Creative Dialogue, Signification, Gender, and Space: Talking through Contemporary Children’s Stories

Abstract

THE FOCUS OF THIS CHAPTER is on Kimenye and Macgoye's writing for children and young adults and their subsequent transgression of boundaries through the process of Signifyin(g) therein. However, is pertinent to begin with an analysis of the literary and publishing context from which their writing arises. Thereafter, I focus on how they employ children's stories as a way of finding a voice and identity for the woman writer, while both conforming to and subverting their normative status as African women.Situating Kimenye and Macgoye in the East African Literary and Publishing ContextI had often seen my master and Dick employed in reading; and I had great curiosity to talk to the books, as I thought they did; and so to leam how all things had a beginning; for that purpose I have often taken up a book, and have talked to it, when alone, in hopes would answer me; and I have been very much concerned when I found remained silent.1The most obvious interpretation of Olaudah Equiano's statement here relates to his naivety in believing that the act of reading for Europeans involves a dialogue between text and reader. Yet can also be interpreted as signifying that African readers and writers are unable to discover any recognizable self or environment in books written by European writers.With regard to what was once considered the somewhat radical notion of Africans participating in the act of writing, during his school years the Kenyan writer and publisher David G. Maillu was so unsure about such a prospect that he remembers asking his teacher if was possible. potentially disillusioning response was that his teacher thought he had once read a book written by a West African.2 Similarly, Bemth Lindfors opens Mazungumzo (1976), his collection of interviews with East African writers, publishers, editors, and scholars, with the reflection that twenty years ago East Africa was considered a literary desert.3 Maillu confirms this, saying that the 1970s, while some writers tried to get published, it was assumed that only English people wrote.4 Similarly, Nancy Schmidt states: before the decade of African independence in the 1960s, almost all literature for African children was published in Europe.5 This state of affairs continued into the 1970s, to the extent that Grace Ogot considered Africa-centred junior readers to be badly needed to break through the Enid Blyton collections so entrenched in the market.6 Simon Gikandi recalls that when he was at school in East Africa during the early 1970s, although Kimenye's readers were by then available,the normal literary fare for junior secondary school English [...] consisted of a good dose of abridged Robert Louis Stevenson novels [and] Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare .7Meena Khorana explains the reason for this as one of assimilation, since was the practice prior to independence to import European texts into the colo2 nies; these books advanced the colonial agenda through stereotypical plots, characterization, and themes.8 During the colonial period, in order to condition Africans to a eurocentric way of thinking, the colonizers chose to ignore or forget all forms of African civilization9 - the variety of impressive dwellings, sanitation, and systems of law that existed, for example - in preference to imagining and fantasizing Africa. In his essay The Language of African Literature, Ngugi wa Thiong'o highlights Europeans' construction of themselves as superior to the inferior African ?Other' and how, as a way of gaining control over Africans, they forbade the use of indigenous languages in colonial schools because language acts as a carrier of culture.10 Likewise, that the imposition of European languages divorces Africans from their history and heritage is a fact also acknowledged by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952).11 notion of the African ?Other' was further reinforced by the literature that a eurocentric English education prescribed as suitable reading-matter. …