Devil on the Cross Literary Elements

Political Satire, Fiction

Kenya, the early 1980s

The story is told from the point of view of an unnamed Gĩcaandĩ Player, who nonetheless has limited insight into each character's thoughts and feelings. Thus, at time the narrative takes a first-person point of view (during which the Gĩcaandĩ Player comes off as a less-than-reliable narrator), but the text primarily consists of third-person limited narration.

The text is enraptured by the fantastical and musical, but it is also elegiac and aggrieved with the treatment of peasants and workers in post-colonial Kenya.

Jacinta Warĩĩnga is our protagonist, while the antagonist is less distinct—standing opposite Warĩĩnga are the tycoons, businesspeople, and compradores who have exploited her and other workers.

The major narrative arc of the text revolves around Warĩĩnga's journey towards self-discovery and redemption from a hopeless victim into a strong, Marxist heroine. Thus, the major conflict is both internal (i.e., within Warĩĩnga as she convinces herself that she is capable of revolutionary self-reliance and dismissing the temptations of the Devil) as well as external (i.e., in terms of the ideological conflict between Warĩĩnga and the tycoons who speak at the Devil's Feast and who manipulate workers outside the Feast). More generally, the major conflict in the text may also be understood as class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the working class.

The climax of the text, as referenced by the narrator in his false start to the narrative in Chapter 2, is in the discussion that Warĩĩnga has with the Devil on the Ilmorog golf course. In this conversation, not only are the capitalist superstructures that keep the masses enslaved laid bare (i.e., in the form of the Devil's discussion of propaganda, education, religion, etc.), but it is also here that Warĩĩnga is made to most climactically confront and reject the neocolonial conditions that are being forced on her. It is notably only after this climactic moment that she is able to reform her life and get to a place where she can confront the Rich Old Man from Ngorika, another tense and action-packed moment in the text.

Ngũgĩ deploys foreshadowing extensively in the text, contributing to his larger development of the theme of dualities (since foreshadowing represents a kind of doubling or echoing), as well as his combination of fantasy and reality (since certain foreshadowings are so pointed as to appear a little unrealistic or unlikely). For example, consider how the game of the Hunter and the Hunted, played by Warĩĩnga and the Rich Old Man from Ngorika in her youth, foreshadows her eventual killing of the Old Man with Mũturi's pistol. Consider also how this event is foreshadowed by the Devil's proposition to Warĩĩnga, where he tells her that he has a job proposal for her in Ngorika.

N/A

Kenya's history, geography, popular culture, religion, and folk traditions are referenced heavily in the text, which also makes heavy use of Kenyan adages and idioms. Also, Ngũgĩ's other works are alluded to, as Ilmorog is a shared setting between many of his works.

Ngũgĩ's imagery is at once surreal and highly grounded in the material facts of local reality. This contributes to his larger development of fantasy and reality as commingled, and it also establishes his writing style as distinct from a Western or Eurocentric canon.

There are many paradoxes that exist in the system of capitalist oppression laid out by Ngũgĩ in the text. As just one example, consider how the Devil tries to sell Warĩĩnga on a potential escape route from neocolonial conditions. He tells her that, in order to escape the system, Warĩĩnga must sell her body and become arm candy for a rich tycoon, both allowing herself to be completely obliterated by capitalist desire and also continuing to perpetrate the system. In this way, her only path out is a path back in and a reinforcement of the system.

Warĩĩnga's story is often paralleled to the story of other Kenyans (like Mũturi, with whom she shares a boss)—and, specifically, with other women and sugar girls. This is done to make Warĩĩnga stand out as a representative of both the average worker's struggle and the average woman's struggle in modern Kenya. This everywoman status to Warĩĩnga is a reason that the narrator consistently reminds us that he tells Warĩĩnga's tale only for instructional purposes.

N/A

Kenya as a country is personified often throughout the book—for example, as a pregnant mother.