8 - The work of art in exile: Matigari

Summary

Of all Ngugi's major works, none seem to have generated as much ideological and theoretical debate as Matigari. This debate has revolved around the identity of this novel in relation to the author's stated intentions, its place in the changing canon of African literature, and the way it forces us to rethink cultural production in the postcolonial state. Reaction to Ngugi's major novels has always been strong and contentious, but the most remarkable thing about the debates revolving around Matigari is that they have not been concerned with the author's personality and his politics, but with a specific set of formal questions: does the overt and consistent use of allegory in the novel represent a new form of didacticism or does it lend itself to linguistic creativity? Is Ngugi's concern with the everyday politics of the postcolonial state a continued search for, and refinement of, techniques of realistic representation, or is the site of everyday culture one of experimentation, in the tradition of what has come to be known as the left-wing avant-garde? Is the powerful religious language of the novel an abdication of Marxist secularism, or is religion deployed in the name of an aesthetic ideal and ideological ends? And what is the meaning of Ngugi's appropriation of Gikuyu oral narratives – does it constitute a significant move away from the tradition of the European novel, or is orality a mark of his embrace of postmodernism?