Abstract
Yvonne Adhiambo Owour’s remarkable debut novel Dust (2014) made its entrance in the literary scene at a time when cultural discourse on the purpose and meaning of monuments to brutality had increasingly become contentious. As a novel which concerns itself with British colonial heritage in Kenya, the Mau Mau War, and the private losses suffered by the Oganda family, Dust is centrally placed as an intervening voice in any thinking about how colonial monuments affect subjective and social coherence in the postcolonial imagination. The colonial mansion, Wouth Ogik, stands at the center of the novel as a symbol of colonial violence, war, death, and, finally, potential. This article explores the rhetorical significance of the house which, together with the disillusionment which accompanied Kenya’s nationalist project following its independence, suggests possible ways of transcending an otherwise bleak postcolonial present.
Introduction
Located within a long tradition of novels which ostensibly centre on a specific house, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust (2014) is among the precursors of the resurgence of African historical writing. Lizzy Attree (2018), for instance, places Owuor’s novel alongside Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu (2014), Peter Kimani’s Dance of the Jakaranda (2017), and Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s House of Stone (2018), all of which rewrite colonial pasts from the perspective of the colonized. In sharing commonalities with both of these forms, Dust presents itself as a historical novel of the house which traces the traumas resulting from the British occupation of Kenya, the nation’s path to independence, and the political upheaval following shortly thereafter. I am thus interested in the ways in which historical trauma in Dust is depicted as both a sociopolitical fact and as a psychic malady suffered by generations of the Oganda family: the parents, Nyipir and Akai-Ma Oganda, and their adult children, Odidi, Ajany, and Galgalu.
The novel opens with the assassination of Odidi in Nairobi, a murder which we later learn is bound up with what Grace A. Musila terms the “trope of assassination” (Musila, 2015: 62). This trope is reiterated through repeated references to Tom Mboya, whose legacy is connected to the national hopes of many Kenyan citizens at the dawn of independence. Odidi’s assassination also coincides with the return of his sister Ajany from South America and the arrival of the British Isaiah Bolton in Kenya, and resonates with the mysterious circumstances surrounding the assassination of Mboya in the same city in 1969. I will return to these points in due course. For the time being, it is worth noting that the newly-arrived Isaiah believes himself to be the adult son of the British colonial officer, Hugh Bolton, who envisioned and built Wuoth Ogik shortly after his own arrival in Kenya in 1950.
Wuoth Ogik — a Dholuo name meaning “The journey ends” (Owuor, 2014: 316) 1 — is, at the outset of the narrative, the Oganda homestead with its attendant secrets. Among these secrets lurk the circumstances that led Nyipir to meet and work with Hugh; Akai’s origins, her affair with Hugh, and subsequent marriage to Nyipir; and Isaiah’s parentage. Like Musila, Nelson Mlambo regards Dust as a lamentation of the “corrosive and immanent ‘national economy of secrets’” because it depicts the Oganda family as “dysfunctional and it is this dysfunctionality which gives it form and the form is symbolic of a national family which is equally dysfunctional and looking for answers, healing and closure” (Mlambo, 2014: 58). This dysfunction plays itself out within the walls of the haunted house and resonates beyond the immediate family unit. Wuoth Ogik therefore gestures towards an unassimilated history as initially personified by the malevolent figure of Hugh, and represents the various forms of haunting that characterize the postcolonial Kenyan experience. While Attree reads the silences in the novel as a temporal marker for the Moi Era following Kenyan independence, Mlambo’s conception of the Ogandas as allegories of the nation extends the temporal limits of these silences to include the colonial encounter with Hugh Bolton, the Mau Mau War, and the postcolonial present.
“For me, as a child of Kenya”, Jalida Scheuerman-Chianda writes in her review of Dust, the novel’s “power lies in its ability to recognize and present possibilities for us to explore and understand our difficult histories” (2014: n.p.). She goes on to remark on how details such as the Mau Mau War and the assassination of Mboya in the text “reveal the ways these events shaped and continue to shape not only Kenya, but each one of us” (2014: n.p.). “What endures?” Dust’s central consciousness repeatedly asks, as it weaves a narrative around Wuoth Ogik. The answer seems to be enduring itself.
