"Flowers in All Their Colours": Natios and Communities in Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood

How has the neocolonial nation been defined in fiction? Representations vary from depictions of barren wastelands run by corrupt rulers in Ousmane Sembene's Xala (1974) to isolated outposts ruled by megalomaniacal army generals in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Ngugi wa Thiong'o's 1977 novel Petals of Blood, (1) however, takes a slightly different tack: it depicts the postcolonial African nation as a complex and multifaceted entity, and it represents this nation in three ways. First, Petals of Blood reveals that there are many ways of viewing the postcolonial African nation: examining the official national structure created artificially by colonialism (a structure which Ngugi clearly derides), or looking at the various locally created harmonious and not-so-harmonious communities within the official nation. Second, the novel presents several different locally created communities, which I will term, following Timothy Brennan, natios. It also espouses an ideal natio based on communal harmony and socialist economics, in which wealth is based on the amount of labor put in, and the peasants, the main labor force, control the means of production. Ngugi implies, in the course of the narrative, that this ideal natio can only be created through armed struggle, which would bring an end to the existing official nation and replace it with his ideal one. This ideal natio would eventually be led by farmers, workers, and intellectuals, and would result in a more or less classless society. Third, although the novel idealizes the natio just described, it also presents its argument through a series of contrasts in which the official nation and the various natios are played off of each other, suggesting that Ngugi ultimately endorses a view of the nation that is multiple and diverse, with structures of complicity and resistance contained within it. In the novel, then, there are four kinds of contrasts that Ngugi sets up for us: the contrast between several ideal natios and the artificial nation; the contrast between political betrayal and social justice; the contrast between an ironic narration and a "murder-mystery" narrative structure; and the contrast between many different commentaries and narrators of the action who frequently contradict each other. Since all of these contrasts suggest that there are many different ways of conceiving the ideal natio, most of the focus of this paper will be on describing and analyzing these contrasts. Before I analyze these three aspects of the novel I would like to point out that I use the word "nation" to refer to the artificially created neocolonial Kenya that Ngugi critiques, and the word natio to describe the local communities, some of which he valorizes. I take the words natio and "community" from the critics Timothy Brennan and Wole Ogundele, respectively. Brennan defines the natio as "a local community, domicile, family, condition of belonging." (2) Ogundele defines the community as "at once political and cultural," an entity that "problematizes and questions the political rationale of the nation-state." To Ogundele it is "the 'home base' of all major African writers ... the 'ground' on which they stand to resist and for resisting the cultural and political hegemonies of colonialism as well as neocolonialism." (3) Besides these two definitions, my notions of nation and natio also involve the importance of language in forming a concept of community. Indeed, in his other novels and essays Ngugi often refers to language as the unifier for a nation or several nations. In his collection of essays Moving the Centre, for example, he points out that Kiswahili unites East Africa linguistically and that it is one of the fastest-growIng languages in the world. He argues that it is the national language of Tanzania, an "all-Kenya national language," and has a similar position in Uganda. It functions as a language of unity and is a part of East African history. (4) As Ogundele has shown, the relationship between the nation and the natio in fiction has ranged from the "assimilation phase" during which the state absorbs the history of a particular community, through "metonymy" In which the description of the culture of a community stands for the culture of the state, to "adversarial" relations in which the identities of various communities are asserted through local and national languages (MC 116). …