One might think I was describing the era when Ngũgĩ’s novel was first published, the seventies, or the era when he first published his lectures on the politics of African language and African literature, Decolonising the Mind, the early eighties. Plus ça change. How can we revolutionize the revolution, keep the fire going this time? What can we learn from this novel, born in prison, born of conflict, born at crossroads in the lives of Ngũgĩ and his country? What can we learn about the politics of art—and the art of politics—from Devil on the Cross, which bears the crosses of its birth like so many scars?
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Ngũgĩ describes Devil on the Cross as the story of “two main journeys over virtually the same ground. Warĩĩnga”—the novel’s heroine—“moves in a matatũ taxi from the capital city Nairobi to Ilmorog, a fictional rural outpost. Then Warĩĩnga makes a second journey in a car from Nairobi to Ilmorog to Nakuru. A gap of two years separates the two journeys.” The central conceit is that Warĩĩnga and the others on the matatũ—the driver, a village woman, a worker, a lecturer, and a businessman—are all headed to the same event in Ilmorog’s Golden Heights: a “Competition in Modern Theft and Robbery,” allegedly sponsored by the Devil. There, fantastically grotesque businessmen perorate on their exploitative skills and propose innovations in vampiric capitalist ploys. The most horrific of these borders on science fiction: a factory that will manufacture spare parts of the human body for the rich, so that they may be immortal. University students and unionized workers storm the competition in protest; there is a riot; arrests and unjust trials follow.
Woven around and through this political satire is Warĩĩnga’s personal story. The novel traces her evolution from her dismal condition at the start of the novel: a suicidal, self-hating modern young woman who had a child out of wedlock with a “Rich Old Man,” and has just been fired for refusing her boss’s sexual advances. This evolution entails a career plot in which Warĩĩnga returns to her love of engineering; a political plot in which she awakens to the possibilities of class solidarity, community-owned enterprise, and political revolution; and a marriage plot involving the lecturer whom Warĩĩnga meets on the matatũ, a composer named Gatuĩria. Devil on the Cross is not just a road story, then. It is also a story of education, a work of protest fiction, and even a kind of novel of manners. Its skeletal structure—two journeys—is thickly fleshed with flashbacks, folktales, and fables, as well as praise songs, proverbs, and parables. There are scenes of dialogue that read like mini-plays; there are transcriptions of song; we even read a proto-concert program for Gatuĩria’s oratorio.
Devil on the Cross is rampantly hybrid and adamantly unpredictable. It veers into the past and the future, skips years in a paragraph, lingers over a matatũ journey for fifty-odd pages. At one point we read a dry, highly technical description of how an engine works. The novel is often marvelously vivid and whimsical:
It looked as if Mwaũra’s Matatũ Matata Matamu Model T Ford, registration number MMM 333, was the very first motor vehicle to have been made on Earth. The engine moaned and screamed like several hundred dented axes being ground simultaneously. The car’s body shook like a reed in the wind. The whole vehicle waddled along the road like a duck up a mountain.
In the morning, before starting, the matatũ gave spectators a wonderful treat. The engine would growl, then cough as if a piece of metal were stuck in its throat, then it rasped as if it had asthma.
Though Ngũgĩ’s writing is steeped in material reality, the profusion of similes—all deft, all vibrant—in passages like this lends a surreal air to Devil on the Cross. One businessman at the Robbers’ Den has a mouth the shape of a kingstock’s beak; another has eyes “the size of two large red electric bulbs.” A devilish voice speaks to Warĩĩnga, offering her “a ride in a car that moves smoothly over tarmac highways with the grace of a young man sliding across the perfumed body of a woman.” This metaphor illustrates even as it enacts the smooth sliding of parallel planes in the novel—reality and fantasy.
This sinuous dreaminess is fitting given the number of actual dream sequences in Devil on the Cross, including the eerie eponymous one:
She saw first the darkness, carved open at one side to reveal a Cross, which hung in the air. Then she saw a crowd of people dressed in rags walking in the light, propelling the Devil toward the Cross. The Devil was clad in a silk suit, and he carried a walking stick shaped like a folded umbrella. On his head there were seven horns, seven trumpets for sounding infernal hymns of praise and glory. The Devil had two mouths, one on his forehead and the other at the back of his head. His belly sagged, as if it were about to give birth to all the evils of the world. His skin was red, like that of a pig. Near the Cross he began to tremble and turned his eyes toward the darkness, as if his eyes were being seared by the light. He moaned, beseeching the people not to crucify him, swearing that he and all his followers would never again build Hell for the people on Earth.
