation demonstrates in this passage ‘We were expelled around – I think it was 1946 – because it was the year of the age-group called Cugini/Mburaki’ (p. 330). Generally speaking, the vision of life and time in traditional Africa (and to a certain extent even nowadays) was that of a circle on which birth, initiation, old age, death, life in the ancestors’world, rebirth, were but the different stages of the perpetuation of the everlasting vital force transmitted from generation to generation. In Petals of Blood the overall structure can be viewed as an attempt to recreate this cyclical vision of time. In fact the novel as a whole is itself cyclical insofar as it has no real ‘beginning, middle and end’ (p. 191).

2) The Statement: NOW

The whole period recreated through successive generations from the mists of time until ‘now’ is covered by the statement up to Munira’s confession. As regards the statement, time is divided into days, as the policeman ‘would collect the day’s instalment ... every evening’ (p. 190). We are constantly reminded of the passing of time on this second level, almost day by day: three days on page 306, eight days more on p. 308, which makes eleven days altogether; then on the twelfth day (p. 320) Munira confesses to his crime. In total the statement is written in eleven to twelve days and this short period is superimposed on a long stretch of time, that of Kenyan history, so that days on the second level correspond to years or more on the first level.Besides, as on the first level, the writer makes use of elastic time on the second level. Whereas Part I and Part II, that is to say at least sixteen years (Emergency/accident) but in fact more (history), are written in eight days, the rest of the period (i.e. a week before and twelve days after the accident, three weeks in all) is covered in three or four days. Slowing-down in action is echoed by slowing-down in narration, and to the same purpose: focusing on the central event.

As we know, the statement was written after the accident, and from that point of reference it goes back into the past to explore the reasons and motivations behind the murder. What Munira, Godfrey, and the others are attempting to do (although in different ways) is to find out the truth about this crime. But, as Karega remarks, ‘To understand the present... you must understand the past’ (p. 127). Hence the constant movements between NOW and THEN, the dialectical confrontation between the present and the past. Through the device of the statement, Ngugi carries into literary creation his conceptions of history and politics.

3) The writer’s time: THEN, NOW, TOMORROW

When Munira’s statement comes to an end, the novelist takes his place as the narrator. He therefore covers the period starting from Munira’s confession and extending into the future, that is to say a part of the NOW, and the TOMORROW

But insofar as he is ‘the god who ordains all’, he is at the same time, throughout the novel, the master of THEN, NOW and TOMORROW. Ngugi is the master of time in another way, for there is a third level superimposed on the other two. This is the period when the novel was being written, from October 1970 to October 1975 as we are informed at the end. But then, to come back to the first level, the accident must have taken place around 1974, which means that Ngugi started writing before some of the fictional events were supposed to happen and completed the novel less than a year after the date set for the accident. Consequently the later events, the accident and detention in particular, are contemporary with their literary expression. There is then a close correspondence not only between the third and first levels of time but throughout the three levels: the period of detention (first level), the statement (second level) and the writing of this part (third level) may be considered as taking place at the same historical moment. Thus the novel is not cut off from history in the making, nor is the novelist from his African audience. This is no art for art’s sake production. On the contrary it is a work which establishes a close relation between fictional and historical times, between literature and reality, operating within a dialectical framework. In Petals of Blood Ngugi reveals himself as being the chronicler, the historian of his time who takes into account all the facts in the past which are likely to explain or justify today’s events.

Believing as a historian that the present has its roots in the past, Ngugi as a writer constructs his novel accordingly, as an illustration of the historical and literary levels of this belief which he hopes his African audience will share. The general structure moves from NOW to THEN as the expression of the search into the past for the causes of the murder just committed. But, although it is important from a dramatic point of view, the murder itself is only the starting point of the novel in the thematic and technical senses of the word. To a certain extent it can be considered as a pretext for a more ambitious purpose. It seems that the writer’s ultimate objective is ‘to make them relive their history’, just as Nyakinyua does in the story. The old woman plays the part of the traditional ‘griot’ in the narrative and Ngugi means to be the modern ‘griot’ for his Kenyan and African audience. Like the Theng’eta she brews for the main characters, the writer, through his novel, is ‘the spirit ... [which] can make them cross the river of time and talk with their ancestors’ (p. 210). Here again, this journey into time is accomplished on three levels: on the first level with the characters, in particular the main protagonists (There are four of them, like the petals of the symbolical Theng’eta flower); with Munira the narrator through his statement; with the writer through the novel. In other words the reader is carried almost simultaneously through the THEN (past), NOW (present) and TOMORROW (relative or real future), in constant back-and-forth movements between the three levels. Thus the narrative technique perfectly conveys this specific vision of time described by Munira as ‘one continuous sweep’ (p. 21) or ‘a vast blankness without a beginning, middle and end, not tick-tock-tick-tock divisions...’ (p. 191). It expresses the novelist’s intention to ‘chant for those that went before us and those coming after us’ (p. 211) and, like Nyakinyua with whom he seems to identify himself, to be ‘the link binding past and present and future’ (p. 212).

But then if ‘past-present-future are one’ it is no use trying to escape the past, to refuse to hear ‘the call of the past’, as his characters (and most Africans, he seems to imply) do. Wanja remarks that ‘you [Munira] too are in flight’ (p. 73) and later expresses her determination ‘to defeat the past’ (p. 107). They are at once obsessed by and afraid of the past. And yet the past is always present; it invades the present. To refuse the past amounts to escaping the present, that is to refuse to live; this is what Munira attempts to do. Yet he fails. He must finally obey the law of history. Because the past merges into the present and announces the future, as the narrative technique constantly shows through the juxtaposition without any transition of different time-sequences (see p. 295). But then, as Karega asks himself: ‘Which past was one talking about?’ (p. 214).

