the catalogue of shipwrecked books (edward wilson-lee)

Wilson-Lee’s book succeeds in incorporating a ranch of fascinating material. It recounts the life of Hernando Colón, Colombus’ second and youngest son, who, having travelled with his father to the newly discovered Americas in 1502, subsequently set about creating the biggest, most diverse library in the western world. Hernando did this at a time when printing was in the process of growing exponentially. His mission, according to Wilson-Lee, was positively Borgesian. It was to construct a repository of the world’s knowledge, not just from within christendom, but from every corner of the globe. The inference here is that Hernando’s knowledge of his father’s journeys, as well as his personal experiences of the Americas, meant that he was able to conceive the importance of embracing the multiple cultures of the expanding world which was only just starting to become known. (A fascinating side-note to Hernando’s library was his garden, created on the banks of the Ebro in Sevilla, where he cultivated many plants from the Americas, among other sources.) As such, Hernando represents one of Europe’s first globalised minds, as well as constructing a knowledge-base which prefigured the arrival, centuries later, of the World Wide Web.

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books exudes scholarship, as the author investigates and imagines the contents of the library, much of which has since been lost. However, as much as anything else, this is an intriguing study of a man at the centre of a world perched on the brink of a radical transformation, one whose effects were being processed by European societies struggling to come to terms with the forces unleashed at the close of the fifteenth century. Hernando’s quixotic response, one that sought to consolidate and protect not just the world’s extant printed knowledge, but the very idea of knowledge itself, comes across as a heroic and progressive reaction. The significance of ‘the book’ as a pillar of society, is one that has been constantly threatened. Not for nothing is the image of book-burning associated with an idea of bringing down the classical conception of a knowledge based society, to replace it with one of superstition and conspiracy. 

a grain of wheat [w. ngũgĩ wa thiong'o]

Before beginning a brief account of this book, it seems right to ask a simple question. Why had I never heard of it, or its author before? A Grain of Wheat was originally published in 1967, so it's not like it should be waiting to be discovered. The author has published a host of books and been imprisoned for his literary activity. And whilst I'm a long way from the epicentre of English-language literature, wherever that might be, it's also not as though I'm on some dim distant shore, picking up bottles hoping they contain a message written in my language.

A Grain of Wheat is a remarkable piece of writing. Based around four central characters, each with differing perspectives on the history they've lived through, it gives an account of how the Mau Mau insurrection leading up to Kenyan independence in 1963 affected a single village and its inhabitants. Ngũgĩ's prose style has the straightforward power of someone who knows they're recounting difficult issues to a large audience. It never dallies or gets bogged down in its mission. The narrative is sufficiently complex to keep the reader wondering how it's going to unfold, and the structure of the book has a limpid cleverness, shifting backwards and forwards through time, filling in gaps the reader had forgotten existed, constantly illustrating the way an action made at a given time lives on in the years that will follow it. Technically, A Grain of Wheat is an extremely compact, skillful piece of writing. But above and beyond this it also has an irresistible humanity to it, never afraid to show a good man in a bad light or a bad man in a good one. Ngũgĩ captures the sense of moral dislocation that inevitably accompanies living under a repressive regime, the way in which all aspects of life are tainted by fear and an overriding desire to return to some kind of normality.

The book's depiction of British rule is scathing. It's not afraid to call a detention centre a concentration camp, where men are held without trial for year after year. Guantanamo is nothing new under the sun. The last blighted years of British colonial rule are rarely thought about now, (we tend to perceive ourselves as a faintly benign influence in comparison to the perfidious Latins or Belgians) but Ngũgĩ illustrates both the savagery of that epoch, and the scarred imprint it left on the Kenyans who had to begin reconstructing their country after the British had finally left. In the course of this description he articulates a brilliant exposition of the rationale and objectives of a terrorist campaign.

All of which brings me back to my opening question. Ngũgĩ wrote this book in English (he later started to write in Gikuyu, his local language). The book fulfills the brief of literature in so many ways, in particular as understood within an Anglo-Saxon tradition. It brings together complex ideas from a definable political period and conveys those ideas through its subtle, psychologically perceptive characterisation. It tells a powerful story with economy and humanity. Apparently (I learn from the introduction) Ngũgĩ acknowledged the influence of Conrad. The book itself was actually written in Leeds, where the author was working on his MA, and I doubt there were many better books written in Leeds in 1967. In spite of all this, Ngũgĩ is unknown in this country, and he certainly never got near my syllabus back at York.

Is Ngũgĩ the victim of prejudice? Has A Grain of Wheat not been acknowledged because the book scratches at a sore the UK would rather forget? Somehow I suspect that this isn't what's happened. Rather, he's a victim of something more mundane, which is an introspective ignorance, an ostrich like reluctance to look beyond the circumference of the acknowledged Anglo-Saxon world. Which might be indicative of a hidebound arrogance, which might in turn be a cultural extension of the earlier colonial policy.