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WORK TITLE: Dance of the Jakaranda
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1971
WEBSITE:
CITY: Nairobi
STATE:
COUNTRY: Kenya
NATIONALITY: Kenyan
http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/dance-of-the-jakaranda/ * http://www.akashicbooks.com/author/peter-kimani/ * http://akumedia.aku.edu/faculty-and-staff/peter-kimani/ * https://aalbc.com/authors/author.php?author_name=Peter+Kimani * http://www.jamesmurua.com/peter-kimani-launches-dance-jakaranda-nairobi/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2003044515
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PR9381.9.K543
Personal name heading:
Kimani, Peter, 1971-
Found in: Before the rooster crows, 2002: t.p. (Peter Kimani) p. 4 of
cover (b. 1971 in Gatundu, Kenya)
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PERSONAL
Born 1971, in Kenya.
EDUCATION:Graduated from University of Houston.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist, educator, and writer. Standard, Nairobi, Kenya, senior editor; Aga Khan University, Nairobi, Kenya, founding faculty member of the Graduate School of Media and Communications. Visiting writer in English at Amherst College.
WRITINGS
Author of columns for the Standard and the Daily Nation; contributor of articles to the London Guardian, the New African, and Sky News; also the author of the novel Upside Down.
SIDELIGHTS
Peter Kimani is a Kenyan journalist, educator, and writer. He worked in Kenya’s press for two decades, largely with the Standard, where he became senior editor. Kimani then turned to academia, becoming a founding faculty member of the Graduate School of Media and Communications at Aga Khan University. He writes columns for the Standard and the Daily Nation, and has also contributed articles in the London Guardian, the New African, and Sky News. He is one of three international poets commissioned by National Public Radio to provide a poem for the 2009 presidential inauguration of Barack Obama.
In 2017 Kimani published the novel Dance of the Jakaranda. The novel is set at the turn of the twentieth century as the British-engineered railway has reached into Kenya’s interior Rift Valley from Mombasa. The novel centers on hotelier Ian Edward McDonald, preacher Richard Turnbull, and Indian railroad designer Babu Salim and his musician grandson, Rajan. Kimani shows the state of Kenyan society through a series of flashbacks into these lives before culminating in their coming together when Rajan is kissed by a white woman, bring calamity to the Jakaranda Hotel.
Kimani talked with Dan Magaziner in an interview on the Africa Is a Country Website about the novel and his creative choices in constructing it. Magaziner first queried about Kimani’s choice to write this story of colonial Kenya as a work of historical fiction. Kimani explained that “historical fiction, first and foremost, serves to re-imagine what’s already documented. In the case of Africa and other colonized societies, historical fiction serves to reclaim a people’s history, or at least inject fresh perspectives to counter the dominant colonial views.” Kimani also remarked that the novel “reassesses the establishment of the British colony in Kenya at the turn of the last century to illuminate on the so-called British enlightenment of the ‘Dark Continent.’ It challenges the reader to reassess what history books say [about] colonial Kenya. The metaphor of fact as fiction appears rather appropriate at this … point and time in America.”
In the same interview, Kimani continued, noting: “If I were to write a straightforward history, I wouldn’t enjoy similar latitude. Fiction has enormous power as it allows people to see their lives in terms different from those conferred on them by others.” Magaziner then questioned Kimani about his choice to exclude African characters from being the central characters in the novel. To this Kimani responded that “this absence is deliberate and symbolic. Whether you are dealing with colonial history or even in contemporary writings about Africa, Africans are passive witnesses to their own history.” Kimani noted that “all African characters are peripheral” in classic novels on the continent, including those by Joseph Conrad and Karen Blixen.
Writing in Library Journal, Ashanti White opined that it is “reminiscent of Iman Veijee’s Who Will Catch Us as We Fall.” White noted that Dance of the Jakaranda would “appeal to readers of historical and literary fiction.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews observed that “Kimani weaves together a bitter, hurtful past and hopeful present in this rich tale.” The reviewer admitted that “despite an overly complex and loose narrative, this is a thoughtful story about a country’s imperialist past.” A Publishers Weekly contributor stated: “Highlighted by its exquisite voice, Kimani’s novel is a standout debut.”