III - The Mask’s Dance in a Huge Arena of God

In Petals of Blood, the narrative technique and the use of time both serve to illustrate Ngugi’s original conception of History. 79 To Ngugi, ‘History is not a gallery of dashing heroes’ (p. 241). Rather than being concerned with facts, victories, defeats, famous men, it ‘should be about those whose actions, whose labour, had changed the nature over the years’ (p. 198). In other words, history must be about those who are affected by events and in the last instance influence them and thus really make history, rather than about the events themselves. It must concentrate on the people, the way they have worked, suffered, felt and thought as well as on their culture; in short it must be collective, particularly in the African context, because ‘the voice of the people is truly the voice of God’ (p. 125). This is why in Petals of Blood little space is devoted to the ‘accident’ itself whereas most of the narrative attempts to reveal the causes and motivations behind it. This is why the novel is teeming with characters of successive generations who are called on the historical stage to give their varied accounts and thus ‘restore the truth of a past sequence of events (p. 191).

Truth should be the historians’ ultimate aim. They should correct the prejudices about the African past that non-Africans have created, and re-establish the truth which has been distorted. They must also be concerned with truth in today’s Africa where the political authorities have sometimes a tendency – at least this is the case in the novel – to disguise the truth under such cynical euphemisms as ‘taking medicine’ for being tortured or ‘going to tea’ for a shameful political operation. To the official version of ‘the accident’ he opposes the people’s true version: it would have been convenient for the authorities if they could have found ‘political motivations’ (p. 193) for the murder because it would have justified reprisals against Karega and the union; but the genesis of the crime, as it is reconstituted by the people, casts a true light on it: it might have been a political assassination (Karega and Abdulla had sufficient reasons for that) but it is not; it is only a personal, a religious crime. Thus objectivity in history is obtained through the confrontation of numerous and varied subjective points of view which are collected by the dancing MASK.

In this way the historian will be able to discover the LAW of History. Although this law is rather difficult to apprehend as it seems to be an attempt to reconcile the belief in God and Marxist principles, we may sum it up like this: nobody ‘can escape fate or the past’, everyone must face the past (since it is merged into the present), take his responsibility and try to change the present situation to prepare for a better future. Karega – and in fact the other three protagonists too – is a living proof that it is possible to fight for a better and juster world, and that in fact the individual is free to choose and to take sides with the oppressed masses. The novel ends on an optimistic note (‘Tomorrow... and he knew he was no longer alone’ [p. 345]) in order to suggest that there will be more and more people like Karega, that Africans should not hesitate to join his likes because, in so doing, they would only obey the Law of History: ‘The true lesson of history was this: that the so-called victims ... the masses, had always struggled with spears ... to end their oppression and exploitation: that they would continue struggling until a human kingdom came ..’. (p. 303).

Here, past, present and future are united in the vision of History, and the political militant joins the historian and the novelist. The idea of ‘a great past – A past when Ilmorog, or all Africa, controlled its own earth’ (p. 125) is the key to a bright future thanks to History which should help us to answer certain questions, the most important and urgent one being ‘how come that... those who worked for us now went hungry and without clothes’. The historian and the militant provide the answers through the art of the novelist. They take us on a journey through space and time. However the purpose of this historical fresco is not the recreation of the past for its ownsake but as the only way to understand the present and build the future. There is no passive nostalgia for the past, no poetic fascination; it is recreated at once because it belongs to the present and the future and because it is meant to rouse the audience’s consciousness. And the novelist invites his African audience to go with him on a third journey, a real one this time, which will take them through political awareness and activism, towards a happier future. But it is going to be a long and painful journey, and they must be prepared, they must unite and fight (p. 303). But the Law says they will get home. There will be a homecoming.

Yet ‘who will sing’ this journey into the past, and the present, and the future? And what is the role of the historian during this journey? The first answer is rather obvious, except that Ngugi makes no distinction between the writer and the historian, thus establishing a close relation between history and literature: ‘Perhaps in a small way the African writer can help in articulating the feelings behind the struggle’ (Homecoming, p. 50). As for the manner in which ‘he registers the conflicts and tensions in his changing society’, Ngugi sees him as ‘a kind of sensitive needle’ (Homecoming, p. 47). Yet the novelist cannot be content with being like Munira, just ‘an outsider, a spectator of life, history’ (p. 212), because he is no different from the masses and should not be cut off from them, for ‘the writer himself lives in, and is shaped by, history’ (Homecoming, p. 47). In keeping with the Marxist ideology, the novelist, being both a product and a producer of culture, has a double function when he records the evolution of society and makes the readers cross the view of time: ‘He must do both: simultaneously swim, struggle and also watch, on the shore’ (Homecoming, p. 39). This is indeed what Ngugi manages to do in Petals of Blood: he is the observer, the god who selects and coordinates the elements of the fresco to make it meaningful; he is the mask carrier but he is also at times one of the protagonists who steps on the stage to express his own political opinion. Petals of Blood is a perfect illustration of ‘littérature engagée’.

To restore the truth and thus stir the African masses into action, the novelist and the historian cooperate on a technical level. Narrative and time are aptly combined to convey the feeling of the varied dimensions of history, of the three horizontal and vertical planes of one event. If, as a character puts it, ‘History was a dance in a huge arena of God’ (p. 340), Ngugi invites the readers to watch and follow the Mask dancing around, and up and down, the three-tiered arena, while the militant expects the historian and the writer to be convincing enough to carry the audience’s adhesion.

Although the eagerness of the political militant may render the message a little too didactic, although the elaborate technique may appear at times confusing to casual readers (to us it suggests the swarming of life and the intense activity, in a changing society, in short it is the image of life), we consider that it is a useful and an excellent work. Ngugi manages to combine his conception of history, his political beliefs and his aesthetic preoccupations in this very ambitious work. It is also a great African novel in content as well as in form, and one of its extremely interesting aspects concerns the passage from oral literature (the ‘said’) to written literature (the novel as a whole) through the medium of the statement. Ngugi appears as a modern ‘griot’ who is true to his self-appointed mission and faithful to his people. Moreover we feel that he is, like Achebe, ultimately concerned with ‘the human condition’, and this is why all readers, non-Africans included, are ready to start on a new journey with this fascinating guide.