Warĩĩnga’s recurring dream is important enough to give the novel its title. But while its allegorical significance may seem obvious—Ngũgĩ spells it out shortly thereafter—the dream’s details are uncanny and disturbing as such: the two mouths, the gluttonous or pregnant belly, the play on “horn” as both bestial and musical. That is, this feels like a dream, or, rather, the stuff of nightmares. What kind of politics can such a surreal and genre-bending form produce?
Let’s reverse the question: what kind of form do Ngũgĩ’s politics produce? A key pivot in Ngũgĩ’s thinking when he was writing Devil on the Cross was a new focus on his audience: “I knew whom I was writing about, but whom was I writing for?” Discussing the inception of the novel in Decolonising the Mind, he says, “I knew that form by itself, no matter how familiar and interesting, could never hold the attention of my new kind of reader for long. . . . Content is ultimately the arbiter of form.” He chose the material most relevant to the Kenyan public he wished to reach—“the historical reality of a neocolony.” He thought this “new kind of reader”—the kind who would go on to read Devil on the Cross out loud in bars and on matatũs, on factory lunch breaks or after family suppers, the kind who would force the book into a second and third printing—these members of the urban and rural underclass would be familiar with an oral tradition. This tradition encompasses the digressions, proverbs, riddles, and outlandish fables that make the novel such a wild—and hybrid—ride.
This kind of reader would also understand, Ngũgĩ thought, that in the Kenyan neocolony “reality is stranger than fiction.” To this extent, then, the formal distortion in Devil on the Cross is meant to reflect the distortion—the absurdity and grotesquerie—of the neocolonial regime that Ngũgĩ wished to satirize. The novel is reminiscent of Mikhail Bulgakov’s brilliant censored masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, which Ngũgĩ cites as an influence. Like that Russian novel, Devil on the Cross manipulates scripture—the Devil’s temptation of Christ and the Parable of the Talents—palpating it into weird forms that illuminate structures of power and violence. Ngũgĩ also picks up filaments from Gĩkũyũ folklore that translate handily into a critique of capitalism. The man-eating marimũ, for example, ogres with two mouths and long hair, are said to live on the labor of men. In this sense, it is not that Ngũgĩ chose to filter his political message through an absurdist form; his political views determined that form. This is not so surprising. It is a central tenet of Marxism that the material (the base) determines the form (the superstructure). And Ngũgĩ is nothing if not a Marxist.
It is tempting to decolonize Ngũgĩ’s Marxism. What does it mean that this Gĩkũyũ writer is so wedded to “a basic philosophic outlook” that emerged out of nineteenth-century Germany? While a young Ngũgĩ was beginning to resist the linguistic and cultural imperialism of the British Empire, a French-Algerian Jew named Jacques Derrida was beginning to deconstruct certain principles of what he called Eurocentric thought. We can see many of these principles in Ngũgĩ’s early Marxist w
ork. There is a tendency to extoll purity, authenticity, the spoken word. There is a nostalgia for rustic ways of living (I wince whenever he unselfconsciously writes “peasant”—I doubt that word has positive connotations for anyone anymore). There is an insistently optimistic trajectory, a belief in making progress toward a better end. There is a belief that the world has a center, and that we can displace or replace it for good. And there is a powerful sense of “the real” as a material and inescapable condition of life.
One might think this philosophical frame would affect only, say, how Ngũgĩ’s characters speak or act. But aspects of his Marxism permeate his literary form as well. The most manifest of these is his habit of articulating the world in terms of duality. In Devil on the Cross, there are two of everything: bags, shadows, paths, pots, halves, mouths, forces, hearts, roads, ways. The novel opposes man and woman, love and hate, good and evil, life and death, the managers and the managed, producers and parasites. When Gatuĩria describes his oratorio, he says, “there is music and the music; there is song and the song.” Naturally, the oratorio takes two years to complete and comprises two hundred sheets of music. Duality is almost a tic in Ngũgĩ’s work—not just in his fiction, but in his essays, too, where language has a “dual character”; an “imperialist tradition” opposes a “resistance tradition”; folklore depicts our “twin struggle” against other animals and nature; and “two dialectically opposed traditions of Kenyan history, culture, and aesthetics” are responsible for raising “colonial Lazarus from the dead.”