In an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Angela Ajayi opined that the text, “though accessible with little to no frills, exists in a too loosely organized state. The narrative shifts suddenly, leaping across decades, or clumsily weaves in errant tales of storytellers from within the plot. But the dark mysteries of the past … buoys the reader’s interest.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Fiammetta Rocco explained that after the author “has his plotlines all set, his writing relaxes, and it’s here that you can see his raw talent. The final one hundred pages of the book has riffs on Africa’s Big Man politics, the motormouth chefs who grill meat in Kenyan markets … the petty traders, the freehearted truckers and the ‘twilight girls,’ who emerged from the racial straitjacket colonialism had imposed on the nation. I grew up in Kenya, and I have never read a novel about my own country that’s so funny, so perceptive, so subversive and so sly.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2016, review of Dance of the Jakaranda.
Library Journal, February 1, 2017, Ashanti White, review of Dance of the Jakaranda, p. 72.
New York Times Book Review, February 17, 2017, Fiammetta Rocco, review of Dance of the Jakaranda, p. 10.
Publishers Weekly, December 12, 2016, review of Dance of the Jakaranda, p. 120.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), February 12, 2017, Angela Ajayi, “Storyteller Unfolds Dark Mysteries in Kenya’s Past.”
ONLINE
Africa Is a Country, http://africasacountry.com/ (April 12, 2017), Dan Magaziner, author interview.
African American Literature Book Club Website, https://aalbc.com/ (October 13, 2017), author profile.
Aga Khan University Website, http://akumedia.aku.edu/ (October 13, 2017), author profile.
Amherst College Website, https://www.amherst.edu/ (October 13, 2017), author profile.
Conversation, https://theconversation.com/ (October 13, 2017), author profile.
University of Iowa, International Writing Program Website, https://iwp.uiowa.edu/ (October 13, 2017), author profile.*
Dr Peter Kimani is a founding faculty member of the Graduate School of Media and Communications. An award-winning journalist and author, he has put in 20 years on Kenya’s vibrant national press, rising to senior editor at The Standard. His work has also appeared in The Guardian, The New African, and Sky News, among others.
As a writer and columnist for the Daily Nation, Peter toured Kenya and the region extensively, covering conflicts from Darfur to Somalia, while documenting reconstruction efforts, from South Sudan to Somaliland.
He is the author of three novels, most recently, Dance of the Jakaranda, a historical novel due out next February by Akashic Books of New York.
The work of historical fiction
April 12, 2017 by Dan Magaziner
0
Historical fiction has been having a bit of moment recently, especially among authors from the African continent and its diaspora. Authors imagine new possibilities out of old configurations; the past often proves as fecund as the futures that writers of speculative or science fiction might imagine. Recently novelists such Yaa Gyasi, Yvonne Owuor, Colson Whitehead, Chimamanda Adichie (in Half of a Yellow Sun) and others have availed themselves of the multiple opportunities that the past – whether well known or not – presents for creative narratives explorations. Earlier this year, the Kenyan journalist, poet and professor Peter Kimani joined their ranks. His Dance of the Jakaranda is an epic account of 20th century Kenya, narrating the East African colony’s history from the building of the Uganda Railway at the century’s open (and cosmopolitan world of its construction) to the politics and tensions of belonging that marked independent Kenya’s early days.
Dance of the Jakaranda is published by Akashic Books, an independent publishing house based in Brooklyn, devoted to publishing overlooked and/or politically defiant works of fiction. We are grateful to Akashic for bringing Kimani’s book to press, and to Peter Kimani for making the time to speak to AIAC.
Dance of the Jakaranda is a work of historical fiction, moving backwards and forwards in time between the turn of the 20th century and Kenya’s independence-era. What is the work of historical fiction? How does it differ from straight-forward history? What are the limits and possibilities of the genre?
Historical fiction, first and foremost, serves to re-imagine what’s already documented. In the case of Africa and other colonized societies, historical fiction serves to reclaim a people’s history, or at least inject fresh perspectives to counter the dominant colonial views. In most instances, colonial histories are fraught with inaccuracies, distortions and simple falsifications. Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow’s book, The Africa That Never Was, is a valuable text chronicling Western myths about Africa. To paraphrase Chinua Achebe, one of the fathers of African fiction, his motivation for writing Things Fall Apart was to show the world that Africa’s traditional past was not “one long night of savagery.”
