Reflections on the Colonial Violence in Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma (1956) and Ngugi Wa Thiong’O’ A Grain of Wheat (1967)

Résumé

:  While many previous studies on Kateb Yacine and Ngugi Wa Thiong’ O’s literary works were undertaken separately, the present paper seeks to shed light on the neglected aspect of analyzing their two selected novels comparatively. By taking advantage of Greenblatt’s New historicist approach, which favors anchoring the text in its context, the attempt will be to unveil the ways both authors, who wrote while events were still unfolding, use their fictions to depict the colonial violence and its several ramifications on the Kenyan and Algerian peoples. The analysis fins connection among these two authors’ converges as they learnt the language of the colonizer and take it back to their own community thus making themselves translators of their people’s grievances during the colonial period. Their visions and discourses on the use of violence by the British and French colonizers can be compared in many ways. Upon closer examination of the two fictions, the study is based on the New Historicist approach, with reference to Stephen Greenblatt’s theoretical concepts of “textuality of history” and “historicity of the text” to compare how Kateb and Ngugi paint the colonial oppression in fiction. By borrowing these two notions, we intend reading these two literary narratives within a comparative and new historicist framework; a close attention will be paid to the similarity of the colonial experience of violence displayed in the two texts rather than differences such as the geographical distant locations in which they occur. The argument is that the political situations Kateb and Ngugi reflect on, the ways they insert historical facts in their fictions which is characterized by revolution and literary innovations makes the comparative analysis of the two texts worth to be investigated.