IN-BETWEEN CULTURE IN NGUGI WA THIONG’O’S A GRAIN OF WHEAT

Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is one of the leading names among East Africa’s first generation of writers, that is, those Africans who began to write and publish in English at the end of the colonial era. His historical novel A Grain of Wheat, which is concerned with the achievement of Kenyan independence, explores several issues such as national consciousness and symbols, decolonisation, independence, and neocolonialism. In the novel, Ngũgĩ portrays lots of realistic themes (violence, betrayal, etc.) and describes people’s deep feelings about the colonial world. In this context, this study attempts to read the novel in light of postcolonialism, through a close analysis of the text in terms of its different representations of people’s activities, characters, and the Mau Mau revolt. The study shows how a national culture develops and how a national ideology is presented, and reveals the hybrid relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of “in-between”. In his discussion of the mentioned term, Bhabha uses concepts such as hybridity, mimicry, negotiation, interstice, and liminality to show that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. This contact zone, in the context of postcolonial culture, then, becomes a place of colonial invasion and resistance; also a place of cooperation and reception, communication and mimicry and it is used to explain how people choose and create culture from colonial culture. Relying on the theoretical support of Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the “in-between”, this study analyses the possibility of the development of in-between culture in the novel which demonstrates that the mixture of cultures is an effective way for newly independent countries to get rid of the shadow of colonialism.