In one essay from “Decolonizing Language,” Ng~ug~i declares that writers must “be the voice of the voiceless. They have to give voice to silence, especially the silence imposed on a people by an oppressive state.” During his AP interview, Ng~ug~i discussed his concerns about Kenya, the “empowerment” of knowing your native language, his literary influences and his mixed feelings about the United States. Ng~ug~i’s comments on subjects have been condensed for clarity and brevity.
“I am fine (with speaking English). After all, I am a distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, in Irvine. So it’s not that I mind English, but I don’t want it to be my primary language, OK? This is how I put it: For me, and for everybody, if you know all the languages of the world, and you don’t know your mother tongue, that’s enslavement, mental enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue, and add other languages, that is empowerment.” His U.S.
publisher, The New Press, has just released “Decolonizing Language,” which the author praises as a “beautiful” title. “Decolonizing Language” includes essays and poems written between 2000 and 2019, with subjects ranging from language and education to such friends and heroes as Nelson Mandela, Nadine Gordimer and Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author whose 1958 novel, “Things Fall Apart,” is considered by many the starting point for modern African literature. Achebe also helped launch Ng~ug~i’s career by showing a manuscript of an early novel, “Weep Not, Child,” to publisher William Heinemann, who featured it in the landmark African Writers series.
Ng~ug~i has been praised by critics and writers worldwide, and imprisoned, beaten, banned and otherwise threatened in his native country. Since the 1970s, he has mostly lived overseas, emigrating to England and eventually settling in California, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. One of the world’s most revered writers and a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize, Ng~ug~i remains an energetic speaker with opinions no less forceful than they have been for the past 60 years.
Since emerging as a leading voice of post-colonial Africa, he has been calling for Africans to reclaim their language and culture and denouncing the tyranny of Kenya’s leaders. His best known books include the nonfiction “Decolonizing the Mind” and the novel “Devil on the Cross,” one of many books that he wrote in his native Gik~uy~u. If you have any kind of questions regarding where and ways to make use of #kidsontheyard, you can contact us at our own web site. “I very much like the African American writers. I discovered them at Makerere University (in Uganda), and Caribbean writers like George Lamming were very important to me.
The writers of the Harlem Renaissance fired my imagination and made me feel I could be a writer, too.
