The Ngugis and the jukebox dance

Author Tee Ngugi, one of the sons of writer Prof Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

What you need to know:

  • First, it has been in the publisher’s pipeline for seven years.

  • Secondly, its release in this so-called “month of love” fills up the weekly quota of romance that we have missed because of the absence of Mexican soap operas from our TV screens, as the digital migration row rages on.

One of the first literary offerings from local publishers this year is Seasons of Love and Despair, a collection of short stories by Tee Ngugi, released under the Spear Books series of East African Educational Publishers.

There are many reasons to celebrate the arrival of this collection.

First, it has been in the publisher’s pipeline for seven years. Secondly, its release in this so-called “month of love” fills up the weekly quota of romance that we have missed because of the absence of Mexican soap operas from our TV screens, as the digital migration row rages on.

But the more significant thing is that Tee Ngugi’s book gives us cause to (re)examine the value of the short story and prompts us to debate the relationship between raw talent and skill in this business of art.

As the title suggests, the seven stories in this volume scrutinise two extreme human emotions — ecstatic love and deep, suicidal angst.

Diagnosing love requires no real expertise and yet, describing its nuances and effects takes the work of a studious mind.

Tee has such a mind.

Unpredictable outcome

He cuts through the mass of emotions with the patience of a botanist peeling off the layers of love’s twisted paths in its cycles of infatuation, passion, acceptance, commitment, heartbreak, anger, angst, and renewal.

But in Tee’s world, things rarely move towards a predictable outcome. His stories, especially “Love and Damnation,” are packed with (un)pleasant surprises.

“Love in the Age of Innocence” captures every variety of love — affection, attraction, attachment, intimacy, kindness, compassion and even, simple pleasure. By ‘age of innocence,’ Tee clearly means childhood. But he is also portraying that bygone, earthy time before cellphones and social media changed the way we relate and redefined romance.

Tee’s stories can be read as incisive social commentary on the unwanted outcomes of an unjust economic system — poverty, run-away crime, debauchery, alcoholism, unemployment, quasi-literacy and ill health in unplanned towns and forgotten hinterlands.

But great art transcends reality. It uses a lot more than the tools of the sociologist, the historian, the political scientist and the human rights activist to communicate its view of society and its analyses of human character.

Aside from his considerable stock of figurative language, Tee distinguishes himself as an artist by using several rhetorical devices.

He has an ear for music and an eye for painting and he incorporates these arts into his writing with the ease of a consummate curator, one whose exposure to the arts covers several cultures.

In one instance, Tee freezes the action in a story with a murder scene that is likened to a painting. In another instance, he places a deceitful character, Esther, at the feet of a painting of the Virgin Mary.

As she dusts the painting she confronts her fraud: “Esther pitied the virgin. She had lost her son so that human beings might be saved, but they continued to lie, murder, fornicate and steal”.

To summarise plot, character and action, Tee sometimes resorts to Biblical fables and Christian hymns, aware that his audience will already be familiar with these texts. Even so, he is not afraid to question religion, to show up the ironic hypocrisies of those who claim to act in God’s name. But in a country that is now neck-deep in the gospel of prosperity and vulgar panda mbegu preachers, Tee’s portrait of fallen church leaders might be dismissed as too mild, if not downright old-school.

The short story is a difficult genre. Dialogue must be written with sharp precision and the description of scenes and characters must be composed without verbiage. The compact narrative is a tight balance between concealing and revealing.

Tee is clearly the master of the short sentence. He uses it to govern pace and to effect narrative economy. Occasionally, however, Tee slips into aimless rumbling — as if he is not sure that he has illustrated the function of a character well enough or is uncertain of how quickly his story should head for the denouement.

‘Mystery of Missing Girl’ is guilty of such lapses. Are Fantud’s nightly encounters with Adolphhius real or are they the substance of his hormone-driven teenage dreams? Tee can’t seem to decide between the brand of realism that he has thus far employed with dexterity, and the temptation to delve into magical realism as a viable means for exploring the liminal world of desire.

And so the nightly sequence is repeated over and over again, dragging on rather needlessly.

A collection of short stories faces the pressing challenge of variety. Each story should stand out as distinctly different from the others. Most of Tee’s characters are — as Rehema describes the protagonist in ‘Broken Lives’ — fugitives from communal ties. To separate them from one story to the next, Tee shifts the setting and he changes the point of view. 

The short story serves many purposes. It is attractive to the reader because it can be read in one sitting — in traffic, in a doctor’s waiting room or as a sleeping aid. For the writer, the short story is a practical way of exploring an idea that might be developed into a full-length novel.

For example, those who have read ‘Minutes of Glory,’ a short story in Ngugi wa Thion’go’s Secret Lives (1974), recognise the bar-maid Beatrice Wanjiru and her haughty colleague Nyaguthii, a “bird in flight”, as the seeds that gave birth to Wanja of Petals of Blood (1977).

And incidentally, why are the Ngugis so fixated on (wo)men dancing next to a jukebox in a bar? It is a sequence that pops up in every other story by the Ngugi, the patriach and it is making regular appearances in the writing of his daughter, Wanjiku, and that of his sons Tee, Mukoma and Nducu.

Granted, the sight of patrons dancing in bars is a daily occurrence in every hamlet in Kenya. But even more important than this reality is the possibility that the Ngugis use the bar room dance as a trope, a figuration that says many other things.

Consequently, it can be seen variously as: the dance of abandon and ecstasy, an escape within or from a love gone sour; the beseeching dance, a quest for liberation from poverty; or the dance of trepidation that inversely tempts fate, literally inviting the gods to do their worst since life is already so bleak it can’t get any worse.

The lottery called genetics — which determines what we inherit from our parents — gave unto Tee a whole lot more than the image of (wo)men dancing next to juke boxes. But whether one hails from a family of footballers, doctors, musicians, politicians or writers, converting the raw talent that one inherits — and the opportunities that are generated within and by the family — into tangible skill is a long-drawn-out process that requires personal dedication.

Scoring a fine goal

The art of fiction is a craft whose rules and methods must be learnt. But you can learn the skill and lack the flair. Ultimately, like the skill of a footballer, the art of fiction is honed by perspiration.

It is perfected by countless scribbling or dribbling sessions; miles of legwork reading and re-reading everything — facts, fiction and fables; non-fiction writing and experimental narratives that amount to wild and wide shots at the goal; harsh but valuable criticism; premature gratification from unworthy praise; and then, finally, writing, revising, rewriting a complete manuscript.

With Seasons of Love and Despair, Tee Ngugi has scored a fine goal. It demonstrates that he has learnt the rules and the method.

This skill, and his instinctive knack for weaving words into stunning portraits, give us every reason to believe that he will step up to the big league soon and give us more and, maybe, longer fiction.

 

Dr. Nyairo is a Cultural Analyst. [email protected]