Wangechi Mutu

on “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy

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I read Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things” many, many years ago, at a time when I was considering the idea of what home meant to me. I’d been away from home for over a decade, and yet wasn’t used to being away, was deeply homesick, missing my birth home and rethinking what family meant. I was completing my M.F.A. in sculpture at Yale University and was thinking about belonging, transience and sacrifice. I found myself working through the very large imprint made on my psyche by this book: a story of a family in India that reads like a metaphor for the entire dysfunction and history of a country. Through this, I began to piece together personal narratives to reflect larger stories about a people and their trauma. This book helped me reflect on how important the personal experience is in describing the shared, and even the universal.

Wangechi Mutu reviews “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy. Margaret Cheatham Williams

Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born artist, now based in New York. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Tate Modern, London, among many other places.