I’d never heard of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o before he died this past May (I’m a rube). Intrigued by his many reverent obituaries, I chose the Kenyan author’s A Grain of Wheat at random from the seminal works that were circulating, then ordered a copy from my best friend. Taking place in central-ish Kenya over a few days in 1963, Grain begins when a man named Mugo refuses to give the village speech for Independence Day, to the great confusion of his community, who wishes to honor the courage he displayed while held in a brutal detention camp during the rebellion against the British colonizers. Why doesn’t he want this honor? What could he be hiding?
The answer to this first of many mysteries lies at the heart of Grain, which follows Mugo, husband and wife Gikonyo and Mumbi, British collaborator Karanja, resistance hero Kihika, and other Kenyan men, women, and young people (plus one or two white colonizers) through their memories of Kenya’s Emergency and its aftermath. Like the colonial edifice it toppled, the Emergency ended worlds for the people of Kenya. Under violent occupation, the characters of Grain are forced to betray themselves and each other, mistrusting their loved ones, reporting their comrades, and choosing safety over dignity in ways big and small. In this way, the novel shows racialized class struggle taking place at the level of the individual, the family, and the village, at whose intersections child abuse, misogyny, and poverty weaken the resistance movements that lead to revolution and life beyond.
Thiong’o’s all-seeing Grain (described by other writers as “spiraling” or “a game of mirrors”) provokes an uneasy empathy for cowards and sadists—masks that all of us wear at one time or another, I think, as power permits. I don’t meant to suggest that this is the novel’s politics (its characters also exhibit legendary courage, conviction, and resilience, as well as more everyday qualities: mischief, curiosity, amorousness, pettiness, industry, good humor, etc.), only that it is willing to show us what failure—of imagination, of political will, of one person’s moral obligation to another—can look like, how it snowballs, poisons, and corrupts. Layering characters and perspectives with an awe-inspiring delicacy, Thiong’o has written a novel that is as narratively masterful as it is emotionally complex. It was his second-to-last work written in English before he switched to Gikuyu1; for this reason, as a monolingual, I treasure it all the more.
I read Grain back in June, but it’s on my mind lately because everyone keeps saying, “The world is on fire!” I see it in the comments of recorded ICE kidnappings, I hear it in casual conversations about the economy, I feel it when someone either carefully ignores or fall to pieces over the fact of a hot October day. And it isn’t just Thiong’o—all the books I’ve read lately are apocalyptic, I noticed.
Certainly I gravitate toward the subject. No one could say I picked up Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility, Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, or Jordan Thomas’ When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World without knowing what I was getting into. But I think 2023 was a turning point for me, when I devoured (from between my fingers, or so it seemed) Cormac McCarthy’s unforgettable final novel/s, The Passenger and Stella Maris. Since then, ending worlds have seemed to seek me out, from William Carlos Williams’ fascinating, frustrating fantasia of genocide, In the American Grain, to Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac, a fictionalized biography of John von Neumann whose last section dramatizes the 2016 DeepMind Challenge Match (an historic Go match between the world’s best player and a computer program), to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, which follows six people aboard the International Space Station as they orbit Earth 16 times—that is, for a period of 24 hours.
This last was beautifully done, but as I read it, I felt a strange resentment growing inside me. In this near-plotless novel, Harvey’s crew of astro- and cosmonauts does little more than observe the world below them. They keep the lights on, as it were, running tests, exercising their muscles, and telling stories. Other than their wealth of memories and a spacewalk or two, however, life on the ship consists of the calm contemplation of a truly mesmerizing view: the Earth, Orbital’s main character. From high in the atmosphere, the reader joins them for the most engrossing geography lesson ever given, peering down to observe the globe’s oceans, mountain ranges, and superstorms as they slip by like puddles on a leisurely bike ride. Sparely beautiful, the story is absorbing, if unsatisfyingly passive at times.
It was not until the end of Orbital, with the clear foreshadowing of a specific doom, that I put my finger on my resentment. Harvey is elegizing life on earth as we know it—and the culprit, industrialization-driven climate change, couldn’t be more clear. But by situating this destiny within its universal context, a billion-year timeline of stardust and its various reconfigurations, she strips her elegy of urgency.
I can’t blame her for this. I can’t blame anyone for the way they confront the existential crisis that lies before us. But I can dislike the confrontation. The ended worlds of other authors have left me frightened or infuriated or motivated, have driven me to the depths of despair (McCarthy) and the plateaus of resignation (Thomas). This one has simply frustrated me.
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