In light of the above, I begin this article by exploring the house as a site of entanglements between Hugh, Nyipir, and Akai. These entanglements, I argue, are forged through various traumas which impede the forward momentum of Nyipir and Akai’s lives well after Hugh’s death. This analysis is informed by the latter’s depiction as a ruthless tyrant and the depiction of Nyipir as a traumatized postcolonial subject whose connection to living is rendered unstable by his various encounters with atrocity. I then go on to examine the portrayal of Hugh as an agent of the British Empire and his relation to Wuoth Ogik and the Ogandas. My analysis is informed by the ways in which these characters move in and through the house, which functions as the repository of their secrets. Their respective destinies, I argue, reflect at least some of the ways in which postcolonial subjects are still acted upon by traumatic legacies.
“Stranded in time’s paradoxes”: Nyipir, Mboya and the shadow of Britain
Dust contains three epigraphs which immediately announce the centrality of memory as that which endures well beyond the fact of death. The second epigraph from the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez in particular — “Follow my tracks in the sand that lead | Beyond thought and space” — hearkens to the traces lives leave behind and gestures towards an arid landscape which nevertheless functions as a site of remembrance. This emphasis on memory and memorialization proves useful in thinking through acts of remembrance in Dust. We are, for example, confronted with characters whose lives are bound up with notable historical events such as the arrogant British settler appropriation of Kenyan land, their ensuing panic at the threat of losing it during the Mau Mau War, and the ways in which the white settlers used native civilians as agents of murder. The novel questions how, amongst other things, Kenyans might live with the profound weight of the particular history they carry.
Gerald Gaylard describes postcolonialism as “a pause which has been created by uncertainty as to how to understand and respond to history […] one reason for pausing seems to be the difficulty of articulating new answers and the arbitrariness of the old ones” (2006: 57). Although made with reference to the utility of the breaches to modal boundaries occasioned by the use of elements of the fantastic in the works of authors such as Mia Couto, Gaylard’s claims proves relevant to the difficulties with articulation encountered by characters like Nyipir and Akai in Dust. Writing on the relation between postcolonialism and trauma, Ato Quayson observes that traumatic events “do not easily yield ‘facts’ in any straightforward sense of the word” (2003: 78). Instead, historical traumas present us with a complicated version of recollection which “had no place” (Caruth, 1996: 153). This lack of definitiveness is also reflected in the form of the narrative of Dust which, like many trauma fictions, is characterized by the “irruption of one time onto another” resulting in the disruption of the “conventional linear structure” (Whitehead, 2014: 6) that typifies realist narratives. This temporal fragmentation is also apparent in the Oganda parents’ struggle with articulation and historical coherence. Implicit in this disorientation is the unbearable weight of a historical trauma to which there has yet to be resolution.
Despite current contestation around the uses of trauma theory in reading postcolonial texts, critics nonetheless agree that traumatic histories are inassimilable and that they are transmitted across generations. Frantz Fanon (1961), Paul Gilroy (2005), and Toni Morrison, for example, contend that racist histories have lasting effects on the psychic lives of the oppressed and their descendants. If we accept Neil J. Smelser’s contention that that “it is possible to describe social dislocations as traumas if they disrupt organised social life” (2004: 37), then colonialism, which was predominantly grounded on racism, constitutes a particular kind of historical trauma. Remarking on the racial memory in another context, Sam Durrant argues that
“the weight of the whole race” cannot be accommodated within consciousness, it passes itself from generation to generation as symptom or affect. It passes itself on as a memory of the body, a memory of violence inflicted on the racially marked body, a memory that takes on a bodily form […] because it exceeds both the individual’s and the community’s capacity for verbalisation and mourning. (Durrant, 2004: 80; emphasis in original)
Having experienced the most overwhelming kinds of violence and cruelty from Hugh, Nyipir and Akai share with Morrison’s characters the corporal manifestations of racial violation. However, their symptomatic response to it is more than merely embodied, but is also embedded in their respective silences and their behaviours.
