Ngugi wa Thiong'o in/and 2006

Abstract

xile is exit in excess; exit is also homecoming's traumatic co-traveler. Move- ment within the geography and the psyche postulates exclusionary position- ing of place and identity. What does the place of arrival contain, asks the migrant? What does it expect from me? How do I handle my past, my memory? Is there room for negotiations? Experiencing exile and living it distract and refract the subject. The pressure from the outside is internalized. How many times has not a migrant or exilic person or (as here) writer been asked the question: When do you plan to go home? or are you, really?—meaning, do you subscribe to domesticity or alterity? Are you one of us or do you persist in being an alien? Most writers in intellectual exile, voluntary or not, realize with sadness that ques- tions such as these are part of the adopted territory's conservative nurturing of the One and Only, whether we define it as Nation, Language, Literature, Religion, or Family-all written large. Isolation or alienation has a price. Confronting such questions, the writer often fumbles with the words, not knowing what to say or how to legitimate his/her role playing; as a writer in disguise speaking/writing (also literally) in many tongues. For many emigres exile becomes a performance that hosts a whole spectrum of hybrid identity markers: nostalgia for home, anger, duplicity, self-reproach, mourning, but also an incisive sense and recognition of what it is to be a global citizen. These are some general meditations that foreground this essay about Ngugi wa Thiong'o in what I call sustained performative exile in the US, as it materialized during the single year of 2006. Who is he then? A Kenyan writer in voluntary or nonvoluntary exile in the West; the writer of Murogi wa Kagogo or The Wizard of the Crow, his latest novel that appeared in Gikuyu in May (in parts; three out of six) and in English in August; a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California at Irvine; Director of UC Irvine's International Center for Writing and Translation; an emigre writer, one of the many postcolonial nomads