Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams

groundbreaking, Gikuyu-language journal, Mutiiri. Political exile from Kenya, Ngugi — as he is known worldwide — is currently the Erich Remarque Professor of Languages at New York University, with a dual professorship in Comparative Literature and Performance Studies.
Baudelaire writes, “De la vapourisation et de la concentration du moi. Tout est la.” (“The dispersion and the reconstitution of the self. That’s the whole story.”) It’s not. This is a primary message of African literature and art today. Ngugi wa Thiong’o is one of its primary exemplars.
This interview focuses on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s book of essays, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1998). Based on the four lectures he was invited to give at Oxford University in 1996, as a part of the Clarendon Lectures in English Literature series, and subtitled “Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa,” the book moves freely and universally, from Plato to Okot p’Bitek, pre-ancient Egypt to post-modern New York, the Macaulay, colonial minute to Marx to Mau Mau — from the war between art and the state to “the beautiful ones . . . not yet born.”
In the book’ preface, while Ngugi gratefully recalls a pleasurable and productive stay at Somerville College, he also notes, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, perhaps, a feeling of rebuke from “a huge portrait of Queen Elizabeth I . . . (on) the wall of the dining-room of Jesus College for my unfavourable reference . . . to her edict of 1601 in which she had called for the expulsion of black people from her realm.”
At Somerville, the college of Margaret Thatcher when she was a student at Oxford, Ngugi feels “another rebuke for (his) claims . . . that the capitalist fundamentalism of which she and Reagan were the leading apostles was wreaking social havoc in the world and generating other forms of fundamentalism in opposition or alliance.” His apartment abuts “Margaret Thatcher Court.” The interview takes place on a mild and gray Veteran’s Day afternoon. A landscape of missing ceiling panels, hills and valleys of paper, mail clutter, catalogues, piles of folders that have never been vertically filed, books, empty bags, quite far-back issues of African literary journals, and many half filled boxes of Mutiiri, Ngugi’s NYU office looks out on a rare, mercifully undeveloped patch of downtown Broadway. Noticing that Ngugi has lost his voice due to a cold, I sympathise. He replies that characters in his new novel lose their voices, too.
CC: Many of your first publications appeared in the Makerere University English department’s literary magazine, Penpoints. You call your new book of essays Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams. What are some of the connections between the two? Is the repetition deliberate?
NWT: Yes, there is a connection. Penpoints is a good name: penpoints — the power of the pen. I was interested in the power of the pen. The echo is there.
CC: The subtitle of your new book is “Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa.” Much of your previous non fiction — Decolonising the Mind and Moving the Centre, for example — might be described in similar terms. What provoked you to continue in this vein? What new critical and political issues for you in the last five years make these new essays further departures “towards” formulating an aesthetic as well as taking a political stance?
NWT: Two things. Although I’m calling it “Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa,” a better or more appropriate subtitle might have been “A Performance Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa.” The question of performance is more pronounced here than in any of my previous works. That is quite important to me. Second, in this text I’m much more interested in the nature of art and the nature of the state, and their relationship: something which I have not explored in my previous works. I’ve touched on the subject here and there but without a coherent framework. Art’s war with the state is basic to the nature of art and the nature of the state, any state. There is always the possibility of conflict between the state and art.
CC: The concept of “performance” has become a uniting theme in your work. You write of it “in the narrow sense of representation of an action as in theatre and in the broader sense of any action that assumes an audience during the actualisation. The concept of performance is opening out new possibilities in the analysis of human behaviour, including literature.
“The exercise of power, for instance, involves variations on the performance theme.” Indeed, you are a professor of Performance Studies. What drew you to this new scholarly discipline? How did your life and writing prepare you, perhaps without your knowing it, for this new field? There is a sense in your writing that you are learning from it at least as much as you are contributing to it with your work.
NWT: Of course, I’ve been in theatre all my life. I’ve worked in community theatre in Kenya: in the Kamirithu Community Educational and Cultural Centre. And this, of course, brought me into conflict with the state in Kenya. My work in theatre has been a preparation for this. I have also gained from using the term as a conceptual tool. So much in society depends on “performance.” It provides new insights into certain behaviours. It is central to so many things. For example, you can’t have religion without performance: performance, weekly, daily. Think of all those festivals. Think of performance in a wide sense. Performance enables people to negotiate their way through the various realms of being. Performance is a means for people to realise their unknown, even if it’s only in the imagination. Performance is a very important concept. I have learned from it, but also I have been involved in it.
