Author Yvonne Owuor reminds us that creative writing is the conscience of society

Author and 2003 Caine Prize winner Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor at a celebratory event to mark publisher Kwani?'s 10-year anniversary at the Kenyatta University in Nairobi on November 28, 2013. PHOTO | EMMA NZIOKA | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Writers often imagine into existence characters whose very standing in society disturbs conscience and force us to rethink and re-evaluate our very behaviour and manners.
  • When we send out word, inviting papers for the conference to celebrate her work, we did not anticipate Maria N. Segero, an A-Level student at Aga Khan Academy, who presented a paper on silences as political weapon.

This week we took time out to celebrate creative writing as embodied in the work of Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, one of Kenya’s young writers whose book Dust has been a major success.

This seems on the face of it something of an anomaly. Yvonne has one novel to her name, written and published in 2013.

Why would anyone imagine that this singular publication is worth celebrating? Why would anyone think that a young writer like Yvonne deserves more than a passing mention?

The truth of the matter is that we live in a society where being young and creative does not elicit the kind of ululation that should attend to such rare youthful achievement. Our society is conservative in this regard; for us, celebrations come at the end of a career not at the start.

We think otherwise. We think that creative writing is a big deal. It is the space where imagination is nurtured and unleashed, where an inner sense of purpose is discovered and can be articulated and where convictions are revealed.

Creative writing historically has embodied and shaped conscience; spoken truth to power in ways history and historians rarely do. Writers often imagine into existence characters whose very standing in society disturbs conscience and force us to rethink and re-evaluate our very behaviour and manners.

It is precisely because of this that characters in creative works carry a rare capacity to say what the historical archive rarely captures. We know those characters in a novel when we read it; we imagine in our own heads what the writer is saying and understand the licence the writer holds to shape thought and whip society out of its blindness to social justice. Creative writing is ultimately where memory is invoked.

Yvonne has cut out a niche as a compelling conscience of society. When we send out word, inviting papers for the conference to celebrate her work, we did not anticipate Maria N. Segero, an A-Level student at Aga Khan Academy, who presented a paper on silences as political weapon.

But in some interesting way, it is young Maria who went straight to what Yvonne represents for many of us. She asked: “If your child asked you about what happened to Tom Mboya, JM Kariuki, Robert Ouko, or Pio Gama Pinto, what will you answer?”

This rhetorically posed question elicited silence, a typical Kenyan reaction that Yvonne pithily captures in Dust when she states that Kenya’s official languages are English, Kiswahili and Silence.

But there was also memory. As a country, we have preferred silence over memory. Yvonne set out to provoke our memory and remind us that we have a history of calculated amnesia. It was, therefore, apt that Maria Segero concluded with the question: will we continue to stockpile these weapons of silence?

The overall reason for convening a conference to reflect on Yvonne's work is that she has earned our admiration as a moral compass and conscience of society.

We did not gather simply to celebrate what she has written; we also gathered to celebrate the potential she embodies, the shining light she represents for younger writers, the motivation she elicits in others who feel their untapped potential. She embodies our dreams for a different nation, one that she writes about from Turkana, for instance.

A few months ago, our colleague from the University of Johannesburg, Dr Pinkie Mekgwe, wondered aloud what it is we do in Kenya to be able to produce many young, brilliant creative writers? I must ask what it is that others outside Kenya see in our capacity for creativity that we Kenyans rarely see? We celebrated Yvonne because Kenya must see what others outside Kenya already see.

Godwin R. Murunga is a senior research fellow in the Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi