Author and 2003 Caine Prize winner Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (center) who
was celebrating the release of her new book, Dust , gave a speech during
one in a series of celebratory events to mark KWANI's 10 year
Anniversary at the KU business center conference room on the 28th of
November 2013. Photo/Emma Nzioka
Sitting with Yvonne Owuor under a garden
table soaking up the morning sun, I am struck at the similarity between
her and her female characters.
A paradox of fragility
and strength, wide curious eyes with a playful glint lurking at the
back, and, perhaps most interestingly, the “otherworldliness” a lot her
female characters have. The likeness goes beyond their character traits
alone — many are slight, slender-limbed, tall and dark, the very
description of Yvonne.
Arabel Ajany and Akai-ma in
Yvonne’s newly released novel Dust are clearly touched by something
beyond the here and now. They see beyond the surface of things, are
extraordinarily sensitive, have a strong link with the instinctive and
supernatural.
The meek and girlish dispositions of
Lune and Chichi in Weight of Whispers, just as ethereal as Dust’s Ajany,
are paradoxically saved by this fragility, knowing when to push pride
and shame aside and surrender to the simple will to live.
This
is unlike Kuseremane, the male in their midst who wants things done in
his stubborn rigid way, a fact that ends in his downfall.
Push comes to shove
In
a sense, the eventual actions of these female characters prove them
more reality-centred and grounded than the men themselves, belying the
fragility and need for protection that they nevertheless evoke.
In
them lies the Jungian archetype of the Divine Child, fragile,
vulnerable and weak on the surface, yet when push comes to shove, strong
enough to become the sources of salvation for those in their midst.
I
first met Yvonne when working as a volunteer at the 2006 Kwani?
literary festival. By the time I met her, she had won the Caine Prize,
been awarded Eve Woman of the Year, and been on the cover of numerous
glossy magazines and newspapers.
She had “Star” written all over her and I, fresh out of college, was terrified about how to behave in her presence.
It
was thus interesting to notice that she was anything but the diva. If
anything, she was silent and rather introverted. Beyond the occasional
smile she would flash, she pretty much kept to herself.
It was only years down the line that I got to see another side of Yvonne: playful, mischievous with a wild sense of humour.
In
a writer’s conference in Frankfurt in early 2011, we spent more time
scribbling and passing notes to each other, occasionally diving under
the table to hide and muffle laughs as we imagined that Nairobi had been
taken over by green aliens, than listening to anything the esteemed
scholars had to say.
Gritty topics of genocide
But
behind Yvonne’s own easy going, occasionally cheery and amiable
disposition is a strong intensity which is perhaps most apparent through
her writing. It is one not afraid to face the hard facts and messiness
of what it means to be human.
Not sappy stories of
everlasting romance and eternal happy-ever-afters does she chase after,
it is the gritty topics of genocide, tragic falls from grace,
heart-wrenching betrayals, shattered dreams that span her repertoire.
At
a recent event, Binyavanga Wainaina spoke of being accosted by a
Nigerian writer who averred that of all the winners since the inception
of the Caine Prize in 2000, Yvonne’s short story was the best ever
written.
It’s not just the weight of her themes, but
the style of her writing that makes it stand out. Dazzling phrases such
as “God’s dazzling darkness”, “Rumours of sorcery slithered across the
darkness”, “Music and painting bandaged soul holes”, or “Ajany learned
to paint, covered shame with vivid colours.”
The Caine
Prize judges cited awarding the winning prize to Weight of
Whispers based on the “subtle and suggestive way it dramatises the
condition of the refugee and also successfully incorporates so many
large issues.” If any criticism were to be made of her work, it would be
that there is not more of it to explore.
Yvonne rose
to literary fame in 2003 when she won the Caine Prize for African
writing, the second and last Kenyan to have done so since.
Apart
from this short story award, another of her short stories, “The Knife
Grinder’s Tale”, was turned into a short film going on to win an award
at the San Francisco film festival for Best Short Film in 2007.
As
if a handmaiden to her writing is Yvonne’s spirit of wanderlust that
has seen her flit across spaces, countries and continents, working,
curiosity and the hunger to learn, opening her up to fields as varied as
IT, film, arts administration, environment and cultural conservation.
