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In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir
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About In The House Of The Interpreter: A Memoir
Product Description With black-and-white illustrations throughout World-renowned Kenyan novelist, poet, playwright, and literary critic Ng˜ug˜ý wa Thiong’o gives us the second volume of his memoirs in the wake of his critically acclaimed Dreams in a Time of War. In the House of the Interpreter richly and poignantly evokes the author’s life and times at boarding school—the first secondary educational institution in British-ruled Kenya—in the 1950s, against the backdrop of the tumultuous Mau Mau Uprising for independence and Kenyan sovereignty. While Ng˜ug˜ý has been enjoying scouting trips, chess tournaments, and reading about the fictional RAF pilot adventurer Biggles at the prestigious Alliance High School near Nairobi, things have been changing rapidly at home. Poised as he is between two worlds, Ng˜ug˜ý returns home for his first visit since starting school to find his house razed and the entire village moved up the road, closer to a guard checkpoint. Later, his brother Good Wallace, a member of the insurgency, is captured by the British and taken to a concentration camp. As for Ng˜ug˜ý himself, he falls victim to the forces of colonialism in the person of a police officer encountered on a bus journey, and he is thrown into jail for six days. In his second year at Alliance High School, the boarding school that was his haven in a heartless world is shattered by investigations, charges of disloyalty, and the politics of civil unrest. In the House of the Interpreter hauntingly describes the formative experiences of a young man who would become a world-class writer and, as a political dissident, a moral compass to us all. It is a winning celebration of the implacable determination of youth and the power of hope. From Booklist Following Dreams in a Time of War (2010), acclaimed Kenyan writer Thiong’o, in this second volume of his memoirs, remembers his four years in boarding school in the late 1950s in Kenya’s first high school for Africans, modeled on Tuskegee in the U.S. His brother is a guerrilla in the mountains with the anticolonial Mau-Mau (terrorist or freedom fighter?), and the teens’ dual viewpoint will hold readers, both the wry commentary on the literature curriculum (he loves Shakespeare but doesn’t get Wordsworth’s daffodils) and especially his growing political awareness of the savagery of empire building (“King Solomon’s Mines was full of adventure but clearly at the expense of Africa”). His inspiring role models include Garvey, Du Bois, and Nkrumah, and he joins the call for whites to “scram” from Africa. The A-student wins a scholarship to prestigious Makerere College, but, even though he is no activist, he narrowly escapes prison. The personal detail dramatizes the farce of the colonial land grab and of Christianity as liberation of the natives. --Hazel Rochman Review Praise for In the House of the Interpreter National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist “Ngugi’s memoir eloquently telegraphs the complicated experience of being simultaneously oppressed and enlightened at the hands of a colonial regime.” — New York Times Book Review “It’s a work of understated and heartfelt prose that relates one man’s intimate view of the epic cultural and political shifts that created modern Africa . . . . Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Kenya endures. And it comes alive in the pages of his brilliant and essential memoir.” — Los Angeles Times “Many incidents in In the House of the Interpreter will remind readers of the great novels of the African American canon, particularly Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, both about blacks pursuing an education in a nation riddled by racial prejudices . . . . Considering the scope of Ngugi’s life, when completed his extraordinary memoirs encompassing colonialism, post-colonialism, English racism, African despotism, exile, and fame may well belong among the major works of history and literature of our time.” — Washington Post “Elegantly written…a test
