The Perfect Nine
by
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Book as means, story as end
review
Bronwyn Mills
I think telling stories and listening to stories is a human need.
— Miriam Margolys, BBC presenter
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I should like to devote this Remarkable Reads review to Ngugi wa Thiong’s most recent novel, The Perfect Nine, though the word “novel” may be a bit inaccurate. It is actually an epic, “told and retold as part of the lore of the Gikuyu people ,” as Ngugi informs us in the book’s Acknowledgements. Ngugi has written it in Gikuyu and then translated it into English for those who are not versed in the original language. Epic? The minds of us raised in the European tradition immediately wander off to the classics of ancient empire, the Iliad, the Odyssey, which, we were inaccurately told as students, Homer “wrote.” A) No, he didn’t; after some time, someone wrote down what Homer and others performed orally; and b) both extolled the culture of heroic warrior men, with Ulysees’ Penelope, the patient wife spinning, waiting passively at home, and the active women portrayed as sirens, seductresses and not quite worthy of these warriors.
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Ngugi, however, has not only created a retelling and interpretation of the epic, but shifts the emphasis--women as heroes. For, 23 years after the publication of his Decolonizing the Mind, the colonial intrusion into the colonized minds' is not just a “he” being exposed to an external version of the world through the colonial project, but a she exposed to the colonial rearranging of her world but also a world where she, as person with agency, has virtually been erased by the dominance of male-ness.
Not in Ngugi’s rendering.
Mind, there is absolutely nothing, nada, doctrinaire or heavy-handed about Ngugi’s book: the shift to heroic women is perfectly natural, no questions asked. It just is. Assumed. And this is what makes the book so engaging: we are immediately taken into a world where women are quite naturally active participants in the drama. Similarly, the book does not bother with, or genuflect towards, the culture of the former colonizer (the UK in Kenya’s case) —no need to do so. The Anglosphere is irrelevant. The epic’s first language is Gikuyu; and for those of us who must read the epic in English note that, as opposed to someone from outside his culture, the author is rendering that translation, No slip ups in terms of an outsider “correcting” something he or she does not understand.
The story’s germinal patriarch and matriarch are Gikuyu and Mumbi and their nine beautiful daughters, the “Perfect Nine,” of the title. These beautiful daughters do have suitors with active parts in the unfolding of the action, ones who brave ogres and the other dangers that beset them, but it is the women who save the day. Indeed, as the story begins, the nine have suitors who it appears, first deploy their charms via macho display:
Not in Ngugi’s rendering.
Mind, there is absolutely nothing, nada, doctrinaire or heavy-handed about Ngugi’s book: the shift to heroic women is perfectly natural, no questions asked. It just is. Assumed. And this is what makes the book so engaging: we are immediately taken into a world where women are quite naturally active participants in the drama. Similarly, the book does not bother with, or genuflect towards, the culture of the former colonizer (the UK in Kenya’s case) —no need to do so. The Anglosphere is irrelevant. The epic’s first language is Gikuyu; and for those of us who must read the epic in English note that, as opposed to someone from outside his culture, the author is rendering that translation, No slip ups in terms of an outsider “correcting” something he or she does not understand.
The story’s germinal patriarch and matriarch are Gikuyu and Mumbi and their nine beautiful daughters, the “Perfect Nine,” of the title. These beautiful daughters do have suitors with active parts in the unfolding of the action, ones who brave ogres and the other dangers that beset them, but it is the women who save the day. Indeed, as the story begins, the nine have suitors who it appears, first deploy their charms via macho display:
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“What is this stupidity in full display” asked
Wairimu [one of the Perfect Nine.] “You come here, from wherever you did, to bring us This foolishness? “War among yourselves? Are you not mature men? “Why war among the same people? “Did you come her for Love or War?” Her sisters ululated in support of her wise words, Wangui [another sister] started a song…. |
As the story unfolds, we find out that Mumbi and Gikuyu have, themselves gone through various travels and trials; and that, ultimately the suitors, beginning with groups of ten with each selected sister, will have to go through a similar journey as well as their own particular kinds of trial to win the heart of their chosen sister. Says Gikuyu,
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“My daughters will do the choosing.
“But there is only one thing they cannot choose. “My daughters will not go away and leave us here alone.” |
There follows several competitions amongst the suitors for the women, but the ultimate test is a journey to the Mountains of the Moon, where at the top, those who make that journey,
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“At the top, you’ll scoop some of the moon into a
gourd. “Look about and you will see a round lake. “You will get some water into the gourd to mix with the moon. “I want each group to bring back their own mix of water and the moon, “for the libations to bless your new journey into your future.” |
And there is one final task, for Warigia, one of the sisters who is crippled—“her legs did not have the power of the other organs”—to bring back the hair that grows in the middle of the tongue of Mwengeca, the king of the human-eating ogres; for that hair cures all, and “will restore full power to Warigia’s legs.”
Thus we have the epic: a challenge, a journey, tasks/challenges which must be performed/met, and the return. Ultimately the story is a foundation myth—how “we,” in this case the Gikuyu, became a people. I will not spoil it for the reader, save to say that not all met the challenges and survived but, of those who did, having accomplished them was sweet.
Ngugi was my teacher and remains a mentor/inspirer. In an email exchange he wrote, modestly “I am glad to hear you are reading my first ever attempt at an epic: The Perfect Nine.”
He went on to note some of the technical challenges:
Thus we have the epic: a challenge, a journey, tasks/challenges which must be performed/met, and the return. Ultimately the story is a foundation myth—how “we,” in this case the Gikuyu, became a people. I will not spoil it for the reader, save to say that not all met the challenges and survived but, of those who did, having accomplished them was sweet.
Ngugi was my teacher and remains a mentor/inspirer. In an email exchange he wrote, modestly “I am glad to hear you are reading my first ever attempt at an epic: The Perfect Nine.”
He went on to note some of the technical challenges:
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In the Gikuyu edition, Kenda Mũiyuru, I had to invent my own metric system based on the concept of Nine/Ten. So the lines would be in multiples of ten or Nine, or their variations, like 5, 3 etc. Nine of course is also the nine months in which we all dwell in the womb of our mothers.
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Poetry and epic…music, the music of one’s mother tongue, the music of its conveyance--
I return to the epigram, what BBC presenter, Miriam Margolys, once said, “I think telling stories and listening to stories is a human need.” As a child, I was read stories—yes, read to—every night; and I also remember a favorite uncle, a sailor, who would tell stories of his travels. He would come home from being at sea for months, and we would all gather round for his tales. As an adult, I have vivid memories of sitting in the salon of a priest of a traditional African religion, listening to a conversation. A point was made. “Yes,” replied another, “that’s like the story of the hyena and the dog—” or whatever the traditional tale was. It went on back and forth, tales upon tales, one of the most vibrant conversations I have had the pleasure of sitting in on.
As much as I treasure my books, as much as I laud books, the active, oral telling of tales is even more magical. And most assuredly, the Margolys statement above does not refer to the solitary act of reading, but to the collective, active telling of tales, true or false, shared simultaneously amongst a group, intently listening and engaged.
Indeed, the sticking point is that an epic, among many so many peoples, not only amongst the Gikuyu in what is now Kenya, as found in the Mabinogen of my Celtic ancestors in what is now Wales, the creation stories of the Hopi and other Native Americans, even Beowulf amongst the Anglo-Saxons, and so many others—all of these epics and sagas were performed, told and listened to, until, like Homer’s anonymous admirer, someone came along and wrote them down. Wrote them down to honor them, to save them, to be read, taken from orature—what African scholars have rightly called the rich and varied traditions or oral tales that are easily the equivalent of what we newbies call “literature” in our own traditions and languages.
Of course each teller may very well have—and so often had—rendered the story slightly differently, with the listeners feeling free to interject: “No, that’s not the way it went” or “Yes! Remember?” On the other hand, I am reminded that as Gutenberg and printing got underway, never mind the diminution in the dynamism of telling. Quite a number of local languages died out; even the wonders discovered by the earliest Arab scientists and astronomers from the House of Wisdom in Babylon languished long in obscurity because the early printers could not figure out how to render the Arabic of that era on a printing press. Language = culture—so many times I have had that not only pounded into my head, but realized its veracity in my own travels in various parts of the world. So much was lost. So much cried out to be treasured.
