Identity, Decolonial Agency, and the Issue of Language and Education in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s In the House of the Interpreter

Abstract

As the title indicates, this research aims to study the concepts of identity, decolonial agency, and language and education in Ngugi wa Thiong‘o In the House of the Interpreter. These themes are very prominent in postcolonial studies and literature. The exploration of Ngugi in terms of depicting his cultural identity and his people reveals the hybrid culture of the postcolonial societies and writers. For this sake, we will rely on postcolonial theory to explore how Ngugi used literature to bear witness to his community and history. The text under study, a memoir, depicts mainly the author's childhood in a colonial school. Therefore, the themes will be explored through the narration of his personal experiences that simultaneously depict his people‘s traumatic colonial experiences. Ngugi creatively employed orality in the autobiography, which gave the memoir a sense of oral testimony and reflected authenticity in African literature. Ngugi‘s attempt is to reconstruct identity and decolonize his society from the colonial ties, such as the issue of language that was imposed by the colonial authorities. Thus, a discussion of Ngugi‘s articles and essays alongside the text under study will further contextualize and deepen the examination of the memoir. Throughout the study, we will try to address the questions of how Ngugi used literature to decolonize the Kenyan society and reconstruct identity. Additionally, Ngugi is considered a spokesman of his society, so we will show how the African writer became an active agent in the debate of society. For a writer who shifted from writing in English to Gikuyu, the exploration of the debate of language is a matter of study as well as education, for Ngugi was taught in a colonial school.