Crossing Over: Identity and Change in Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye's Song of Nyarloka

It is fortunate for East African literature, as well as for its admirers outside the region, that Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, who has long been recognized within Kenya as one of that country's leading literary lights, is finally receiving greater international recognition. Readers outside of Africa now have easy access to her two best novels, Coming to Birth and The Present Moment, in new editions from the US-based Feminist Press. In addition, a new collection of Macgoye's poetry has been released as the twelfth title in the East African Educational Publishers (EAEP) "Poets of Africa" series: Make It Sing and Other Poems includes previously unpublished work alongside some of Macgoye's classic poems. Importantly, this volume also includes the single poem that may ultimately stand as Macgoye's magnum opus—the 1,200-line epic, Song of Nyarloka. In this poem, Macgoye maps out the main thematic contours that appear throughout her work.

For much of her writing career, Macgoye has lived with the paradox of being widely recognized within her adopted homeland of Kenya, but generally overlooked by the international critical establishment. To date there is only one significant critical consideration of Macgoye in a scholarly journal—a Valerie Kibera essay examining Macgoye in relation to Bessie Head. Within Kenya, by contrast, Macgoye is hailed and embraced. Her writing has received national and international awards, her fellow writers revere her, her poetry has been adapted for dramatic presentations, and her works are taught in the schools. Graduate theses on her works are appearing in Kenyan universities. Newspaper accounts regularly celebrate Macgoye as the "grandmother" or the "doyenne" of Kenyan writers. One such feature story in the Sunday Standard calls her simply a "national treasure" ("Catching Up").

As a writer, Macgoye defies easy categorization. Born as Marjorie King, the only child of a working-class family in Southampton, England, she moved to Nairobi in 1954 as a bookseller for the Church Missionary Society (CMS), the mission arm of the Anglican Church. She was always something of a maverick, however. When she quit CMS in 1960 to marry Daniel Oludhe Macgoye, this was a time when interracial marriages were not unheard of in Kenya, but typically involved a rising star of Kenya's political elite. Marjorie, by contrast, married a junior civil servant, became integrated into his Luo extended family, took Kenyan citizenship following independence in 1963, and raised four children in Kenya. Now in her early seventies, Macgoye continues to live in Nairobi following the death of her husband in 1990. Her novels and poems are written and set in Kenya, draw on her Kenyan experiences, and explore Kenyan (especially Luo) sensibilities and experiences.

In short, Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye is a Kenyan writer, but in a position unlike any other, making it difficult to fit her into any particular critical pigeonhole. What, after all, is one to do with this white Kenyan who confesses admiration for the settler writer Elspeth Huxley but whose life and writing belong to a world ideologically and experientially remote from Huxley's? How does one account for a writer who has reversed the normal postcolonial paradigm, having left the First World to settle and write in the Third? What to do with a missionary who never fit the traditional evangelical mold but who is also unapologetic about the controversial role of missions in Africa? One suspects that this difficulty in categorizing Macgoye is part of the reason that international critics have tended to overlook her literary accomplishments. This is unfortunate, since it is precisely Macgoye's complexity that adds to her interest.

The aim of this essay is to introduce one of Macgoye's most important works, her lengthy poem Song of Nyarloka, and to argue for its status as one of the central texts of Kenyan literature. Song of Nyarloka deserves to be read alongside other East African...