Whispers and the Politics of the Everyday

Abstract

This chapter examines the characters in Whispers and how they mediate the everyday. It reads Mutahi’s characters and the narrative structure he adopts as allegorical. It argues that Mutahi structures his narratives around a fictional family as a convenient foil and uses his characters as allegorical types. By creating a fictional ‘domestic space’, he locates his readers within a habitat they already inhabit and characters they can easily identify with. As it explores these narrative possibilities that the allegorical structure avails the writer, the chapter also demonstrates its limitations. It argues that because these characters are typological, they ‘enter’ the column already ‘formed’, making them unchangeable and thus incapable of engaging with the complex and fluid challenges facing the postcolonial Kenyan subject. The chapter concludes that at the heart of the column is the struggle for an elusive consensus between an emergent powerful modernizing discourse and a resilient cultural normative.

An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49097-7_10