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My essay attempts a revisionary reading of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between. The first work by a leading African/postcolonial novelist, this novel has generally been read in terms of an "English aesthetic" that Ngugi would come explicitly and decisively to repudiate in his later writing, most notably Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross. Along with Ngugi's second novel, Weep Noi, Child, The River Between is thought to display a certain simplicity, if not naivete, in terms of its aesthetic ideology. My argument is that critics have overlooked the depth and complexity of Ngugi's early fiction. Ngugi's apparent embrace of "Englishness" in his earliest fiction is riddled with ambivalence, ambiguity, and slippage. Undoubtedly, The River Between and Weep Not, Child draw on aesthetic models from Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Hughes. But these texts are colonial mimics that critique even as they seem to imitate.
This essay lurns on a revisionary reading of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's earliest novel, The River Between. It is excerpted from a longer project that includes, as well, a critique of the aesthetics of mimicry and irony in Ngugi's second novel, Weep Not, Child. The premise of my overall argument is relatively straightforward: The River Between mimics and revises canonical English texts, specifically Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays; in turn Weep Not, Child mimics and revises The River Between.1 My essay revives and seeks to expand an argument propounded by Ato Sekyi-Olu in an insightful but curiously neglected essay published nearly two decades ago. "The verdict of critics of the work of Ngugi wa Thiong'o," Sekyi-Otu begins, "is that his early writings are modest artistic exercises woven around plots whose narrative structure is uncomplicated and charting problems of picayune ethical significance" (157). Contending that the critical verdict of the philosophical and aesthetic universe of Ngugi's early fiction requires reappraisal, he contests the self-evidence ofthat consensus: "Is it possible that some of the characteristic concerns which we encounter in the later Ngugi are first dramatized in the earlier novels, perhaps with the matchless complexity of a vision not yet privy to the reductive truths of a systematic doctrine?" (Sekyi-Otu 157). My reading of The River Between answers this question in the affirmative. I also seek to...