Gathering the Dust: Narrating National Hauntologies and Futures in Yvonne Adhiambo Owour’s Dust

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a reading of Yvonne Owour’s Dust as a text that engages with national histories in a bid to trouble official Kenyan public memories and re-imagine Kenyan visions of the future. In this article, I argue that the text’s representation of histories of colonial and post-independence violence, injustices and exclusions is not only an act of memorialisation and mourning; it also invites the readers to imagine possibilities of dissent, healing, and inclusive and reconciliatory horizons. In this way, I posit that the text performs the task of re-membering and gathering. Taking on the novel’s repeated injunction to the reader to contemplate with the narrator ‘what endures?’, I argue that Owour prods us to look beyond the present, as we also think about the here and now in ways that are life-affirming and liberating. Ultimately, Owour’s novel gestures at the possibilities of crafting new beginnings and envisioning alternative, more restorative and transformative national socialities. Further, I argue that the text ties these Kenyan experiences to global black expressions of struggle, solidarity and futurity.

KEYWORDS:

• futures
• counterfutures
• memory, hauntologies
• vernaculars
• violent intimacies
• redemption
• atonement

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class, University of Johannesburg.