Gender Question | When the erased wife meets the restoring narrator
In grand narratives of heroes, we tend to forget about the partners, wives and children whose invisible work propagates the myth of the brilliant man
If you, like me, are on a journey to understand how and why liberal heroes must fall, I’d really recommend these two pieces of reading. One is a slightly older article about George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. The other is on N’gugi wa Thiongo’s wife, Nyambura, written recently and published on this platform.
Eric Blair, who wrote under the pseudonym of George Orwell, married Eileen, a student of English at Oxford, where she studied under JRR Tolkien, in 1936. When they met, Eileen was pursuing a Masters degree in psychology at the University College of London. Soon after their marriage, they moved into a tiny cottage in Wallington which had an outside privy. By Orwell’s own admission, Eileen’s care greatly aided the author’s life, as he often fell ill. According to at least one biographer, his writing greatly improved after marriage. And yet, not one of the six main biographers of Orwell focuses on Eileen’s contributions to his prodigious oeuvre.
We know she wrote “emendations” to his drafts, and we know she contributed to Animal Farm, his novel satirising the Soviet Union that wasn’t published till after World War II was over, though it was ready a full year before. We also learn that Eileen was a bright, precocious woman: she asked that the word “obey” be removed from her wedding vows, and in a letter to a friend soon after her wedding, she pointed out that she had to cancel her plans to visit because Orwell got ill when he received notice that she was going out.
It isn’t till one reads Sylvia Topp’s biography of Eileen Blair that we are moved to draw a picture of their domestic life — despite Orwell’s politics of proletarian living and the insistence on brotherhood that drives socialism, equality of labour did not seem to apply with the four walls of their cottage.
Eileen was there, “working, dealing with his correspondence, organising their social lives, doing all the shopping (involving a bus ride to a village three miles away) and much of the cleaning (there is, intermittently, a “char”), tackling the occasional flood, the cesspit, the house, the garden, his illnesses, the chickens, the goat and the visitors,” Anna Funder writes in the Guardian piece.
What’s more, Eileen was a working woman. When Orwell went to Spain, shortly after their wedding, as a volunteer of the Spanish Republicans to fight against the nationalist General Franco, she too joined the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), a Trotskyist party, and worked on communications during the Spanish civil war.
Yet, Orwell’s politics, so attuned to the plight of the working man and the oppressed classes of England, remained silent on the working woman. This silence must be understood. We experience it even today, more than 120 years after Orwell was born, and nearly 75 years after his death. When we don’t take the domestic work done by a woman into account at all, we only enable the myth of the hard-working man. This silence is an erasure. It denies the partner her right to be counted equally.
“Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted,” Orwell wrote in the famous collection of essays, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941), which was published at a time when the world, divided by ideologies and political systems, waged war using the economic advantage that colonialism had accorded Western nations.
Yet he failed to make a similar argument about his personal life — as Funder, author of Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, reminds us, in Homage to Catalonia (1938), a book that detailed their time in Spain fighting alongside the Republicans for the socialist cause, the writer mentions Eileen 37 times, not by name but as his “wife”. “No character can come to life without a name. But from a wife, which is a job description, all can be stolen. I wondered what she felt as she typed those pages,” Funder writes.
The erasure across histories
In fact, it is an erasure that Mukoma wa Ngugi revolted against when he outed his father, the famed Kenyan post-colonial novelist, playwright and theorist Ngugi wa Thiong’o in a tweet on March 13.
“My father @NgugiWaThiongo_ physically abused my late mother — he would beat her up. Some of my earliest memories are of me going to visit her at my grandmother’s where she would seek refuge. But with that said it is the silencing of who she was that gets me. Ok — I have said it,” Mukoma posted on X.
What was this silence that he was referring to?
In November 2022, Mukoma wrote a post on X, and it’s now pinned to his profile page, which means it’s the first thing you see when you go to his page.
“It hurts to see my late mother, Nyambura (my daughter is named after her) being systemically erased from the @NgugiWaThiongo_ story. We literally (of course) and figuratively would not be here if it was not for her keeping us glued together through the political persecutions,” he wrote.
Ngugi, as Anushree Majumdar wrote for HT Premium, was one of the behemoths of African and Kenyan literature. Now 86, and a resident of the United States, the writer was subjected to political and colonial violence, even as he advocated the overthrow of what he called the “colonisation of the mind” — his first novel which came out in 1964 was in English, his subsequent novels were written in the language he spoke growing up, Gikuyu. On December 31, 1977, he was arrested and spent a year in prison. Thereafter, he spent over 25 years in exile, returning to his homeland only in 2004, where he and his wife, Njeeri, were attacked by a group of masked men. Yet, Ngugi’s activism has remained unabated.
In an interview to LA Times, Ngugi explained the reason behind his 1977 arrest:
“In December 1977, I was arrested and placed in a maximum-security prison because I had participated in the play I Will Marry When I Want, which was performed by peasants and workers from the local village in Gĩkũyũ [and which Ngũgĩ co-wrote with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ]. There I was, in prison, thinking about it all. The leader who put me in prison was Jomo Kenyatta, himself a Gĩkũyũ speaker.”
Kenyatta was the president of independent Kenya, and detained Ngugi, who was then chairman of the University of Nairobi's literature department under regulations that echoed the laws of other African countries, which permitted the state to detain a person indefinitely without charge or possibility of appeal if his views do not coincide with those of the government.
Without a doubt, Ngugi was a hero — and he and his first partner, Nyambura, suffered through exile and the worst of both colonial and political violence, living also through the Moi dictatorship after Kenyatta died.
“We lived through the horrors of the dictatorship with an exiled father and an embattled mother with six kids doing as best as she could. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of a dictatorship will know I am not telling the full story here. There were days when we did not have enough to eat or enough school fees (yes, I was sent home on many occasions because of this). But in the midst of all that she called a family meeting and said, on the pain of her death, she will never want us to disown our father just to get relief from the dictatorship – as some of the other families had done,” an article in Brittle Paper quoted Mukoma as saying.
In telling Ngugi’s story, his enduring heroism, we elide over the troubling aspects. Mukoma’s claims should make us sit up and take notice of the people who live with heroes and their experiences. In the invisible, another kind of story waits to be told.
Dhamini Ratnam, editor in charge of HT Premium, writes about gender, sexuality and our blind spots.