A Land with Three Shadows:
Combined and Uneven Development in A Grain of Wheat
Jingting, Fu1, Tao Li2
ABSTRACT
Taking the four days before Kenya’s independence
as the historical background, Ngũgĩ wa Tiang’o’s novel A Grain of
Wheat reveals multiple tensions in the colonial and postcolonial
society. With the theory of combined and uneven development, this
paper systematically analyzes the novel from economy, politics and
culture, exploring how Kenyan society presents a multi-layered
combination and unevenness under the interweaving of global
capitalism and colonial modernity. In economy, the novel shows the
combination and unevenness between colonial capitalism and
traditional Kenyan agriculture, as well as the rupture between the
emerging bourgeoisie and the persistent poverty of the peasantry. In
politics, the coexistence and conflict among the colonial regime,
tribal tradition and nationalist force are described. In culture,
the novel presents the cultural disillusionment of the colonizer,
showing how the combination of morality and violence is
irreconcilable in practice. Native’s cultural identity fracture is
also revealed. Meanwhile, the fiction reflects Ngũgĩ’s combination
and turn in his literary creation—From Western literary forms and
English to the indigenous cultural narratives and Gikuyu. The study
finds that A Grain of Wheat is not only a historical review of
colonial tyranny, but also contains criticism of decolonization in
post-independence Kenya. Moreover, the paper illustrates how African
literature represented by Ngũgĩ’s works seeks to give voice to its
subjectivity in an unequal global literary system. Ngũgĩ’s literary
practice provides important insights into the cultural dilemmas
faced by societies in the global South today in the process of
modernization.
Keywords: Ngũgĩ; A Grain of Wheat; combined and uneven development;
unequal global literary system.
