The poetics of repair: Cultural practice, ritual and language in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Matigari and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust

Abstract

This article examines the similarities in the deployment of cultural practice, ritual and language to foster the restoration of community in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Matigari (1987) and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust (2014). It argues that both novels, despite belonging to different literary generations and adopting different narrative strategies, locate the work of communal repair in the same cultural resources: the reclamation of names, the practice of oral testimony, embodied ritual gesture, multilingual code-switching, ritual engagement with land, and acts of hospitality and shared provision. Working within postcolonial theory, drawing on Frantz Fanon’s account of national culture as material resistance, Wa Thiong’o’s theory of orality and linguistic decolonisation, Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, Gayatri Spivak’s subaltern problematic, and the model of abrogation and appropriation developed by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, the article shows that both novels stage cultural practice as a self-generated, community-authored act of restoration that operates independently of, and frequently in defiance of, the postcolonial state. It concludes that this restorative vocabulary, while genuine, remains incomplete and unevenly distributed across each community’s members.