Weep Not, Child
(debut novel, 1964) I went to jail because of a play I had written. The toilet paper given to us was hard, it was aimed to punish prisoners. But as writing material it was good – it held a pen well. I wrote my first Gikuyu novel translated into English and published as Devil on the Cross on this paper.
Prison was important because I really started thinking of the language question in a political and historical concept, in terms of the colonised and the coloniser. But I had been moving towards this for a long time. The proceedings of the Makrere Conference were published in the magazine, Transition, founded by an Asian, Rajat Niyogi. In one of its articles the question was raised why those who met at Makrere, were calling what they were writing, ‘African literature’ thus issuing a public challenge, as it were, on the whole assumption about English as a vehicle for African literature. I began to think about this seriously when in jail. No writer expects a prize. A prize is not a right.
Writers like Mulk Raj Anand and RK Narayan were very important in the great Nairobi debates on the reorganisation of teaching of literature. In 1969 some of us at the Nairobi University, Kenya, called for the abolition of the English department as then organised and its replacement by a department that centred African, Asian, Latin American, Caribbean literatures. I have referred to Mahabharata in my novel, Wizard of the Crow. Mahabharata is one of the greatest imaginative feats in the world. Its very length outmatches Homer’s Odyssey and The Iliad. From it comes The Gita, a religious text, which in widespread use and moral influence, is on a par with the Bible and the Koran. One of my favourite characters is Eklavya, who teaches himself to shoot with arrows, after Drona declines to teach him, and then he is disabled by Drona. Though brief, the episode as a whole, subverts the feudalistic hierarchical order of society assumed in the epic as a whole. I have cited the episode in my novel Wizard of the Crow to show how oppressive ruling classes in the world suppress creativity from the ordinary working man and woman.
Write, write, write again and again and you will get it right.