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What weight can a language bear? Translatability and Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2018

Grant Farred
Grant Farred*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
*
gaf38@cornell.edu
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Abstract

Using theorists such as Deleuze, Guattari and Heidegger, this essay is a critique of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's much publicized decision to write in Gikuyu rather than English, the language Ngugi condemns as the instrument of colonialism and its successor, neo-imperialism. In line with Deleuze and Guattari's argument that Kafka's work is best apprehended as the determination to make German bear the full weight of his “minor” (as a Czech Jew) experience, this essay elucidates the ways in which Ngugi's ostensibly political turn is unable to write what it means to live, in Deleuze and Guattari's phrase, “in another's language”. To live, that is, the experience of “dislocation” (a rubric which would include colonialism and the failures of African sovereignty, not least among them) from one's own language (however provisional and contingent such a claim on language always is) as the first – necessary – condition of making literature. Of making language bear the weight of the very experience it is intent on denying articulation.

Keywords

Minor literatureDeleuzeGuattariHeideggerNgugiKafkaColonialismPostcolonialism
Type
Article
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 81 , Special Issue 3: Translating African Thought and Literature , October 2018 , pp. 425 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © SOAS, University of London 2018 

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