That’s the point of departure of Dance of the Jakaranda. It reassesses the establishment of the British colony in Kenya at the turn of the last century to illuminate on the so-called British enlightenment of the “Dark Continent.” It challenges the reader to reassess what history books say colonial Kenya. The metaphor of fact as fiction appears rather appropriate at this this point and time in America.
If I were to write a straightforward history, I wouldn’t enjoy similar latitude. Fiction has enormous power as it allows people to see their lives in terms different from those conferred on them by others. The colonizers understood this. As Ngugi wa Thiong’o often narrates, his foundational play, The Black Hermit, written during his student days at Uganda’s Makerere University, was initially frowned upon by the British colonial authorities because it had a scene showing a British man raping a local woman. British men were considered “civilized” and so were not expected to perform such base crimes, even in imagined narratives.
At the heart of the novel is the construction of the so-called Lunatic Express, the railway line that enabled white settlement and facilitated the interior’s economic exploitation. Yet you seem to think it’s more complicated than that. Why and how did the railway matter?
Your assessment of the railway is accurate. It was the avenue through which the British accessed the Kenyan hinterland for its economic exploitation. But it is also a powerful force, disrupting local cultures and way of life, damaging the environment, etcetera. But it is also a transformational force, creating new townships where it courses through. Above all, the railway is a petri dish of sorts: its compartments are assigned according to racial hierarchy– with whites in First Class and Africans in Third Class –and becomes a metaphor of the segregated society that the colonialists build in Kenya.
In a certain sense, the railroad presages racial segregation as official policy in the colony. Different races lived separately, whether in urban or rural settlements. But the railroad also serves another important function. It starts by the ocean and ends at the headwaters of Lake Victoria, coursing through fertile territories. The Iron Snake, as locals call it, swallows all that the land can produce for shipping away to Europe. This finds traction with Walter Rodney’s seminal treatise, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa — the colonial architecture ensured Africa would continually feed European industries with raw materials to harness goods that were resold to Africa at far steeper prices than original value. That way, Europe created its wealth while impeding African industrialization.
The novel is also the story of two Englishmen, one Punjabi, and their literal and figurative “seeds.” They and their descendants are the protagonists and narrators for most of the novel. Although there is a disembodied, recognizably “African” narrative voice that considers practices of storytelling, etcetera, there is no “African” main character, as predominates, for example the work of other Kenyan writers, most notably Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Why did you, a Kenyan writer, choose write Kenya’s history this way, in these voices?
Ngugi wa Thiong’o made a similar observation when he read an earlier draft of the novel. I should mention Ngugi has been very important in my development as a writer. He also sat on my doctoral committee. Ngugi said he found it “intriguing” that a novel by an African writer lacked a major character who is African. My response then, as now, is that this absence is deliberate and symbolic. Whether you are dealing with colonial history or even in contemporary writings about Africa, Africans are passive witnesses to their own history. Think about major novels on Africa by European authors: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or Out of Africa by Karen Blixen. They do not have major African characters. Same with Ernest Hemingway. All African characters are peripheral. There are similar parallels in the way Western news networks report on the continent. In humanitarian reports, it is always a white aid worker, so-called consultant and what have you, who narrate Africa to the world.
The inter-textual reference to Heart of Darkness, for instance, situates Dance of the Jakaranda as a response to the whitewashed elements of African history through Western fiction. I hope I won’t give away too much by revealing the novel’s controlling motifs are darkness and light. I am inviting the reader to consider what so-called European enlightenment brings to the Dark continent. My story of Africa without Africans is a way of highlighting that absurdity.
The only African character with a substantial role in the novel is Nyundo, the drummer. He serves as a folk historian. Through him, the novel questions the privileging of the written, over the spoken word. The written being the colonial and “official” version of our history, the spoken being the people’s memory of their past. Nyundo’s actions in the novel are both subversive and restorative. His life in the novel symbolizes burial and resurrection of African memory.