There are, according to Ngũgĩ in Detained, even two sources for this very dialectical mode, this pitting of a thesis against an antithesis:
Without struggle, there is no life, there is no movement. The thought is not original—I once read it in William Blake: without contraries there is no progression; attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence. And later in Hegel: contradiction is the root of all movement and all life, and only in so far as a thing incorporates a contradiction is it mobile, does it possess impulse and activity.
Ngũgĩ’s insight into the dual origins of his mode of thought is striking, as are its implications for Devil on the Cross. His division of the world into opposed binaries does not constrain this novel; rather, it propels its activity, even its impulsiveness. I would suggest that this inevitable movement of the dialectic—the energy produced by opposition and dualism—is why the novel is not reducible to its stated Marxism. Again, the art of Devil on the Cross does not rise above its politics. It is set into motion by them.
To take one example, Ngũgĩ notes that while the novel is structured by two journeys, they “are two layers of parallel journeys that suggest other journeys.” We also see many emblematic crossroads, or points of intersection. (The titular cross is one such symbol.) Crossroads can be literal, as when Warĩĩnga stands before the tracks and contemplates jumping in front of a train—another kind of crossing over. The crossroads are also figurative, in the sense that a metaphor (meta-pherein: to carry across) draws together two different ideas (a car ride; making love) in a new way. And these crossroads are narrative in the sense that Devil on the Cross is rife with coincidences, moments when plot trajectories intersect. To detail them here would belabor the point—and spoil the story! But these coincidences—sometimes Dickensian, sometimes possessed of tragic depth—are key to the topsy-turvy quality of the world of Ngũgĩ’s novel. Concepts and lives are upended in an instant.
Somewhat unexpectedly for a novel whose political premises are set out in advance, and laid out explicitly, Ngũgĩ’s coincidences are surprising. The last pages of the novel showcase Ngũgĩ’s magnificent skills in narrative momentum and suspense. They also rely on the very dialectical form—the reversal of opposed binaries like young and old, man and woman, rich and poor—that Ngũgĩ derives from his Marxist politics. The final image he leaves us with—of a gun-toting, jeans-wearing, judo master of a car mechanic who will marry whom she wants, when she wants (which may be never)—is as wondrous a revelation as I have ever read. Warĩĩnga the revolutionary has the panache and the glory of a comic book heroine or a blaxploitation star. Devil on the Cross has been published in English, Swedish, Norwegian, Russian, German, Tamil, and Swahili. Its next translation ought to be a graphic novel, that recent and global genre of the people.
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The most crucial political and artistic decision that Ngũgĩ made before sitting down in Cell 16 of Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison to write Devil on the Cross was to write it in Gĩkũyũ. The decision has struck some as insular, if not Sisyphean (Gĩkũyũ is spoken by only about 22 percent of Kenyans and is read by far fewer). Reviewing Devil on the Cross in 1982, in the London Review of Books, Victoria Brittain wrote, “It will be tragic if his response to the political polarisation in his society is to turn his energies inward, so that he writes only in Kikuyu for a peasant audience, and refuses to address the outside world.” When Ngũgĩ was rumored to be a contender for the 2010 Nobel Prize, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani wrote an op-ed in the New York Times bemoaning Ngũgĩ’s continued commitment to writing in Gĩkũyũ: “I shudder to imagine how many African writers would be inspired by the prize to copy him.” In Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ explains his reasoning for this controversial and consequential choice. For him, language is a means of communication and a carrier of culture. On one hand, language reflects reality and literature holds a “mirror” to the world. On the other, language creates reality and “communication creates culture.” To write in Gĩkũyũ was thus both to reflect reality—his and his readers’—and to create reality, to make a truly African literature, rather than the Afro-European texts that constituted the canon at the time.