CC: Is an emphasis on “performance” a way of advancing postcolonial critical discourse? As you discuss it, the concept of “performance” would seem to broaden and, perhaps, revitalise postcolonial studies.
NWT: Yes, and not only the postcolonial but many disciplines. The concept of performance can also be used to look at some of the older disciplines and reinterpreting some of the older texts. For example, Elizabeth Claire’s work on performance and dance in Jane Austen has let us see what we hadn’t before in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Performance is a concept that enables many things to be looked at differently. In classical writings, too, like Plato, for instance, the context of the dialogues is a performance in the dramatic sense. If you look at Plato’s Republic, the dialogues exist within the larger context of their dramatisation and, furthermore, the contexts of dramatic and religious festivals. There is a kind of performativity all around. The concept, however, must not become too wide or so broad that “anything goes.” I take, for example, two features like representation and the assumption of an audience to be very important. In other words, a farmer planting crops ordinarily for the production of whatever he wants to eat or sell could be called a performance.
But if I’m demonstrating as a farmer that I plant crops so that people can come and see how this is done, that would be a performance that is assuming that there is an audience. Even though this is an act I am actually doing, I am representing another action. The audience is very important.
CC: Another large, perhaps parallel theme in this book is orature. You write that “Orature . . . is not seen as a branch of literature but as a total aesthetic system, with performance and integration of art forms as two of its defining qualities. It is more basic and more primary than the other systems of the literary, the theatrical, and the cinematic because all the other systems take one or more of their main features from orature.”
You consider orature, “a unifying force,” including “the four aesthetic systems of the written, the oral, the theatrical and the cinematic.” You argue that “The centrality of orature to all the other systems calls for a reconfiguration and regrouping of disciplines” in which “their hierarchical ordering . . . is denied” and there is an end of “the historical rifts separating theorist, critics, and practitioners.” What are some of the critical, historical and geographical factors that have led you to such a conclusion? How has it influenced and changed your own writing and thinking?
NWT: If you look at orature in all societies, classical or contemporary, it refuses to draw very firm boundaries between disciplines, genres or forms. If you take a story, an oral narrative for instance, it will contain dance or music. The work might also involve audience participation, a chorus, or even the audience as a chorus. Often there are songs themselves or songs that involve dance variations. In some cases the word for the song and dance is the same.
A song, a proverb, whatever: it suggests other forms. As important, performance is central to the study and realisation of orature, as well as narratives, proverbs, whatever you do. Performance is central, unifying. There is a performance to space, to architecture, to sculpture. The assumption in classical orature is that the boundary between the natural world and the supernatural is fluid. In terms of aesthetics, the integrative aspect of orature is a very important element. Many disciplines and activities come under the umbrella of orature.
The theatre is a halfway house in which the realisation of the drama is for it to become orature. The realisation on stage of a musical composition embraces the concept of orature. While it integrates the many different possibilities of performance, orature also allows for the differences, for example, among narrative, song or drama.
CC: Orature and performance work together. Is performance a means to embracing orature?
NWT: Performance is central. They are not synonymous. Performance is what distinguishes orature from literature, even in the most obvious way: when you are reading a novel, you don’t need a performance.
CC: You’re completing a new novel. Are there ways in which your thinking about orature and performance has affected the novel?
NWT: Yes, but we won’t go into too much detail about it because writing is a complicated process. Performance is central to the new novel. It is a state of performance. The characters are engaged in the constant performance of their own being for the narrative. You never quite know who they are.
Often they reinvent themselves through performance. Even I, as their author, do not know where or how the whole novel is going to end except in the constant performance of their own being.

l Ngugu wa Thiong’o has written over twenty books, including I Will Marry When I Want (drama), Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Detaineed: A Writer’s Prison Diary, Njambe Nene and the Flying Bus (children’s literature), and many novels, historical and experimental.
CC: Is this a reinvention both in public and private?
NWT: Yes. The characters in this new novel constantly reinvent themselves. I don’t know if they are making progress because I’ve only done the first two drafts. My wife, Njeeri, is now reading it. She’s at the house and maybe you should call there.
l To be continued