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Chapter 6 estranging rage: ngugi’s devil on the cross and wizard of the crow Ngugi describes Devil on the Cross as a novel loaded with— and surrounded by—the emotions of imprisonment; and yet few readers and critics of the novel would characterize it as affective in the familiar terms of the bourgeois novel; indeed, this work is not emotive or sentimental in the same way as Ngugi’s early novels, nor does it contain the collective emotions generated by his major plays. Are terms such as emotion and sentiment being redefined here, or is the novel simply incapable of sustaining the emotion behind it? Had Ngugi turned to ostreinane (estrangement) because he now wanted “his audience to comprehend the action intellectually,” as Alamin Mazrui has argued, or was evacuating emotions from Devil on the Cross a way of repressing the subjective and—in Ngugi’s lexicon—the bourgeois aspect of the novel as a genre? simon gikandi, ngugi wa thiong’o In his 2000 study of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s works, Simon Gikandi notes an incongruity between Ngugi’s description of the “strong emotions and deep personal feelings” involved in writing the novel Devil on the Cross, and the lack of affect or sentiment in the novel itself. In his memoir Detained, Ngugi describes painstakingly writing the novel on toilet paper in prison, only to have the prison guards confiscate the writings: “With this novel I had struggled with language, with images, with prison, with bitter memories, with moments of despair , with all the mentally and emotionally adverse circumstances in which one is forced to operate while in custody—and now it had gone” (Detained 164; quoted in Gikandi, Ngugi 209). He also recounts his elation when the new warden returns the manuscript to him; Ngugi only says aloud, “Thank you,” but adds that the warden Kim-final.indb 129 Kim-final.indb 129 7/9/13 2:52 PM 7/9/13 2:52 PM 130 on anger “will probably never know the depth of emotion behind those two words” (Detained 165; quoted in Gikandi, Ngugi 209). But Devil on the Cross itself, Gikandi observes, is “not emotive or sentimental” like Ngugi’s earlier realist novels and his plays; Gikandi asks how we should understand this change in affect (Ngugi 209).1 My response to Gikandi’s question is that rather than “evacuating” emotion, Devil on the Cross redefines, or rather, reimagines emotion, the relation between emotion and reason, and the collective, systemic nature of individually experienced emotions. As I have been discussing throughout this book, we still tend to think of emotion as divorced from reason. For example, in considering why Ngugi turns to non-realist estrangement aesthetic techniques in Devil on the Cross, Gikandi quotes Alamin Mazrui in conjecturing that perhaps the change is because Ngugi wants “his audience to comprehend the action intellectually?” (Ngugi 209). But the full sentence from Alamin Mazrui and Lupenga Mphande’s original essay reads: “In his early novels, Ngugi draws his audience into his descriptions emotionally; but now he wants his audience to comprehend the action intellectually as well” (171, emphasis added). The inclusion of “as well” is significant, marking the difference between thinking of reason as opposed to emotion, rather than reason as linked to emotion. Mazrui and Mphande discuss how, during the period when Ngugi embraces Fanonian Marxism, he also begins to employ Brechtian estrangement in order to depict the experiences of individuals as well as to explore and make explicit exploitative, dehumanizing systems of capitalism and neocolonialism.2 In doing so, emotions, and the social forces that shape and are shaped by emotions , become no longer simply about an individual’s atomistic experience ; rather, emotions and reason are mutually determining and depend on a dialectical understanding of the individual and the collective , mutually forming through history. In this chapter, I argue that both the perceptions of Ngugi as an angry , idealistic nativist and of his later novels as being less emotional than his earlier works rely on a shared error: a conception of emotion as individual and separate from reason, collectives, ideological systems , and history. I first discuss the construction of Ngugi the author as angry nativist, and how such readings, in separating the individual from the social and historical, remove the rational and cognitive grounds for political anger. Then I move to a discussion of emotions, particularly anger, in Ngugi’s later novels Devil on the Cross and Kim-final.indb 130 Kim-final...

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