"Wizard of the Crow"
The Kenyan author explores his experience with dictatorships in an interview and excerpt from his novel.
By Salon staff
Dec. 13, 2006 | While many readers might associate you with tragic treatments of African life, this novel is a comic work. What made you opt for this mode?
"Wizard of the Crow," which I describe as a global epic from Africa, deals with the forces affecting our lives today through a dissection of dictatorships as the extreme of authoritarianism. A dictatorship is a tragedy manifesting itself in comedy, in short it is a comedy rooted in tragedy. So I approached the tragedy through its manifestation, which is comedy.
You write first in Gikuyu, a language of your native Kenya, then translate the text yourself into English. Why is that and does the text change in feeling at all in translation from one language to another?
I have been an advocate for writing in African languages as opposed to the current situation where a majority of African intellectuals write in English or French. But at the same time I want to show the obvious: that through translations, a work written in an African language is still available to other readers outside that specific African language. It is always difficult to render the musicality of one language into another, especially where the two languages have different structures. It is especially difficult where one language such as Gikuyu is very tonal. In the case of "Wizard of the Crow" I tried to render in English the playfulness of the original, and I hope I succeeded, 75 percent at least. The humor largely comes through.
"Wizard of the Crow" seems very much influenced by the oral traditions of African storytelling. What are some of the challenges in adapting that to the form of a long novel?
The story, the element of what happens next, is common to all fictional narratives, written or oral. But performativity is obviously more pronounced in the oral. I tried to capture this element. There are other elements such as the fact that in many folkloric narratives, there are no strict barriers to movement in time and space. Also no barriers in between species. Humans and animals and plants do sometimes talk to each other. But all this simply points to the oneness of creation behind its multi-manifestations and variations. Ovid's theme in "Metamorphosis" is change itself as the constant theme in nature, society and thought, and I hope I managed to render a similar sense of changefulness in "Wizard of the Crow."
After being imprisoned for your writing, you left Kenya in the 1970s. You're now a professor at the University of California at Irvine and live in California. How has living in exile outside of Africa affected the way you write about Africa?
Yes, I was imprisoned in a maximum prison in Kenya, without trial, in 1978. Later in 1982, I was forced into exile by the brutality of the Moi dictatorship. While exile detaches the writer from the feel of the everyday, it can also whet one's hunger and desire to connect. But it can also help clarity by establishing distance.
How has your notion of your work's purpose changed over the past 30 years? Do you see fiction differently than you did in the political upheavals of the 1970s?
I used to think of fiction as being able to effect change immediately. I still believe that fiction in the larger context of literature does intervene in social struggles but I take a larger view. Literature as art, a product of imagination, is also more essentially food for the imagination. Imagination is an integral art of the human. Imagination needs art to keep it alive.
Do you have a favorite book from 2006?
Yes, "Wizard of the Crow." Actually, my favorite is the novel I have not yet written, the novel I have always striven to write.
Next page: Read an excerpt from "Wizard of the Crow"