Truthfully, I don’t think there is a single answer to the question, how, then, does one write about, let alone create, a book which is also receptacle for a treasure of orature? Those who have learned, been taught, certain symbols, now seen and read on a page, have learnt how to “picture” a story; those who have been transported by orature have the additional advantage of having heard and shared one.
In short, Ngugi is a bit like the mythologized Homer, the one who supposedly wrote the epic down, retold and interpreted; and though a book is but a means (print on a page, enclosed—or, in this flat, digital age, rendered on a screen on a “reader") but a means to treasure a people’s telling, at the least it keeps that treasure alive. In Ngugi's case, the book is whole, a tale told with vivacity and creativity. Though some will read only Ngugi's fine translation, I remember Ngugi saying that another argument for the use of Gikuyu, of one's mother tongue, was the simple fact that if a language is not used creatively, as a means of invention, to tell stories, for literature, the language becomes impoverished. That won’t happen on Ngugi’s watch, that is for certain.
I return to the epigram, what BBC presenter, Miriam Margolys, once said, “I think telling stories and listening to stories is a human need.” As a child, I was read stories—yes, read to—every night; and I also remember a favorite uncle, a sailor, who would tell stories of his travels. He would come home from being at sea for months, and we would all gather round for his tales. As an adult, I have vivid memories of sitting in the salon of a priest of a traditional African religion, listening to a conversation. A point was made. “Yes,” replied another, “that’s like the story of the hyena and the dog—” or whatever the traditional tale was. It went on back and forth, tales upon tales, one of the most vibrant conversations I have had the pleasure of sitting in on.
As much as I treasure my books, as much as I laud books, the active, oral telling of tales is even more magical. And most assuredly, the Margolys statement above does not refer to the solitary act of reading, but to the collective, active telling of tales, true or false, shared simultaneously amongst a group, intently listening and engaged.
Indeed, the sticking point is that an epic, among many so many peoples, not only amongst the Gikuyu in what is now Kenya, as found in the Mabinogen of my Celtic ancestors in what is now Wales, the creation stories of the Hopi and other Native Americans, even Beowulf amongst the Anglo-Saxons, and so many others—all of these epics and sagas were performed, told and listened to, until, like Homer’s anonymous admirer, someone came along and wrote them down. Wrote them down to honor them, to save them, to be read, taken from orature—what African scholars have rightly called the rich and varied traditions or oral tales that are easily the equivalent of what we newbies call “literature” in our own traditions and languages.
Of course each teller may very well have—and so often had—rendered the story slightly differently, with the listeners feeling free to interject: “No, that’s not the way it went” or “Yes! Remember?” On the other hand, I am reminded that as Gutenberg and printing got underway, never mind the diminution in the dynamism of telling. Quite a number of local languages died out; even the wonders discovered by the earliest Arab scientists and astronomers from the House of Wisdom in Babylon languished long in obscurity because the early printers could not figure out how to render the Arabic of that era on a printing press. Language = culture—so many times I have had that not only pounded into my head, but realized its veracity in my own travels in various parts of the world. So much was lost. So much cried out to be treasured.
Truthfully, I don’t think there is a single answer to the question, how, then, does one write about, let alone create, a book which is also receptacle for a treasure of orature? Those who have learned, been taught, certain symbols, now seen and read on a page, have learnt how to “picture” a story; those who have been transported by orature have the additional advantage of having heard and shared one.
In short, Ngugi is a bit like the mythologized Homer, the one who supposedly wrote the epic down, retold and interpreted; and though a book is but a means (print on a page, enclosed—or, in this flat, digital age, rendered on a screen on a “reader") but a means to treasure a people’s telling, at the least it keeps that treasure alive. In Ngugi's case, the book is whole, a tale told with vivacity and creativity. Though some will read only Ngugi's fine translation, I remember Ngugi saying that another argument for the use of Gikuyu, of one's mother tongue, was the simple fact that if a language is not used creatively, as a means of invention, to tell stories, for literature, the language becomes impoverished. That won’t happen on Ngugi’s watch, that is for certain.
