Posts

Brother Crow

By: Vivian Phillips Ngũgĩ uses the tropes and symbolism of folklore to highlight the absurdity of the corrupt and ingenuity of the disenfranchised in Wizard of the Crow.  Kamitl and Nyawira   are at the point of begging while trying to survive in a corrupt system that when finally cornered by the police,  Kamitl invokes almost a bastardization of a Deus ex Machina by creating a warning sign that the house the police are trying to barge into is under the ownership of The Wizard of the Crow. This sends the police into a panic and they're immediately scared off by the ideas of bad omens and the threat of witchcraft. This is accidental mysticism empowers the powerless and frightens those with power. Which got me thinking... Out of all the things the "Wizard" could be of, why a crow?  Going back to the tropes of folklore, on a surface level it makes sense, crows are everywhere in humanity's stories, but couldn't Wizard of the Eagle or Wizard of the Lion se...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why My Father Demands There Be Black People in Science Fiction

By Vivian Phillips **Author's Note: This was written February 11th, but for some reason I published it privately, not publicly, I apologize!!**  This blogpost will commentary on the first half of Dreams in a Time of War and the "A Quest of Relevance" chapter of Decolonizing the Mind. The presence of stories coming from one's community as seen in  Dreams illustrates how important it is to a child's development and sense of self. One wonders if Ngũgĩ would have connected to King David so strongly if he didn't have the stories of his half-brother who fought in WWII. Ngũgĩ also recognizes how it can be used to benefit the colonizer as he states in  Decolonizing, "African children who encountered literature in colonial schools and universities were thus experiencing the world as defined and reflected in the European experience of history. Their entire way of looking at the world, even the world of-the immediate environment, was Eurocentric. The images c...
Post a Comment
Read more

White Jesus & Black Christianity

By: Vivian Phillips There are two lines spoken in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi that made me a little uneasy when I first read it. It's in the scene between Kimathi and the Priest.  PRIEST: Wrong Again. We are Africanizing the Church.  We want to see Christ reflected in our culture. Drums in the church. African Bishops. African Moderators. African Cardinals.  KIMATHI: Slave! Slave! When will you throw off your ill-fitting borrowed gown and create something you can truly call your own ? Pastor, tell me the difference between a padre and a settler. Go on.  I believe I understand what Ngũgĩ is trying to say here, that even with the "Africanizing" of the Christian ministry, it still doesn't cover up the fact that it is a tool used by the colonizer to pacify and control the African population. Then of course, I applied it to African Americans. For the enslaved Africans, when they were brought to America it was illegal for them to worship the religion of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Introduction of Decolonization

Meeting Ngũgĩ and His Philosophy By: Vivian Phillips Before this class, I had never heard of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. After a long self-reflection, much to my shame, the only African writers I had read before were Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I grew up in a very Afro-centric household, go to a very Afro-centric church and prided myself into thinking that I had a very Afro-centric mindset overall. While I am aware that I was (and still am) conditioned to have a very colonial mindset due to being raised in America, I believed that it was a blind spot in my psyche that I, at least, had a firm grasp on. Then why was this the first time I've heard of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o at the grown age of twenty-three? Ngũgĩ answered my question in the first chapter of his book Decolonizing the Mind, he wants to write his book in his local language, not English. On the surface level, I understood that language is a colonizer's tool. As a descendan...
1 comment
Read more