The Unvanquished
‘Dust,’ by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
By TAIYE SELASIF
Photo: Thomas Langdon
In 2011, writing in the Book Review about a memoir by Binyavanga Wainaina, Alexandra Fuller opened with a marvelous plea: “Harried reader, I’ll save you precious time. Skip this review and head directly to the bookstore.”
Harried reader, skip this one, too, and go buy Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s “Dust.” In this dazzling novel you will find the entirety of human experience — tearshed, bloodshed, lust, love — in staggering proportions. If, however, you’ve got the time, consider with me what Fuller wrote next: “Although written by an East African and set in East and Southern Africa, Wainaina’s book is not just for Afrophiles.”
Reader, I worry. I worry that you, too, may subscribe to the logic behind that telling “although” — i.e., books written by African novelists should interest Afrophiles only. I struggle to imagine a review that starts, “Although written by a New Zealander, Eleanor Catton’s book is not for Kiwi lovers only.” Yes, Owuor’s luscious debut is set in Kenya. Yes, the novel concerns itself with that country’s blood-soaked history — from the Mau Mau uprisings of the early 1950s to the political assassination of 1969 to the postelection violence of 2007. But should this limit its readership? Allow me to state the unobvious: Although written by an East African, “Dust” is not just for Afrophiles. It is for bibliophiles.
Only the reader who truly loves books — books full to brimming with imagery — will appreciate the magic Owuor has made of the classic nation-at-war novel. With splintered lyricism, she tells the story of the Oganda family: Moses Odidi, a young, brilliant, rugby-playing engineer who is brutally murdered in the prologue; his younger sister, Arabel Ajany, a gifted painter who returns from Brazil to bury her brother, then switches tack and scours Nairobi to “find” him; their father, Aggrey Nyipir, an elegant gravedigger turned cattle herder, once the right-hand man to the rogue British officer Hugh Bolton; Bolton’s son, Isaiah William, arriving in Kenya to search for his father; and Akai Lokorijom, the devastatingly beautiful, AK-47-wielding woman who unites them all. These are fragile, passionate human beings, most of them guilty of righteous violence, all of them bearing wounds and hopes that will lead to death or redemption. The richness of the plot alone will challenge a lazy reader. But the visceral lusciousness of the prose will thrill a lover of language.
“Wuoth Ogik was once a sanctuary crammed with the music of rangeland life,” Owuor writes of the Oganda family’s patch of Kenya: “a father’s hollow cough, herders’ sibilant whistles, day handing over life to the night, a mother’s sudden, haunted cry, a brother singing water songs to camels. What endures? A father sighing Aiee! Talkative shadows, crumbling walls, scent of dung and dream, reflections of long-ago clattering of polished Ajua stones falling into a brown wooden board of 14 holes; the lives of cows, sheep, goats and camels; three mangy beige-and-black descendants of a fierce mongrel herding dog with a touch of hyena. What endures? Elastic time.”
Owuor’s prose is a physical expression of the landscape it evokes: raw, fragmented, dense, opaque. Beautiful, but brutally so. There’s a sort of lawless power at work in her text, a refreshing break from the clinical reserve so beloved by American M.F.A. programs. This language sweats. It bleeds. Critics may object to the novel’s unapologetic density, or find the characters’ ruminations unfashionably “emotional.” I tend to think Owuor’s style evinces a rare and brave choice: to feel, and to make her readers feel, to strand us from our intelligence. Ajany, frustrated in her quest to solve the mystery of her brother’s death, shuts herself inside at one point, “weary of scrubbing tears away.” So too, we sense, Owuor has had enough of putting on a brave face. This is a novel about characters who let themselves cry when circumstance demands it.
“Dust” moves as the human mind moves: forward and backward, incoherent, indulgent, lingering on the light on a tree, sliding into murky reverie. Owuor repeats her characters’ names — to an excessive extent, it might seem, were she not so lovingly protecting them from the namelessness of the forgotten. Ultimately, the disjointed prose mirrors brilliantly the fragmented nature of both memory-keeping and nation-building. This is form as content, a text in the shape of its subject.
That said, if you’re looking for a tidy primer on Kenya’s postcolonial politics, read Wikipedia, not “Dust.” Owuor has said: “I wish to understand something about my country, one that murders the best of its own. What kind of nation gets terrified of a great imagination? What kind of people annihilate holders of a persistent and transcending dream?” This is a novel about Kenya, certainly, but one that leaves open the question of what Kenya is and whom it may kill. Owuor tells her country’s stories — and they are plural: urban, rural, Indian, English, Luos, Kikuyu — with bitter honesty. There are no blameless Kenyans in “Dust.” A noble man buries innocent victims; a suffering wife shacks up with a servant; a visionary genius consorts with thieves. There are no heroes here.
There are no African archetypes, either. When Ajany sleeps with Isaiah, as we know she will, we’re spared the conventions of interracial romance in favor of raw despair. This is not a “Kenyan Woman” sleeping with a “British Man,” but a brotherless sister huddling for warmth with a fatherless son. So, too, when Nyipir packs for his long-awaited journey to Burma, his erstwhile Kenyan torturer in tow, we witness not enlightened forgiveness but hardened, humbled men. And Akai-ma — Hugh’s lover, Nyipir’s wife, Odidi and Ajany’s mother — ranks among the most inimitable female characters in modern literature. These are fractured characters all, desperate for tenderness, an end to silence. The greatest mercy shown in “Dust” is the telling of the truth. “Concentrated silence drowned the hardest of men,” Owuor writes. “The body of a human cannot live without kindness. . . . This is what weakens men.”
Amid the bloody shootings, political sleaziness and gruesome secrets of Owuor’s Kenya, kindness — however fearful, however fragile — does exist. Of course it does. As Owuor asks in her 2003 short story “Weight of Whispers” (which won Africa’s prestigious Caine Prize): “To be human is to be intrinsically, totally, resolutely good. Is it not?” There are no conquering heroes in “Dust,” but there are unconquerable dreamers, Kenyans who share the author’s own hurt-hardened brand of hope. “I think about the dreamers we have killed,” Owuor told an interviewer once. “And yet, if we stop dreaming big dreams for this land, for ourselves, for each other, then we have killed each other.” Perhaps what most endures, at the end of “Dust,” are the big dreams Owuor has for her broken subjects.
(article was published in the New York Times February 28, 2014)
DUST
By Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
369 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.