Ngugi, Petals of Blood, Heinemann (London, 1977).
Ngugi, Homecoming, Heinemann (London, 1972).

During the years of silence that followed the Publication of A Grain of Wheat, it was said that Ngugi was working on a novel whose title might become 'Ballad of a Barmaid'. This echo of Ballad of a Sad Cafe seemed a break away from the Biblical rural themes of the previous novels, The River Between, Weep not Child and chiefly A Grain of Wheat. Was the new work to take after the long line of prostitute novels so abundant in the literary production of East Africa – novels that work both as a satire of urban corruption and, at a deeper level, as metaphors for the sterility of 'New Africa'? Ngugi finally changed the title to the ambiguous, complex image of Petals of Blood. Yet, if we keep in mind this first draft centred around the character of Wanja, if we attempt to connect the grain of wheat and the flower of blood, we may bring to light a continuous development around the theme of fertility, which may help us to understand one of the facets of this rich, complex novel. Holding this one guideline, it is possible to examine how the dreams, the desires, the decisions of the individuals can merge into the collective history which is the subject of the novel.
A Grain of Wheat (Heinemann [London, 1967])ends with several confessions, and above all with the confession made publicly by the protagonist, Mugo: these words, in themselves a sacrifice, make possible the act of fecundity. This is illustrated by the carved stool given by Gikonyo to Mumbi, the couple who were the Kikuyu Adam and Eve: 'He thought about the wedding gift, a stool carved from Muiri weed. 'I'll change the woman's figure. I shall carve a woman big-big with child'' (p. 213).
Petals of Blood opens on Wanja's desire to have a child, on Munira's anguish which is connected with a feeling of sterility and impotence: 'isn't there a safe corner in which to hide and do some work, plant a seed whose fruits one could see?' (p. 7). Both have come to Ilmorog, this 'waste land', in order to beget life, to start their own life anew: ' ... breaking with the sense of non-being' (p. 15). The trwo notions are linked in a symbolic system in which the identity of the individual and of the group rests primarily on this capacity to give birth, to ensure continuity.
One must remember that in a tradition where a young man or woman may be addressed, even in a modern context, as 'mother of...', 'father of ...', with the names of the offspring they will have one day, procreating is not a matter of individual choice, but a duty towards the group, the living, and the dead of the lineage. Thus is ensured the identity of the individual: a woman is a full adult on the day she is a mother; a man's virile power cannot be separated from his capacity to beget children, hence, in fiction, the metaphors chosen to express the decline of a culture, the anguish of a dominated people: they are all images expressing a threat to fertility.
In Ngugi's work, the two early novels The River Between (Heinemann [London, 1965]) and Weep not Child (Heinemann [London, 1964]), are in many ways Bildungsromane describing the painful maturation into adulthood, the difficult choice between two modes of initiation (The River Between), between two father figures (Weep not Child): these unresolved contradictions leave the hero unable to assert himself as a man. With rather cruel irony, the narrator of Weep not Child insists on the immaturity of Njoroge, who has neither the power, nor even the desire to conquer Muthoni, although she is eager and ready to form a couple with him.
In the first chapter of A Grain of Wheat, one does not need complex psychoanalytical keys to detect a terrible fear of impotency in Mugo's dreams and fantasies. He feels threatened by the mocking eyes of an 'evil mother' figure, is laughed at by young women, cannot pick up or connect the loose fragments of his past and of his personality. There is also a threat of sterility, at the beginning of the novel, in the separation between Gikonyo and Mumbi who do not talk any more and do not even look at one another.
The first pages of Petals of Blood remind one, in this regard, of the first chapter of the previous novel: the same nightmare with its images of impotency, the same mocking old woman, the same laughing young women. Fertility and identity are linked in the same way, as problems that face Wanja and Munira, but also Karega and Abdulla: they all seek to procreate and to be born again to make sure the line is not broken. Karega once believed in the power of germination, in a future, and wrote about it in his notebook: 'And the seed we planted together, with so much faith, hope, blood and tears. What is the new force, what's the new force that will make the seed sprout and flower?' (p. 46).
First, it is established in the novel that solitude is sterile, in all the images where Munira can be seen 'sheltering from others in his school', 'watching from the safety of his classroom' (p. 24), but also in his empty house, in the bar, 'that other hiding place' (p. 23); he is an outsider from inside, who excludes himself from a world where life is outside, in the physical struggle of women with the earth (pp. 20-24). This isolation is similar to Mugo's at the beginning of A Grain of Wheat, as he lives away from the women and mothers of the village in his fireless hut. The flower eaten by a worm which is shown to the school children is also an image of sterility: 'It cannot bear fruit... [it is] prevented from reaching the light' (p. 22). In order to bear fruit, one must not be afraid to live, afraid like Munira who shies away from his own desire '... careful not to be dragged into an area of darkness' (p. 24). Man and woman must meet on the path, like Munira coming across Wanja; they must become one like the androgynous statue of the fighter which the villagers admire in the lawyer's house.
In Petals of Blood, women, especially when they are seen through the eyes of Munira and Karega, play a very important part. The book's dedication – both outside the narrative and also part of it – does place the novel under the sign of women, which might appear as a paradox for what is also a political and historical survey, a socio-economic analysis of a contemporary situation Here can be found together biography and poetry and the three great archetypes: the mother, the wife, the lover, universal characters which in Ngugi's work have very definite functions, on the psychological and symbolic levels.
