Last Friday, renowned novelists Ngugi wa Thiong'o of Kenya and George Lamming of Barbados spoke to an audience of around one hundred in Salomon 101 about the politicized uses of literature in postcolonial Africa and the Anglophone Caribbean. This event was the third installment since 2004 in the Department of Africana Studies' Conversations in Africana Writing series.
Department Chair Barrymore Bogues introduced the two writers and jumped in only a few times over the course of the hour-and-a-half talk. Lamming and Ngugi read aloud from and discussed each other's work. Their deep engagement with each other's writings and thinking steered the conversation on its own.
Lamming, who is one of the Anglophone Caribbean's most distinguished novelists and cultural critics, inquired early in the talk about Ngugi's statement that - despite his prior formal education in Uganda and professorship at University of Nairobi - his 1977 political imprisonment was the real beginning of his education.
Ngugi explained that his time in prison among working class Kenyans revealed just how estranged from the working class experience he had become. He attributed this split from his countrymen to his adoption of English over the indigenous languages spoken in Kenya.
Shortly after his imprisonment, wanting to rekindle his ties to the public and challenge dominant English language-centered conceptions of knowledge and history, Ngugi vowed to write in his native Gikuyu. Though he supports the translation of his novels, which depict the modern Kenyan political situation, into English and other languages, he said that writing these novels in English would be "harvesting from (Kenyan) cultural production, then packaging it" in a language unintelligible to most of his countrymen.
To the question of the function of language in his own novels, Lamming explained that the average Barbadian has mastered two or three languages, among these "the language of feeling" - creolized English - and "the language of statement" - standard English.
Lamming said that weaving all these variations of English into his books pays tribute to the agency that West Indians have exercised in molding language and thus in shaping their own reality.
Lamming argued that this agency and the complexity of the Caribbean situation are often effaced by the tourist images of the Caribbean as a place of only picturesque palm trees and beaches, images that foreigners and West Indians alike have internalized.
Though the two guests hailed from countries thousands of miles apart, both were concerned with many of the same issues, namely the loss of indigenous or creole culture to formal education and standard English and the anonymous images of "sand and sex," as Ngugi put it, that are projected onto Africa and the Caribbean.
