Critics killed Grace before her time by ignoring her writings

“Who killed Grace Ogot,” reads a message I received from one of her fans (readers) immediately after her death was announced by local media on Wednesday, March, 18, 2015.

“She died at Nairobi Hospital,” was my answer after browsing the three local TV stations that the Communications Authority of Kenya reluctantly resurrected recently.

To give my message more punch, I added: “Her one and only husband told the press she died from illness.”

Our exchanges went on and on in a manner that made me look and feel ignorant of the mysterious world of death and religion.

The Grace Ogot fan who happens to be a very successful mathematics teacher told me most authoritatively: “A person, a human being, doesn’t die just like that. A jealous or envious Kenyan somewhere must have had a hand in the death.”

“So, do you know the killer? Was she murdered?”

“I am not talking of literal killing. I mean some witch or medicine man; some failed and outshone neighbour or envious critics-cum-scavengers like you who rejoiced in underrating and denying her space in your scholarship and newspaper expositions and exchanges while she lived and created so many memorable short stories.  Yes, one of you, one of you from wherever. Could be you, could be somebody from Vihiga, Siaya, Kisumu or beyond.”

DAYS OF MY LIFE

“But Grace Ogot was such a devout Christian and I don’t think she’d buy your superstition. Please read her autobiography, Days of My Life, to confirm that her Christian-cum-religious roots went deep and wide.”

“You claim to be a professional interpreter of creative writing but fall short of appreciating the plentiful superstition in Akinyi’s imagination. You sound like you haven’t read the glaring belief in the mythological in The Strange Bride, The Promised Land and Land without Thunder.”

“Excuse me.  I come from Homa Bay where my Seventh Day Adventist upbringing forbids such readings, let alone superstitious thinking.”

“But if you believe in Christianity then you believe in the supernatural, the impalpable, the imagined like Satan and Jesus and their relatives. That’s the same as the invisible forces, human forces that have conspired to kill Grace. So you are the same, you critics who would have wished the death and total disappearance of her works from world literatures.”

My tormentor meant to say that Kenyan literary critics and scholars do not say and do enough studying of and writing on our own creative writers, including the departed Grace Ogot.

He reminded me that we tend to wait for them to die in order to pen obituaries and “shed crocodile tears,” to quote his clichéd expression.

DOES NOT CARE

I couldn’t help but think of the Communications Authority of Kenya that does not care that the majority of my compatriots prefer locally created and conceived products on NTV, KTN and Citizen.

Do Kenyan critics behave like the dictatorial communications authority, ignoring and suppressing the local and dying, for example, to impress the latest neo-colonial economic predator called China by digging in to their literature and consuming whatever they spew in the cultural market?

I think they do and the paucity of scholarship on Grace Ogot, like many others, speaks it all.

Thus although she is literally dead, most local critics spent their time ‘killing’ her by saying little or nothing about her works. In a way, my interrogator was arguing without saying so that Kenyans lack national pride and consciously ‘kill’ their cultures by embracing the foreign and exotic.

Prof Amuka teaches literature at Moi University. [email protected]