We are initially told that Nyipir and Akai belong to that generation of Kenyan parents who tried to conceal the devastating state of postcolonial Kenya from their children, a concealment which, we later learn, is only one of many profound omissions on their part. Their silences may be partially attributed to the traumatic nature of their respective experiences because, as Chris van der Merwe and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela explain in another context,
When people are overwhelmed by a traumatic experience, there is a silencing of the senses […] [and this] silencing is more than a lack of words; it is also a lack of understanding of what has happened to them. (2007: 33)
As evidenced by this quotation, the silences which often accompany trauma are due to the fact that trauma “disarticulates the self and creates holes in existence” (LaCapra, 2014/2001: 41). This is a disarticulation which coincides with the affront to both the signifying potential of language and the human desire to derive meaning from experience. Cheryl Glenn also makes a convincing argument that language “cannot be understood unless we begin by observing that speech is not only surrounded by silence but consists most of all in silence […] Silence and language work together, each shaping and generating the other” (2004: 4). This dialogical relation suggests that the silences of those who have been traumatized are both symptomatic and profoundly meaningful.
The Oganda parents are severely plagued by the trauma of history, existential uncertainty, and overwhelming silence. Having been an active participant in the struggle for a better Kenya in the 1950s and having assisted Hugh in “hunting” people following 1969, Nyipir is a venerable figure of pathos in the novel, since he embodies an individual marked both by time’s cruel passage and several traumatic ruptures. Similarly, Akai conceals a painful past during which she tragically lost her first-born twin babies, a loss from which she appears never to recover. Nyipir’s secrets are directly related to his role in the country’s political struggle, beginning with the loss of his father and brother at a very young age. Pained by any reminder of all that he has hitherto endured, Nyipir “built illusions of another Kenya, shouting out the national anthem when he could as if the volume alone would remove the rust eating into national hopes” (26). Both Akai’s and Nyipir’s illusory Kenya is constructed as much for the perceived benefit of their children as it is in the service of forgetting those memories which, if articulated, would constitute a threat to the forward momentum of their lives.
Nyipir’s traumatic experiences begin with the untimely loss of his immediate family prior to his adolescence. His older brother and father are conscripted to fight in Burma never to be heard from again, his mother and younger sister die shortly thereafter, and he is adopted by a fiendish uncle who abuses him and whom he accidentally kills. Due to this manslaughter, a prepubescent Nyipir runs away from home at a time that coincides with the beginning of the Mau Mau War, is taken in by missionaries, and later finds himself working as an undertaker. It is the undertaking job which presages his life as an assistant to tyrants such as Hugh. Nyipir is so profoundly affected by the consequences of empire that, later in his life, his mannerisms recall this fact. During his visit to retrieve Odidi’s corpse in a Nairobi mortuary, for example, the narrator notes that “his manner is genteel English colonial stranded in time’s paradoxes” (18). Similarly, the newly-returned Ajany notices her father’s overwhelming grief at Odidi’s death and, observing his expression and movements, comments: “Here. The evidence. They are descendants of a lineage of Living Dead” (18; emphasis in original). Both the narrator and Ajany’s observations signify the abiding legacy of British rule in Kenya, its devastating impact on the lives of those left behind well after the formal withdrawal of the Empire, and the implicit promise of assimilation into the culture of a country Nyipir has never seen. In other words, his mannerisms reflect the spectral imprint of colonialism and simultaneously suggest that he embodies indigenous Kenyans whose lives have been irrevocably transformed by their encounter with empire.
