Contemporary Literary Criticism | Thiong'o, Ngugi wa - Roger A. Berger (essay date spring 1989)

Roger A. Berger (essay date spring 1989)

SOURCE: Berger, Roger A. “Ngugi's Comic Vision.” Research in African Literatures 20, no. 1 (spring 1989): 1-25.

[In the following essay, Berger explores the comedic elements in Ngugi's fiction, noting how the author's satirical overtones transform his novels into works of “resistant political discourse.”]

The serious aspects of class culture are official and authoritarian; they are combined with violence, prohibitions, limitations and always contain an element of fear and of intimidation. … Laughter, on the contrary, overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations. Its idiom is never used for violence and authority.

—Mikhail Bakhtin

1

We are reluctant to term Ngũgĩ's fiction comic. Indeed his novels and essays reflect an earnestness and an understandable seriousness, given what he sees as the betrayal of African aspirations...

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