Bloomsday Festival 2026: From Dublin to Nairobi - A Lecture by Sahara Abdi

Join us at for a special lecture by Kenyan writer Sahara Abdi on Sunday, 14 June at 3pm.

James Joyce’s Ulysses is often celebrated as a European modernist masterpiece. Reading it from a postcolonial perspective reveals resonances with the experience of colonial and postcolonial Kenya. Dublin, under British rule was not only politically constrained but culturally subdued. Joyce dramatizes these pressures through the lives of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. These texts speak to similar forms of marginalization and linguistic domination experienced in Africa.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, one of Kenya’s most important writers offers a lens for reading these resonances. His central argument in Decolonising the Mind is that colonial language is a tool of domination. “The domination of a people’s language by the language of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised.”

Separated by time, both Joyce and Ngugi are reconstructing cultural memory under colonial pressure and they represent two colonial experiences responding differently to same imperial language.

This lecture juxtaposes Joyce and Ngugi to explore how both writers represent colonial subjectivity, the politics of language, and the dignity of ordinary life, despite their different historical and geographical contexts.

Sahara Abdi is writer, a literacy advocate and the founder of , a literacy organization dedicated to fostering reading, writing, and creative expression in Northern Kenya. Through her writing, she amplifies the stories and identities of children from Northern Kenya. Her work blends storytelling and advocacy to promote literacy and representation for young readers across marginalized communities. She champions storytelling as a powerful tool for identity, belonging and social change.

The lecture is supported by the Embassy of Ireland, Kenya.

is organised by in partnership with Fáilte Ireland and the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport.

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Host or Publisher James Joyce Centre