Muthoni gives the disabled a voice

Muthoni wa Gichuru’s novel The Carving was the winner of the 2018 CODE Burt Prize for African Young Adult Literature Kenya.

The Carving is a story about a disabled boy with a talent for art who is forced to leave school and take up manual work when his mother falls ill.

His father has abandoned the family years before, but a concerned teacher intervenes and gets him back into school. Despite frequent bullying by other students, he wins an art competition that marks a turning point in his life.

People with disabilities are not commonly featured as lead characters in a children’s book.

“If literature is a reflection of society, then why do we ignore a section of our society?” Gichuru asks.

The Carving was partly inspired by her brother, who is lame, and by memories of a childhood neighbour who was severely disabled.

“They may not look like or sound like everyone else, but they are integral to any society and have a lot to contribute,” says Gichuru of people with disabilities.

Beyond her personal experiences, for the book, she carried out in-depth research on disability in Kenya and available health services because she wanted to create awareness about treatment for the disabled.

Gichuru’s storytelling skills were nurtured when she was a young girl herding the family goats in the countryside.

“The place had a lot of free space where I could roam and allow my imagination to get the better of me,” she says.

She grew up in a small village in the Nanyuki region of central Kenya.

Gichuru adds, “I learned to write stories mainly because I started reading voraciously when I was in Standard One.”

She wrote stories all through her school years, and even before completing a Bachelor’s degree in information studies, she had published her first book.

Gichuru ventured into the genre of youth literature when her husband challenged her to write a book that their young son would one day read.

She wrote Breaking the Silence, about a girl who was gang raped and tells of her experience. The book was runner-up for the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 2011, shortlisted for the Macmillan Prize for Africa and is now a school set-book in Rwanda.

To date, Gichuru has published half a dozen books and short stories targeting teenagers and younger children.

She admits to finding shorter stories for young children more difficult to write than longer works for young adults because so much needs to be captured with just a few words. “I ruminate, sometimes for weeks, before I begin to write a short story and then I rewrite the story, sometimes more than a dozen times,” says Gichuru.

Between working full-time and raising a family, Gichuru writes in the evenings and early mornings. She says she enjoys the creative process, made even sweeter by being shortlisted for a prize or winning one.

However, she says the publishing process in Kenya takes too long even after a novel has been accepted for publication.

Her love for books has been passed on to her three children who read voraciously.

“For young adult books I use my sons as a sounding board. I also write stories for my five-year old daughter, which we read together.”

The Burt award came with a cash prize of 9,000 Canadian dollars and a guaranteed purchase of 3,000 copies. The CODE Burt prize, initiated 58 years ago in Canada, is one of the few book awards focused on youth literature by writers from Africa, the Caribbean and the Native American communities of Canada.

Gichuru was shortlisted for the Burt Kenya prize in 2016 for her book Hidden Package. As the 2018 winner, she is eligible to participate in this year’s BURT regional prize for Africa, competing with winners from Tanzania, Ghana and Ethiopia.

She is currently revising The Carving while working on a new young adult manuscript.