Matigari

Place on List:

II. Literary Genre: The Novel

3. How is political conflict directly represented in novels?

Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Matigari. (1987, Kenya)

Supporting References:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C5%A9g%C4%A9_wa_Thiong%27o
2. Short Blog review: http://sbwanderer.blogspot.com/2007/04/book-review-matigari.html
3. On the writer:http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/oct/08/ngugi-wa-thiong-o-nobel-prize-literature

4. blog review: http://bloggingtheclassics.wordpress.com/2010/10/06/ngugi-wa-thiongo-1987-matigari/
5. Poor review: http://www.africabookclub.com/?p=4605
6. Uskalis, Eriks. "Allegory and the retrieval of history: Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between and Matigari." The Free Library 01 July 2005. 05 September 2013 <http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Allegory and the retrieval of history: Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River...-a0160750020>.

7. Birch, Dinah. "Ngugi Wa Thiong'o." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013 .

The article offers an overview of Ngugi Wa Thiong'o and less a discussion on the above-cited text.

“Ngugi Wa Thiong'o (1938– ) Changed his name from James Ngugi when he stopped writing in English and began publishing in Gikuyu. Both decisions were motivated by his belief that writing in the language of the colonizer alienated Africans from their own culture. His essays on postcolonial politics have been as influential as his fiction and plays: Homecoming (1972); Writers in Politics (1981); Barrel of a Pen (1983); Decolonising the Mind (1986); Moving the Centre (1993); Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams (1998). He was born in Kenya, where a State of Emergency was declared in 1952 because of the Mau Mau uprising, and educated at University College, Makerere, and at Leeds University. While he was teaching at the University of Nairobi his play in Gikuyu, translated as I Will Marry When I Want and co‐written with Ngugi wa Mirii as a literacy project, was performed by a peasant cast to huge audiences in 1977; its licence was withdrawn and Ngugi was detained for a year, and was not reinstated in his academic post. Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981) is a scathing attack on neocolonialism. Ngugi went into exile in 1982. In The River Between (1965), set around 1930, Waiyaki fails as a saviour who tries to reconcile cultural integrity and educational enlightenment. Weep Not, Child (1964), set during the Emergency, explores a child's perplexity as his intellectual ability provides him with schooling that makes him feel he has betrayed his family. A Grain of Wheat (1967) is stylistically more complex than the earlier novels, its dislocating shifts in perspective enacting for the reader the fragmentation of Kenyan society at the moment of independence. All the characters, Home Guards, District Officers and freedom fighters alike, are crippled by guilt; as General R says, ‘No one will ever escape from his own actions.’ Petals of Blood (1977), a modernist version of crime fiction, depicts a community's attempt to realize the dream of national identity in opposition to global capitalism. Devil on the Cross (1982), Matigari (1987), and Wizard of the Crow (2006) engage directly with Gikuyu orality.”