Ngũgĩ admits that to write a novel in Gĩkũyũ was also a great struggle. There was the matter of his detainment at Kamĩtĩ, of course, where the only paper was toilet paper and “one had to keep on playing a game of write-and-hide.” But “there were other problems that had nothing to do with the fact that the room of one’s own was Cell 16. Words for instance. Sentences. Paragraphs.” Ngũgĩ quotes T. S. Eliot on the slipperiness of words, which “crack . . . break . . . slip, slide, perish.” (That French-Algerian Jew would agree.) Ngũgĩ was confounded by basic questions: tense, time, space, orthography, tonal variations. “Yes, words did slip and slide under my own eyes,” he says. “They would not stay in place. They would not stay still.” There was also the perennial problem of “finding the appropriate ‘fiction language,’ that is with fiction itself taken as a form of language.” There is a truly heart-stopping moment in Detained when Ngũgĩ’s cell is searched and his painstakingly drafted manuscript is confiscated. After three depressive weeks, a senior officer returns it to him: “I see nothing wrong with it,” he says. “You write in very difficult Kikuyu!”
Perhaps the officer simply wasn’t familiar with the language. I wouldn’t know, having read the novel only in English. One of the ironies of Ngũgĩ’s decision to write in Gĩkũyũ is the inevitability of its English translation. This is not merely an exigency of an Anglocentric publishing world, against which Ngũgĩ often rails. It was also built into his initial decision: “I had planned to finish the Gĩkũyũ version by the end of 1978. In line with my new thinking on Kenya’s national languages, I would embark on a Swahili version in 1979. . . . In 1980, I would attempt an English version. English was a foreign language, but it was an important language in the history of Kenya.” Indeed, Ngũgĩ’s education in English literature is ever present in his allusions to Conrad, Woolf, Dickens, and so on. When we learn that the original pages of Devil on the Cross, drafted before his detainment, were in English; that he wrote the novel in “difficult” Gĩkũyũ; and that he himself translated it into English, we see the complexity of this seemingly univocal decision. Its aesthetic, political, and personal implications are as layered as Samuel Beckett’s decision to write in French, or Zora Neale Hurston’s decision to write in African Ame
rican dialect. Ngũgĩ’s choice to write in Gĩkũyũ has proved political not only as a return to his African roots but also as a landmark in global translation.
Ngũgĩ is now a doyen of translation, the founding director of the University of California, Irvine Center for Translation. In his 2012 Globalectics, he calls translation “the language of languages.” Translation is what allows for a “mutually affecting” cultural exchange in a networked globe where every point can be a center, and all points are equidistant from the earth’s core. In Rebecca Walkowitz’s recent book, Born Translated, she notes that “many books today do not appear at first only in a single language. Instead, they appear simultaneously or nearly simultaneously in multiple languages.” She suggests that one feature of contemporary fiction is that it is “born translated,” or written for translation, which works “as medium and origin rather than as afterthought.” Ngũgĩ, who wrote three decades ago, in Decolonising the Mind, that “language is mediating in my very being,” is not just the father of mother tongues; he is also the father of this crossbred prose, this translanguage. Every word he writes now is shadowed by its translation. Like his devil on the cross, his novels are born with two mouths—or more. When we read Devil on the Cross in English, certain words are italicized—those that appeared in English, French, Latin, and Swahili in the original Gĩkũyũ text. Ngũgĩ’s novel reminds us there is no pure or ur-language, not even the one your mother spoke.
Ngũgĩ recently wrote what may be the most translated short story of all time, “Ituĩka Rĩa Mũrũngarũ: Kana Kĩrĩa Gĩtũmaga Andũ Mathiĩ Marũngiĩ” (“The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright”) for Jalada, an online literary journal published by a Kenyan collective of young African writers. You can read the story in more than thirty languages, and more translations are being commissioned. It is a lovely, lively fable about a competition between the arms and the legs. It easily translates, so to speak, into an allegory about the need for socialist cooperation in a body politic, the idea that, as Ngũgĩ writes in Decolonising the Mind, “work, from each according to his ability for a collective vision, was the great democratic equalizer.” Delightful details emerge when the story’s momentum diverts it from this total vision. So, when the hands try to walk along the ground, the thumbs are stretched away from the other fingers: “far from the separated thumb making the hands less efficient, it enhanced their . . . grasping power. What’s this? Deformity transformed into the power of forming!” This seems as good a description as any of how language—translated, slippery, fallen, accidental, bent, broken, imprecise—yet has the power of poesis, of making (poiein: to create).