Narrative Strategies and the Issue of Traditional Culture in Ngugi`s Early Novels

Patrick McGee in Telling the Other asserts that Chinua Achebe`s engagement in postcolonial writing aims `to undo the imperialism of the metaphor.` The deconstruction of imperialist metaphor, no doubt, serves to historicize, and thus to restore humanity to, the Africans that were reduced to an evil force in the European literature and historiography. Since `undoing metaphorical writing,` after all, calls forth realist writing, McGee is not very far from Kwame Anthony Appiah when the latter claims that `the first generation of modem African novels` are `realist legitimations of nationalism.` These critics are correct in seeing an ally of African nationalism within the postcolonial African novels of the first stage; yet their view that understands these African novels as a `realistic` or `rationalizing` writing, this paper argues, is not extensive enough to account for their narrative complexity. Appiah also asserts that the early African fictions `authorize a `return to traditions` while at the same time recognizing the demands of a Weberian rationalized modernity.` Despite its insightful mention of the African dilemma between tradition and modernity, Appiah`s thesis is too universalizing to do justice to the diverse and complex political agendas of the first-generation African writers. This paper argues that the first-generation African writers did employ the strategy of mythologizing (inclusive of both retelling and creating myths) as well as that of demythologizing in their early narratives. This paper investigates the ways the two postcolonial narrative strategies are used in Ngugi wa Thiong`o`s The River Between and Weep Not, Child. The significances and purposes of these strategies in Ngugi`s early novels will be charted through a brief comparison with the narrative features of the first novels of other postcolonial African writers. The conclusion of this paper is that Ngugi exploits both the mythic/mythologiz-ing discourses and the demythologizing/rationalizing discourses for the cause of decolonization, and especially the former discourses should be comprehended as a precursor of the Kenyan author`s Fanonian search for the national culture of resistance.