ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the power of children's multilingual play in literary memoirs by two Kenyan authors: Binyavanga Wainaina's One Day I Will Write About This Place and Shailja Patel's Migritude. Binyavanga Wainaina burst into literary recognition in 2002, claiming the Caine Prize for Writing with his short story "Discovering Home," the springboard for his later memoir. In 2003, Wainaina used his prize money to found Kwani? a Kenyan literary magazine. In contrast to Wainaina, Shailja Patel focuses upon the power of playful linguistic abandon that she has enjoyed only as an adult. In Migritude, children's verbal play illustrates the implication of the young into the dissemination of the ideology of the postcolonial nation-state. The very title of Patel's project, Migritude, is an act of playful splicing— a neologism, coined by Patel in order to describe the interwoven threads of her artistic mission.
