At age 87, Kenyan author Ng~ug~i wa Thiong'o remains impassioned...

In one essay from "Decolonizing Language," Ng~ug~i declares that writers must "be the voice of the voiceless. They have to give voice to silence, especially the silence imposed on a people by an oppressive state." During his AP interview, Ng~ug~i discussed his concerns about Kenya, the "empowerment" of knowing your native language, his literary influences and his mixed feelings about the United States. Ng~ug~i's comments on subjects have been condensed for clarity and brevity. 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). 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. "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. ... At the Makerere conference (the African Writers Conference, in 1962), I met with Langston Hughes, and oh my God it was so great!. Langston Hughes of the Harlem Renaissance! To shake hands with a world famous writer was very very important to me." "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." His U.S. If you liked this post and you would like to acquire much more details with regards to Online ESL 1st Grade Teacher kindly take a look at our own page. 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. "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.