Although he tends to speak the least, Nyipir is arguably the most significant character with regards to the novel’s dealings with the site-specific entanglements between historical trauma and empire. Burma, for instance, is a place Nyipir has never been to, and nor does he have any knowledge of it apart from its geographical coordinates which he learned as a schoolboy. Much like the spectral Britain from which he derives his mannerisms, Burma is a non-place, a geographical black hole from which loved ones never return. The centrality of place and placelessness in relation to space here corresponds with Nyipir’s perpetual state of being haunted by the past. He remains lost in reverie as he explains that “Our people. Went for King Georges’s war. Didn’t come back” (69). Embedded within Nyipir’s characteristically truncated manner of speaking is a sense of what precisely occurred during the British Crown’s exploitation of black Africans who were recruited to fight on behalf of their colonizers in the Second World War. The exploitation of both East and West Africans resulted in young boys as well as men being deployed to fight — often to certain death (see also Bandele, 2007). A full account of what Burma means to Nyipir is buried behind his inability to explicitly declare that the likely reason for his family and countrymen’s failure to return is that they died.
Nyipir’s silences and difficulty with articulation extend to his involvement in the Mau Mau War and his “work” as an assistant to Hugh, and are a function of memories which resist linguistic expression and yet refuse to be ignored. Isaiah’s arrival is, ultimately, a catalyst for the dislodging of the many secrets contained within Wuoth Ogik. Like his presumed father before him, Isaiah arrives at Wuoth Ogik “with a dust devil under the guardianship of a red orange sunset” (60). He bears a surname resonant of a past the Oganda parents would rather forget, a name only known to Ajany as a scrawl inside the books in the study of the house. Isaiah’s questions regarding the whereabouts of Hugh therefore grant even more mystery to the name of the phantom within Wuoth Ogik, yet Ajany is unable to extract answers from Nyipir, a man with “dust in his eyes, inward gaze” (46). Isaiah’s and Ajany’s questions, much like the hard earth which suddenly appears to resist his labour following Odidi’s death, require Nyipir to find some kind of language with which to share the unshareable: a past he has locked away in order to re-enter the land of the living — albeit as the “Living Dead” (18).
By virtue of being inherently traumatic, Nyipir’s memory of Hugh is locked away in the same space of his psyche where he stores his torment regarding Burma and the Mau Mau War. The refrain, “And if I should speak, may the oath kill me” (69; emphasis in original), is the cipher which contains the totality of that which he is unable to articulate. Derived from his involvement with the Mau Mau, this code denotes a correlation between speech and death. He confides in Ajany,
Silence’s oaths, slow-dripping venom with their seductive promise of memory loss. Erasure of secrets, as long as the oath was fed in intermittent seasons with spilled human blood […] He explains, “We know, nyara, that to name the unnamable is a curse […]. Even if you plant another story into silence, see, the buried thing returns to ask for its blood from the living.” (68–69)
Nyipir’s position on the uses of silence here is linked with “memory loss” and “erasure” (68), both of which are rendered sacred by their association with the sacrificial spilling of human blood and the signifiers “oath” and “covenant”, both of which imply a noble agreement. These associations are, however, revealed to be effective only insofar as they constitute a means of survival.
On a historical level, the cipher refers to contestation over land between settlers and the indigenous peoples of what was then known as the British colony of Kenya. This contestation involved the social stratification and dispossession which resulted in the Mau Mau War (1952–1960), a conflict against the stripping of land ownership and the eviction of Africans from European farms, the groundwork for which was institutionalized by the Crown Lands Ordinance of 1902 (Furedi, 1989: 5). This Ordinance granted settlers rights to lay claim to any patch of land they desired on the colony, even if that land was already populated by its original inhabitants. As a result, settlers chose for themselves land which “contained the richest soil” and black Africans had no choice but to live as “squatters and labourers” (Furedi, 1989: 9) on “British” farms. Furedi also observes that much of the social stratification was along ethnic lines; thus “while many [Gikuyu] suffered the brunt of [land dispossession] […] others became involved in the new colonial system”, with a large proportion of them being allowed to become “educated and entrepreneurial” (Furedi, 1989: 5). Later, the Gikuyu were conscripted to fight on the side of the British as part of the King’s African Rifles (KAR). As a result of the stark inequality produced by this, there grew an increasing resentment against the Gikuyu elite, who came to be regarded as enablers of the colonial administration.
