Dustby Yvonne Adhiambo OwuorKnopf, 2014 A strange thing happens halfway through Dust, the debut novel by 2003 Caine Prize Winner, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. A woman has been mourning her brutally murdered brother. A man has been harassing her family ostensibly to discover the secret of his father's mysterious disappearance decades earlier. The man fixates on the woman, the daughter of the family. He follows her, makes demands of her, tracks her, takes up a room near hers in a guesthouse in Nairobi, foists himself on her wherever she goes, forces himself into a taxi she enters, harangues her, shows up at her door demanding "where's my father?" Then, more than feelings are hurt: fists fly, he's on top of the woman with his hands around her neck, her arm is twisted in an odd way, she is bleeding:

It is possible to brawl in private silence. He can’t remember locking her legs to the ground with his own. He remembers the intoxicating blend of sweat, adrenaline, soap, and woman.Turned on.Wanting.He is large enough to contain her, sad enough to need to get lost inside her, with her, through her.…Her nose is bleeding. Her teeth grasp his fingers. He drags his fingers from her mouth.He pulls back his arms to deliver a blow. She whimpers. He sees how small she is.Remorse.

Then, in a gradual dawn that makes the emotional transition all the more sudden, they are in each other's arms, making passionate love, clinging desperately to each other, promising each other things with their bodies. They fall deep in love and return to each other’s bodies over and over throughout the second half of the novel:

But first, he will strip off his clothes, and then hers, crushing spaces of distance, the limits of skin. Crumbling in her bed, she will arrange his limbs around her body in order to become cocooned. Entangled, secured, and warm, they both sleep at once.

The woman is changed: her quest to understand her brother’s death is subsumed (and concluded) within this man's quest for his father. Before, she was drawing, painting, and sculpting images of her brother, re-imagining and re-creating a totemic male who is dead before the beginning of the novel. After the beating and sex, she wakes up, sculpts and molds an image of the man's father.The man has conquered and completely taken possession of her. She will take him back to her homeland, where he will go on to take possession of her family home after being given the title deed by her father. Subsequently, he will burn down that home with the consent and approval of all who resided there. The woman will look to him for answers, stammering as is her wont, asking if they can rebuild. He will tell her that it "[t]akes time … But we have time."The woman is Arabel Ajany, of multiple roots and varied ethnic extraction in a country with more than forty ethnic groups: She is Dodoth, but also Turkana, and also Luo. She is a Nyarnam (daughter of the lake) but the lakes to which she belongs are in Western Kenya (Nam Lolwe) and in Northern Kenya (Anam Ka’alakol). Ajany complicates what it means to be Kenyan and embodies the inherent contradictions of ethnic nationalism. She echoes the words of a Kenyan Somali man who, bemoaning the Kenyan governments' oppression of ethnic Somalis, in the Al Jazeera documentary "Not Yet Kenyan," says that he does not speak Arabic or Kiswahili but he speaks fluent Dholuo (the language of one of the larger ethnic groups in Kenya) and tearfully asks, "does that not make me Kenyan?"If Ajany complicates ethnic Kenyan nationalism then another character, Ali Dida Hada, explodes ethnicity and nationalism: He is from Eritrea, but crossed into Kenya in the sixties. He speaks Tigrinya but he is a naturalised Luo. He speaks any number of other Northern languages. He has changed his name many times and never uses his true name until the end of the story when, walking with his lover, Akai Lokorijom, he "tells her that if she wants he will tell her his original name, the one he had forgotten." The reader never learns his name. Even so, Ali Dida Hada remains legible, even if tenuously, within ethnic genealogies. Another character, the Trader, Zaman Nawfal, is impossible to describe within an idea of Kenya: "The Trader knows neither where he was born nor who his father was. He has hazel eyes and a skin tone that changes with the seasons, place, and circumstances in which he finds himself."Dust is peopled with characters who make fragmentary and irreconcilable the idea of a Kenyan identity. Owuor pushes this logic to its infuriating end, challenging the very idea that post-colonial Kenya is an ethnic "black" or ethnic African country. In doing so, the story gives the settler identity a disturbing legitimacy. The dead men at the heart of the novel—Odidi, the Kenyan, and Hugh Bolton, the Englishman—are also representative of entire national histories, both given equal grounding.Numerous languages appear in the novel, but with an English man at the heart of the novel and the novel itself written in English, English whiteness and Kenyan Englishness thus strategically encase and penetrate the story.  "Pulses of language—Kiswahili for trade, English in spots, and fifteen murmured dialects—this was how they crossed worlds." Kenyanness becomes a kaleidoscopic many-thing.

