One Day I Will Write About This Place
Binyavanga Wainaina
One Day I Will Write About This Place
Binyavanga Wainaina tumbled through his middle-class Kenyan childhod out of kilter with the world around him. This world came to him as a chaos of loud and colourful sounds: the hair dryers at his mother's beauty parlour, black mamba bicycle bells, mechanics in Nairobi, the music of Michael Jackson - all punctuated by the infectious laughter of his brother and sister, Jimmy and Ciru. He could fall in with their patterns, but it would take him a while to carve out his own. In this vivid and compelling debut, Wainaina takes us through his school days, his failed attempt to study in South Africa, a moving family reunion in Uganda, and his travels around Kenya. The landscape in front of him always claims his main attention, but he also evokes the shifting political scene that unsettles his views on family, tribe, and nationhood. Throughout, reading is his refuge and his solace. And when, in 2002, a writing prize comes through, the door is opened for him to pursue the career that perhaps had been beckoning all along. A series of fascinating reporting assignments follows in other African countries. Finally he circles back to a Kenya in the throes of postelection violence and finds he is not the only one questioning the old certainties.
3.3 out of 5 based on 5 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
272 |
| RRP |
£15.99 |
| Date of Publication |
November 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-1847080219 |
| Publisher |
Granta Books |
| |
Binyavanga Wainaina tumbled through his middle-class Kenyan childhod out of kilter with the world around him. This world came to him as a chaos of loud and colourful sounds: the hair dryers at his mother's beauty parlour, black mamba bicycle bells, mechanics in Nairobi, the music of Michael Jackson - all punctuated by the infectious laughter of his brother and sister, Jimmy and Ciru. He could fall in with their patterns, but it would take him a while to carve out his own. In this vivid and compelling debut, Wainaina takes us through his school days, his failed attempt to study in South Africa, a moving family reunion in Uganda, and his travels around Kenya. The landscape in front of him always claims his main attention, but he also evokes the shifting political scene that unsettles his views on family, tribe, and nationhood. Throughout, reading is his refuge and his solace. And when, in 2002, a writing prize comes through, the door is opened for him to pursue the career that perhaps had been beckoning all along. A series of fascinating reporting assignments follows in other African countries. Finally he circles back to a Kenya in the throes of postelection violence and finds he is not the only one questioning the old certainties.
Read an extract from the book | NYTimes.com
Reviews
The New York Times
Alexandra Fuller
"Harried reader, I’ll save you precious time: skip this review and head directly to the bookstore for Binyavanga Wainaina’s stand-up-and-cheer coming-of-age memoir, “One Day I Will Write About This Place.” Although written by an East African and set in East and Southern Africa, Wainaina’s book is not just for Afrophiles or lovers of postcolonial literature. This is a book for anyone who still finds the nourishment of a well-written tale preferable to the emptycalorie jolt of a celebrity confessional or Swedish mystery. "
12/08/2011
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The Sunday Times
Ian Critchley
"Beguiling ... He does not deny that his continent faces intractable problems, but he is more interested in writing about those aspects of Africa that westerners rarely see. He writes about weddings and football matches, birthdays and funerals, and business deals that are struck only after a day and a night of drinking and socialising. He describes taxi-buses that wait until they are overfull before setting off, street traders vying for business, and the way that the sounds of Congolese rumba inspire dancers. Too often Africa is seen in the western media as a place of war, famine, disease and corruption. Wainaina offers a different slant. This is Africa from the African point of view, a vibrant celebration of “normal human beings doing normal things”."
06/11/2011
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The Guardian
Helon Habila
"If there's one dominant characteristic of this new generation [of African writers], it is a sense of cultural and historical alienation; hip-hop now carries more weight than the Mau Mau struggles. A rural Masai girl exhibiting un-rural sass and confidence is described as a "person who must have a Tupac T-shirt stashed away somewhere". Wainaina's book, which typifies the new trend, is politically and socially engaged — that is, it attempts to explain Kenya and Africa, but it does so without a knee-jerk resort to colonial woes, and this is very welcome."
05/11/2011
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The Independent
Zoe Norridge
"Absorbing … Above all this is a coming-of-age memoir about disappointment, changing aspirations and familial, if not romantic, love."
09/12/2011
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The Economist
The Economist
"Such is Mr Wainaina’s force of personality and his enthusiasm for promoting the arts of Africa that it would be cheering to report that his first book, “One Day I Will Write About This Place”, is worth the wait. It is not. Mr Wainaina should not have been encouraged to write in the form of a memoir ... Too many African writers are co-opted by the American creative-writing scene only to be reduced by prevailing navel-gazing."
14/07/2011
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