[Spoiler alert] This is obviously an apposite moment to consider questions of statelessness, forced and volitional migration and national identity, in Kenya, the United States and beyond. To my mind, the novel’s “hero” is the Punjabi technician, Babu Salim, whose only seed is sisal and whose grandson becomes a political sensation towards the novel’s end. By that time, with the Empire having fallen, Kenya having become independent and India and Pakistan partitioned, Babu and his descendants are effectively stateless. What is your response to the “Indian question?” How/do questions of race and belonging complicate our understanding of nationalism, in Africa and elsewhere?
My novel teases out Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities and the limits of nationalism. A running theme in the novel is the question of identity and belonging. I seek to answer the question: what did it mean to be Kenyan in that moment of our history? To find an answer, I go back to the founding of the Kenya colony, then leap forward to the onset of independence, when Africans take charge. The characters in the novel review what’s lost, and gained, in the new dispensation.
The Indians of East Africa have a complex heritage. They were colonized in their homelands, but some were complicit in the establishment of the Kenya colony, and enjoyed more privileges in colonial Kenya. Yet others fought to end British colonization of Kenya. It is the latter group that my book seeks to acknowledge. The question of identity becomes a larger contemplation of what it means to be human in a prejudiced world. Just look at contemporary US, UK, Germany, France, etc. There seems to be a competition to prove who is a more authentic American, British, German and French than others.
For a novel that stretches across the Indian Ocean and beyond, Dance of the Jakaranda also has a distinct sense of place. Why Nakuru?
I struggled with the question of the novel’s locale for a while. Initially, I was tempted to set the novel in some unnamed place on the continent. I personally have problems reading such novels because I feel unmoored. In any case, such a device is useful in times of political repression. The Malawian poet, Jack Mapanje, for instance, had to device codes to describe his homeland without invoking its name. The departed Kenyan playwright, Wahome Mutahi, used a similar device in his political plays at a time of political repression. The trick was for the place to remain some “imaginary” country somewhere in Africa.
But I was writing in a different time when we have a fair amount of freedom, so it was unnecessary to disguise my locale. I thought about the place that reflected the spirit of a multiracial and multicultural community, and I found Nakuru came closest to that. I researched on its history to recreate an authentic atmosphere of the time.
Peter Kimani
Faculty
Faculty
Our People
Dr Peter Kimani is a founding faculty member of the Graduate School of Media and Communications. An award-winning journalist and author, he has put in 20 years on Kenya’s vibrant national press, rising to senior editor at The Standard, where he still writes a weekly column. His work has also appeared in The Guardian, The New African, and Sky News, among others.
As a writer and columnist for the Daily Nation, Peter toured Kenya and the region extensively, covering conflicts from Darfur to Somalia, while documenting reconstruction efforts, from South Sudan to Somaliland.
He is the author of two novels, Before The Rooster Crows and Upside Down, which are widely studied in Kenyan schools and the region and was one of only three international poets commissioned by the National Public Radio to compose and present poems to mark Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009.
Peter Kimani
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Professional and Biographical Information
Peter Kimani works across four main areas: creative writing, African literature, postcolonial studies and journalism. His research explores the relationship between culture and the politics of identity and representation in colonial and postcolonial Africa.
He is the author of three novels: Before the Rooster Crows, Upside Down, and, most recently, Dance of the Jakaranda, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. A critic for that newspaper remarked: “I have never read a novel about [Kenya] that’s so funny, so perceptive, so subversive and so sly.”
Kimani was one of three international poets commissioned by National Public Radio to compose a poem for Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009. He is a founding faculty member of the Graduate School of Media and Communications at Aga Khan University in Nairobi, Kenya, and is currently the Visiting Writer at Amherst College.
2007 Resident
Africa
Eastern Africa
Kenya
English
Peter KIMANI is a newspaper editor making a name as a satirist and novelist. Awarded the inaugural Okoth K’Obonyo Playwriting Competition in 1994, he attended the Mesa Refuge writing residency in California in 1999. His first novel, Before the Rooster Crows, was published in 2002 to wide acclaim. He is currently the managing editor of the national paper Saturday Times in Kenya, while working on his second novel. He participates courtesy of a private gift to the IWP.
Peter Kimani
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Dr. Peter Kimani is a leading African writer of his generation. Born in 1971 in Kenya, he started his career as a journalist and is the author of several works of fiction and poetry. He was one of only three international poets commissioned by National Public Radio to compose and present a poem to mark Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009.
