Re-Historicizing the Conflicted Figure of Woman in Ngugi's Petals of Blood

The 1972 novel Petals of Blood marks Ngugi wa Thiong'o's growing interest in strong women characters like Wanja. Wanja succeeds in areas where women literary figures traditionally do not. In her relationship to the land, her strength as a mother/nurturer figure for the entire village, and her ability to forge her own destiny, Wanja is a female figure rife with agency and power. She steadfastly resolves to accompany others in their return to the city despite the unpleasant memories it holds for her, and she continues the trek even after she is raped. She improves Abdulla's business with her knowledge of advertising and marketing and eventually makes a significant profit for them both through her appropriation of the theng'eta drink. Her final turn to prostitution, though certainly a tragic and cynical decision on her part, is also a reasoned and logical solution to the problems she faces.

As the only primary woman figure, Wanja's character at first glance carries auspicious—if tenuous—hopes for African women and for their depiction in the works of a growing body of the African canon and postcolonial literature more generally. This agency is precisely the part of Wanja's characterization that is so uncritically appealing to many feminists. We find Wanja a refreshing change from traditional, passive, melodramatic, male-dependent, lackluster heroines. As a result, Ngugi has a long list of feminist supporters. For example, Judith Cochrane argues that it is the Gikuyu women "rather than their menfolk who seem to have the better understanding of the needs of their own people and of the new Kenya, and who seem better able to reconcile those needs with traditional values and customs" (90). Deirdre LaPin writes that Wanja is an "admirable, indeed heroic, character" (116). And Eustace Palmer confirms that Wanja is "brave, resilient, resourceful and determined" (278-79).

Yet these critics have overlooked the use of Wanja as trope, or the archetypal nature of her characterization. Indeed, where they have identified it, feminist critics applaud this use of trope. Palmer, for example, who writes in such glowing terms of Wanja, nonetheless identifies Ngugi's use of her as an allegory for Kenya and Africa:

The drought is also political, spiritual, economic and emotional, as with Wanja who, yearning after a release from barrenness, becomes restless and moody in proportion to the aridity of the environment. The drought generally refers to the people's deprivation of all those things that should make life meaningful. (273)

And this reading is certainly not confined to feminist critics. As Govind Narain Sharma suggests, Wanja "is the spirit and earth of Kenya, humiliated, exploited and ill-used" (302). This all-affirming acceptance of Ngugi's use of Wanja as trope has left him open to other important and little discussed criticism that has gone unanswered; or perhaps the lack of discussion is answer in itself. For whenever a male author—regardless of his race, sexual preference, or intentions—sets out to characterize a female figure, he invites particular criticism and speculation. This is true even for an author like Ngugi, who regularly demonstrates his support of women and women's rights in interviews and lectures. ¹ In her article "The Mother Africa Trope," Florence Stratton takes Ngugi to task not only for using Wanja as a trope for Africa and Kenya, but also for restricting her to clichéd Western representations of woman as mother, virgin, or whore, all equally defined and reflected through male desire. In fact, Stratton admits, the launching of such a scathing attack on Ngugi is necessitated precisely because he is "the male [African] writer who has been most lionized by feminist critics" (54).

This paper intends to respond to Stratton's criticism in part with a historical analysis of Kenyan women, particularly mothers and prostitutes. In my understanding of Petals, there is no denying that Ngugi...