Ultimately, all the bookstores were raided, and all the books seized, by the police. It is quite different to be among those disenfranchised by these gods, for centuries at risk of life and limb. Nor is such exile played out exactly like Caribbean novelist George Lamming's. You are always on the outside. In a way, one does not face up to the reality of one's new surroundings.
Home is still part of the imagination and writing helps to make it more real.
While they wait, however, English-only readers can peruse the recent collection of his Clarendon Lectures in English Literature, Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams, delivered at Oxford University in 1996. The hope is that his actions from this exclosure, whatever they are, will not directly affect those confined within the vast territorial enclosure. Once more, the state feels threatened by change which, after all, is life. Ngugi tells us, art is a matter of life and death. Ngugi wa Thiong'o is Professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies at New York University.