The first one is the mother, a peasant woman always seen at work in the narrative, harvesting, sowing: 'He was thrilled by the sight of women scratching the earth because they seemed at one with the green land'. (p. 24). This toiling life ennobles Mariamu: '...the piety in her trembling total absorption in her work' (p. 47), and conversely, the degradation of an old peasant woman reduced to casual labour, carting stones at the end of the novel, is a painful sight. These old women are poor, usually widows, maybe in the image of Ngugi's own mother, but gifted with spiritual strength – the eyes of Nyakinyua are 'a concentration of light' (p. 123) – which comes from ancient wisdom, 'insight into the past, what made history move' (p. 123), and from the daily contact with the elemental forces. The first words describing the old woman ('He looked at her furrowed face, at the light in her eyes' [p. 7]), the contrast of furrows and light remind one of the double mother figure who, at the end of Weep not Child, comes to save Njoroge from despair, with a lamp in the night: 'He went towards her, still trembling. And now he again seemed to fear meeting her. He saw the light she was carrying and falteringly went towards it' (Weep not Child, p. 153). A very early short story by Ngugi, 'The Return', presents the same image: when the young man, betrayed by his lover, is going to drown himself, he is similarly saved: 'There, standing and looking resplendent under the bright moon, was his aged mother' (D. Cook, ed., Origin East Africa, Heinemann [London, 1965], p. 59).
Though the figure of the revered mother, who provides shelter, warmth and the solace of food – like Mariamu and the memory of her very sweet tea - is very important, the writer does not over-idealize this type of character: Nyakinyua does not see everything, cannot tell what she knows: 'She had... descended into a private gloom of memories and uncertainties. She remained thus, hand on the stirring stick, head inclined to one side, eyes on the floor, answering none of the questions on their silent faces (p. 214). This mother image is also double: to the 'good' mother is added a threatening witch-like figure like Wanja's 'good' mother and 'bad' aunt. In A Grain of Wheat we have Mugo's wicked aunt or the widow with the cold hearth who wants to make him her son. It is significant to compare once more the first pages of the two novels: in the earlier, the hero, unsure of his identity and of his virile power, remembers, in a dream or a nightmare, his aunt vomiting next to him. In Petals of Blood, an old woman deposits 'a mountain of shit' at the place of Munira's endeavour, the school, which somehow also stands for the book itself. It is a gesture both derisive and threatening – an image of rejection, of expulsion from the mother – and its repeated evocation by the villagers eventually paralyses Munira. He had dreamt that he was going to bear fruit, first of all by teaching, imparting knowledge, just like Waiyaki in The River Between, but this dream, in the first chapters, is faced with the reality of the rotten apple, the mucus, the excrement, the mocking eyes of village women, '...the many eyes that laughed at his failure behind the hedges.' (p. 11), just like the eyes of the old woman Mugo nearly strangles in A Grain of Wheat, because she has, like his aunt, 'that oblique smile, that contemptuous glint in the eyes' (A Grain of Wheat, p. 205).
Similarly, Karega is somehow paralysed by the memory of his mother Mariamu, who looks so reassuring. In a dream, he starts in a quest for her, through marshy land, 'adrift on a raft', full of anxiety, trying to prove to her his maturity: 'I wanted to find you... to show you that I have grown big' (p. 237). This is close to Njoroge' shame in front of his mother, at the end of Weep not Child: 'the guilt of a man who had avoided his responsibility for which he had prepared himself since childhood' (p. 154). One can also notice that this mother figure, who is deeply rooted in continuity with the ancestors, in close contact with the sacred, courageous in the armed rebellion, does not have by her side a complementary father figure, who can be strong in valour and wisdom. In Ngugi's works, the fathers who survive have all been traitors. It is a pattern constantly found in the imaginary world of East African literature, where the father is either dead, or a traitor, or humiliated, unmanned, (like the father in Weep not Child). And the mother cannot transmit by herself to her son the necessary virile confidence which would enable him to conquer young women.
Just as the several characters representing mothers throw complementary light on one another in Petals of Blood, according to Ngugi's specific technique of echoing protagonists and secondary characters, in the same way, the wives are also variations on one theme: the image of the obedient wife, who lives her Christian religion with the same fervour as her mother lived the old religion. The Munira's wife is thus 'drained of sensuality... in a cold incandescence of the spirit.' (p. 17). These secondary characters – Munira's mother, his wife, Wanja's mother – live 'outside' the novel itself, in the town of Limuru which represents the recent past, half-way between Nairobi and the traditional village of Ilmorog. Just like the 'mothers', their vitality, their warmth is remarkable, their spiritual strength expresses itself in songs. But just like the wife of the catechist in The River Between, of Jacobi in Weep not Child, they are dominated by husbands who are hardened by a narrow religion, who have sold themselves to the new forces, to money, from which they get their manly power: 'With money I can buy the princess of England' (p. 233), Wanja's father used to say.
Among these couples from the emerging middle class like Wanja's parents, or from the rich established middle class, like Munira's parents, all the resentment, the satirical barbs of the narrator are focused on the husband, whereas the wife, who is passive, but a source of warmth, with the spiritual capacity to suffer, is spared.
The third generation, if one can say rather schematically that mother and wife stand for two stages in a the phenomenon of cultural transformation, is represented in all of Ngugi's works by pure idealistic young girls who are vaguely frightening because of their education and their independent ways, and also always belong to a wealthier family than the young man who courts them. They are the girls that the young protagonists in The River Between and Weep not Child dare not conquer, but also Wanja in her youth, with her rejected suitor and his adolescent poetry. When they live fully up to their moral convictions, they meet with a tragic end: thus we may compare the death of the young circumcised girl Muthoni in The River Between, of Kihika's heroic fiancée in A Grain of Wheat, or here, Makimu's suicide. When this young woman goes away or dies, the young man who loved her falls prey to anguish, to a feeling of impotence, powerlessness mixed with ill-defined guilt, as happens to Karega.
In this modern generation, the really new character in Ngugi's world is that of Wanja. She naturally evokes Mumbi in A Grain of Wheat, who also took responsibility for her fault, for the child she had outside her marriage, and who, through confessing her betrayal, tried to redeem herself and to give Gikonyo a son. But the character of Wanja is unique in this novel, in spite of the precedent created by her own aunt, or the weak, parodic echo of Lilian, the mystical barmaid. She brings to mind all the characters of financially independent prostitutes, such an important feature in the literature of East Africa. They are far more disturbing and threatening than Ekwensi's Jagua Nana (Jagua Nana, Heinemann [London, 1961]): the characters in Okot p' Bitek ('Song of Malaya', in Two Songs, Heinemann [London, 1971]), in Mangua's or Mwangui's novels, in Prostitute by Oculi (East African Publishing House [Nairobi, 1968]), where the protagonist has also killed her baby. Along the same line is the very harsh scene in which Wanja watches her dying father, her thrill in her power: My heart is tearless' (p. 311). She is the true contemporary of the many fictional characters of modern women who are paradoxically freer than men in this rapidly changing society and loom frighteningly in their lives, like the protagonists of Rebecca Njau's Ripples in the Pool (Transafrica [Nairobi, 1975]), Meja Mwangui's Going Down River Road (Heinemann [London, 1976]), Samuel Kahiga's The Girl From Abroad (Heinemann [London, 1974]).