The factors highlighted above contributed to various protests by the indigenous peoples which, in turn, culminated in the eviction of both squatters and labourers from “European” farms in 1950. While earlier protests had entailed “civil disobedience”, the forced eviction escalated the resistance to include the use of “force and sabotage” (1989: 110). Due to the settlers’ ensuing panic and subsequent attempts to thwart dissent by killing known protesters, oaths of silence were used by the indigenous peoples as a method of recruiting, training, and organizing amongst themselves.
Furedi further observes that oathing was inherited from earlier agrarian protests by the rural peoples of Kenya (1947), and was a means of “forging consensus and unity” (1989: 8) which was later adopted by the Mau Mau during the more overtly violent years following 1950. Fearing increasing insurgency during this period, the colonial powers instituted a Declaration of Emergency in 1952, going as far as to confine protesters in concentration camps. By the time the British had gained their first victory over the Mau Mau in 1955, the spirit of dissent had been firmly established among the Kenyan peoples, and so the bloodshed did not relent until, roughly, 1963. It was this persistence that forced Britain to agree to negotiate Kenyan independence, which the country gained in 1964.
The optimism which accompanied Kenyan independence was unduly interrupted by a rising tribalism which had long been festering and which culminated in the assassination of Mboya in 1969. Mboya’s death, according to the narrator, “created a fissure in the nation, as if it had split apart its own soul” (272). Notably, this has a profound effect on Nyipir, who had pinned all of his hopes on the promise of prosperity Mboya represented. Mboya’s assassination was immediately followed by the persecution of the Luo peoples — of which he and Nyipir are members — who were “hunted down like vermin” (234) and “renamed cockroaches and ‘beasts of the west’” (272). With the death of Mboya, Nyipir, like many Kenyans, “lost Kenya. Often, for him, it was still 1969” (275). Therefore, just as Belgium manufactured social stratification between the Hutu and the Tutsi during their colonization of Rwanda, by involving the Gikuyu and the educated elite in their colonial project Britain produced the genocidal logic that would engulf post-independence Kenya.
Nyipir’s oathing cipher thus highlights the haunting effects of Kenya’s turbulent history, particularly amongst those who had to endure it, and reflects his gradual cynicism about life itself. The foundation of this cynicism begins with the loss of his family as a boy, is exacerbated by his encounters with atrocity as a younger man, and is compounded by the untimely death of Odidi. Nyipir first encounters atrocity while working as an assistant to “Warui the gravedigger”, a ruthless man who “made bodies disappear for the Crown, and anyone else who paid for it” (167). He is later employed to do the same in the army camp neighbouring his mission school. In both jobs he is charged with burying the dismembered body parts of what are presumably murdered Mau Mau protesters. The only difference being that he initially does so at night with Warui, but is expected to do so during the day in his later job. Nyipir is profoundly affected by his first encounter with disembodied human remains in daylight:
This is a body, he thought […] This is blood, and waited for the rumble that would surely end a world confronted by this horror. It didn’t come. […] Much, much later, Nyipir’s mind watched life shutting down on itself inside the pitch of human screams: Ngai, Ngai, Ngai. God, God, God. (171; emphasis in original)
Nyipir’s encounter with inconceivable violence enacted upon his fellow embodied humans here constitutes his first definitive disillusionment with life. Having absorbed the Christian conception of an ethical universe through his missionary education, he regards this encounter with the inhumane as a signal of the end of a world in which this is possible. In the absence of a moral universe in which appeals for the sanctity of human life provoke a response, however, he finds himself stranded in an unhomely world governed by the brutality of death and the silence of night. “The body of a human”, he later writes in a letter to his surrogate father, “cannot survive without kindness. When it meets hatred, it stops trusting life” (172; emphasis in original). This newly-gained knowledge of amorality causes him to distrust the sanctity of his own life.
