“A Universal Garden of Many-Coloured Flowers”: Place and Scale in the Works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Abstract

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s literary career has attracted much attention from critics attempting to understand the tensions of culture and class, unity and difference, and oppression and resistance that exist within and between his works. Many of the contradictions are structured around perceived breaks in Ngũgĩ’s thinking, especially between an early, locally focused concern with cultural nationalism and a later, more globally focused narrative of neocolonialism. Drawing on concepts and frameworks from recent debates in geography, this article challenges the assumptions of a local-global dichotomy that underpin much of this criticism; geocritical analysis of four works spanning Ngũgĩ’s career ( The River Between, A Grain of Wheat, I Will Marry When I Want, and Wizard of the Crow ) suggests a consistently “glocal” understanding in his representation of place and scale. Ngũgĩ has tended to narrate local place as the product of large-scale interventions and to understand the global as constructed from and manifested within place-based conditions. By decoupling issues of class, culture, domination, and resistance from dichotomous alignment with the local and global as opposing forces, this article argues critics can better understand the nature of these tensions and more precisely deal with the shifting means by which Ngũgĩ attempts to negotiate them.