Wanja is the central character of the book, and the narrative is organized round her quest for fertility and rebirth, in its four main stages. In the same way that Mumbi, in A Grain of Wheat, had to live through her conjunction with Karanja, her confession to Mugo, in order to be finally united with Gikonyo with a promise of fertility, so Wanja, in a quest which is more physical, more overt, will unite with Munira, then Karega, then Abdulla, in the three parts of the novel, trying to achieve rebirth and access to a new spiritual identity. Each of these conjunctions will be a challenge for the three men, an ordeal through fire, the touchstone of their power and purity of intent. The first phase, the brief union with Munira will prove a failure for them both: 'maimed souls... looking for a cure' (p. 73). Wanja did not commit herself truly, she only half-believed in the diviner's predictions about the power of the moon together with a pure heart. Munira fails to make her fertile because he is totally passive with her, easily humiliated, and because he only lusts for her body. His imported puritanism has him separating the spiritual from the carnal, as in the dream where the caricature missionary, Fraudsham, warns him of the horror of sin and stands in the way of his desire for Wanja: 'The perfumed garden that was her body' (p. 34) '…. all right as long as one was careful not to be dragged into... an area of darkness... Yes... darkness unknown, unknowable... like the flower with petals of blood'(p. 24).
Munira fears the devouring woman suggested in Walcott's poem (see 'The Swamp' in Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948-1984, Farrar, Straus and Giroux [New York, 1988 (1986)], p. 59). He rationalizes his feelings of anxiety by a moral condemnation of this Jezebel which brings back the memory of a shameful visit to a prostitute. The only possible outcome of this contempt and fear is the destructive jealousy that will make him drive away Karega. The sterility of his union with Wanja is that of the flower eaten by the worm, which has not come to light: 'This is a worm-eaten flower.... It cannot bear fruit' (p. 22). It is the sterility of the earth itself: Munira and Wanja are gnawed by a worm, they are dried up, cut off from their pasts, rootless: 'It was as if there was a big break in the continuity of his life and his memories' (p. 15). They are no longer attuned to the old cycles, in the same way as the land is dried up because the train, the devouring dragon, has eaten up the trees that gave birth to rain. The whole landscape evokes the metaphor of sterility in T.S. Eliot: '... a drought-stricken, depopulated wasteland' (p. 110).
Yet, after this first part, it is made clear that man must act. Nyakinyua, 'mother of men', reminds the others that it is necessary to challenge one's destiny: 'It is our turn to make things happen. 'Why should people accept any act of any God without resistance?' With her words, her songs, her fertility, she will infuse strength into the community: 'We made our own words and sang them and we danced to them... We must sing our tune and dance to it… us that sweat, us that feel the pain of bearing' (p. 115). She will remind them of Ndemi's virile strength, of the Promethean power of the founding ancestor: 'He who wrestled with God' (p. 120). The second part, 'Toward Bethlehem', shows the people of the Old Testament walking towards the star, the birth, so that the cycle of fertility can. be resumed on the parched land.
In the third part, 'To Be Born', there seems to be a favourable divine answer. The sacrifice of Wanja, once more humiliated by Kimeria, but this time to save the child Joseph, appears to atone for her previous fault, to restore the balance where order had been disrupted by initial failure: 'crops will flower and later we shall harvest'. The chapter brings scenes of sowing and harvesting. As the legend of origin mentions in the first pages, the Kikuyus are a sedentary, agricultural people who have a memory of their nomadic, pastoral past and still have a lot of cattle for sacrificial, symbolic purposes. Paradoxically, they are all the more attached to their roots in the land since these are comparatively recent, at times contested historically speaking.
In the novel two systems of metaphors are thus opposed: meat and seed, devouring and germination. On one hand the scavengers, Cui (the leopard), Kimeria ('he who swallows'), Hawkins, the hawk. These meat-eaters all live by the rule quoted by Wanja, who learnt it from her greedy, corrupt father: 'You eat somebody or you are eaten' (p. 291). Wanja herself proclaims more cynically the motto which others follow hypocritically: 'We are all prostitutes... in a world of grab and take' (p. 240), Karega says. Many elements are part of the same metaphorical network, such as the train that eats up the forest, the machines that swallow up the houses (p. 265). All this cannibalistic world is described in the last pages: 'the era of drinking blood and feasting on human flesh' (p. 344).
Opposed to this violent and uneven struggle for survival, is the slow travail of the earth and the seasons. The third part of the book is a song of praise to rain, to harvesting, to the feast of circumcision which will at last take place (p. 203). Wanja and Karega have apparently found their roots, paid the price that was needed to be accepted within the village community. Their love-making; like other instances of fertile love-making in Petals of Blood (p. 74) takes place directly on the nourishing earth, whereas the doomed union of Karega and Makimu had occurred in an ill-defined space, on a marshy island. The pantheistic lyricism of this part of the novel brings to mind D.H. Lawrence, with this exact coincidence of telluric forces and human desires, with this type of love-making which is close to wrestling between man and woman. Mukami, struggling with Karega had played with desire, but Wanja, 'the wrestler', gives herself totally, while maintaining the tension, the antagonism which, in Ngugi's work, is essential to all searching for unity. The projected title of A Grain of Wheat, 'Wrestling with God' comes to mind as it speaks of the struggle between Jacob and the Angel, in the Old Testament, and also of the fight between warring spirits in Kikuyu mythology. The village seems to have won in its wrestling with God, to have conquered forcibly its miraculous harvest, and Wanja appears to be reborn.