While Nyipir’s macabre work is propelled by the conviction that he will one day earn enough money to travel to Burma to retrieve his lost relatives, it also constitutes an induction into silence as symbolized by its ultimate manifestation: death. The dead bodies he comes into contact with are also far from ordinary, since they represent abjection. Julia Kristeva conceives of the abject as “one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” (Kristeva, 1982: 1; my emphasis). She goes on to elaborate that abjection is comprised of “wastes [that] drop that I might live” (Kristeva, 1982: 3). These wastes include, but are not limited to, a “wound with pus . . . the sickly, acrid smell of sweat […] [and] decay” (Kristeva, 1982: 3). In other words, abjection comprises all bodily excretions that are “radically separate, loathesome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either” (Kristeva, 1982: 3). Judith Butler further posits that abjection “delineates the boundaries of the body which are also the first contours of the subject” (Butler, 1990: 169). Read as a manifestation of the abject, the human remains with which Nyipir comes into contact signify the violation of bodily integrity, as well as symbolizing the erasure of the humanity of the murdered.
While abjection is primarily linked to the corporeal, it shares also with trauma the blurring of assumed boundaries between inside and outside. For example, the Freudian definition of trauma is as that which “a breach in the mind’s experience of the time, self and the world […] an event that is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly to be fully known” (Caruth, 1996: 4). This implies a severing to that structural integrity which is contained within Kristeva’s definition the abject. Nyipir’s reaction to the mutilated bodies above suggests the excess which characterizes encounters with atrocity, due to its layered symbolic resonance. Following the assassination of Mboya, Nyipir’s desire to travel to Burma is again interrupted by his meeting with Hugh and, as he later confides in Galgalu, “We hunted men […] [That] kind of thing does not end right” (271). He elaborates, “I fed and washed a man who could kill if he wanted to — and he did. But he showed me how not to be afraid” (271). Implicit in his work as an undertaker, the futile belief that his father and brother are still alive, and work with Hugh, is the extent to which Nyipir remains tethered to death.
“Talkative shadows, crumbling walls”: Wuoth Ogik and the spectres of the past
Owuor’s novel is concerned with the significance of Wuoth Ogik as it pertains to the destinies of the characters, but also with the tensions its very existence conjures for postcolonial peoples. Due to its origins, the house qualifies as a colonial artefact which, because it occupies several temporalities and contains several characters’ memories, may also be regarded as a monument. Moreover, as exemplified by the recent #RhodesMustFall protests in South Africa and the United Kingdom, and the conflicts around Confederate statues in the United States, monuments have increasingly become the subject of much contestation in global discourse. In Anglophone Africa, this contestation is intimately bound up with an aspiration for a modernity grounded in contextualized and ethical engagement with colonialism’s violent legacy. The associations between various manifestations of silence, haunting, and remembrance in the novel are furthermore intimately woven into the architecture of Wuoth Ogik, a house which “[pays] homage to water” (72).
Hugh emerges as a spectre who haunts Wuoth Ogik, the house’s very existence recalls this fact. This haunting is further evidenced by the unsettlement caused by the arrival of the stranger who bears his name. We later learn that this stranger arrives due to being sent a book from the study of Wuoth Ogik and a portrait of the naked black woman signed by Hugh, by the deceased Odidi. These objects and the far-reaching memories they evoke are contained within the house. In addition to being associated with the ephemeral element of water in which many of the lifechanging events in the novel are drenched, the inside of the house is also imbued with “memories of long ago, flickering shadows pouring out of nooks” (72). The house’s increasingly debilitated physical structure indicates that its very existence is bound up with colonial arrogance and brutality.
