Representations of Indian Ocean Ecologies, Heritage and Kinship in Banaadiri Fishing Poems and Owuor's The Dragonfly Sea

ABSTRACT

This article brings Yvonne Owuor’s 2019 novel The Dragonfly Sea into conversation with nine Banaadiri fishing poems called geeraarro, a form of classical Somali oral poetry in the maanso category. I explore the ways in which ideas of labour, kinship, and cultural heritage are presented in the fishing poems created over generations by an Indian Ocean coastal community as compared to a novel based on an Indian Ocean Island community, written by a Kenyan writer, and published by a major US publishing house. Working through oral narrative structures, the novel and the poems explore the relationship between littoral communities and Indian Ocean ecologies. I model how the comparative analysis of radically different forms of literature can illuminate the relationship between story, poetry and ecological sensibility. It breaks down the barriers between orality and literacy through the use of a range of analytical approaches including close reading, close listening, textual and performance analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Indian Ocean ecologies
• littoral communities
• environment
• heritage
• labour
• kinship
• orality
• poetry

Disclosure Statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

This article stems from the author’s doctoratal thesis which was funded by the SWW DTP and Funds for Women Graduates.

Notes

1 All the fishing geeraarro discussed in this paper occur in my PhD thesis. See Salaad (2020). In addition, some of the Banaadiri geeraarro referenced in this article were published in a literary magazine called Wasafiri in 2021 in an issue entitled “Water”. See Haji Malaakh Haji (2021).

2 Women refusing biological and ancestral essentialism and finding fluid identities and a sense of belonging by selectively claiming cultural heritage is an abiding theme of a long and global history of women’s writing. Yvonne Owuor is inspired by many other prominent twenty-first century Kenyan women writers publishing literature that explores themes of race and cultural heritage for a global English reading market, including Grace Ogot, Margaret A Ogola, Muthoni Likimani, and Marjorie Phyllis Oludhe Macgoye (see Owuor 2013).

3 Geeraar is the singular form of geeraarro.

4 Garays is a thin, light, brightly coloured cloth while baati is a tie-dyed or coloured cloth. Shaash refers to a married woman’s silk headscarf.

5 The Yaa Uleed’s main role during the fishing expedition is to extract and throw out any water that comes into the boat while they are in the sea. When the boat returns after a fishing expedition, the Yaa Uleed is also responsible for Qalfeed the cleansing of the boat of algae and sea greens.

6 For articles that show that for fishers their work is more than labour but a way of life and part of their identity, see Holland, Abbott, and Norman (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ayan Salaad

Ayan Salaad is a researcher in the fields of Indian Ocean, African, and Translation Studies. She holds a BA in English Literature from Queen Mary, University of London and an MA in African Studies from SOAS, University of London. She completed a SWW DTP funded PhD at Southampton University which compared expressive culture in Banaadiri oral poetry with globally circulating Indian Ocean texts. She is particularly interested in the intersections between orality and literacy, theories around material culture and writings about islands, oceans and coasts. In her doctorate, she explored the way that Banaadiri oral poetry and Indian Ocean texts present local and Indian Ocean identities as mutually co-constitutive through different forms of material culture, such as textiles, cloth and gold jewellery. She has a chapter forthcoming in a Routledge edited volume entitled Women and Water in Global Fiction: Feminisms and Gender.