🌹Petals of Blood🌹

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“He carried the Bible; the soldier carried the gun; the administrator and the settler carried the coin. Christianity, Commerce, Civilization: the Bible, the Coin, the Gun: Holy Trinity.”

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Here is my blog on Petals of blood written by Ngugi wa Thiong'o 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.

About Writer 

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o born James Ngugi on 5 January 1938 is a Kenyan author and academic who writes primarily in Gikuyu and who formerly wrote in English. He has been described as having been "considered East Africa’s leading novelist".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 Mũtĩiri. 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 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 Ngũgĩ 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 a 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 Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ and Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ.

Works of Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

About Novel

To go through the text here is a presentation by @yeshaBhatt ma'am. This presentation will help you to know about the text in easy language, as given in the thinking activity by Ma'am. Here is my response to the question asked in google classroom.

Petals of blood from yeshab68

1) Neo-colonialism: with reference to Petals of Blood

During the age of imperialism, European powers conquered African lands and ruled them as colonies. As African nations began to throw off their colonial rule and become independent in the mid-20th century, they began to form their own governments and seek to establish control over their economies. However, most of them became almost immediately privy to neocolonialism, which is where foreign investors and local ruling elites partner to "invest" in the country, but instead return said country to an almost colonial type of relationship. They are now subject to market forces, loans, transportation changes, and local corruption. Ngugi chronicles Ilmorog's experience with neocolonialism, showing that all of the new modern developments merely hid the fact that the people were losing any power of their own.

Africa is considered to be the most affected continent by European imperialist aggression, it suffered from long years of eventual conquest and colonization. This later fought and resisted all forms of domination and get its independence; however it still suffers from what we call neo-colonialism.

Neo-colonialism is known to be the last stage of imperialism39 which is the control of less-developed countries by the developed ones without any physical presence of the colonial 15 forces in the country. Although the country has gained independence its politic, economy, and educational system is directed from outside, usually from the rejected colonialist or from other empowered states.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o's 1977 novel Petals of Blood, however, takes a slightly different tack: it depicts the postcolonial African nation as a complex and multifaceted entity, and it represents this nation in three ways. First, Petals of Blood reveals that there are many ways of viewing the postcolonial African nation: examining the official national structure created artificially by colonialism. or looking at the various locally created harmonious and not-so-harmonious communities within the official nation. Second, the novel presents several different locally created communities, which I will term, following Timothy Brennan, nations. It also espouses an ideal natio based on communal harmony and socialist economics, in which wealth is based on the amount of labor put in, and the peasants, the main labor force, control the means of production. Ngugi implies, in the course of the narrative, that this ideal nation can only be created through armed struggle, which would bring an end to the existing official nation and replace it with his ideal one. This ideal ratio would eventually be led by farmers, workers, and intellectuals, and would result in a more or less classless society. Third, although the novel idealizes the natio just described, it also presents its argument through a series of contrasts in which the official national and the various nations are played off of each other, suggesting that Ngugi ultimately endorses a view of the nation that is multiple and diverse, with structures of complicity and resistance contained within it. In the novel, then, there are four kinds of contrasts that Ngugi sets up for us: the contrast between several ideal nations and the artificial nation; the contrast between political betrayal and social justice; the contrast between an ironic narration and a "murder-mystery" narrative structure; and the contrast between many different commentaries and narrators of the action who frequently contradict each other. Since all of these contrasts suggest that there are many different ways of conceiving the ideal nation, most of the focus of this paper will be on describing and analyzing these contrasts.

Words: 1050

Reference:  

View of "Flowers in All Their Colours": Natios and Communities in Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood | International Fiction Review, https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/view/7768/8825. Accessed 8 January 2023.