Symbol, setting, and the architecture of decay: Tragic realism in selected short stories of Nairobi Noir

Abstract

The article contends that decay in some short stories from Nairobi Noir, edited by Peter Kimani, is not an incidental or purely individual phenomenon but a traceable outcome of historical events: colonial urbanism, colonial urban planning and the internalisation of colonial power, as well as post-independence governance failures such as state violence and ethnic profiling. Drawing on New Historicism, the article reads ‘The Hermit in the Helmet’, ‘Have Another Roti’ and ‘She Dug Two Graves’ as literature that responds to Nairobi’s spatial heritage of colonialism and its political legacy from the post-independence era, before articulating the ways in which ‘economic inequality’ is dramatised in the anthology’s subtexts by ‘Say You Are Not My Son’ and ‘Andaki’, and the pathways out of decay that these works collectively imagine.