Owuor's debut novel is not short of flair as it deals with life, death, truth and love. But sometimes the poeticism goes so far as to break its own spell.
If buried memories are dust, then water binds them together and helps give them form. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's debut novel Dust works hard with that conceit, setting those two elements - sand and water - together in a tense cops-and-robbers pursuit. At stake are some of literature's loftiest themes: life, death, truth, deceit, country, and love.
The book opens with an engineer named Odidi Oganda, the story's embodiment of water, as he flees the gun-toting police through the streets of Nairobi, Kenya. He dies sputtering blood and leaking faeces. The violence inspires his family - father Nyipir, mother Akai-Ma, and sister Ajany - to examine their own pasts, each with varying shades of that same degree of violence, until deeply buried secrets are brought to the surface to face the rain. Circling the Ogandas is Isaiah Bolton, whose missing father Hugh has a suspicious connection with the family. The story weaves through major entries in Kenya's historical timeline, mixing the Mau Mau Rebellion, the 1959 assassination of Tom Mboya, and the 2007-08 post-election violence into the same thematic stew as the Oganda recipe of secrets and amnesia.
Published in late January 2014, Dust has drawn accolades from some of African literature's modern titans, including Taiye Selasi in The New York Times, as well as Binyavanga Wainaina, author and editor of the Kenyan literary journal Kwani?. To celebrate Kwani?'s recent ten-year anniversary, Owuor shared a University of Nairobi stage with Americanah author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for a double-launch.
Reviewers outside African literature circles have given the book an enthusiastic reception too. All seem to be praising Owuor for her fiery, poetic approach to prose, while the most ardent have suggested that befuddled readers are just being lazy.
Sand and water
Owuor's style certainly is a remarkable element of the book, perhaps the most. It is intensely visual, bereft of exposition, and wielded in grammatical fragments. It is writing that wants to be sensuous, gathering the five senses together for a riot of stimuli, while at the same time winking and nudging through the subtext of its themes and metaphors.
At times, it works very well. The first 17 pages vault alongside Odidi as he tries to evade the police. He reflects on a complicated relationship with his father. He pines for his girlfriend, his sister, and, with boyish resonance, his mother. "He grips his shattered right shoulder. Protrusion of bone. Blood trail. Trickle from his mouth. It is said that in the throes of battle dying men cry out for their mothers. Akai-ma, Odidi groans. She wards off ghouls and bad night entities, wrestles God, casts ancient devils into hell before their time, and kicks aside sea waves so her son will pass unhindered. Akai-ma."
Other times, it falls flat. Anxiety "flutters" like a stone. "White-streaked hairs" somehow perform a "verdant sprouting." Owuor also has an overwrought tendency to intrude on her narrative with would-be profundities, as when the "anguish was a phantom limb, raw, weeping, and invisible." Or with her meditation on the oaths of silence, which are "slow-dripping venom with their seductive promise of memory loss." Used sparingly, some of these expressions might hit home. But there are far too many of them. They snare attention and break the storyteller's spell, which is the style equivalent of an on-stage magician accidentally sawing a woman in half for real.
Debates over poetic prose often hinge on this tension between what works and what doesn't. Readers and writers who prefer a more documentarian approach believe it is the only way to fully realise characters and plot, while those more taken by abstraction see themselves as truer artists plumbing for meaning in the deep pipes of subtext and allusion. Some combination of the two is probably the best, though trickiest, approach.
Owuor, winner of the 2003 Caine Prize for Fiction and a 2005 resident of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, seems to be consciously struggling with that dichotomy. In an interview with Guernica Magazine, she said her book took over eight years to finish and that she showed an early draft to Wainaina, who told her, "Yvonne, this is crap." In the novel's acknowledgments, she thanks her editor for killing off a litany of her "darlings," which is industry speak for language choices writers adore in spite of their dysfunction. That cull, she goes on to write, brought "order into a long, long tale." More order would've been better, but there's every reason to think a second book might produce it.
In the meantime, Owuor's debut is certainly not without merit. In particular, Dust contains two reactions to death not diminished by stylistic shortcomings. One makes private investigators out of its affected. Chief among these is Ajany, who reveals one of the story's key secrets while relying on a childhood memory to sculpt clay, which is where the dust and water image patterns most meaningfully converge. By contrast, the other reaction is paranoid and self-serving, and the agents of its persuasion do their best to brush away the truth. Nyipir is one of these, though he partially redeems himself as the story draws to a close. It is that triumph of truth over corruption that comprises the book's central optimism, offering a hopeful vision of the future for a country too often sandbagged by negative news coverage.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
For further reading around the subject see:
Fiction So Popular, It's Criminal: The Rise of the Crime Novel in Africa Wainaina: One Day I Will Find My Voice Speaking About Africa: The Danger of a Single Story
Paul Carlucci is a Canada-based writer. He has reported for Think Africa Press from Ghana, Zambia, and Tanzania. He's also an author of short fiction, with stories published in numerous Canadian magazines and journals. His first book, The Secret Life of Fission, was published by Oberon Press in 2013. His second, The Highrise in Fort Fierce, comes out this fall. Learn more at www.paulcarlucci.net.
