Nairobi’s Marginal Postcolonial Homes: The House Signifier in Meja Mwangi’s Fiction

Abstract

This paper uses Meja Mwangi’s novels Cockroach Dance and Going Down River Road to assess the author’s portrayal of ‘house’ as a versatile signifier for the alienation of Nairobi’s postcolonial urban space. In other words, the paper examines how far the author, through the descriptions of house, home-making, and not/being at home, reveals the main challenges facing Nairobians. The phenomenological orientation, relying mainly on the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is used to understand how the poverty and inequalities experienced in residential areas in informal settlements impact on the subjectivity of the characters depicted in Meja Mwangi’s fiction. Because for Merleau-Ponty all consciousness is a unified subject-object relation, the study considers the tactile experiences of the individual character in the world to account for their identity. Hence, the struggles to make a home, and the everyday experiences of the characters in their quest for survival, and the idea of the body’s subjectivity in place, help in delineating the various experiences of home and what they mean for Nairobians depicted in Mwangi’s texts. Finally, Mwangi’s use of the grotesque, humour and irony to depict the alienated reality in respect to housing and being-at-home in the changing postcolonial urban space is seems to artistically underpin the symbolism of different experiences of home for marginalised Nairobians. By using the phenomenological ideas of Merleau-Ponty, the study asserts that identities are shaped by the complex whole of the experiencing self, the place of experiencing and the others around the self. Mwangi succeeds in depicting the fluid and intersecting marginalities and vulnerabilities that afflict today’s growing urban informal settlements. Within the slum environment, the traditional understanding of home as a solid identity with stability for members is destabilised by crippling realities that the poorest of the city residents have to deal with as they struggle to call Nairobi home. The study concludes that it is the economic situation caused by poor income that forces and Nairobians into slums and traps them there.