The Dragonfly Sea, the latest novel by Yvonne Owuor accurately captures a convergence between the past and the present in Africa.

It is a distinctive presentation of the history of a continent riddled with struggles to overcome external and internal forces that have condemned the black people, but has not broken their resilient spirit.

Owuor, the Caine Prize winner who also authored Dust, does not disappoint. Her latest novel reads like an extended poem; rich with literary devices and flowing seamlessly as it unravels actual and imagined experiences of Africa.

The literary text follows the lives of three key characters and in the process, summarises what defines African history through transition in education, language acquisition, religion, and concept of time and the elusive question of boundaries in relation to the subject of globalisation.

The novel is set in Pate Island, itself a symbol of isolation, but also stretches to other places. The narrative revolves around the lead character Ayaana, who lives with her mother and later finds her ‘father’, an experience that shapes her future.

Other experiences that shape her life include an encounter with a religious extremist, a cultural emissary from China and her trip to the Far East. All her experiences depict external intrusion by other cultural and economic powers (and even a present reality of Kenya’s marriage with China), while her trip to the Far East reflects the unending migration of Africans to other worlds.

Apparently, three characters, including seven year-old Ayaana, her ‘father’ Muhindi who stands in on behalf of her real runaway father, and her mother Munira, a lustful sorceress, keep the narrative rolling.

Hopeless state

The novel opens with Ayaana in a hopeless state of waiting for her father. She is holding a white kitten in a symbolic demonstration of clutching on to false hope. The ‘white’ in kitten can also illustrate foreignness of the being. Also, waiting in itself by the character is a metaphor.

Ayaana has never seen the man or heard about him, yet she waits. She has been waiting for days for the figure she has been missing in her life. She is not the only someone trapped in a state of waiting: Her ‘father’ Muhidin as it later emerges is in a futile state of optimism. He is desperate to pursue knowledge about the world. He has some maps written in cryptic language and also an emblem of archaic compass.

He knows the tools he has will not help him much and even tries to assuage his curiosity by repeatedly saying, “It is nothing,” yet he reaches out for the book and compass.

By extension, Owuor echoes the concept of absurdity espoused by Samuel Beckett in his play, Waiting for Godot. It is a drama of two old men under a tree waiting for Godot, who has all the time been doing nothing, yet, ironically, cannot find time to meet the duo. It defies common sense. What keeps a person waiting for something that is obviously unbecoming? What goes on in the mind of people to deny the obvious?

Like Ayaana, Muhidin’s life is fractured after a troubled childhood. We meet him at the age of 14, orphaned and brought up by his uncle who, together with his wife, mistreat him. Due to the suffering, he develops a strange feeling of homesickness for an unknown place.

In essence, Owuor seems to philosophise on expectations versus reality. When people desire what they have been deprived, they seek to cover the void by whatever is available, no wonder Ayaana settles on Muhidin as a father.

But what makes Ayaana desire to have a father? The novel depicts the mistreatment she receives in school before fleeing. Society constantly reminds her of what she does not have and instills a feeling of guilt in her. In other words, Owuor demonstrates how social forces from within and beyond the borders have pushed African countries into an endless pursuit to create an image as constructed by outside forces.

Then there is the issue of Ayaana, a child character struggling with asthma. Owuor is not the first writer to use asthma as a narrative strategy. William Golding in Lord of the Flies has also used it to demonstrate the frailty of human life.

In Owuor’s novel, the condition demonstrates the frailty of Africa. It is likely to suffocate from allergens, otherwise known as foreign interference unless a panacea is found. Hence, we see Ayaana’s mother attempting to provide a solution for her child: “Bi Munira, her mother, had rubbed clove oil over her tightened chest and stuffed the all-ailment-treating black kalonji seeds into her mouth.” Mother and child represent Africa in collective sense trying to survive from external forces.

As the novel further reveals, an African country is conquered as visitors enter through the monster sea using gigantic water vessels. We have real but fictionalised names of places as well as outright imagined settings. But despite the porous borders and cultures, the resilient continent has retained its local names of places and people, language and the concept of time. In the book, Kiswahili words are widely used especially on sayings.

As it appears, Africa is trying to understand and explain itself to the world. Unfortunately it is using yardsticks from external forces rather than defining its own path. Through Ayaana, we see a continent grappling with a desire to learn. She goes to a school where she is forced out for looking strange.

Nevertheless, she is determined to learn. With the help of her ‘father’, Ayaana has a staggering beginning, often speaking the foreign language in broken tenses and struggling with vocabularies.

External forces

She also learns arithmetic, among other disciplines, but the omniscient narrator notes, “Music amplified what they could not find in books.”

The question of what defines African education is what also features in Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz’s short story, Half a Day.

Owuor also emphasises her perspective on the continent’s history through Munira, Ayaana’s mother. As it appears, Munira had differences with her father and mother, prompting the former to curse her, “You have squandered a right to our name.”  Consequently, it provokes the question of identity that the continent asks itself. What is in a name? Should we hitch a ride on the identity of others or devise our own?

Munira, having lost her right to family name, is left in the wilderness of being nondescript. Her daughter haunts her as she enquires why they do not have a name. In response, she creates a false name, sky name or rather Wa Jauza. She warns her daughter against saying it aloud, lest enemies seize it from them. It consoles, thus creating doubts on what naming really means. In essence, the writer seems to suggest that Africa should rid herself of definitions imposed by her colonial fathers and create her own definitions.

Without defining yourself, the writer seems to suggest, the external forces will mutilate your worthy self. For example, Munira is good at making clothes, yet she has accepted a negative definition by a malicious society. She submissively says, “I’m supposed to be a lustful sorceress...trappings even.”

It demonstrates submission to what ‘others’ have created about us. In other words, Africa has been deprived of her worth because of her submissiveness. Physical as well as literary, “…these boundaries were breached…island doors were flung open,” making the continent vulnerable. Africa has to be selective of what she accepts. This argument is precisely captured when Muhidin responds to the question by Ayaana about what is good and bad about sea water. The storm, he answers. The porous border can allow anything in, bad or good.

Getting rid of what is foreign is perhaps demonstrated well towards the end of one of the initial parts of the novel, where there is a connotative killing of the white kitten. When the kitten dies, the narrator calls it ‘corpse’ instead of carcass. The being had assumed a human form and permanency, making the characters forget its mortality.

When it dies, only Munira, Muhidin and Ayaana remain to bury the ‘corpse,’ while everyone else walks away. As the narrator puts it, the trio “waited for nothing”.

However, the death opens a journey to discovery by Ayaana that nothing is everlasting and for everyone else, Africa is on her own.

The novel also explores the concept of time by intermingling Western aspects of hours, minutes and seconds, as well as days, months and years, with Africans’ past approach of seasons seen through the arrival of dragonflies among other evidences. In other words, the narrator shows the two traditions can form a hybrid rather than compete with each other.

Besides making reference to decades-old history of foreigners finding way into the Kenyan coast, the novel also talks of some actual historical experiences, including the 1998 twin bombing of Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. At the same time, there is also an elaborate revelation about forced disappearances in Kenya that is an issue at the present.

The narrator notes that, “to this day on the island, rumours still circulate to explain abrupt human absences.”

In other words, the novel is so rich with the history of Kenya and Africa as a whole and is expected to generate heated debate during the September 27-29 Macondo Festival at the Kenya National Theatre. During the literary event, Owuor is expected to speak on history and literature as well as respond to questions from readers and scholars.

She will be among dozens of authors from Africa who will attend the three-day event, where they will debate on the re-imagining of history through fiction.