Why university dons should take a second look at Owuor’s ‘Dust’

Author Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor gave a speech during a celebratory event to mark KWANI?'s 10 year Anniversary at the KU business centre conference November 28, 2013. PHOTO | EMMA NZIOKA | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • The scatological expletive mavi ya kuku (chicken poop) is already part of the discourse. It is associated with the Kibaki administration (2002-2013).

  • As Ajany and her family transport Odidi’s body to northern Kenya for burial on December 30, 2007, “on the ground, that night, in a furtive ceremony, beneath a half moon, a chubby man will mutter an oath that will render him the president of a burning,

  • dying country.”

  • It requires little imagination for a Kenyan to know who the “chubby man” is.

If like Kenya’s literary scholars you’re allergic to complex works of art, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s debut novel might not be an ideal book for you. Titled Dust, the winner of this year’s Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Fiction, the fine novel demands of its reader’s a huge amount of patience. 

It is the story of Ajany Oganda investigating the life of her departed brother, Odidi Oganda. A member of a criminal gang in Nairobi, Odidi is killed in a hail of bullets on December 27, 2007 after a botched heist in Nairobi.

Ajany returns from abroad to bury her brother and piece together their family history. In the process, her story moves back and forth to trace the histories of violence, betrayal, and displacement that bedevil the Odidi family and the Kenyan nation at large.

Muddying the post-colonial waters, Owuor presents Odidi and Ajany’s father, Nyipir, as having been complicit in suppressing the agitation for Kenyan independence as well as profiting from the instability in northern Kenya.

The colonialists and the colonised have quite a lot in common.

The novel traces the major events in post-independence Kenya, a nation marked by more horrors than hopes. There is some love and inter-ethnic exchange, but we encounter betrayal and murder at every turn in the story. After the assassination of Tom Mboya in 1969 Kenya’s official languages become “English, Kiswahili and Silence.”

In Dust, Owuor has crafted an allusive novel, not only referring to real historical events and personalities but also to other texts. The novel is representative of post-2007 Kenyan fiction in many ways.

The scatological expletive mavi ya kuku (chicken poop) is already part of the discourse. It is associated with the Kibaki administration (2002-2013).

As Ajany and her family transport Odidi’s body to northern Kenya for burial on December 30, 2007, “on the ground, that night, in a furtive ceremony, beneath a half moon, a chubby man will mutter an oath that will render him the president of a burning,

dying country.”

It requires little imagination for a Kenyan to know who the “chubby man” is.

If Ngugi wa Thiong’o conjured Kenya as a literary nation in his A Grain of Wheat (1967) and the magnum opus Petals of Blood (1977), Owuor has captured in this stunning novel the despair that still structures the 21st-century Kenya.

This is a country whose main characteristics are violence, death and displacement. As reviewer for newspapers, I spend a lot of time looking for mistakes in the novels I read, mainly to shield readers from bad works.

NOT A SINGLE FAULT

But I couldn’t find a single fault in Owuor’s Dust,  a novel written by the 2003 winner of the Caine Prize who has also held a full fellowship at the 47th session of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

One may accuse her Ajany of being a Luo nationalist, just as most of Ngugi’s characters are Kikuyu nationalists.

She seems to go along well with people from other parts of the world, but not with non-Luo Kenyans. She is a product of her time; the post-independence leaders have ensured that positive interactions among Kenyans of different backgrounds are minimal.

By locating the Oganda family’s home in Northern Kenya, where characters who identify as Luo perform camel songs, the novel suggests the possibilities of a true intra-Kenyan cosmopolitanism.

Even Odidi’s father, Nyipir (the one from Pir) may never be able to go back to his unpolluted ethnic identity in the Eden-like Luo mythical past that is Pir.

The word “Oganda” connotes both beans and the society. The Oganda family, then, is not only a microcosm of the nation, but is also the source of life and nourishment needed to ensure a Kenyan future. The novel is full of action and can easily be adapted for the screen.