Yet the description of this pastoral happiness is made painful by the irony of the narrative. Wanja's past, mentioned early in the story, corrodes the evocation of innocent emotions; the few references to the city of New Ilmorog, in the near future, colour the painting of this fragile golden age with a pathetic, ironic tone. And yet, great was the temptation of happiness, attractive the image of a future that might have been, in the restored unity of mind, body and soul. This tightly knit community where peasants, traders, schoolmasters can fill they roles is strong enough to drink at the source of its past, to invent new rites. The evening when they all drink Theng'eta, the drink that makes one potent, is explicitly a ritual of rebirth: ''Farewell to the drought in our lives', added Abdulla. 'And for more sperms of God to fertilize the earth', Munira said' (p. 205). The night is fertile: 'Harvest time for seeds planted in the past…. He feels in himself the power of an immense dewy dawn over Ilmorog' (p. 234). Theng'eta made with germinating millet has, through sympathetic magic, all the virtues of this grain. The grain also includes beans, peas, maize which are grown by women but are linked to the virile image of the corn cobs, the ears of millets which are called 'fingers of God'. The symbolic value of the seed is also found in two other areas, with a certain ambivalence: first the corn was the code name given by the forest fighters for the precious bullets acquired with human lives. The seed is also the basic element in the making of Theng'eta '3P for Power': alcohol liberates speech in the group, lets them grasp the truth when they all take it together, ritually, with a pure heart, but it will also tempt Munira, Abdulla and Karega to despair and die.
By the end of the third part, no root has germinated from the seed, from the rain: 'Karega and Wanja revert to their former selves. The soil has not been fertile for long, it was premature to hope for harmony and fulfilment: for the seed to grow, it must first rot in the ground. There in no redemption without suffering. Nativity takes its full meaning only at the time of the Passion: the symbols of the New Testament underlie the last two parts of the book.
The fourth part, 'Again... La luta Continua', examines the conditions of this fertility. The protagonists had dreamt of finding their way back into circular time, an eternal present where the ancestors, the living and the unborn children would merge into the same cosmic harmony. But this was an illusion as short-lived as the fantasies born of drink. The old Nyakinyua herself loses her power when Ilmorog is no longer a closed world; the tarred road, just like the train in other novels by Ngugi, is the force that rapes the village, divides its inhabitants, sterilizes the fertile fields, empties of its meaning the last sacred piece of land - the place where the hut of the unseen diviner stood. The village is now irreversibly connected to Nairobi, to the whole of Africa. It lives now in linear time, joins in the progression forward into the unknown, for better or for worse. Nyakinyua's death is announced very early in this fourth part when she has been uprooted, bought out by the bank: '[the bank which] uproots lives of a thousand years' (p. 276), she cannot fulfil her role any more. On her grandmother's land, 'Wanja has had two houses built, the wooden hut where the pressure lamp - the star of the village when she first came - still burns, and the concrete house where the many-coloured electric bulbs proclaim her recent transformation into a triumphant prostitute.
Is fertility still possible? More explicitly than in the previous chapters, Wanja is now identified with modern, urbanized Kenya, just as Mumbi, in A Grain of Wheat, had stood for the Kikuyu earth which was at stake in the civil war: 'This is New Kenya. You want it, you pay for it, for the bed and the light and my time and the drink I shall later give you and the breakfast tomorrow' (p. 279). The conclusion reiterates this interpretation of Wanja's nature: 'These few who had prostituted the whole land turning it over to foreigners for thorough exploitation' (p. 344).
Is it too late for her to be redeemed, for all to find a feeling of identity, a faith in continuity? Even Karega who, at one time, had seemed to carry a promise for the future, whose political commitment had been criticized less harshly than Munira's timorous idealism, can do nothing for Wanja. And yet he knew her better than the schoolmaster, respected her without judging her. But his words are cold, hard, in the style of those of Joseph, his pupil, who bores Abdulla (p. 340). He does not lack wisdom or courage, but the fire that would make him apprehend spiritual realities: he refuses the link with his roots, refuses to take into account Wanja's past, her source of strength. In order to make the present fertile, one needs to accept humbly the continuity with the past. Karega has destroyed Wanja's dream with his cold language, his 'didactic triteness'(p. 326) and can do nothing for her any more.
Seeking to be born again and to give birth, the protagonists are going to discover together the necessary grafting on the tree of the past, which is indispensable for the painful rising of the sap: 'Could I resurrect the past and connect myself to it, graft myself on the stem of history even if it was only my family's history outside of which I had grown? And would the stem really grow, sprouting branches with me as part of the great resurgence of life' (p. 244). According to this metaphor expressed by Munira, they must all consciously explore their own roots. Whatever the price of this difficult reordering of experience, this painful search for meaning, they have to re-establish their links with their own past: 'I had to take a drastic step that would restore me to my usurped history, my usurped inheritance, that would reconnect me with my history' (p. 229). Dreams, confessions, dialogues will help them along this journey into the past. The text that Munira writes, constrained by his exacting homonym, Inspector Godfrey ('...this is becoming ridiculous. I, a grown-up, a teacher, guarded and scribbling fiction on paper' [p. 191]), plays in Petals of Blood the same part as the confession-speech which Mugo in A Grain of Wheat prepares under the pressure of the village. It is a novel within a novel, or the story of novel-writing itself: 'For what are recollections but fiction, products of a heated imagination?' (p. 191), soothing words, the writing-down of a meaning which is a way to die to oneself, but also the only way to open out onto the future.
