What’s your impression of Bangladesh? This is my first time here in Bangladesh, and in Asia overall, and I’m really impressed – because all I’d seen before coming here is all you see in the media.
But because I’m also from a country and continent that suffers from the danger of the single story, I’m more or less open to other places.
What has been your most interesting discovery about Bangladesh? I really find it exciting how empowered the women are. Yes, there are other places in the world where challenges of gender equality still exist, but I’m really proud to meet all these women who openly claim their feminist identity. I really hadn’t expected this. I’d known that it was a conservative society, so I didn't think there’d be such a force of women which is that strong.
Is it the same back home in Nairobi? In other parts of Kenya? In Nairobi, yes. In other parts of Kenya, no. When it comes to gender equality, it’s skewed towards the higher-income group of people. It’s still a struggle. Even in Kenya, I say that there are strong activists – but we’re strong activists because we need to be. There’s so many things that go on, there’s so much violence against women that go unpunished. And the women in the lower-income group are usually the ones who suffer more.
What has been your most interesting discovery about the literary scene in Bangladesh? I found that it’s really vibrant and there’s huge enthusiasm among the crowds. I was in one session today [Saturday] where the crowd was standing! That doesn’t happen in Kenya. Just looking at the number of people is fascinating – for us it’s still a bit of a challenge to attract such a crowd towards the reading culture. So it seems to me that the literary culture is quite strong here if a literary fest can have such a strong crowd.
Well, this festival is geared towards English literature. In Kenya, would the struggle to get a reading crowd be higher for an English festival specifically? It’s a struggle in general. We’re a multilingual country so we have two official languages – Kikuyu and Kiswahili, but because English is the language of instruction in schools, most people who will be reading for pleasure would be reading in English. So, we very rarely find fiction that’s being done in Kiswahili –parents even find books for children in English to make their children learn the language vetter.
Does that have an effect on the literature in Kiswahili? Yes, it’s very small. The number of people who are writing Kiswahili is quite small. There are the coastal areas where writing in Kiswahili would be common because people read it there but other than that it’s a very small market.
In your talk on Friday, where you discussed your novel “Of Goats and Poisoned Oranges,” you mentioned it can be a struggle to use words from your native language in English writing. Could you tell us a bit about that? I’ve read many other writers also from African countries that aren’t widely read and I’ve seen how they use a word but not footnote it. There’s some fancy things you can do – in your writing – wherein you don’t need to explicitly explain the meaning of that word, but imply it with the context you’re writing in. But again, there are some other words that you’d need to define, so I still feel like it’s a bit tricky.
You said English is your main language. Is there an urge to use any of the native languages in your writing? For certain things, yes. Even when I say English is the main language I use, when I speak to my friends in Kenya we throw in a lot of words that are not typical English, so I still want my reader to feel that it’s a Kenyan voice. So it’s the idea of these various forms of English because we do throw in some of our languages even while speaking English.
So in my book, even when it’s a conversation in English, I need it to seem like a conversation two Kenyans would have. So, the book is in English but I also want to portray the Kenyan element.
You spoke earlier about the danger of the single story that all developing nations somehow or the other suffer from. What is one Kenyan narrative that you would like to redefine through your work? I want to show that Kenya is a growing nation. Yes, we do have a problem with terrorism, we do have al-Shabab and Somali militants – but that’s not everyday. Yes we have poverty, but on the other side, we still do have people coming out of poverty.
There’s a lot of technological innovation going on in Kenya. There’s Ushahidi [a non-profit software company that created a mobile app to manage group check-ins during emergencies], which was created in Kenya during post-election violence, and was also used in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake. It was developed by Kenyan programmers.
Kenya is actually a place where digital platforms are being created which are used by the world. Kenya is the home of mobile money, and is still the most successful mobile money platform in the world.
I want people to know that in Kenya, there isn’t just poverty – there is poverty, there are people with jobs, there are people creating jobs. And the story I want people to know is that it’s being done home-grown. A lot of the times, success stories in Kenya, when being told in the West, tend to focus on the “international aid” bit, but I want to show them that Kenyans are doing it by themselves. We don’t need saviors.
I don't want any single story to dominate the narrative of Kenya. What I’d want is a diversity of stories that really shows the diversity of living in a place. I’m sure it’s the same in Bangladesh.