Kimani earned his doctorate in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program in 2014, and is a faculty member at Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications in Nairobi. Dance of the Jakaranda is his third novel. He two previously published novels are, Before The Rooster Crows and Upside Down.
Kimani is a founding faculty member of the Graduate School of Media and Communications at Aga Khan University in Nairobi, Kenya. He is also an award-winning journalist, rising to senior editor at The Standard. His work has also appeared in The Guardian, The New African, Sky News, and the Daily Nation. Peter has toured Kenya and the surrounding region extensively, covering conflicts from Darfur to Somalia, while documenting reconstruction efforts, from South Sudan to Somaliland.
Kimani, Peter. Dance of the Jakaranda
Ashanti White
142.2 (Feb. 1, 2017): p72.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Kimani, Peter. Dance of the Jakaranda. Akashic. Feb. 2017. 320p. ISBN 9781617754968. pap. $15.95. F
Kenyan author Kimani, who currently teaches at Aga Khan University in Nairobi, holds a doctorate in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston and was commissioned by NPR to compose a poem for Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration. Marking his U.S. debut, his latest novel is another accomplishment he can add to his list. Set on the cusp of Kenya's independence, it focuses on the lives of three men and their multigenerational, multicultural connections during a volatile time in the nation's history. The main protagonist, Rajan, is a musician who sits at the intersection of the upheaval. When he starts dating a beautiful white woman, Miriam, they enjoy the youthful bliss that accompanies young love, but as tensions rise and secrets of their small town are revealed, both are thrown into a world that shatters their innocence. The characters are human, teaching us that even someone who does wrong is not all bad, and Kimani writes with such vivid detail that one can easily visualize the vast scenery. VERDICT Reminiscent of Iman Veijee's Who Will Catch Us as We Fall, this novel will appeal to readers of historical and literary fiction.--Ashanti White, Fayetteville, NC
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
White, Ashanti. "Kimani, Peter. Dance of the Jakaranda." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 72. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301208&it=r&asid=eb9db07c3b48c91b93201b1e203c2c14. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479301208
Kimani, Peter: DANCE OF THE JAKARANDA
(Dec. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Kimani, Peter DANCE OF THE JAKARANDA Akashic (Adult Fiction) $15.95 2, 7 ISBN: 978-1-61775-496-8
African colonialism is confronted in this subtle, multilayered Kenyan tale.A "massive, snakelike creature whose black head, erect like a cobra's, pulled rusty brown boxes and slithered down the savanna": it's 1901, and the first train has arrived in Kenya's Rift Valley from the port of Mombasa. This is how Kimani (Before the Rooster Crows, 2004) opens this lyrical and powerful historical novel about his homeland. It's primarily the story of three men: the Master, Ian Edward McDonald, the Brit who built the railroad; Richard Turnbull, a preacher and friend of McDonald's; and Babu Salim, an Indian who helped build the railroad. Babu is also the grandfather of Rajan, a talented musician who now sings his songs in the Jakaranda Hotel, near where the railroad ends. Once a majestic monument to love that McDonald built for his wife, Sally, it fell to ruin--a "veritable heart of darkness"-- after she refused to live there, disgusted when she saw how McDonald brutalized the workers and servants. Through a series of flashbacks the lives of these three men "run parallel to each other for decades," finally coming together and unraveling in a "momentary clash" in the 1960s when Rajan is suddenly kissed in the dark hotel by a mysterious woman who then disappears. His obsession with her finally ends when he sees her on the dance floor and brings her onstage. Rajan and Mariam quickly develop a relationship; when he brings her to meet his elderly grandparents, she utters something to Babu, unleashing an unexplained curse dealing with ages-old illegitimacy and infidelity upon the family. Kimani weaves together a bitter, hurtful past and hopeful present in this rich tale of Kenyan history and culture, the railroad, and the men and women whose lives it profoundly affected. Despite an overly complex and loose narrative, this is a thoughtful story about a country's imperialist past.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kimani, Peter: DANCE OF THE JAKARANDA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471902030&it=r&asid=376ef317a01ca14ccf4258ee4e3e19ce. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471902030
Dance of the Jakaranda
263.51 (Dec. 12, 2016): p120.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Dance of the Jakaranda
Peter Kimani. Akashic, $15.95 (320p)
ISBN 978-1-61775-496-8
