Fire Symbol Analysis

In Petals of Blood, fire represents how repression and shame can lead to oppressive violence—with unexpected consequences. Fire appears early in the book, in a newspaper article explaining that three Kenyan businessmen, Mzigo, Chui, and Kimeria, have died by arson in the Kenyan town Ilmorog. The book then flashes back to the earlier lives of various people of interest in the murder. The novel reveals that Ilmorog’s schoolteacher Munira, after paying for his first sexual experience as a teenager, felt so much shame and religious guilt that he built an effigy of the sex worker’s house and set it on fire. When he failed to put the fire out completely, the resulting blaze nearly burned down a barn. This incident links sexual repression and shame to fire and its out-of-control consequences. Later, Ilmorog’s barmaid Wanja tells Munira that her cousin’s estranged husband—who used to beat her cousin and steal her cousin’s money, until her cousin left him—set her aunt’s hut on fire and killed her by arson while trying to murder his wife. Wanja’s story connects the symbol of fire, representing sexual repression, to the violent oppression of women. The novel thus implies that men’s sexual repression or shame leads them to attack women. The novel’s climax bears out this implication. Though the police suspected that the labor organizer Karega may have killed the businessmen, Munira eventually confesses that he burned down the brothel where the businessmen died because he wanted to kill Wanja, his ex-lover and the brothel’s manager. Munira was trying to “save” Karega, another ex-lover of Wanja’s, from her sexual attractions, which he believed to be demonically powerful. Munira expresses his religiously inflected fear and hatred of Wanja’s sexuality by trying to set her on fire—again, fire symbolizes the violent outbursts that sexual repression can occasion. Yet Munira’s fire kills three businessmen, not Wanja, so that fire also symbolizes how uncontrollable and unpredictable such violence can be.