Review by New York Times Review
IN 2011, WRITING in the Book Review about a memoir by Binyavanga Wainaina, Alexandra Fuller opened with a marvelous plea: "Harried reader, I'll save you precious time. Skip this review and head directly to the bookstore." Harried reader, skip this one, too, and go buy Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's "Dust." In this dazzling novel you will find the entirety of human experience - tearshed, bloodshed, lust, love - in staggering proportions. If, however, you've got the time, consider with me what Fuller wrote next: "Although written by an East African and set in East and Southern Africa, Wainaina's book is not just for Afrophiles." Reader, I worry. I worry that you, too, may subscribe to the logic behind that telling "although" - i.e., books written by African novelists should interest Afrophiles only. I struggle to imagine a review that starts, "Although written by a New Zealander, Eleanor Catton's book is not for Kiwi lovers only." Yes, Owuor's luscious debut is set in Kenya. Yes, the novel concerns itself with that country's blood-soaked history - from the Mau Mau uprisings of the early 1950s to the political assassination of 1969 to the postelection violence of 2007. But should this limit its readership? Allow me to state the unobvious: Although written by an East African, "Dust" is not just for Afrophiles. It is for bibliophiles. Only the reader who truly loves books - books full to brimming with imagery - will appreciate the magic Owuor has made of the classic nation-at-war novel. With splintered lyricism, she tells the story of the Oganda family: Moses Odidi, a young, brilliant, rugby-playing engineer who is brutally murdered in the prologue; his younger sister, Arabel Ajany, a gifted painter who returns from Brazil to bury her brother, then switches tack and scours Nairobi to "find" him; their father, Aggrey Nyipir, an elegant gravedigger turned cattle herder, once the right-hand man to the rogue British officer Hugh Bolton; Bolton's son, Isaiah William, arriving in Kenya to search for his father; and Akai Lokorijom, the devastatingly beautiful, AK-47-wielding woman who unites them all. These are fragile, passionate human beings, most of them guilty of righteous violence, all of them bearing wounds and hopes that will lead to death or redemption. The richness of the plot alone will challenge a lazy reader. But the visceral lusciousness of the prose will thrill a lover of language. "Wuoth Ogik was once a sanctuary crammed with the music of rangeland life," Owuor writes of the Oganda family's patch of Kenya: "a father's hollow cough, herders' sibilant whistles, day handing over life to the night, a mother's sudden, haunted cry, a brother singing water songs to camels. What endures? A father sighing Aiee! Talkative shadows, crumbling walls, scent of dung and dream, reflections of long-ago clattering of polished Ajua stones falling into a brown wooden board of 14 holes; the lives of cows, sheep, goats and camels; three mangy beige-and-black descendants of a fierce mongrel herding dog with a touch of hyena. What endures? Elastic time." Owuor's prose is a physical expression of the landscape it evokes : raw, fragmented, dense, opaque. Beautiful, but brutally so. There's a sort of lawless power at work in her text, a refreshing break from the clinical reserve so beloved by American M.F.A. programs. This language sweats. It bleeds. Critics may object to the novel's unapologetic density, or find the characters' ruminations unfashionably "emotional." I tend to think Owuor's style evinces a rare and brave choice: to feel, and to make her readers feel, to strand us from our intelligence. Ajany, frustrated in her quest to solve the mystery of her brother's death, shuts herself inside at one point, "weary of scrubbing tears away." So too, we sense, Owuor has had enough of putting on a brave face. This is a novel about characters who let themselves cry when circumstance demands it. "Dust" moves as the human mind moves: forward and backward, incoherent, indulgent, lingering on the light on a tree, sliding into murky reverie. Owuor repeats her characters' names - to an excessive extent, it might seem, were she not so lovingly protecting them from the namelessness of the forgotten. Ultimately, the disjointed prose mirrors brilliantly the fragmented nature of both memory-keeping and nation-building. This is form as content, a text in the shape of its subject. That said, if you're looking for a tidy primer on Kenya's postcolonial politics, read Wikipedia, not "Dust." Owuor has said: "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?" This is a novel about Kenya, certainly, but one that leaves open the question of what Kenya is and whom it may kill. Owuor tells her country's stories - and they are plural: urban, rural, Indian, English, Luos, Kikuyu - with bitter honesty. There are no blameless Kenyans in "Dust." A noble man buries innocent victims; a suffering wife shacks up with a servant; a visionary genius consorts with thieves. There are no heroes here. There are no African archetypes, either. When Ajany sleeps with Isaiah, as we know she will, we're spared the conventions of interracial romance in favor of raw despair. This is not a "Kenyan Woman" sleeping with a "British Man," but a brotherless sister huddling for warmth with a fatherless son. So, too, when Nyipir packs for his long-awaited journey to Burma, his erstwhile Kenyan torturer in tow, we witness not enlightened forgiveness but hardened, humbled men. And Akai-ma - Hugh's lover, Nyipir's wife, Odidi and Ajany's mother - ranks among the most inimitable female characters in modern literature. These are fractured characters all, desperate for tenderness, an end to silence. The greatest mercy shown in "Dust" is the telling of the truth. "Concentrated silence drowned the hardest of men," Owuor writes. "The body of a human cannot live without kindness This is what weakens men." Amid the bloody shootings, political sleaziness and gruesome secrets of Owuor's Kenya, kindness - however fearful, however fragile - does exist. Of course it does. As Owuor asks in her 2003 short story "Weight of Whispers" (which won Africa's prestigious Caine Prize): "To be human is to be intrinsically, totally, resolutely good. Is it not?" There are no conquering heroes in "Dust," but there are unconquerable dreamers, Kenyans who share the author's own hurt-hardened brand of hope. "I think about the dreamers we have killed," Owuor told an interviewer