No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 August 2017
This essay locates the valences of the popular in Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s fiction to understand how Rwanda as a background for a thriller fits into a longer tradition of African popular genres that represent the aftermath of violent conflict. The question of whether Nairobi Heat and Black Star Nairobi attempt to illuminate the genocide or only evoke it as background shapes the approach to the popular. The essay then identifies ways in which Mukoma’s novels are also in conversation with the more canonical works of anticolonial “writing back” to empire and in fact perform an unnarration, or blotting out, of that discourse and the historical dynamics that inform it. Mukoma does not divorce himself entirely from this older literary project, which exercises a disruptive influence in the popular as he configures it. Finally, the essay examines the relation among action, morality, and sentimentality to identify how Mukoma reclaims the plot of intervention from the humanitarian framing of the failure of international intervention.
1 Ngugi, Mukoma Wa, Nairobi Heat (New York: Melville House, 2010)Google Scholar.
2 Ngugi, Mukoma Wa, Black Star Nairobi (New York: Melville House, 2013)Google Scholar.
3 Mukoma Wa Ngugi, “Searching for Clues in a Dangerous Nairobi.” Interview on All Things Considered, NPR, July 13, 2013, www.npr.org/2013/07/13/200832498/searching-for-clues-in-a-dangerous-nairobi, accessed on February 13, 2017.
4 The improbable may not be a surprising feature of the crime novel, yet the extent of it in Nairobi Heat drew the attention of reviewers. See Publishers Weekly, May 30, 2011.
5 Barber, Karin, “Popular Arts in Africa,” African Studies Review 30.3 (1987): 1–78 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 7.
6 Ibid., 9.
7 Bryce, Jane, “Who No Know Go Know: Popular Fiction in Africa and the Caribbean,” The Oxford History of the Novel In English, Vol 11: The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950, ed. Simon Gikandi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 217–235 Google Scholar, esp. 219.
8 Hall, Stuart, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 227–240 Google Scholar, esp. 230. Hall only hesitantly endorses a class-bound notion of the popular as the cultural production of the working people because he is cautious about notions of cultural authenticity.
9 Higginson, Pim, The Noir Atlantic: Chester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel (Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press 2011), 27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Mukoma, “Searching for Clues in a Dangerous Nairobi.”
11 Todorov, Tzvetan, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1978), 43–44 Google Scholar.
12 Ibid., 47.
13 Pearson, Nels and Singer, Marc, eds., “Open Cases: Detection, (Post)Modernity and the State,” Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational Word (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 3 Google Scholar.
14 Ibid., 48.
15 Coundouriotis, Eleni, The People’s Right to the Novel: War Fiction in the Postcolony, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 9–10 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Ibid., 17.
17 Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” 228.
18 Slaughter, Joseph R., “Vanishing Points: When Narrative Is Not Simply There,” Journal of Human Rights 9 (2010): 207–223 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 Ibid., 215.
20 Mukoma, “Searching for Clues in a Dangerous Nairobi.”
21 Slaughter, “Vanishing Points,” 210.
22 Ngugi, Black Star Nairobi, 256.
23 The child soldier narrative has been analyzed as an interrupted novel of education, and this pattern fits Muddy’s story. See Coundouriotis, The People’s Right to the Novel, 222.
24 Ngugi, Nairobi Heat, 98.
25 Ngugi, Black Star Nairobi, 75.
26 Ngugi, Nairobi Heat, 99. Ishmael is named after the narrator of Moby Dick, the only surviving member of the Pequod, which suggests that Mukoma is reworking Melville’s theme of the hunt for evil. See Melville, Herman, Moby Dick, or the Whale (New York: Signet, 2013)Google Scholar.
27 Ngugi, Black Star Nairobi, 127.
28 Ibid., 162.
29 Coundouriotis, The People’s Right to the Novel, 27–28.
30 Ibid., 104.
31 Ibid., 105.
32 Ibid., 183.
33 Mukoma Wa Ngugi, “Beauty, Mourning, and Melancholy in Africa39,” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 9, 2014, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/beauty-mourning-melancholy-africa39/, accessed on February 13, 2017.
34 Hirsch, Marianne, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22 Google Scholar.
35 Ngugi, Nairobi Heat, 56.
36 Ibid., 59.
37 Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa, A Grain of Wheat (Oxford: Heinemann, 1986)Google Scholar.
38 Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa, Decolonizing the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), 1 Google Scholar. Ngũgĩ has argued repeatedly in his essays that “imperialism is still the root cause of many problems in Africa.”
39 Ngugi, Nairobi Heat, 72.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 73–74.
42 Women are treated as the cliché sacrificial figures who shore up the sense of justice that drives men. See Boehmer, Elleke, “Motherlands, Mothers, and Nationalist Sons: Representations of Nationalism and Women in African Literature,” From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial, ed. Anna Rutherford (Sydney, Australia: Dangaroo, 1992), 232 Google Scholar.
43 Anna, Simons. Networks of Dissolution: Somalia Undone (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995), 39 Google Scholar.
44 Ngugi, Black Star Nairobi, 250.
45 Mukoma, “Searching for Clues in a Dangerous Nairobi.”
46 Ngugi, Nairobi Heat, 41. “He started to say something, making pleading gestures, but O shot him twice—once in the heart and once in the head.”
47 Ibid.
48 Ngugi, Black Star Nairobi, 167.
49 Ibid., 215.
50 Ibid., 229–30.
51 Ibid., 256.
52 Ibid., 256.
53 Ibid., 257.
54 Ibid., emphasis added.
55 Ibid., 258.
56 Ibid.
57 Ngugi, Black Star Nairobi, 259.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., 267.
62 Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, 47.
63 Ibid., 48.
64 Knight, Stephen, The Mysteries of the Cities: Urban Crime Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (London: McFarland, 2012), 11 Google Scholar. Knight has correlated innovation in crime genres to the historical emergence of urban centers. Although his scholarship is historical, Nairobi’s millennial emergence as an economic powerhouse undergirds the new feel of Mukoma’s fiction in an analogous fashion.
65 Ngugi, Nairobi Heat, 67.
66 Ngugi, Black Star Nairobi, 257 (emphasis added).