Apart
from her Arts degree in Linguistics and History from Kenyatta
University, Yvonne studied film in South Africa at Cape Town Film and
Television School, going on to a Masters of Arts in TV and Video for
Development at the University of Reading in Britain on a Chevening
scholarship.
With the book out, Yvonne feels on a
creative roll, further enhanced by what she terms as the gift life has
given her, of going to the University of Queensland on a creative
writing scholarship in early 2012. She is currently based in Australia
until the end of her course next year.
“It was the gift
of two-and-a-half years of doing nothing but blissfully writing. Dust
had been forced to evolve between what I thought were my real jobs —
developing a new curriculum at the Aga Khan University and directing the
Zanzibar International Film festival,” she says.
Yvonne
had begun writing Dust in 2005, where it had been inspired by the
constitutional referendum of the same year, only to find herself
re-writing it after the 2007 post-election violence.
“The
post-election crisis changed the story, the character of the young man
and the extrajudicial killing involved. I was curious about a nation
that kills its young after it uses them. It’s a story about lost dreams,
the idealism that destroys the people it carries,” she says.
Indeed,
dreams and ideals are big on Yvonne’s agenda in this particular book,
perhaps the far opposite of the question of adjusting to cold reality
seen in Weight of Whispers. This duality of striving to be alive to
reality yet at the same time holding onto dreams is the challenge her
writing throws to the floor for readers.
“I think about
the dreamers we have killed, people like Tom Mboya, who in his short
time here, changed the course of a nation. And yet, if we stop dreaming
big dreams for this land, for ourselves, for each other, then we have
killed each other,” she says.
Fear of excellence
Yvonne
goes beyond the Kenyan borders, looking into the African continent.
“There seems to be a human fear of certain transcendence, a fear of
excellence. We kill our most precious, those who are able to see beyond.
People like Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba, Tom Mboya. The country
needs to find a way of naming its ghosts and apologise to the dream and
these dreamers it has killed off.”
Moses Odidi Oganda, a
central character in Dust, snapped after seeing the connection between
government corruption and economic inflation.
Getting
kicked out of his lucrative engineering company for refusing to be party
to a scheme where his company colluded with the government to swindle
citizens, Moses refused to remain silent.
He went
round the city passing a petition for people to sign to stop this. The
resultant disappointment about people’s apathy turned him to crime,
which in turn led to his death.
While Dust deals with
silences of Kenya’s past, the author sees a connection between being
able to tell stories and to break silence.
“I imagine
art as another way of speaking, the way the silences can be expressed.
You can decide to turn it to something else but its primary role is to
give voice and witness.”
The questions she posed about
Kenya in her public lecture at Kenyatta University last November were
direct and unflinching, inspiring the audience to rise in a sombre
standing ovation, as if in haunted reflection.
She
invoked the ghosts of Tom Mboya, JM Kariuki, Alexander Muge, Pio Gama
Pinto, Robert Ouko and the thousands that died in the 2007/8 clashes,
deaths that have since been papered over.
“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? Why?”
Accept and move on
One
would say that only a child, a naive innocent would ask questions like
these, would refuse to accept the statements of “accept and move on” and
“that’s life”.
It, however, could be argued that the
refusal to probe these questions is what makes the country continually
“lurch from one incomplete and painful episode to another, without the
relief of resolution or denouement”, as she put it.
Harper
Lee’s seminal To Kill a Mockingbird makes use of a child narrator,
Scout, whose childish understanding cannot comprehend why one race would
want to lord it over another, expecting everyone to be fair and just as
she was taught by her father.
The questions Scout
asked presented new possibilities to question what it meant to be human
in America in the period around the civil rights movement, and strive to
uphold human dignity.
Perhaps if as a nation we are
to stumble upon the Biblical “kingdom of heaven” in the form of a more
effectively working society, it will only happen if we look for it with
the combination of child-eyed wonder and hard-nosed reality Yvonne
champions.
Even with the publication of Dust, Yvonne is
working on her second novel right now. She advises aspiring writers to
write and refuse to allow the distractions around them to consume them.
The
only regret she has in her writing life was starting late. “I wish I
had been less afraid and started this sooner. Maybe everything has a
process, but I wish I had walked into this with greater strength much
sooner.”
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