Bloodhounds at the Gate: Trauma, Narrative Memory, and Melancholia in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Memoirs of Wartime

The complicated positions from which Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o witnesses the trauma of the emergency period in Kenya (1952–59) are examined in this paper against the background of trauma and witnessing first threshed out by Dori Laub. Proceeding from a discussion of trauma, witnessing, narrative memory, and melancholia, I show that while the memoirs narrativize events that do not rise to the high threshold of traumatic experience, they contain reconstructed narrative memories of the loss and melancholia Ngũgĩ felt during the period. Progressively, the young Ngũgĩ accepts substitutes for what he calls “the lost old world” that enable him to articulate his melancholia as grievance. These substitutes paradoxically become available to Ngũgĩ at the colonial school, the site that would have ensured the production of the autonomous self alienated from his lost world. Paradoxically, the autonomous self ends up speaking for his community.