Mrs. Shaw

by Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ, Mukoma Ngugi

In the East African Kwatee Republic of the 1990s, the dictatorship is about to fall, and the nation’s exiles are preparing to return. One of these exiles, a young man named Kalumba, is a graduate student in the United States, where he encounters Mrs. Shaw, a professor emerita and former British settler who fled Kwatee’s postcolonial political and social turmoil. Kalumba’s girlfriend, too, is an exile: a Puerto Rican nationalist like her imprisoned father, she is an outcast from the island. Brought together by a history of violence and betrayals, all three are seeking a way of regaining their humanity, connecting with each other, and learning to make a life in a new land. Kalumba and Mrs. Shaw, in particular, are linked by a past rooted in colonial and postcolonial oppression, yet they are separated by their differing accounts of what really happened.

The memory of each is subject to certain lapses, whether selective or genuine. Even when they agree on the facts—be they acts of love, of betrayal, or of violence—each narrator shapes the story in his own way, by what is left in and what is left out, by what is remembered and what is forgotten.

Genres: Africa

200 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2015

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Please read my review here:
https://lindasyearlybookchallenge.wor...

[World Literature Today]

"The first chapters introduce Kalumba and his close friends from the movement, Ogum and the less-privileged Sukena. Moreover, they relate the brutal repression—including the murder of Ogum’s father, a preacher—leading to Kalumba’s clandestine escape. Kalumba’s journal, the diary of an exiled activist writing his dissertation in Madison, constitutes the second section. The final chapters of the novel, whose settings make manifest its structure, relate Kalumba’s return, doctorate in hand, from his ten-year exile. " - Robert H. McCormick

This book was reviewed in the March 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...

[Gautam Bhatia · Rating 5 out of 5]

[The African edition of this book is called "We, the Scarred", but it appears not to have a Goodreads page just yet.]

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We, the Scarred is set in a fictional East African country in the 1990s (it is a clear allegory of Kenya). It begins with one of the protagonists, Kalumba, fleeing into exile when he finds that his name is on a List of opposition activists to be massacred. While Kalumba escapes the massacre, his best friend, Ogum, loses his father in the killings. Ten years later, the Dictator is finally removed from power by the Movement to which Kalumba and Ogum both belonged, and Kalumba prepares to return home. In the meantime, Kalumba’s former lover, Sukena - herself a movement activist - and Ogum have fallen in love, and are preparing to marry. There are also ugly rumours that “the List” was originally given to the police by one of the Movement activists, and that it might have been Kalumba himself. Kalumba’s arrival back home - just as the nation is on the cusp of moving on from its traumatic past - is like a match in a tinderbox, with its potential to shatter the fragile consensus upon which everyone has agreed to move forward.

I read We, the Scarred in one feverish sitting, tearing up at many points. This novel is all the more poignant if you know something about Kenyan history - the parallels to the “First” and “Second” Liberations are stark, and some of the historical references make sense with the context - but even if you don’t, this novel about failed revolutions, national myth-making, exile and return, and how a person’s fate is entwined with a history and a present beyond their control, will linger in your mind long, long after you’ve put the book down.