When they look into their past, all must put their finger on the initial fault: Wanja chose the world of money, her father's world, instead of the values and dreams offered by her young suitor (p. 231) and, as a consequence of this first choice, ended up killing her child. Karega was the cause of Makimu's suicide. Abdulla did not revenge his comrade in the fight. Just like in A Grain of Wheat, at the end of their exploration of their past is the moment of choice, of responsibility, when the protagonists or their parents of their own free-will undertook a wrong act that now compromises the future of the whole community. This total freedom of choice cannot be brushed away; in the words of Wanja: 'I ask neither pity nor forgiveness nor any understanding excuse' (p. 291). There is always a moment when one decides alone: 'She had chosen. This she could not now hide from herself. Karega was right. She had chosen and she could not blame it on her parents and on Kimeria. At least, she could have chosen to fight differently. Her grandfather had chosen. Her father had chosen. Karega had chosen. Everybody chose to accept or not to accept' (p. 328). The past of the parents reveals the existence of a terrible causality which transcends generations: the choices made by Wanja's father, a 'loyalist', in the emergency and those made by her aunt who became a prostitute weigh as heavily on her life as the heroic actions of her grandfather, of her grandmother. But with Ngugi, as with other East African novelists, the description of these three generations and of their actions does not express a type of sociological or psychological determinism. In a conception of the world where each man is but a link in the long chain of lineage, an intermediary for the vital forces that are carried along, each act, each choice puts at stake a whole spiritual balance, may compromise the work of the ancestors and commit the generation to be born; we do not find determinism here, but a lesson concerning freedom, responsibility, the duty to fight. In A Grain of Wheat, the civil war was the cause and the consequence of an inability to fight, of spiritual cowardice. Here, this spiritual maiming is the product of society after Independence and produces it in turn: 'At the bottom of Wanja's story and experience was an injustice that did not make sense' (p. 296). 'It was our souls that were maimed' (p. 297). Once the fault has been identified, one must confess it to others, for this journey into the past is neither a therapeutic auto-analysis, nor an act of private contrition to ensure individual salvation. What is at stake is the survival of the community, and words have to be exchanged so that this torturing act of lucidity may bear fruit, so that men may be clear to one another, 'a mutual nakedness' (p. 230). To wrench one's true destiny from God, one must fight first within oneself, 'wrestle with the true god within us' (p. 164) but one must also voice one's fault. Wanja reveals that, according to the old diviner, it is only after such an avowal of sin that she may become fertile (p. 291). The protagonists all feel with Munira how essential it is for them to say clearly where they erred, now that they need to be forgiven: 'I was weighed down by a sense of guilt, as if I had contributed to Wanja's degradation and the evil of the world, and I felt a tremendous need for forgiveness' (p. 297).
Once they have discovered and confessed their failing, the four protagonists find themselves, like the previous generation (p. 355) faced with the choice that will make rebirth and fecundity possible. They all decide to act in order to choose the side they are on and make up for their past timorousness. Yet, it is ironical that once their minds are made up, they lose the control of their action, their deeds fall into a pattern of exchanges that underlines their spiritual interdependence: Munira lights the fire that Abdulla had intended to start, Wanja kills the man Abdulla had decided to murder and he saves her without realizing it is her. But this final conflagration has enabled each one of them at last to fulfil his destiny.
Finally, the man who gives a child to Wanja is Abdulla, the silent man who has suffered much, who has acted for the present in the continuity of old values, with the same courage as Nyakinyua's husband, the fighting hero: 'he was a man'. Abdulla too was a man, totally committed once as he fought in the forest: 'That was the day of his true circumcision into a man' (p. 136), and Wanja has given him back his old pride. Abdulla, not Karega, is truly generous: he chooses Joseph not as a son but as a brother, in a bond which just as strong but imparts more freedom than the bond between father and son. Just like Bunyan's hero, he has come out of the slough of Despond and can reconcile within himself the linear time of the new world and the circular time of his roots, as is expressed by the beautiful metaphor of the dance: 'Maybe... maybe, he thought, history was a dance in a huge arena of God. You played your part, whatever your chosen part, and then you left the arena, swept aside by the waves of a new step, a new movement in the dance' (p. 340). He accepts his place in the cycle, the coming to an end of his role, his being overtaken by the generation to come: 'let it be.… His time was over'. Above all, it is significant that Abdulla is the only one that has the secret of the use of words and can join in the song with the women without breaking it, and can also pick up the thread of a new song: 'It was Abdulla who helped him out. He sang that when the old thread was broken, it was time for the whole people to change to another time altogether and spin a new and stronger thread' (p. 209). He is the only man qualified to give life to Wanja again, even if, in a final ironical twist, he is to remain unaware of his paternity.
Munira also discovers himself fertile and bears fruit in his own way. This character, who is a brother to Wayiaki, Njoroge and Mugo in the previous novels and is treated even more harshly, with a more corrosive lucidity than the younger protagonists, is granted in the narrative the privilege of acting at last upon reality, of ceasing to be this outsider who stands on the shore, an eternal spectator from the heart of his shuttered house. He has set fire to the walls, sacrificed himself so that the city may be purified. Until the end, he will be this parody of an Old Testament prophet, a parody even of Christ at the time of Passion, but his own mode of fertility has been established in spite of all. First, as a schoolmaster, he has not been the stealer of children the village feared, but a man that brings new masters, and Joseph is a living witness to the fertility of his teaching; thanks to him, he has been initiated to learning, in the new age group; after all the others who went through Siriana, he has found weapons in books which talk of changes, of action. But Munira's specific fruit is also the narrative he is writing, a painful bringing to light which has its own sacrificial value. The fact that writing aspires to such value in its full fruition is presented ironically in the novel, in the words of Fraudsham who encourages his pupils: 'telling them that writing was akin to religion: 'My boys, a sublime act, a cleansing rite'... 'An act of confession of heated passions and anguish'. Karega, the realist, will not accept this pretension. but Munira's text is akin to the purifying fire he wishes to light, an image which is both ironical and heroic, an image of the novel itself as a dangerous act of atonement, which seems to foresee and call for the punishment of the writer.
