Answers about English Language

[julianmclain99]

His U.S. publisher, The New Press, has just released “Decolonizing Language,” which the author praises as a “beautiful” title. “Decolonizing Language” includes essays and poems written between 2000 and 2019, with subjects ranging from language and education to such friends and heroes as Nelson Mandela, Nadine Gordimer and Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author whose 1958 novel, “Things Fall Apart,” is considered by many the starting point for modern African literature.

Achebe also helped launch Ng~ug~i’s career by showing a manuscript of an early novel, “Weep Not, Child,” to publisher William Heinemann, who featured it in the landmark African Writers series. Ng~ug~i has been praised by critics and writers worldwide, and imprisoned, beaten, banned and otherwise threatened in his native country. Since the 1970s, he has mostly lived overseas, emigrating to England and eventually settling in California, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

Ng~ug~i has published a handful of books over the past decade, including the novel “The Perfect Nine” and the prison memoir “Wrestling with the Devil,” and was otherwise in the news in 2022 when his son, M~ukoma wa Ng~ug~i, alleged that he had physically abused his first wife, Nyambura, who died in 1996 (“I can say categorically it´s not true,” Ng~ug~i wa Thiong’o responds). “In Kenya, even today, we have children and their parents who cannot speak their mother tongues, or the parents know their mother tongues and don’t want their children to know their mother tongue.

They are very happy when they speak English and even happier when their children don’t know their mother tongue. That’s why I call it mental colonization.” “On the one hand, I am grateful to be here and to have a job at a California university, as a distinguished professor. I appreciate that. But I was coming from a country which was a white seller colony, and I can’t forget that when I’m here. People don’t even talk about it here. They talk about it as if it were normal.

So we talk about the American Revolution. But is it not Native Americans who were colonized? So I am very fascinated by this normalized abnormality.” One of the world’s most revered writers and a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize, Ng~ug~i remains an energetic speaker with opinions no less forceful than they have been for the past 60 years. Since emerging as a leading voice of post-colonial Africa, he has been calling for Africans to reclaim their language and culture and denouncing the tyranny of Kenya’s leaders.

His best known books include the nonfiction “Decolonizing the Mind” and Online Spelling And Vocabulary Tutoring the novel “Devil on the Cross,” one of many books that he wrote in his native Gik~uy~u. “I very much like the African American writers. I discovered them at Makerere University (in Uganda), and Caribbean writers like George Lamming were very important to me. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance fired my imagination and made me feel I could be a writer, too.

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