A (re)escritura e a diferença: estratégias de descolonização na obra de Ngugi wa thiong’o

Abstract

The intention of this work is to demonstrate how the dynamics of the artistic/ intellectual production of the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o, whose works have gained notoriety from the second half of the twentieth century - especially by its oposing tone and anti-colonial and anti-imperialist position - is symptomatic of the resistance promoted by some intellectuals and operated within the African nations, from the composition of plays with the help of peasants, through fiction in English or, as Ngugi points in Decolonising the mind (1986), an Afro-European language, entering in his most radical and perhaps infamous stage: the refusal of the use of a non-African language to produce his literature, coming at last to the point that seems to be his in-between ness: the self-translation of Murogi wa Kagogo (2004) novel written in Kikuyu translated to English under the title of Wizard of the Crow, in 2006. There is, in our perception, a movement between Manichean positions, in which the writer assumes a speculate stand, working here with the concept proposed by Abdul R. Jan Mohamed, that is, the subject put shim self in a locus of enunciation, whether the total assimilation of the colonizing culture, or on the opposite side of that: the total rejection of the status quo. However, our work intended to point not for the specular positions taken by Ngugi (although they appear to be fundamental processes in his works), but to the choice of a third locus of enunciation, as the foundation for a syncretic one posture, in which the traffic between the different traditions from which this subject is for med can dialogue, demonstrating the existence of one and the other. The title, The rewriting and the difference: decolonization strategies in the work of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, is an attempt to approach a theoretical corpus that could encompass arising thoughts of Cultural Studies, Philosophy, and especially of the Translation Studies, besides the analysis of the Literary Studies, first area of this work. The bibliographic references reveal thoughts of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Edward Said, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Antoine Berman, André Lefevere, Walter Benjamin, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, John Samuel Mbiti, Simon Gikandi and of course, Ngugi himself, among others.