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In his American debut, Kimani illustrates the discordant history of East Indians in Kenya through a fabulously complicated set of intriguing characters and events. One balmy night in 1963, a musician named Rajan is transfixed by the kiss of an ambiguously ethnic woman named Mariam, whose ethnicity seems ambiguous (Rajan himself is East Indian). He takes her home to his grandfather Babu, a meeting that "transcended any explanation other than fate." Babu, it turns out, was a Punjabi laborer who first arrived in Mombasa in 1897 to build the railroad that "slithered down the savanna" under the direction of Mariam's illegitimate English grandfather, commissioner McDonald. After a misunderstanding between the two men blossoms "into a grudge that would last a lifetime," an intricate set of events comes to fruition with Rajan and Mariam's relationship. The joy of Kimani's storytelling is only rarely hampered by the unwieldiness of his plot; he alternates between the colonial past and the "season of anomie" that begins when an edict from the Big Man, who rules the newly independent Kenya and threatens "foreign nationals" (those whose heritage was English or East Indian) such as Rajan with deportation. Rajan's understanding of himself as "a brown man in a black world which had been placed under white rule" fractures as surely as the nation itself does, sent reeling in the face of a "past that had finally caught up with the present to complicate the future." Highlighted by its exquisite voice, Kimani's novel is a standout debut. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Dance of the Jakaranda." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p. 120+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225028&it=r&asid=8d0aae7ee32e7080eca31407e00c07fc. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475225028
Storyteller unfolds dark mysteries in KenyaAEs past; FICTION: A Kenyan novelist retells the history of his country through a multiracial and multicultural lens
(Feb. 12, 2017): Lifestyle:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Star Tribune Media Company LLC
http://www.startribune.com/
Byline: ANGELA AJAYI
Special to the Star Tribune Storytelling in Africa was once part of an oral tradition in which knowledge and history were passed from one generation to another. Using music and invocations, storytellers were vital members of their communities. But with colonialism, this tradition was discarded in favor of more Western narratives. Doing his own part to redress this wrong, Kenyan author Peter Kimani has just published a third novel, oDance of the Jakaranda.o Blending legends and history, his all-knowing narrator tells the story of Kenya from its existence as a British protectorate u owhen God and the white man were one and the sameo u to the dawning of the era of the oBig Mano in an independent nation. There is an emphasis here on retelling a history of a diverse people, Swahili language included. As the narrative unfolds with a secret at its core, the intertwined lives of four central characters are revealed. In the prologue, the reader is thrust into the interior of a moving train, oa monstrous, snakelike creature whose black head, erect like a cobraAEs, pulled rusty brown boxes and slithered down the savanna.o Inside, sitting side by side, are two characters u a loveless Englishman, Ian MacDonald, who oversaw the building of the railroad, and Reverend Turnbull, an English preacher, with a few salacious secrets in tow. The year is 1901, six decades before KenyaAEs independence. The Indian and African workers who built the railroad are also on the train, divided respectively into second and third class. In this scene, the seeds of unresolved lineage are sown u a third character, Babu, a Punjabi immigrant and a former railroad technician, is described simply as othe runaway father.o It is BabuAEs story that undergirds the plot and beguiles us with tales of a shipwreck on board a dhow from India to Kenya, as well as the clashes of personalities, desires and cultures u British, Indian, African u that arise as the railroad is built on the oblack-cotton soil.o Here, the novel gains some richness and relevance. However, the concurrent, more recent story of the fourth character, BabuAEs grandson Rajan, with its rather dull preoccupations, requires extra commitment on the readerAEs part. Additionally, KimaniAEs writing, though accessible with little to no frills, exists in a too loosely organized state. The narrative shifts suddenly, leaping across decades, or clumsily weaves in errant tales of storytellers from within the plot. But the dark mysteries of the past, set alight by the appearance of an attractive woman in a club called the Jakaranda, from which the book derives its title, buoys the readerAEs interest. Most important, a fascinating part of KenyaAEs history, real and imagined, is revealed and reclaimed by one of its own. Angela AjayiAEs work has appeared in Wild River Review, the Common Online, and most recently, in Fifth Wednesday Journal. She lives in Minneapolis.