Isaiah's eventually irrevocable triumph—magnanimous, he chooses not to embroil the culpable, murderous family in court—is a final resurrection and ascension of the dead settler, in the ghost of Hugh Bolton. The settler, and his colonial past, was in fact never dead but lived on in the minds of Ajany and Odidi as "Obarogo", a mythical ogre and lifelong source of terror, the Oganda family's secret shame, and— to the extent that the organs of the law and the police remain involved—a national bugbear:

His sister consumed every story he fed her. Obarogo, the blind bogeyman born out of Odidi’s desire to hear his sister scream. Obarogo, who took life from the wool of darkness. Obarogo, who needed eyes in order to see in the dark and who sought out little girls whose eyes were open when they should have been asleep. Obarogo, of course, avoided boys.

Obarogo in his eternal quest for little girls is destined to find Ajany even though for much of her life she runs "Far Away." Ajany, even as an adult, remains childlike because of the traumas she has survived and her tremendous grief for the loss of her dead brother—she stutters, lacks confidence, craves the support of, and is quick to depend on a man. Obarago manifests as Isaiah Bolton.Ajany's man, Isaiah—who I am unable to resist calling Ajany's rapist—is a white Englishman. His father was a colonial-era settler. Isaiah's flight to Kenya to recover his past, his paternal history, and his property, marks him as a post-colonial settler:

“I say!” the Trader says, a broadcaster’s voice, mocking Isaiah. “I say . . . you here to suckle our violence . . . you like?” Isaiah’s hands rise. “Think what you want . . .” Asshole.“Journalist, project manager, philanthropist, messiah, job seeker— which are you?”Isaiah retreats to the far end of the fire, tenses.

Isaiah is a different kind of vampiric presence altogether. What he is seeking in Kenya is to recover the psychic residue, the lifeblood—"Blood calls to blood. I'll find the child"—of an imperial past, one in which African soil existed to provide the possibility of pious national renewal.In this bizarre arrangement whereby settlers are justified in feeling slighted because of the indigenous resistance they met, Isaiah returns as a force of reconciliation, but a rather one-sided kind. Determined to forever mispronounce the name of his father's final home, "Wuoth Ogik", he declares, "I am worth Wuot Ogyek. Belongs to my father, and you know it."His father, like the post-colonial fortune-makers whom Ajany overhears, was convinced, during the Independence of Kenya from Britain, that, "[w]e were terrified the country was going to the dogs. But it was worse; it was given to the Africans."But Kenya, the country to which anyone might belong, is burning. The novel takes place during the violence that followed the election of 2007-2008. Wuoth Ogik is decrepit. Far south from there, Kenya is going through what amounts to a civil war. The eventual toll is 1,500 lives lost and 300,000 displaced. The flames of the burning country are always lapping at the story, flaring up at the edges of the pages, or in front of things in miniature:

[A] chubby man will mutter an oath that will render him the president of a burning, dying country. The deed will add fuel to an already out-of-control national grieving … Even the house was dying … A temptation: to set alight walls inhabited by unseen termites that are eating it to the ground.… Red flames soar … In the dream, he was in the center of an inferno. That woman merged with the flames … The landscape is on fire … Burning vegetation … The world bright and burning … Burning grass. The fire had left a trail … The house is still falling down … A desert supernova of frozen flame … They leave so the fire burning down the house can finish its work. … He has seen that death was also fire, and it warmed the face of life.

The conjunction of Ajany and Isaiah, the return of the indigene and the settler, fractures the possibility that histories can be concluded or neatly separated, and gives Kenya's colonial and post-independence histories a regenerative power that points towards the interminable, the permanent, and the cyclical. "The pieces of landscape gathered by winds tumble into their new fractured space." This fracturing, which breaks and scatters the human jigsaw, is the swirling cosmic cloud of Dust:

He [Nyipir] did not yet understand the state of the nation, or that interrogation units were generating far too many bodies for one man to bury alone under the blanket of night. Bodies in gunia leaked liquids into the ground, over his hands, the stench of invisible human beings, smashed up and nameless, lowered into grounds that he then levelled.

Fracturing of identity, the breaking apart of the image and its reflections—the breaking apart of Kenya and its self-image—are what create of the narrative a fractality that overflows the bounds of the novel itself. Ajany returns from Brazil to Kenya because her beloved brother has died, murdered. Isaiah comes to Kenya because his biological father has died, murdered, though he only learns the actual facts of the deed and is propelled by it when he is an adult, many years later. Ajany's father, Nyipir, lost both his father and brother to the English Empire's battles in Burma. He will eventually set off to find them. Ajany, upon seeing her brother dead, sets off to find him, by retracing his steps, by finding those who knew him, by walking the paths and breathing the air he did, as though able to travel back in time to recover the lost. Visiting the road and corner on which Odidi was shot,

She scrapes fragments of her brother's dried, rusted blood onto a small piece of paper … The acrid loathing surges from her body, gushes out of her mouth and mingles with the chaos on the ground.… She had touched the memory blood.

