Literature's power lies in simple local stories that speak globally

Between 2008 and 2012, one of the examinable secondary school set books in Kenya was The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera. The novella is one of those small and deceptively simple books that pack a lot of punch in terms of symbolism, meaning, universality of human struggle and the ability of literature to capture the reality of a certain people’s worldview so succinctly that you, as the reader, find yourself taking your position among the characters and likening some of them to your real world.

The Whale Rider tells the story of a girl called Kahu, the rejected-stone kind of character who tries to show a grandchild’s love for her grandfather, a chief called Koro Apirana, but the latter seems too steeped in patriarchy and the belief that only a boy child can inherit leadership. The story by Ihimaera, a towering literary figure in New Zealand, succinctly captures the Māori worldview, specifically the concept of whakapapa (genealogy) and the oneness of the natural and spiritual worlds. In the Māori worldview, humans and whales are believed to have one ancestor, Kahutia te Rangi.

So, the extended metaphor that beautifully carries forward the story of Kahu is that when whales start washing up and dying en masse on the shore, and the requisite rituals cannot take them back to the ocean, the ominous sign is that the people are in trouble. The connection to the whales elevates what seems a small family drama to the cosmic level, where the story now mirrors the universal archetype of a wounded animal whose fate is intertwined with the fate of the people in the world.

By extension, the danger posed by the dying whales, on another level, sends an ominous message to the real world about the danger of perpetuating beliefs that are so outdated they threaten the very future of the world. This comes out beautifully when it emerges that Kahu, the girl who was overlooked because the society places more premium on boys, actually carries the spirit of the ancestor of the community and holds the key to the restoration of the health of the whales and the destiny of the land.

So, when I read the small book, I decided to ask those who had studied the novella what their impression of the book was. I focused mainly on boda boda riders, as I was also researching a novella commissioned by One Planet Publishers, who had asked me to write a novella  titled The Daredevil Rider about two girls, one from a rich family and one from a poor family but in the same school.

So, I asked a cousin who was a boda boda rider back in Embu, and you could tell the impression The Whale Rider also had on those who were examined on the book in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education exams. My cousin lit up and even pointed out that a fellow boda boda rider had given his bike the name ‘The Whale Rider’. I asked him who would fit the character of Nani Flowers (a character in The Whale Rider) in our family, and I was not surprised when the name he pointed out was exactly the person I had in mind.

I wanted to confirm that I was not the only one who found the deceptively simple novella quite moving. And like all simple stories that seek to capture the worldview of just one community in very simple terms but end up capturing our universal story as a species, The Whale Rider elicited all sorts of interpretations, the same way I heard, in college tutorial sessions, young naughty minds trying to convince us that The River Between by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and several other African classics, could be read to fit certain meanings that I won’t go into here.

The reason I chose to revisit Ihimaera’s simple story is that, for those who have had the privilege to review hundreds of manuscripts to decide which ones show promise, one notices a tendency among highly promising writers to make their stories unnecessarily complex. A keen reader will also tell you whose works some of these upcoming writers have read.

You also see, especially when you settle down to review and assess scripts that show great promise, an attempt by someone to write about either a country they have not visited; and when you sit down to discuss the script, they actually admit it was inspired by a certain writer whose successful works use that setting.

So you find yourself at pains to explain that there is really no need to write like anyone else, or to set your work in the same place as your favourite writer. It reminds me of one time, after sitting my KCSE exams, when I called a media house and said I wanted to write. The editor I was connected to by the then receptionists asked me what I wanted to write. I gave a few names of the feature writers I had read. Then the editor told me: “Henry, don’t write like these people. Write like yourself.”

Those words will go with me to the grave (not soon, I pray, though).

Great writing, a pretty good dose of which I have had the privilege not just to read but to witness as typescripts mellow into drafts, revised drafts, and award-winning gems, is local. Those who end up telling the most powerful stories do not start boarding planes to gain knowledge of exotic places to write about. They do not first have to be familiar with the moral archetypes that drive global literature or the turgid theories that are sometimes deployed in the academy to peel meanings like layers of an onion in lecture theatres.

The stories we can tell best, and which can lend themselves to the most esoteric theories, are the stories that we understand. Local stories. Simple stories powerfully told. For, at the end of the day, what is universal is at the same time local, depending on where in the world one stands.

When you read The Whale Rider, or indeed Things Fall Apart, or The River and the Source by Margaret Ogola, it is first and foremost a local story powerfully told by someone who understands it. As the American R&B trio TLC has been imploring us since the 1990s: “Don’t go chasing waterfalls. Listen to the rivers and the lakes that you are used to.”

 For the golden gems of our creativity are never hidden in the faraway corners of the world. They are hidden in plain sight. Within.