Ngugi

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, author of "Decolonization of the Mind," introduced us to the very relevant idea that under a colonizing power, people aren't really themselves. In order to shed this watered-down formed of humanity, Africans as a whole had to unload the burden of imperfection from their shoulders and take pride in their own lives and the deep roots that their ancestors cultivated for them. Without this spirit, Ngugi commented that blacks in Africa were simply letting themselves become a casualty - a statistic with no name, unless they claimed a name as their own.

The reason I say that Ngugi's theory of decolonization of the mind is so relevant is because his essay and his two short stories, "Wedding at the Cross" and "Minute of Glory," definitely capture the zeitgeist of our generation. I was talking with some of my buddies the other night, and we came to the conclusion that the reason that we and everyone we know is so quick to go out, try every drink and drug in existence, cover ourselves in tattoos, and generally rage to the fullest extent every single day is due to the overwhelming notion that we just might die at any moment.

Now let me take that back a step. "Minute of Glory" and "Wedding at the Cross" both tell two entirely separate stories with vast differences between setting, symbolism and roles of characters, but they do parallel each other in a couple important ways. The first is the fact that the ends of both stories revolve around a forceful decision made at the last moment that alters the protagonist's life forever. While Glory's ending is a bit more depressing, expressing the waste of a perfect opportunity to grow for a single minute of revenge, Ngugi is cunning in telling the reader that decolonizing oneself is not an easy task. This is where the second parallel lies; the decision to decolonize for both heroines involved completely abandoning everything they knew as "safe." For Wanjiru ("Minute of Glory"), she had to make the decision to steal hundreds of dollars, risking her life and livelihood has a barmaid, but the story ended with her martyrdom of her freedom teaching another to find her own way to feel human again and to use Wanjiru's mistakes as a guide - in that way, she lived up to the beauty her name beheld for her. For Miriamu ("Wedding at the Cross"), she had to give up money, her parents, her husband and her whole family in order to go back to the simple life that she first fell in love with. For this sacrifice, she turned away from the cross, yes, but was greeted back into her life of genuine love for her friends and savior by a crowd of people dancing, laughing and singing.

So back to everyone dying. To elaborate on what I said before, the reason we said everyone in our generation's willing to live so heavily for the day boils down to the fact that we've been conditioned to be afraid. Look at it this way: the president in office when I was born was banging his aides, the president after that started a war that's seen many of our friends and family off to the afterlife, and our current president promised us something new and frankly, I'm getting desensitized by the whole ordeal. The World Trade Center was hit by terrorists and thousands of innocent lives were lost in a single horrific event when I was in fourth grade, just barely getting a grasp on the world. Now, our privacy is slowly slipping out from under us and the world seems to be edging closer and closer to either nuclear war or natural cataclysm. We're simply all nervous wrecks, so Ngugi's works can teach us all a valuable lesson: Know yourself, know your strengths and especially your weaknesses, and never settle for a life living down on your knees. He leaves us with a powerful warning too; this huge responsibility can be squandered in a single act of revenge. Keep one last thing in mind though. At the end of "Wedding at the Cross," when Miriamu cast aside her false life and lived as free as the spirit she contained, she was greeted by a chorus of dancing and singing, and her captors could do nothing but watch and weep.

Nadine Gordimer

In her works, Nadine Gordimer gives a harsh view into the world of Apartheid-era South Africa and all of the backwards realities that come with it. She not only gave light to the patronizing racism that seemed to permeate every otherwise rational person that appeared in her tales, but the sheer wall that being anything less than a white, middle-to-upper class male presented all around you. Her empathetic use of character, as a white woman writing these stories, truly puts the reader directly in the shoes of someone struggling just to make ends meet in a world that keeps crumbling under its own weight. Most disturbing, though, is the fact that she tends to use nameless characters to represent a whole rather than a single scenario - the true horror of Apartheid doesn't become so apparent until you realize that no one was safe from it, not even those who thought they had all the power.