once. "And yet, if we stop dreaming big dreams for this land, for ourselves, for each other, then we have killed each other." Perhaps what most endures, at the end of "Dust," is the big dreams Owuor has for her broken subjects. TAIYE SELASI'S debut novel, "Ghana Must Go," was published last year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 9, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Set in arid northern Kenya amid the political turmoil of the latter half of the twentieth century, this powerful first novel will evoke references to William Boyd and even to Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. From the dramatic prologue in which Odidi Oganda is killed in a hail of bullets, to his sister Ajany's investigation of his life and death, author Owuor shifts back and forth from the Mau-Mau movement (in which Odidi and Ajany's father, Nyipir, may have been complicit), to Kenya's postindependence hopes and horrors, to the near-present, taking in along the way bloodshed, betrayal, and the critically tragic assassination of Tom Mboya in 1969, after which, we are told, Kenya's official languages became English, Kiswahili, and Silence. The Oganda family's relationship to the English colonialist Boltons, including sire Hugh, whose life had crossed Nyipir's, is at the center of this compelling saga. When Hugh's son Isaiah comes to Kenya to trace his father's fate, the intersection of his activities with Ajany's becomes the driving center of this important addition to the literature of contemporary Africa.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This evocative debut historical novel of Kenya tracks the slow unraveling of the Oganda family after the murder of beloved son Odidi at the hands of Nairobi's finest. Before he can be buried, Odidi's devastated mother takes flight, leaving her picturesque home in a remote northern province. Meanwhile, Odidi's grieving sister, Arabel Ajani, must confront the Ogandas' demons. Caine Prize-winner Owuor's prose, though sometimes too sentimental, is both quixotic and archly descriptive. And while the author may spill a great deal of ink exploring her protagonist's consuming passions and "the kernel of all their deepest yearnings," her writing is exceptionally chiseled and achieves a poetic dimension. Odidi had an "addiction to water songs-a liturgy of flowing, bubbliness. Even the camels listened to him. Rock-drill laughter, excavating terror; salt in soup; no sugar in tea made from rangeland herbs." The author is as at ease evoking the mystical, inflamed Ogandas and the magical Northern Frontier District as she is deconstructing a family of British expatriates, the Boltons, whose destiny intersects with Odidi's. "The country chose its prey. Seduced them, made them believe they owned it, and then it gobbled them down, often in the most tender of ways-like a python." There is hardly any aspect of Kenya that Owuor seems unable to tackle with her unique flair in this masterfully executed novel, from the mid-20th century's Mau Mau rebellion and its aftermath to the stirring personal destinies of her sundry cast of characters. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
From the moment Odidi Oganda is gunned down on a Nairobi street, this stunning debut novel by the Caine Prize- winning Owuor grabs the reader's heart, refusing to let go. Blending short, staccato bursts of words with long, sensuous, prose passages, Owuor lays bare the tumultuous history of Kenya through the lives of Odidi's parents, Nyipir and Akai-ma, and his beloved sister, Ajany. Home from a self-imposed exile in Brazil, fueled by the madness of her grief, Ajany attempts to resuscitate Odidi by reconstructing the last ten years of his life. In doing so, her path crosses that of an equally despairing Englishman, Isaiah Bolton, wandering through Kenya in search of a father he's never known but whose name, Hugh Bolton, resonates with the Ogandas. Their families' secrets mimic those of the citizens of Kenya, whose lives are torn apart by repression and torture. Each fully formed character in this relentlessly sorrowful novel evinces a palpable longing for connection, and as the past unfolds, understanding evolves, anger dissipates, and tears of anguish and relief water the dusty land. VERDICT Owuor represents another shining talent among Africa's young writers publishing in English. This searing novel, though informed by her Kenyan roots, should not be pigeonholed. These unforgettable characters and universal themes will speak to all readers who seek truth and beauty in their literature.-Sally Bissell, Fort Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A brutal death in Nairobi prompts a reunion of the victim's family and unlocks a host of troubling memories. The center of Owuor's moody debut novel is Ajany, a young woman who returns to her family's northern Kenya homestead from Brazil after learning that her brother Odidi has been gunned down in the midst of post-election violence. (The novel is set in 2007, when the turmoil there left hundreds in the country dead and tens of thousands displaced.) As their father and estranged mother reconvene in Wuoth Ogik ("the journey ends"), their efforts to mourn in peace are soon upended. Chief among the disruptions is Isaiah, an Englishman whose father's books fill the house in Kenya. Both he and Ajany's father provide an opportunity for Owuor to explore the previous generations' violence in the country, which she evokes in harrowing detail (family members' military adventures in Burma in particular). But the novel's strength is in the present, particularly as Ajany travels to Nairobi to uncover the circumstances behind Odidi's murder. And there, Owuor explores how layers of corruption threaten to overwhelm the sense of social justice among its citizens and how Westerners oversimplify the country's predicament. Ajany's character might be more effective were her back history in Brazil less sketchy, but Owuor intentionally keeps the novel's tone impressionistic and indirect. Though that can make it harder to keep the plot lines straight, the prose has an appealingly rough-hewn poetry, built on clipped sentences and brush-stroke evocations of the dry landscape. ("The Kalacha dusk will soon descend in colors borrowed from another country's autumn.") Owuor, the 2003 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, has style to spare, which more than compensates for the looseness of the narrative.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
