by KEN WALIBORA WALIAULA
East African literature has elected not only to celebrate but condone the cultural cross-pollination by its unflattering depiction of Asians.
AN insular and provincial approach to literature that blindly values works within narrow national, linguistic, and ethnic frontiers is, like censorship, one of literature’s worst enemies. Satya P. Mohanty’s suggestions in the interview “Literature to combat cultural chauvinism” ( Frontline, April 6) on how Indian literature should be saved from such insular provincial and parochial reading practices are germane to literary and cultural criticism in India and beyond. One-sided and narrow-minded critical stances are self-negating, denying the critic and the reader the rewarding experience and benefits of looking beyond the border. In addition, these reductive modes of reading betray a profound level of cultural chauvinism that is the very bane of our divided world, exacerbating and extending as it does the divisions of those already divided. As Mohanty cogently puts it, “cultural chauvinism is toxic for the student of literature”. Yet, fed on nationalist and jingoistic ethos, insularity in literary and critical practice has been thriving for generations all over the world and is far from over.
Sadly, no part of the world is guiltless when it comes to adopting and exhibiting this insular attitude. The difference lies only in the degree of guilt. We tend to want to know too little about the “Other” in Edward Said’s terms, and, in the process, we deny ourselves plenty of opportunities to learn much about ourselves. This gravely impacts our ways of knowing and remembering. One of the judges of the Nobel Prize in 2008 said about the United States: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.” 1 Mohanty’s vilification of the myopia of cultural chauvinism in literature and the potential of literature to redress this chauvinism certainly comes to us in the spirit of the “big dialogue of literature” towards which this Nobel Prize judge gestures. The judge berates only the U.S. for missing the bus of this big dialogue of literature, as far as literary translation projects are concerned. But I want to argue that it may be that really nobody translates enough. How many of the literary works in African languages have been translated into other African languages? How often does Africa translate itself? How many African literary texts have been translated into Asian languages and vice versa? How many Asian readers are familiar with the works of Daniel O. Fagunwa, who wrote in Yoruba, or Shaaban bin Robert, who wrote in Swahili? Into how many African languages have translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s works in Bengali, or Vishnu Prabhakar’s in Hindi, been made?
The comparative study of literature, which Mohanty recommends for Indian literature, should be replicated in Africa and elsewhere as well, complete with comparisons and a steady stream of mutual translations across national and linguistic borders, and across continents. The situation whereby Western literary texts are translated into languages of the colonised or formerly colonised while little translation of literary texts from these languages makes its way into the language of the imperium or in other non-Western languages is untenable and unbalanced. How, though, should texts that have travelled linguistically and culturally beyond their place of origin be read? How would Asian readers read African texts? Can and should these texts serve as mirrors through which Asian readers would see themselves? Some historical background is in order here.
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Ngugi, who survived the Mau Mau war himself, was keenly aware of the hierarchy that the colonial dispensation created in Kenya. The European colonists were at the very top of the social, economic and political pyramid, followed by Asians, and then at the bottom of the least were the indigenous Africans. It was a paradox of enormous proportions that Africans would be at the bottom of the hierarchy in a land they considered rightly their own. The British had been the first to come, first as missionaries in search of African souls to save or civilise or as explorers in voyages of discovery, then as colonisers or expeditions of conquest, particularly after the 1884-85 conference in Berlin. Keen on exploiting the natural resources of the colony, the British quickly conceived of the construction of a railway line from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast to Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria further inland (then to Kampala). Traversing the entire length of the Kenyan hinterland, the “Lunatic Express”, as its detractors derogatively referred to it, would serve as a veritable conduit for the transportation of these natural resources to Mombasa for shipping to Europe. But who would build the railway? Britain looked to cheap Indian labour. So when the massive project began in Mombasa in 1896, it was the unskilled coolies shipped from India who formed the core of the workforce. These Indian railway workers formed the crux of the future generation of the Indian community in Kenya that Ngugi and other African writers would at the very least fictionalise and at the very worst satirise in their literary works. These Indian arrivals occupied the liminal space between and betwixt the European coloniser and the colonised African. How would the Asian reader receive the image Ngugi depicts of the Asian in the Kenyan colonial world? Here is how Ngugi writes:
“At the back of every shop was such a mound from which came a stench of decaying rubbish. Indian children and sometimes men shat there. African children often rummaged through the heaps, turning over newly thrown rubbish with their feet, looking for bread or forgotten coins. Their feet would dig into the ‘small loads’. The boys would swear horribly and occasionally would throw stones at the Indians in revenge.” (Ngugi, p. 170.)
The reader is compelled to confront not just the offensive smell of the Indian world but the desperate world of the African who scavenges at the back of the shop for breadcrumbs and forgotten coins. The back of the shop may be filthy, really made filthy by the Indian children and men, but the Indian is, in the main, living a life of privilege. The African scavenging at the back of the Indian shop presents a tragic image of want and decrepitude, eating the crumbs from the Indian table, as it were. The human waste that emerges in the rubbish, and not just the rotten bread or coins of little value that the African seeks, compounds that bleak picture of the African fate in the Indian world in Kenya. Referring to the passage in Ngugi’s novel, Harry Sewlall comments:
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