The most striking story, in my opinion, was "Six Feet of the Country." To me, it's easy to make deep parallels between Apartheid and the United States pre-civil rights movement. In a nutshell: white people were in control and veritably drunk with power, everyone else pretty much bowed to them, then a bunch of oppressed people and some of the free ones spoke up, blood was spilled, laws were signed and now the problem's on the long road to being solved. I guess it didn't occur to me until our discussion of "Six Feet" that Apartheid was swallowing the nation whole. Those with no power were too frightened to do anything but submit, and those with power were too blind (and too busy mocking those with no power, the poor devils) to see that they were being slowly choked to death right next to their complacent brothers. But even deeper, there was certainly an issue with sexism - a common theme in both "Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants" and "Amnesty" was that even given some semblence of power, as in the case of "Good Climate", women were largely treated as pawns in the man's game of power struggle. You may be able to help run a gas station or teach children and help maintain a farm, but it's the men who are in control. They're the ones fighting for freedom, making the money, taking your purity then going right back out on the warpath. And what if you were a good, intelligent woman like in "Amnesty" or "Six Feet"? Well, you got to take care of everyone and get called ignorant for doing so. Not a huge payoff. The other facet of Gordimer's works that make them so genius are her metaphors. Every one of her stories spins a binding tale, but even the smallest shrug of the shoulders represents something monumental in the struggle with Apartheid. All of her stories have a common theme of powerlessness, but she takes an interesting turn and chooses to represent this crushing feeling in the interactions of her characters. A good example of this is in "Good Climate", when the nameless con-man seems to drift in and out of the narrator's life, only stopping to have a drink with her, take advantage of her to make her feel young once more, and then walk out the front door just like that with a bit of "borrowed" cash. Even more striking is a quote from "Six Feet", when Petrus "just kept on looking at me, out of his knowledge that white men have everything, can do everything; if they don't, it is because they won't." This heartless man of a narrator will barely pick up the phone to help a man that's relying on him to see a dead relative rest in peace, and yet even he knows, however sarcastically, that he has no power in the large scope of things.

Apartheid was an all-encompassing evil that no one in South Africa was unaffected by. It brought out the worst in people, and yet it brought out some beautiful, poignant works that we can still study and feel that same terrible feeling in the pit of our stomach that these very men and women dealt with for decades. In that respect, I learned a lot from Nadine Gordimer, and would definitely read more of her works. To be put in the shoes of these three flawed but very human narrators and glimpse at what the world was like in Apartheid-era South Africa is jarring, to say the least; it leaves a strange, empty feeling that there's only worse things deeper down, but you have to keep digging. It's cliche, but to say we should be grateful for the lives we live today is a vast understatement, and so I guess the only thing left to do is keep digging and hope we learn something on the other side.

Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe, author of the texts "An Image of Africa," "Girls at War," and "The Madman" which we studied in class, opened his readers' eyes to the vast ignorance that the self-deluded European world holds toward African history, particularly in reference to authentic African literature. That is, Achebe explores the fundamental struggle for Africans to create a history of literature in a world that still believes most Africans are heathens that speak in grunts and stab pigs all day. More importantly, he also writes with a razor-sharp political edge, commenting on the pointlessness of writing down your history and culture (or even living) when one sheepishly accepts another's history and culture as his own. His works are not particularly happy tales, but the stories they weave and the genuine outrage that each one perpetuates directly from Achebe's hand is striking, especially to a member of one raised in said self-deluded European world.

First and foremost, I want to address how hard Achebe's works made me look in the mirror and realize that I am exactly the dumb-ass, preconceived notion-filled fool that "imagines he needs a trip to Africa to encounter those things" that he wrote about. It's kind of startling to think that you have a few things figured out in this world, but then you read "An Image of Africa". Then you realize that instead of taking an hour to read a book about other cultures, meet new people, or brush up on another language, I would probably use that hour to play Killzone 3. I am a younger version of the old man at the beginning of his speech. It makes me feel better to say I'm simply a victim of circumstance.

With that kick to the ribs out of the way, I thoroughly enjoyed Achebe's works. "An Image of Africa", full of tearing sarcasm and coarse language, is a testament to the power of objective readership. In my opinion, an abridged version of this speech should be stapled to anything that identifies itself as "news" or "current events." He is venomous in his attack on Heart of Darkness, and for good reason - why should one man's opinion be passed off as fact, ever? Heart of Darkness was simply a conduit for his heartfelt rage toward all things passed off as fact simply because they were written to be interpreted that way, and that burden weighs down on all of us. Our nation has a known phenomenon called the "media bias," stories that involve tragedy on someone else's part get better ratings, and let's be totally honest, we're all pretty much okay with it.

Furthermore, "Girls at War" and "The Madman" gave vivid insight to just how backwards colonized Africa was. The former begs harsh philosophical questions about what truly dictates "good" or "bad" in a time when being blown up by a mid-afternoon air raid is a legitimate concern and the latter explored the effects of labeling and left the protagonist a hollow shell of a man by the end of the story. What Achebe was addressing in all of these stories is the effect of "colonization of the mind" and its many methods of destroying humanity. Of course, this is all an allusion to the white Europeans and Africans making black Africans feel like animals, but the most disturbing part is the fact that it worked. Whites felt as if they were somehow more than human in a world where the elements or disease will take your fragile life all the same, and in "Girls at War," Achebe showed that even the most strong-willed of people will revert back to their animal instincts of hoarding, fornication, and simply looking out for oneself only when survival is the name of the game. So what's the answer?

Don't play the game. Just go crazy. Do things the way that you want to see them done and dedicate your life to seeing that they get done.

Simple, but very, very relevant. Hmmm.