But its power lies in its syntactic dissidence, suggesting in its deviation from grammatical rules the need to defy conventions that shackle us to corruption and bad governance.  

Since Kibera’s Voices in the Dark (1971), Dust is to me the most experimental Kenyan novel. Ngugi started to experiment with modernistic techniques in A Grain of Wheat (1967), but reverted to realism in Petals of Blood (1977).

A cunningly populist writer, Ngugi doesn’t experiment with language the way Kibera and Owour do; his experiments rely on making the work imitate the speech rhythms of the ordinary folk. Grace Ogot doesn’t deviate a lot from at the linguistic level the way Owuor does in this magnificent offering. 

Rather, our foundational Kenyan writers use grammatical sentences and only experiment with para-linguistic structures (e.g., symbolism, plotting, unreliable narrators and humour).

Owuor takes the bull by the horns in a way other writers haven’t.  Like her predecessors’ works, her novel evokes oral story telling. The opening formula in Luo orature, chon gi lala (once upon time), begins the story and is repeated later in the narrative. The story is presented as an oral performance rather than a scripted novel. 

But unlike Ogot and Ngugi, who make sure their non-English words are comprehensible to an English reader, Owour doesn’t translate or gloss most of similar words, phrase, sentences, and song stanzas. She suggests that this is primarily a local novel for local readers.  

Unlike in Ngugi or Ogot’s work, fragmentary non-sentences punctuate the narrative through Dust to signal violence and the trauma the characters have gone through.

And this is where we need to be careful.  In a world where well-written works are never popular with academicians, Dust might suffer the fate of similar ones before it.

Popularity of a text does not matter as much as its acceptance within certain institutions; David Maillu’s My Dear Bottle and After 4.30 were popular in the 1970s, but are now out of print. 

Despite winning the highest national prize, Owuor’s Dust has received short shrift in Kenya. It is not surprising that most of the reviews of the novel have appeared in Western presses, where Owuor was compared with Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene and other DWEM (Dead White European Male) writers.

This is no accident. Since Chinua Achebe bad-mouthed modernist experiments as a Eurocentric temptation towards art for art’s sake in some of his essays in Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975), African critics have been suspicious of works that use language too creatively. 

DON'T ALLOW DUST TO GO BACK TO DUST

Almost all experimental works from the region similar to Dust — Potent Ash by Leonard Kibera and Samuel Kahiga (1968), Kibera’s Voices in the Dark (1970),  Robert Serumaga’s Majangwa (1971), Kenneth Watene’s Dedan Kimathi (1974), and Rebeka Njau’s Ripples in the Pool (1975) — have been let to go out of print. 

Attempts to kill the dramas of Francis Imbuga and John Ruganda at the height of vulgar Marxism in the Kenyan academy in the 1970s failed because Ruganda and Imbuga were part of the literary establishment in the 1980s. Owuor is not part of this group.

At least Dust is lucky it is from the innovative Kwani Trust and Penguin (though the now-out-of-print Ripples in the Pool was at one point published by Heinemann in their African Writers Series.).

In its experiments, Dust is best appreciated in the academy. Yet it does not fit there either. While one would expect academicians to go for complex novels, our university-based critics prefer openly didactic stories.

In the post-Ngugi literature departments, the tendency was to do formalist analysis of the texts to avoid political commentary that would rub the Nyayo dictatorship the wrong way. 

Although inspired by New Criticism, the “stylistic” readings since the 1980s have not been interested in meanings between the lines or underneath the words; they are linguistic surface descriptions of the obvious, favouring canonical texts whose meanings are uncontested, such as Chinua Achebe’s novels. 

Experimental works like Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,Fragments, and Why Are We So Blest or Dambudzo Marechera’s prose were avoided like the plague. And they still are. 

But Dust is too precious to be allowed to go back to dust like Potent Ash went back to ash before it was through readings.