Home › Authors › Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ Quotes
born 1971 Kenya
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) is a Kenyan American poet, author, and academic. He is associate professor of literatures in English at Cornell University and co-founder of the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Writing.
Kenya Essayists Novelists Poets Random Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ quote
33 quotes
African writers should not have to win a European or American literary prize before we recognize them as writers.
This place, it reminds me how lucky I am — just to be alive, to be walking out of here.
Black Star Nairobi (2013)
To me ‘home’ are the places I feel a need to fight in order to make them better.
African writers are trying to tell a good story that Americans are appreciating more and more, and appreciating its diversity and cross genre aesthetics – and that is a good thing
In the United States, there’s the Nevada desert — and football stadiums, if you count Jimmy Hoffa.
Black Star Nairobi (2013)
We should not always need the medium of English and French to talk to each other
Why should, and to me this is the idiocy of leadership, one person feel that only he has the ability to lead a country of millions?
I also have a very hard time with the divide of high and low culture
American nationalism cannot exist if at some point the American citizen did not consciously decide not to look at the rest of the world
Freedom can only be a word amidst debilitating poverty
I have grown up believing that anything is possible and I think in large part because of my father
I think there is more awareness that violence and civil war are not far behind flaring ethnic tensions
I like to think of being able to use multiple genres as being fluent in many musical instruments
African literature doesn’t have to be one thing; allow it to flourish in many different forms
African writers have been, I think the single most important, facilitators of Pan-Africanism
Ethnicity has become a weapon in the hands of Kenyan and African politicians that they deploy when they need votes
African writers have to be willing to discuss their differences and therefore it is not so much a question of a common message
To erase a border, you have to acknowledge it stands in your way first
I want to work with an aesthetics that is not afraid of the political
I don’t want to write fiction that doesn’t say anything
Topics Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ is quoted on
Works