‘Weep Not, Child’: A cross generational conversation

Even before I was old enough to read adult literature, I had always liked the lyricism in the titles of two of my father’s books; Weep Not, Child and A Grain of Wheat.

What a cruel irony then that the two titles would come, in my mind, to be closely associated with an unpleasant rite of passage. When I was in Form One, the older boys would bully me and then, patting me on the shoulder in mock contriteness, say, “Weep not, child.”

This would elicit much merriment, and would inspire another bullying wag to offer, “Give the ‘rabble’ a grain of wheat.” Every now and then, mention of the two books elicits memories of that period in high school. But, of course, that is not all the books mean to me.

Their larger significance is as works of art, and how they speak or misspeak– in terms of their art, content and cultural assumptions - to me and my generation.

Of particular interest to me is to what extent the two novels, both set in historical and cultural contexts that are different from ours, have succeeded in speaking to a younger generation.

In a recent article commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Weep Not, Child, literary scholar Simon Gikandi writes that the source of most of the novel’s power is its tragic tone and its moments of melancholy.

Then he goes on to say that “melancholy in literature is, of course, an aesthetic effect that depends on an individual reader’s relationship to a text...” For Gikandi, the book evokes memories of his childhood - the landscape, the school, the social classes and the violence of history.

When he first read it in his youth, it spoke to him of a world so close to him that he felt as if “I am reading the life back into the fiction.”

Painfully fresh

For the generation born in the 60s and 70s, however, the world depicted in Weep Not, Child and A Grain of Wheat was both familiar and alien.

Familiar because all around us, to various degrees depending on our particular social circumstance, and though receding in significant ways, that cultural world was still in evidence, and its history of colonialism and violence was only as far away as the first-hand experiences of our parents or grandparents.

When we visited our parents or grandparents in the villages, we saw polygamous households.

Here in the village, many still marched to a different cultural rhythm. We listened to ways of speech that evoked another cultural period, observed a social consciousness informed by another time and space, and saw dress codes from another era (my maternal step-grandmother still wore big bead earrings in her pierced earlobes, and for a long time, until Christianity wore her down, she insisted on wearing her traditional Kikuyu shuka).

And we could see signs of the colonial history in many places and in many of its victims: remnants of protective staked moats dug around villages during the Emergency, and the painfully fresh physical and psychological scars of those who survived the violence.

The world of Weep Not, Child and A Grain of Wheat, though marching off the historical and cultural stage, was in important ways still a part of us.

And yet at the same time , this cultural rhythm, the ancient speech and traditional customs, and the history of colonialism and violence were distant echoes from another time and space, echoes that keep fading as history marches on.

So then how does a novel speak to later generations, to people who - unlike Simon Gikandi with Weep, Not Child - do not have an immediate connection with its cultural and historical contexts? In an appraisal of Things Fall Apart, critic David Kaiza wrote of Achebe’s narrative style: “Telling purely human tales — of men as individuals rather than as spokespersons for an age — was not among Achebe’s talents.

There is a leanness of narrative in his work.”

One senses this historical burden on Njoroge. He frames his ambition in terms of getting back the lost lands and aiding the Black people’s struggle against the white man. And so often, his conversations take on a messianic tone that fails to reflect on the contradictions of his own society or, importantly, his character lacks the multi-layered psychology of an individual struggling to make sense of such contradictions.

But it’s not just Njoroge whose speech and personality suffocate under the burden of history.

Complexity of self

Listening to the other boys arguing about Mau Mau, there is an ‘unnatural’ sureness in the arguments of both the opposing sides, and thus the exchanges seem not to be, as Simon Gikandi writes in Reading the African Novel, the result of “a logical development of the interaction of the characters and their situations.”

Thus Weep Not, Child, as in other books dealing with the theme of the colonial encounter, is less about individuals acting within a certain social and political context, than individuals narrating those contexts.

By contrast , the characters in A Grain of Wheat are double-hearted. Even the Europeans are nuanced.

Mugo, the anti-hero, exemplifies the complexity of self that Salman Rushdie spoke of: a self which, depending on the situation, could be brave or cowardly, loyal or treacherous. Mugo searches for personal meaning through hard work, but discovers - to his anguish and bewilderment - that history and society keep intruding, drawing him to commitments he does not want to make, invoking pasts he would rather forget.

Indeed, all the characters are on a quest for inner peace, as one of them muses: “Which one of us does not carry a weight in the heart”.

Gikonyo is tormented by love and betrayal , and tries to forget both by immersing himself in business and preparations for the impending Uhuru celebrations, but learns that the aches of the heart are not so easily buried.

Mumbi tries to find her peace by unburdening her heart to her husband Gikonyo, but finds that communication, a straightforward process on the face of it, is burdened by misunderstanding and guilt, and the secrets that lie deep in the heart.

Even District Commissioner Thompson is, in the end, a lone tragic figure, cuckolded by both wife and Empire.

The relationships of the characters are nuanced and true to the ‘inner logic’ of the novel”.

Thus A Grain of Wheat, unlike Weep, Not Child, will always speak powerfully to generations dispersed in time and space, because the characters, to use David Kaiza’s depiction of characters in Things Fall Apart, have come “outside the book’s themes to act in a world of senses rather than of social change...”

So although Weep, Not Child will always remain important in the literary history of Africa, it also shows the constraints placed on the novel when its characters become prisoners of history.

-The writer is a social and political commentator based in Nairobi