Dance of the Jakaranda By: Peter Kimani. Publisher: Akashic Books, 344 pages, $15.95.
ANGELA AJAYI
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Storyteller unfolds dark mysteries in KenyaAEs past; FICTION: A Kenyan novelist retells the history of his country through a multiracial and multicultural lens." Star Tribune [Minneapolis, MN], 12 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481065319&it=r&asid=e476d6e597282624fcce5277b7a1cb7a. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481065319
A Railroad Runs Through a Tale of Two Kenyas
By FIAMMETTA ROCCOFEB. 17, 2017
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Peter Kimani Credit Yusuf Wachira
DANCE OF THE JAKARANDA
By Peter Kimani
342 pp. Akashic Books. Paper, $15.95.
Not a week goes by, it seems, without a great new novel or collection of short stories by a writer from one of the many nations of sub-Saharan Africa: about the riotous underworld of Pointe Noire, Republic of Congo, by Alain Mabanckou, Africa’s Samuel Beckett, who now teaches at U.C.L.A.; about the migrant experience and the American dream, by Imbolo Mbue, a Cameroonian writer whose first novel, “Behold the Dreamers,” sold for a million-dollar advance; about the politics of hair by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian storyteller who was at the vanguard of the current vogue with “Purple Hibiscus,” and whose second novel, “Half of a Yellow Sun,” was set against the backdrop of the Biafran war.
Now, in addition to the more contemporary settings — the funky jazz dives with their mugithi music and the eternal dislocation of “Afropolitan” migrants, “not citizens, but Africans of the world,” as Taiye Selasi calls them — African writers are also exploring historical fiction. In “Mount Pleasant,” Patrice Nganang, another well-received Cameroonian writer, who teaches at Stony Brook University, brings to life the magical community of artists and intellectuals that peopled his nation before colonialism; the enigmatic storyteller Petina Gappah, a lawyer who was born in Zambia and raised in Zimbabwe, is retelling David Livingstone’s epic journey to the interior of Africa as seen by the porters he took with him, who after his death, cut out his heart and buried it and then returned his body to the coast, where his final quest had started.
Into this literary caldron steps Peter Kimani, a Kenyan poet and novelist, who was born in 1971 and is a graduate of the University of Houston’s creative writing program. “Dance of the Jakaranda” is set both in the 1960s, at the time of Kenyan independence, and at the end of the 19th century, during the scramble for Africa, the historic race that brought black, white and brown people together to cut a 600-mile line of mostly single-track railway linking Lake Victoria and the headwaters of the Nile with the Indian Ocean at Mombasa. The Kikuyu would later call it the “Iron Snake,” the British the “Lunatic Express.” Winston Churchill declared it “a brilliant conception,” adding that “the British art of ‘muddling through’ is here seen in one of its finest expositions. Through everything — through the forests, through the ravines, through troops of marauding lions, through famine, through war, through five years of excoriating parliamentary debate, muddled and marched the railway.”
Of the roughly 32,000 laborers from British India who were imported to build the line, nearly 7,000 stayed on afterward, the genesis of Kenya’s Indian community. The muddle and the march provide rich inspiration for Kimani. Amid the huge cast of characters that “Dance of the Jakaranda” brings together are three men: Ian Edward McDonald, a colonial administrator; Babu Salim, an Indian technician; and Richard Turnbull, a preacher. McDonald has come to the East Africa Protectorate from South Africa, where he had caught his wife in bed with her African gardener. He stays on after overseeing the construction of the railway, having lost his campaign to be awarded a knighthood by his British masters but given another sort of title instead, the deed to a parcel of land “of his choice, anywhere in the colony.” He settles on a patch of the Rift Valley that he had spied from the train, overlooking Lake Nakuru. There he builds a house, the “Monument to Love,” in an unsuccessful attempt to win back his wife, which in turn becomes a private club and then, when the settlement grows into the town of Nakuru, the Jakaranda Hotel.
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Much of the plot revolves around what happens after Babu, who, like McDonald, also works on the railway and then settles in Nakuru, is accused of fathering an illegitimate child, a girl who is eventually raised by Reverend Turnbull. The story is given traction in a modern parallel set in 1963, when Babu’s grandson Rajan, a crooner in a band at the Jakaranda Hotel, is kissed one dark night by a mysterious young woman who tastes of lavender.