Blood, with which her father, Nyipir, became familiar as a young man who found himself assisting in the disposal—"Vulturing"—of the corpses of those who were tortured and destroyed by colonial forces during the Mau Mau uprising of 1952-1960:

They worked into the deep of night.Few witnesses.The inarticulate dead buried by mute gravediggers.…He also wondered why his body was trembling. All of a sudden he remembered that he had been handling human remains. He knelt over, head close to the earth, and vomited into the soil.

The novel begins with the word “He” and its final sentence is a benediction to the man to whom “He” refers. It marks the possibility that fractal time—events and moments in the story are reflected or represented within other scenes in the story—can nonetheless offer points at which to change the nature of its cycle of loss, searching, reclaiming, violence, death, destruction, and renewal. Indeed, the final chapter is no ending but an interrogation of new beginnings and the possibilities they hold: clean pairings occur and partners walk off together into the distance, graves behind them, and entire futures ahead.

What endures?Starting again.

Ajany's mother, Akai Lokorijom, was Hugh Bolton's mistress. Isaiah, his father's son, claims and conquers his father's mistress' daughter, Ajany. Fractality, the complete representation of an image within a piece of the image, is a form of continuity that Dust interrogates in the refrain: "What endures?"

Memory shapes.To name something is to bring it to life.…To name the unnameable is a curse.

Ajany, in unending mourning, recalls the safety and security of Odidi's presence: "At night, under the stars, Odidi, whose stomach served as her pillow, showed her Kormamaddo, the camel of the skies, and as he did, she knew she was as safe as a seed enclosed in a warm, thick pod." She recalls Odidi's "height, broad-chested, muscled, towering maleness framed by a hauteur that is detached from and laughing at the world," attempting to see him in other men. Isaiah, whom she takes as a lover, comes to fulfill and consummate the romantic vision she could never obtain with her brother.Dust tells the story of the women who remain after the misadventures of the men in their lives. The women kick up dust; the women are the dust that refuses to settle:

"You [Ajany] were born hot. You should've died."…"I was also born hot," Akai says. "As you were … Those born hot die, can even die of nothing. I was not expecting you, but you came, and when you were born, you were fire.”...Ajany is suddenly cold.

Selene, Hugh Bolton's wife, in coming from Britain to pre-independence Kenya, follows Hugh to a place she does not enjoy and in which she can find no comfort, with "insects that attempted to bite, perch, and crawl on and feed off them. Like the country." Bolton abandons her in their still half-formed home then removes her to Wuoth Ogik where he has been having an intense sexual affair with Akai who, "greedy for the promise of the bigness of life, became Hugh's mistress."

For me, he was the face of life. His hair was fire. He had answers. He had travelled farther than anyone I knew. Such a person was what I wanted. This is how I wanted to be.

Odidi, formerly an engineer, becomes an outlaw, leading a group of thugs. In the wake of his destruction, a woman, Justina, remains. Ajany observes that "now she [Justina] tries to gather her shattered selves by putting together pieces of Odidi." But these pieces of Odidi are already gathered and forming inside her: she has conceived a child by him. Justina says to Ajany, "This is our world. Odi's world. Tomorrow, when you come back to look for Justina, you may find there was no Justina. Maybe there will even be no house." Justina's demand: to remove herself from Odidi's world, a world in which female life is contingent on male life, a world in which women are doomed to mourn men indefinitely.Justina's restlessness in leaving Nairobi is Ajany's restlessness when she flees Kenya to Nova Scotia then to Brazil, and when, overcome with grief, she flees Wuoth Ogik to lose herself in Nairobi:

Wanting to throw off the weight of her world and its realities, she dissolves like wax into the music, feels it become her body. Now she is simply Arabel, and the other side of the song is silence, and its roots are in eternity.

This restlessness is also that of the "bald-headed harlot" in whom Isaiah realizes his "vision of presence, of curves within which a hundred thousand sorrows can be deeply forgotten." It is the restlessness of the Trader's wife who perishes with her children in a drought. It is the restlessness of Nafisa, Ali Dida Hada's wife, who abandons him for a "Jaguar-driving Trader," a new pregnancy, and "her nostalgia for the English weather: `Good for my skin, which is now drying up,`" and also that of Selene who decamps from Kenya before she loses herself entirely.  For all of these women—fractals of each other—Kenya seems uninhabitable.Akai, devastated by the loss of Odidi, her son, also flees Wuoth Ogik, running off into the night. Her daughter, "runs out of the room … into a darkening city. She breathes in audible gasps. Speaking to Odidi, of Odidi, for Odidi. Passers-by see a smallish woman in a yellow dress."They are wild women:

Akai had approached and circled him. He stood still and thought of the hyena. … At unpredictable moments, for nameless reasons, she might erupt with molten rock fury, belching fire that damaged everything it encountered. Akai was as dark, difficult, and dangerous as one of those few mountains where God shows up, and just as mystifying.

