For this post, I read a short passage from African writer Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place, which is a memoir about his life and travels through Africa; he strives to depict his homeland as it is, and mocks the popular view of Africa as a desolate land. In the passage I read, Wainaina (who I referred to as the “Narrator” in my network graph) is at home and is struggling with the relationship with his parents (denoted as “Baba” and “Mum” in the graph), schooling, and politics. He travels with his friend, Kariuki, through various African towns and interacts with several townspeople, for example the local chief.
The nodes, defined as characters in the story, are connected by edges, to which I defined as any conversational interactions that occurred–whether the characters talked to one another. This became a bit hazy because the writer did not clearly indicate direct dialogue at times, and implied that there was some sort of conversation occurring. For example, when the local chief, narrator, and Kariuki went to the butcher, there were not specifications on who did the talking and only implied the conversation. I still included it as conversational interaction because how else would they have acquired meat? Additionally, there were clusters of characters who were present in the story, such as a group of women who the local chief interacted with. There was no direct indication of a conversation, but again, it implied dialogue.
However, what is illuminated is the centrality of the narrator. If I were not to read the story, and were to only at this graph (with “Narrator” changed to “Wainaina”), I could tell right away that this story revolves around the perspective and interactions of this character. The graph depicts the story being filtered through the views of this central character, that is so interconnected with so many other nodes–he or she is the driving force of the story.
Nevertheless, again, this network graph lacks the ability to show how much–the depth of–interaction occurred between the narrator and the other characters. While it does illustrate that there is a conversational interaction that has happened, it does not portray the length of the conversations, the importance of the topics, and whether those interactions had any influence over the nodes involved. To solve this, there may have been other meaningful ways to create this network graph that I have overlooked, and other tools that do a better job at capturing the human experience, especially in such potent documentation such as a memoir.
