Petals Of Blood

                  PETALS OF BLOOD

This blog is part of my academic writing. The blog is about the novel "Petals Of Blood ". My topic of the blog is note to on the first chapter of the novel.               

                                         Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (born James Ngugi; 5 January 1938) is a Kenyan writer and academic who writes primarily in Gikuyu. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal His short story The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright, is translated into 100 languages from around the world.

                                            In 1977, Ngũgĩ embarked upon a novel form of theatre in his native Kenya that sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he held to be "the general bourgeois education system", by encouraging spontaneity and audience participation in the performances. His project sought to "demystify" the theatrical process, and to avoid the "process of alienation [that] produces a gallery of active stars and an undifferentiated mass of grateful admirers" which, according to Ngũgĩ, encourages passivity in "ordinary people". Although his landmark play, Ngaahika Ndeenda,  co-written with Ngugi wa Mirii,  was a commercial success, it was shut down by the authoritarian Kenyan regime six weeks after its opening.

                                Ngũgĩ was subsequently imprisoned for over a year. Adopted as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience,  the artist was released from prison, and fled Kenya. In the United States, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine. He has also previously taught at Northwestern University, Yale University, and New York University. Ngũgĩ has frequently been regarded as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He won the 2001 International Nonino Prize in Italy, and the 2016 Park Kyong-ni Prize.Among his children are the authors Mukoma wa Ngugi and Wanjiku wa Ngugi.

                                 Petals of Blood is a novel written by Ngugi wa Thiong'o and first published in 1977. Set in Kenya just after independence, the story follows four characters – Munira, Abdulla, Wanja, and Karega – whose lives are intertwined due to the Mau Mau rebellion. In order to escape city life, each retreats to the small, pastoral village of Ilmorog. As the novel progresses, the characters deal with the repercussions of the Mau Mau rebellion as well as with a new, rapidly westernizing Kenya.

                                        The novel largely deals with the scepticism of change after Kenya's independence from colonial rule, questioning to what extent free Kenya merely emulates, and subsequently perpetuates, the oppression found during its time as a colony. Other themes include the challenges of capitalism, politics, and the effects of westernization. Education, schools, and the Mau Mau rebellion are also used to unite the characters, who share a common history with one another.

                                 The Mau Mau rebellion, as it is often called, which began in Kenya in the early 1950s, was a nationalist, anticolonial armed resistance against the British colonial state. The guerrilla movement called itself the Kenya Land Freedom Army; the British dubbed the movement “mau mau,” a meaningless name, to obscure the aims otherwise so clear in the resistance army’s name. Ngugi Wa Thiongío’s Petals of Blood examines, among other things, the betrayal by the postcolonial regime of the ideals of this anticolonial struggle that helped Kenya achieve its independence.

                                         The novel revolves around three men and a woman. The four friends reveal different aspects of their history to each other piecemeal, just as their families had guardedly explained the past to them. The lingering effects of the Mau Mau revolt have affected all their lives and by the end of the novel, each character is wrapped up in his or her own exclusive epiphany about life in Kenya.

                                      Abdullah, the trader, thinks he failed the movement because he did not avenge the death of a friend who was a revolutionary and who was betrayed. Munira, the schoolteacher and eventual wide-eyed prophet, is paralyzed by the shadow of his successful father, who condemned the Mau Mau but aided the crony corruption of independent Kenya. Wanja, the beauty from a broken home, learns that it was two generations of revolutionary fervor that distorted the home she grew up in. And Karega, Thiongío’s union-pushing hero, scrutinizes the history of Mau Mau as if it were a sacred text. Somewhere in that history, they all believe, is the key to wisdom and justice.

                                    No one reading Petals of Blood can doubt Thiongío’s faith in the power of national myths. But, like Faulkner writing about the American South or Shakespeare writing about England, he also understands how our obsessions with them can ennoble citizens but also can transform them into something grotesque. The messages of Petals of Blood can be as opaque as the history of Kenya, but in that it reflects the relationship most of us have with our own national mythos.

                       CHAPTER 1

1. Munira had come from a vigil on the mountain when the police come for him, saying he is wanted at the Ilmorog police station for questioning about recent murders.

2. Abdulla is also approached, and he is locked in a cell at the station.

3. Wanja is at the hospital and a doctor says the police cannot see her because she is delirious.

4. Karega is asleep when the police come and bring him to the station. People gather outside, thinking he is in trouble for last night’s decision to strike, but the police say it is about murder.

5. The headline reads that Mzigo, Chui, and Kimeria, African directors of the Theng’eta Breweries and Enterprises Ltd., were burnt to death last night, and murder is suspected.

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