They are wild irresistible women:

He [Ali Dida Hada] caught her [Akai's] scent and imagined tasting its source. Her body radiated strength; her movements were a dance. Needing to look at her, he fixated on her outline.

 They are irresistible decisive women: When Ajany asks after Odidi,

Justina’s voice is low, with a touch of mischief. “I hooked him. He came to Twilight 333. I was there. I saw him. I wanted him. I got him.” … “I fed him,” Justina says. “He was so hungry.”

Justina is a painter, an artist like Ajany. Justina offers to paint Ajany who herself understands the world, her path through it, and those lost in it by painting it and sculpting them. Pregnant, Justina materialises Ajany's desire for her brother and her desire to have his progeny (in an argument with Justina she lays claim to the child), to have him live and continue living. "The baby kicks. Odidi, Ajany calls with all her heart, Odidi." Justina and Ajany become fractals of each other, their stories and dreams contained within one another.At a nightclub with Isaiah, “Justina giggles. ‘But you can’t dance with her,’ pointing at Ajany. ‘Why?’ ‘You are just a human being.’"Ajany, not human, "bites him. Isaiah grunts and wipes his bleeding face." Her mother, ethereal Akai, "bites hard into his [Ali Dida Hada's] chin. He moaned.” Yet, for their refracted similarities, Akai and Ajany remain violently estranged from each other: "Ajany had long understood that Akai rendered words as they were made to be—soldier verbs, constructed for action and war. Ajany cowered in front of them." The distance between mother and daughter is as vast as the desolate Northern lands they inhabit: "How could a human being endure such infinite spaces?" It is also a distance as short as the barrel of the gun Akai points at Ajany when she shows that she is desperate for her mother's love.But Ajany and Akai are truly within each other. The violence of their lives superimposes their images on the landscape. They form a lineage of survival.The nuclear family—as the nation in miniature—is, in Dust, a series of images of Kenya in various stages of disintegration, so that "[t]here's nothing left of Oganda's home," or of any other families or their homes.Then, there is the eroticized violence: Isaiah "could hurt [Ajany]. Hands squeeze her neck and arm," before they reconcile and have sex he absurdly promises her that, "I won't hurt you." Perhaps an easy promise to make once the damage has been done but also a promise that has within it his own father's attempt to murder Ajany's mother, Akai, by stabbing her. Stabbing is how Ajany escapes from Brazil, fleeing an abusive and unfaithful lover named Bernado for whom "her body opened a way for her soul to fall into his." Akai’s own infidelity makes her husband Nyipir (who saved her from Hugh's wrath want to, "[c]ut her out. He must bleed out his soul to save Akai’s life, because if she appears now he will slaughter her. He knows which knife he will use, and no one will hold him accountable."Later "Ali Dida Hada pushes [Akai] to the ground, his hands gentle around her neck." After Akai was banished by Hugh Bolton who left her near death in a drought and famine-struck desert while she carried his twins, there was Selene, his wife who "hated Hugh. Loved Hugh. Craved Hugh. Arched into Hugh, who used to gasp but now grunted. She placed his hands around her neck and squeezed. Soft. Gentle. Loving. Loathing. Tears."Dust accumulates "many routes through desire," many routes through life, pain, and survival. It is a story of each woman fighting to reclaim as her own and reconstitute for herself a life with which she "once apportioned hope for people and places." It is a vast, complex, poetic story, a particulate text of Brownian motions, splashed with blood, aflame with feeling, torn by time.Each scene, each character, is a particle of dust, unformed, partial, slipping from grasp. This is the nature of secrets, a glut of which comprise Kenya's still barely articulated, tragic herstory.What Dust offers then is perhaps a movement through language—a connected movement of women's bodies in language—in resistance to this slippage of memory into the "nothing left" of silence and erasure—“amnesia and amnesty”. This resistance of women who don't belong, and have never belonged, women who scream or stutter, who dance and run, whose voices men never truly hear or understand, is a new possibility of what it might mean to become Kenyan and for Kenya itself to become a nation in the still-bleeding and restive shadow of post-independence and post-election violence:

Long ago, I carried Kenya's flag. It was not so heavy then.…Kenya's official languages: English, Kiswahili, and Silence. There was also memory.…Bodies started to stoop to contain the shame, the loss, the eclipse. Such eyes-turned-inward silences so that when bodies started showing up mutilated and truly dead, the loudest protests were created out of whispers.

____Orem Ochiel is a lapsed mathematician and perspiring writer from Kenya. He muses at @nochiel, scribbles inconstantly at Life as Fiction, maintains an inbox at nochiel[at]gmail[dot]com, and writes with the Jalada Africa writers' collective.