Refracting the Political: Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place

Summary

As Kenya’s best-known writer of his generation, Binyavanga Wainaina is recognized not only for his literary output, but also for his theoretical approach to current African writing. Enhanced by his role as founding editor of Kwani?, the literary journal, Wainaina’s voice as pioneer of a new literary movement has been cultivated through his numerous interviews and articles published online. His internationally acclaimed satirical article ‘How to Write About Africa’ (2005) in particular, exemplifies not just Wainaina’s literary stature, but his movement away from the prevailing narratives concerning Africa. While Wainaina’s focus is on stereotypical Western representations of the continent, his article also illustrates a drive towards a new way of conceptualizing an Africa free of images of subjection and subjugation. In stating his reluctance to ‘manipulate myself to suit the postcolonial situation’, Wainaina instead positions himself as an author occupied by multiple concerns, including politics. Asserting that ‘I’m far more interested in texture, in aesthetics, in word play’, Wainaina’s stress on the literary in addition to the political is indicative of his narrative engagement with politics in One Day I Will Write About This Place.

Wainaina’s approach to the political resonates with wider critical debates surrounding recent African writing. Moving away from canonical postcolonial writers, literary scholars are increasingly preoccupied with exploring the new directions African literature is taking. Politics or social commitment, as characteristic features of postcolonial writing, are therefore treated as subjects of contention. This is particularly evident in current African writers’ perceptions of their own work. Mukoma wa Ngugi, for example, dispels the reading of ‘African fiction as fulfilling a political and cultural function’, arguing for the importance of ‘questions of aesthetics’ in literary criticism. Whilst Mukoma’s article highlights the need to read African literature for its form as well as content, it also registers a concern over the place of politics in recent writing. Politics is presented as becoming a stereotypical feature of African writing that new writers aim to make more complex. The multiple focuses of Wainaina’s memoir and his refusal to ‘fulfil any kind of “theme”’, makes One Day I Will Write About This Place exemplary of this emerging tradition. Politics nevertheless plays an important role within the text, and it is Wainaina’s strategies of narrating the political that I will examine further here.