with Kenyan Novelist, Yvonne Owuor

Summary

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's Dust (2014) scrutinizes carefully the multi-generational cycles of violence that have featured in Kenyan history. Rather than posit this in atavistic notions of tribalism, however, Owuor is interested in how tyranny can itself become a ritual: an act that is repeated seemingly with its own momentum. Kenya, as a nation-state that gained political self-rule from European colonial masters, nurtures a deep residue of state violence. Dust takes seriously the idea that human and ecological events are connected; that in fact these two influence each other. Without presenting a voyeuristic attitude towards violence, Owuor deftly invokes human mortality. The novel's plot, however, shows that death is not haphazard, either. Habits of impunity can be strongly entrenched, whether this is for colonial forces stamping out a peasant Land & Freedom (Mau Mau) rebellion, or twenty-first century crime-fighting units in Nairobi that shoot to kill. Impunity. Mortality. Habits. These three elements haunt the text. Owuor's Dust stretches its canvas from Turkana, Northern Kenya, to Brazil. Her characters occupy these spaces in ways that increasingly get us to question contemporary representations of lands and landscapes. The eponymous dust develops into a motif that connects humanity to the ecosphere. In Dust, landscapes come alive. Topographical features are portrayed as living entities, which I think greatly advances our ongoing discussions on how to mitigate climate change. Owuor asks that we re-imagine the oceans, polar ice caps, deserts, lakes, and rivers not as inanimate objects that we act on, but as subjects – and agents – in their own right. In this wide-ranging conversation, Owuor threads together the binary thinking developed during the Age of Reason with a long history of separating culture from nature, arts from sciences, body from soul. In this sense, her writing seeks to undermine an ontology of dualism. Owuor's second novel, The Dragonfly Sea (2019), is an expansive and lyrical ode to the cultural, spiritual, economic, and migratory patterns of the Indian Ocean. A third novel, tentatively titled The Long Decay, is in progress.