Karega, finally, finds his own kind of fecund fulfilment in a manner which is directly political, naturally, but also underlined by a symbol. In this novel which is dedicated to women, two new feminine characters emerge from the shadow in the final pages: one is Wanja's mother, a warm, strong mother-figure who, set free by the death of her husband, can at last help her daughter in turn to accept her own identity as a mother, to connect the past with the child to be born and to have hope in the future: 'Wanja's mother had felt very weak at the knees and she was only able to stand and walk because of her faith in the mercy and the infinite justice of Christ'.
The other character, described just like Wanja at the beginning ('He saw the girl and wondered who she was' [p. 343])' is a newcomer in the book. Karega's mother has died, and he sees, coming towards him, a young woman who is fired by his words with a fervour which complements young Joseph's determination. Through the union between Wanja and Abdulla, the cycle of fertility has started once more; they can all live anew: 're-enacting broken possibilities in their pasts' (p. 245). Through the fire lit by Munira, his sacrifice, the earth-woman can be born again from her ashes, like the Phoenix, in the way Africa itself can be reborn '... with its infinite possibilities for renewal and growth' (p. 246). Through Karega's faith, transmitted to Joseph and to Akinyi, the theme of fatherhood widens into the image, maybe more revolutionary, of brotherhood as evoked in the quotation from Cabral in the dedication of Part Four.
The way the theme of fertility is treated shows the extreme coherence of Ngugi's symbolic system both within Petals of Blood and from one novel to the next. But just like the dancers who succeed one another bringing new steps, the latest novel goes a little further than A Grain of Wheat. Desire and violence have emerged on the surface of the discourse, within the time sequence of the narrative and in the present of the protagonists, whereas, in the previous works, they were kept back and appeared only through minor characters or in the memories of the forest fighters, the cruelties of the Civil War. Here a very strong sensuality comes to the foreground; it remains ambivalent through all the images connected with blood and centred around Wanja, 'the Virgin Whore', who is, like Nairobi, 'a reminder of salvation and shame' (p. 160), at once a devouring flower and a redeemed mother. Violence here takes place in the present, is forecast for the future: Sacrifice in words - Mugo's confession, for example - is not sufficient for the moral purification of the city. Grains of corn can also be bullets. The founding ancestor was not only a ploughman, but a smith, a Promethean figure with 'his wrestling match with the God of metal and stone' (p. 124). The image of the sacred fire, the Phoenix, Sodom and Gommorah, is added to the passive symbol of the grain of wheat rotting in the earth. And as for the land itself, somehow the main character of the previous novels, being at once the mother-goddess Mumbi and the precise object of the Kikuyu rebellion, it does not play such an important part here: 'We are all strangers in our land of birth' (p. 101). Ngugi has deliberately detribalised the novel, and the passage from part III to part IV clearly shows his intention to widen the scope of the novel, as he moves from the symbols centred round paternity and germination to images of fighting and brotherhood.
The importance of the spiritual debate at the heart of Petals of Blood as well as the complexity and coherence of the metaphors make it impossible to give a limited description of this book as a socialist, or social realist work. Through the story of the child which Wanja tries to conceive, Ngugi has connected the singular stories and collective history. The anguished fear of sterility under which the characters labour is a unifying theme which allows both the exploring of the deepest urges in men and of their moral responsibility, and is also treated as a metaphor for the spiritual journey of a dominated people.
In this novel which also presents a socio-economic analysis, it is the theme of fertility which justifies the importance of the feminine characters; they reveal the moral and spiritual strength latent in men, they are complementary with their fire, their light, like Wanja's lamp which 'captured our hearts and imaginations' (p. 31). It is only when they are in contact with their elemental strength that men are brought back to a fuller life: 'The security and the defences around my lifelong twilight slumber were being cut at the roots and I felt the pain of blood-sap trickling through heart's veins and arteries awaking from years of numbness' (p. 244). Petals of Bood relies mainly on the character of Wanja, treated without sentimentality, but with warmth, in all its ambivalence, its vitality, which one cannot reduce to a mere allegory. The weakness of the novel may technically reside in the masculine characters who are made to face her, and, in particular, in the insufficient differenciation between Karega and Munira, who seem at time to be interchangeable, like two forms of potentiality in the same man, a few years apart, as Munira says quite early of Karega: 'Almost a repeat story
of my past' (p. 63). The three men receive harsh treatment from the narrator; one being mystical and isolated, the second cold and didactic, the third a maimed survivor from a lost battle, they appear as rather inadequate saviours, not very likely suitors. Yet the intention of the author may well be to show us that, as they are, individually incomplete, they can help Wanja to achieve her new birth by acting together. Despite his doubts, despite Karega's doubts, writing, the use of words, still has for him a more serious purpose and fulfils a sacred function; this is stressed by the quotations before each section, which remind us of the great reference texts. The novels which do not take this duty seriously are castigated: 'Imaginative literature was not much different: the authors described the conditions correctly: they seemed able to reflect accurately the contemporary situation of fear, oppressions and deprivation; but thereafter they led him down the paths of pessimism, obscurity and mysticism: was there no way out except cynicism ? Were people helpless victims?' (p. 200).
Ngugi analyses mercilessly the weaknesses, the bad faith, the wishful thinking, the contradictions of his characters. He describes them as tempted to despair: 'we cannot after all escape from our pasts' (p. 240). He is above all relentlessly cruel with the character who writes laughable texts, 'incredible, heroic deeds and a little 'Christian message' (p. 215), who thinks he has been entrusted with a sacred mission, to be 'God's watchman' (p. 243). But injustice is present: the old peasant woman has to wheel a cart laden with stones in order to survive, and the duty is to try and act, to believe and make others believe in the possibility of a new birth. One may well say that the happy end - the demonstration that these 'maimed souls' are still fertile - is more an act of the will than a realistic representation, is more in the nature of a parable than of a novel. Petals of Blood will go on raising questions which are difficult to answer if one uses aesthetic and literary criteria that ignore the political, historical, moral and spiritual dimensions which are the foundations of this novel.

Last update: 29/09/2006