In her second novel The Dragonfly Sea, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor introduces us to Ayaana a precocious child whose adventures into young adulthood enrapture. With bated breath the reader watches as she battles the seas, repeatedly confronting the uncertainty these waters bring to her and to Pate her home in the Indian Ocean. She is captivating in her pursuit of identity and in the willful claiming of a father for herself despite her mother’s offense at the choice. She is deliciously daring as she takes on the sea and the skies determined to grasp their depths and light which beckon her to worlds unknown. She is unnerving as she determinedly embraces the new world her facial features allow her access to. Perhaps most breathtaking is the ease with which she navigates these new spaces, in and out of different countries with such mobility speaking to the fluidity of travel possible for a global citizen __her brown skin only a curiosity. Ayaana’s ease of movement across the world’s nations is reminiscent of the travels of the characters from early European/American writings. Writings that inspired a wanderlust for me with adventures in worlds far and foreign seeming possible. But this was way before 9/11.
Sure, black is king but this blackness is nuanced differently as experienced with global travel. And as an African living on the Continent, you quickly learn the black of African American or of Western nation differs from that of South America even more so from that of Africa. One would argue still the black of Sub-Saharan Africa is treated differently to that of South Africa or North Africa. More so when faced with an immigration officer your visa application in hand. In one such moment, an old friend and I reconnected once. Seated in the waiting area of one of the gatekeepers of a place beyond the continent we traded stories in hushed tones. In our hands we held the “summation” of our lives __official invitations, bank records ours plus the hosts’ records __if the former were thought insignificant then surely the latter’s would hold __ and proof we had strong roots in the community to which we were more than glad to return immediately following the end of our business. We both wore the marks of rejected applications, mine current, his from the year preceding. A respected social-entrepreneur in the country, with his innovative works showcased in both national and international media he was forced then to miss an important meeting he had worked hard for. As we spoke, he was subjecting himself anew to the arbitrary process at the behest of a new business partnership. And yet as I think of our experience I recognise that our tries were far removed from those forced to risk it all, who travel in precarious conditions in search of a different life, one less about wealth acquisition and all about humanely existing if only.
I can’t say whether this fluidity in travel is a deliberate theme for Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor __ Ajany her protagonist in Dust has a somewhat similar experience__ or if its existence in her works is simply an offshoot of her personal experiences. Originally from Nairobi, Kenya, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor was resident in England and later Australia while studying for her Post-graduate degrees. This a shared experience with several notable African authors Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo in the 1950s, and 1960s and recently Teju Cole, Helon Habila, Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi and the list goes on. African writers __raised on the continent and who studied abroad, who have brought their version of the African story to the fore as having broken into the Western Publishing stratosphere their works have gained much acclaim globally. A number have been accused of being “Western facing” and not adequately representing conditions for the vast population of the African continent falling short therefore in telling the African story. While their works might not reflect a shared reality for most Africans do they become less or non “African?” Are they not part of the African Story? I wonder.
I admit I often grapple with what the African story is even as the team and I work to promote the telling of it. I think often of how this continent is, this home of 54 associated units. I wonder what African means in the global context and in wondering so how that affects the African story. Is the African story made so only by its language and colloquialisms or setting and characters that have an African ring to them? Am I limited to the condition of my parents or their parents or of their parent’s parents? How far back do I have to go to get to the distilled definition or reflection of this? We are a people caught in the continual condition of inheriting and bequeathing cultural confusions. Must we remain so? Perhaps half a century post-independence we are more culturally interwoven than confused. I am unfamiliar with the Africa of my parent’s younger days, far removed from that of my grandparents, terribly detached from that of my great-grandparents and ancestors. Would their world have stayed static, I wonder, unchanged by the wider world whether or not colonialism had happened nor its incessant neo forms had prevailed? But change is inevitable we are told and our history is what it is. Does my removal from their experience make me or my story less African?
In search of a response to my quandary, I turn to Chinua Achebe’s essay, The African Writer and the English Language in which he speaks to the struggle of the attendees of the famous 1962 conference to define the term African Literature. If a room with him, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Pio Zirimu, Okot p’Bitek, and everyone else, writers whose works have shaped the conscience of this continent post-independence struggled how much more me? However, in this essay he does speak to key attributes for African Literature which I will borrow for the African story;
What all this suggests to me is that you cannot cram African literature into a small, neat definition. I do not see African literature as one unit but as a group of associated units—in fact, the sum total of all the national and ethnic literatures of Africa. … Any attempt to define African literature in terms which overlook the complexities of the African scene at the material time is doomed to failure. After the elimination of white rule shall have been completed, the single most important fact in Africa in the second half of the twentieth century will appear to be the rise of individual nation-states. I believe that African literature will follow the same pattern. Pg 1-2
There is no neat definition for the African Story. We are not a country so how can any one story encapsulate the various aesthetics of our being to resonate in all aspects with the entirety of this continent and her people? These same aesthetics are not easily grasped as they seem to conjure variance in thoughts depending on who you read or listen to. In an interview with PEN America 2019, the author Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi denounces the expectation of literary works by African writers to function as anthropological texts. Stressing this expectation isn’t made of works written by authors from the West. So why do we expect it of works by African writers? Undoubtedly the Africa of today is different from what the writers of yesterday imagined would emerge but an Africa nonetheless that the artist of the day must grapple with and reflect authentically in their works, at least their space in it. Isn’t it fraught therefore to expect or demand the writer be estranged from an authentic expression in a bid to be more reflective of the larger population? The writer’s burden is after all informed by the political and or socio-cultural narratives of their times and is never far from the experiential assessment of these. Even non-authors are influenced by these same places and issues.
Our experiences with the Ibua Labs and Pack Light our inaugural continental call demonstrate a wealth of stories and tellers present for the Africa of today. Keen to be heard. With Pack Light, we drew 66 submissions on childhoods lived in 14 countries on this Continent. Submissions of short fiction, non-fiction, and poetry with themes as varied as colorism, sexual violence, girl-child empowerment, war and conflict, triumphs and loss, an insight into what Africa and African means to these writers simply living in their spaces on this continent. The results from our continental call also showed the Continent’s literary powerhouses reside in Nigeria, Southern Africa, and Kenya still. No surprise here. These countries/regions have historically had a hold on the telling of the African Story. Do we risk having that One story if these places continue to dominate the telling of the African story? I wonder.
Yet as I go on about the African story and how important it is to tell, I recognize Storytelling isn’t without cost more so the written form. What happens to the emerging writer seemingly strapped to this continent where there exist a handful of Continent based publishing ventures? Where do they access the editorial support needed to produce works such as The Dragonfly Sea? The wealth of historical information this novel provides takes time, money and human resource to attain. Processes basic to publishing but often overlooked __the cost for them a deterrent in the self-publishing ventures that many in Uganda and the continent have opted for.
While the quandary may persist tell our stories we must __the writer a bridge between what was and what could be. I hope as we do we can remain enraptured by this Continent and its people, define for ourselves our identity and future, and frame that well enough to anchor the new generations in the Africa of their time just as Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor does in The Dragonfly Sea. While I have no lived experience of Pate it resonates strongly as I brush up against its riveting characters Abeera __I do prefer her brazen, naively bold younger self__ the wizened Muhidin with his depths of profoundness and the indomitable Munira simply living in their time, and space on the continent. This story of one family deftly weaved together with the histories of the East African coast, Turkey, and China __firmly anchored in these__ even as Ayaana speaks to new possibilities for her and the Continent she calls home.