Kimani has done a game job managing the carpentry of this ambitious novel, bringing great skill to the task of deploying multiple story lines, huge leaps back and forth in time and the withholding and distribution of information. Many first novels start well but end less capably, after the writer has expended an overabundance of effort on the opening chapters. Rarely do novels take off in the middle. “Dance of the Jakaranda” is an exception, which makes it even more interesting.
Once Kimani has his plotlines all set, his writing relaxes, and it’s here that you can see his raw talent. The final 100 pages of the book has riffs on Africa’s Big Man politics, the motormouth chefs who grill meat in Kenyan markets (a particular Kenyan kind of wide boy who cheats his customers, but always with a smile), the petty traders, the freehearted truckers and the “twilight girls,” who emerged from the racial straitjacket colonialism had imposed on the nation. I grew up in Kenya, and I have never read a novel about my own country that’s so funny, so perceptive, so subversive and so sly.
Fiammetta Rocco is the culture editor of The Economist and its lifestyle magazine, 1843.
A version of this review appears in print on February 19, 2017, on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Laying the Lunatic Express
REVIEW: 'Dance of the Jakaranda,' by Peter Kimani
FICTION: A Kenyan novelist retells the history of his country through a multiracial and multicultural lens.
By Angela Ajayi Special to the Star Tribune
February 10, 2017 — 10:52am
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Yusuf Wachira
Peter Kimani Photo by Yusuf Wachira
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Storytelling in Africa was once part of an oral tradition in which knowledge and history were passed from one generation to another. Using music and invocations, storytellers were vital members of their communities. But with colonialism, this tradition was discarded in favor of more Western narratives.
Doing his own part to redress this wrong, Kenyan author Peter Kimani has just published a third novel, “Dance of the Jakaranda.” Blending legends and history, his all-knowing narrator tells the story of Kenya from its existence as a British protectorate — “when God and the white man were one and the same” — to the dawning of the era of the “Big Man” in an independent nation. There is an emphasis here on retelling a history of a diverse people, Swahili language included.
As the narrative unfolds with a secret at its core, the intertwined lives of four central characters are revealed. In the prologue, the reader is thrust into the interior of a moving train, “a monstrous, snakelike creature whose black head, erect like a cobra’s, pulled rusty brown boxes and slithered down the savanna.” Inside, sitting side by side, are two characters — a loveless Englishman, Ian MacDonald, who oversaw the building of the railroad, and Reverend Turnbull, an English preacher, with a few salacious secrets in tow. The year is 1901, six decades before Kenya’s independence.
The Indian and African workers who built the railroad are also on the train, divided respectively into second and third class. In this scene, the seeds of unresolved lineage are sown — a third character, Babu, a Punjabi immigrant and a former railroad technician, is described simply as “the runaway father.” It is Babu’s story that undergirds the plot and beguiles us with tales of a shipwreck on board a dhow from India to Kenya, as well as the clashes of personalities, desires and cultures — British, Indian, African — that arise as the railroad is built on the “black-cotton soil.” Here, the novel gains some richness and relevance.
However, the concurrent, more recent story of the fourth character, Babu’s grandson Rajan, with its rather dull preoccupations, requires extra commitment on the reader’s part. Additionally, Kimani’s writing, though accessible with little to no frills, exists in a too loosely organized state. The narrative shifts suddenly, leaping across decades, or clumsily weaves in errant tales of storytellers from within the plot.
But the dark mysteries of the past, set alight by the appearance of an attractive woman in a club called the Jakaranda, from which the book derives its title, buoys the reader’s interest. Most important, a fascinating part of Kenya’s history, real and imagined, is revealed and reclaimed by one of its own.
“Dance of the Jakaranda,” by Peter Kimani
“Dance of the Jakaranda,” by Peter Kimani
Angela Ajayi’s work has appeared in Wild River Review, the Common Online, and most recently, in Fifth Wednesday Journal. She lives in Minneapolis.
Dance of the Jakaranda
By: Peter Kimani.
Publisher: Akashic Books, 344 pages, $15.95.