Kiriro’s debut novel and the many prisons we are kept in

If you go by the Nairobi International Book Fair at the Sarit Centre this weekend, pick up a copy of the just released novel, Woman in Prison by Kiriro wa Ngugi.

This morality tale is breath-taking in its historical span and in its exploration of a vast canvas of human emotions and motivations. The narrative tempo is swift, rather than gruelling. The plot is credible; the diction is captivating.

The dialogue is fast and dynamic and the characters have compelling depth. Their moral dilemmas are realistic and memorable. The title is stark rather than poetic. Somewhere along the line, we are going to meet a woman who does something that sends her to prison.

Kiriro is concerned with much more than the physical prison that the character Jane Wanjira lands in. And this is where things get really interesting because the writer gives us more than one kind of jail, more than one kind of jail bird in the four generations of women that we encounter in this novel.

PSYCHOLOGICAL SCARS

In recent times in this country, we have been quick to broadcast the news of battered women whose bodies bear hideous scars and crude amputations from the physical abuse meted out on them by the insecure men in their lives.

What we have not been as quick to portray, are the thousands of women who carry deep psychological scars from living with verbally abusive men who find all sorts of non-physical ways to keep their women from developing a voice; from honing their individual ambition; from having a public persona.

Think of the number of men who do not allow their women to work. Think of the psycho-social pain that women wrestle with in such circumstances of intellectual imprisonment.

Kiriro’s ability to tease out these kinds of nuance in his portrayal of the ways through which women in our society are marginalised is undeniable. The ambitions of the female characters are heartfelt; the frustrations of unemployed men are tangible.

LOCKED OUT OF SCHOOL

The reality of girls getting locked out of school by circumstances too bleak to pronounce; of Majengo’s commercial sex workers bearing the brunt of dubious researchers and of flashy Moi-era wheeler-dealers mesmerising perfectly capable women, are all such deeply Kenyan realities that I must salute Kiriro for capturing them in fiction before we forget them.

Beyond Kiriro’s fidelity to history lies a stylistic vivacity that is rare in a region where so-called great fiction tends to lose us in the dense detail and interior monologue of the modernist novel whose hallmark is minimum dialogue. Woman in Prison is dense with metaphors from a broad mosaic of local popular culture and Gikuyu folklore. My favourite chapter — in stylistic terms — is chapter 16. I love the way the spurring of lovers is paralleled along the grammar of the boxing ring. The poetry of Muhammad Ali is artfully woven in and out of the chapter but this global icon is never mentioned, even once, by name.

Akinyi is another interesting plot device. She advances some very suspect views of the “Good Wife” with eloquent wit: “I simply can’t see the relationship between responsible fatherhood and a runaway libido: more of the one diminishing the other.” Is she the mouthpiece of a conservative male author or is she the conscience of Jessie, the protagonist?

If I have any real quarrel with Woman in Prison, it is that it is filled with star-crossed women who never have exclusive love to hold for more than 25 minutes of sexual pleasure (okay, I exaggerate but you get my drift). Wives are depicted as hapless bystanders, virtually invisible, and ready to live with infidelity aka undisclosed polygamy. The saving grace in magnifying women’s agency probably comes from women like Nyakio who find no need to saddle their lives with fickle men.

It is unwise to debate Kiriro’s treatment of post-colonial womanhood without studying his masculinities. There is the usual cast of intractable, domineering men (Chief Nyundo), foolish, rich men (Mogaka, Kiprono) and alcoholic, absentee fathers (Amos, Mathenge). Do they find redemption in Paul Gacheru who is witty, self-assured and intelligent but Alpha male in all of his prejudices?

Paul’s foil in the novel is Prof Derek Lewis. This Caucasian male is also used to deconstruct the prison called race. There is a dark secret that lies behind Derek’s veneer as a benefactor whose sole mission is redeeming Africans from dehumanising poverty. His perversions are the reason for Wanjira’s transgression and at this point, it is morally imperative for us to ask whether her punishment fits the crime.

Structurally, I kept thinking that this novel would have been all the more compelling, had it been written with the indelible urgency of the present tense peppered with some cunning time-shifts, posing as memory. I got in touch with this 65 year-old first-time novelist this week. Kiriro said that he started writing this novel in 2001 and the manuscript that he first submitted was, indeed, written in the present tense but the publishers, Jomo Kenyatta Foundation (JKF), asked him to change the story into the past tense.

Aside from hopelessly mixed tenses and the lay-out of run-on dialogue lines that make it difficult for the reader to know which character said what, you have to marvel at JKF’s moratorium on the present. Are we Kenyans so afraid of reckoning with the kind of people that we are? Do we seek recourse in the past because it is easier to blame it for all of our present inequities than it is to find novel ways of charting a new moral course?

Which brings me to the novel’s finale. There are several pleasurable twists in this tale, even if the ending is not the classic happy one of romantic writers. Jessie’s awakening is dramatic. Her exit is painful. Respite comes from the links between Jessie and the first chapter which is, actually, an epilogue. Indeed, Kiriro’s trick of defamiliarisation, his ability to play with narrative chronology, is his greatest talent.

Dr. Nyairo is a Cultural Analyst – [email protected]