A Grain of Wheat

"It’s a novel about Kenya on the verge of independence with a rich cast of characters, from people who fought for independence to people who collaborated with the British colonialists. It’s about the legacy of violence, the intersection of public and private memory regarding conflict. It’s about how we commemorate war and how the celebration of war can be at odds with the experience of veterans. It’s about the possibility of redemption and moving forward from war. At the end of A Grain of Wheat , one character who was embroiled in conflict with another of them says to the other: “What has passed between us is too much to be passed over in a sentence. We need to talk, to open our hearts to one another, examine them, and then together plan the future we want.” So, in those characters’ words, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o explains to the reader why we need to talk about these things, because it’s humanly essential to those who carry the legacy of conflict inside their hearts. Absolutely. There’s so much great writing about war from Africa, from South America, from Asia. And you get different perspectives. Because we hadn’t had wars in our own homeland for 150 years, Americans have a limited sense of the way that people experience war. In wa Thiong’o, in Heaney, you don’t just have war as experienced by combatants, but also by communities. Americans write about war as something you send people off from the community to fight far away. So authors from other countries are not just writing great works of literature, they’re also providing a richer picture of war."