Wuoth Ogik is built by Hugh upon a patch of land in Kalacha, land to which he lays claim shortly after arriving in Kenya in 1950 with his wife Selene. He spends an inordinate amount of time trying to convince Selene that the house is for her when it is, in fact, merely an extension of his possessions, of which she is one. The house, he tells her, is to be built “near a perfect oasis” with “pink and coral stones” (109) from Dar es Salaam. This house, which he would name Wuoth Ogik, is imbued with Hugh’s colonial contradictions:
Glazed stone tiles, plastered walls and floor, Ethiopian Orthodox icons […] Etching in the wall. It read: Crux sancta sit mihi lux / Non draco sit mihi dux / Vade restro satana / Numiquam suade mihi vana / Sunt mala quae libas / Ipse venena bibas. (112–13; emphasis in original)
The construction and aesthetics of this house, whose name he obtains from Nyipir, reflect Hugh’s customary arrogance, since he both claims the land and surrounds himself with conflicting cultural symbols originating from both Europe and Africa. Amongst these objects is the etching on the wall which directly refers to the Saint Benedict medal, crafted and named after the patron saint of Europe, which is associated with protection and exorcism. It is profoundly ironic that Hugh would have the prayer of protection and exorcism sanctify a space which is his only by virtue of conquest and brute force. This irony also extends to the banishing of evil from Wuoth Ogik when, in fact, the very person seeking protection later becomes a phantom that refuses to be exorcised from the house and, indeed, from postcolonial Kenya.
For Hugh, Kenya represents an unmitigated release of inhibitions and the fulfilment of his basest desires. Selene notes her husband’s transformation after moving into the house:
Kenya was seeping into Hugh […] In time, whatever Hugh desired, he touched and claimed. The houseboy: my Kovirondo. […] The dead elephant: my trophy. Kenya: my country. Selene: my wife. (93–94; emphasis in original)
Having left England a former soldier who “had skimmed through war’s ampitheatre, a disgusted and detached witness” (92), Hugh is depicted as having a suitable constitution for his new job as an agent of empire in Kenya. There is, for instance, a particular ruthlessness to be garnered from the description of someone who, unlike Nyipir in similar circumstances, appears unaffected by the atrocities of war. It is this very detachment which becomes fully manifested in Hugh’s colonial arrogance. As Selene’s observations regarding his claims to “ownership” in the excerpt reveal, it is not only objects that Hugh regards as belonging to him, but also those human beings who are native inhabitants of the land in which he arrives not as guest, but as master. The Kenyans are too easily designated by their role as servants, a colonial attitude which logically extends to the wildlife Hugh regards as being for his consumption and, ultimately, to the country itself. “Power”, according to Hugh, “is useless if it cannot be expressed” (101). He is prepared to express this power at all costs.
Contrary to Selene’s attribution of Hugh’s seemingly newfound appetites to the influence of Kenya, the former’s transformation is revealed as stemming from malignant aspects of his own character:
[Hugh] roamed deeper territories. Safari after safari, and an assortment of guns entered the house, as did a parade of slaughtered creatures — heads, skins, tusks. All those things they had never needed until they came to Kenya. Selene abhorred the look of dead animals. Hugh the predator made her nervous. (95)
As reflected here, Hugh is predisposed to ruthlessness because, unlike Selene, he not only lays claim to anything he fancies, but also relishes in the evidence of having killed. While Hugh’s ruthlessness is less than remarkable given Britain’s well-documented colonial legacy, Owuor’s novel extends the consequences of it to include the private lives of her characters. Selene is unnerved by the memorabilia of slaughter that Hugh collects, especially because they are punctuated by silences and secrets. She observes that while he attempts to overwrite the more obvious signs of his transformation with talk of the Kenyan landscape, its flora and peoples, his speech is punctuated by silences. “He spoke”, Selene notes, “and in his words were gaps and new silences” (109); she repeatedly wonders who he is when he goes on his trips with his assistant, Nyipir. The silences she reads in Hugh are distinguishable from the ones that plague Nyipir because the former is an agent of violence, while the other is subjected to it. Hugh’s silences serve to conceal the fact that he is a murderer and that he has taken a mistress, concealments which suggest that he understands that Selene would find both of these morally bankrupt. His silences could be read as signs of shame, were it not for the fact that he continues to feed his unrestrained desires in the exercise (and, perhaps, abuse) of the power vested in him by Britain.
During one of his trips, he and Nyipir stumble upon the attractive Akai bathing in a watering hole during one of their safaris. Having gleaned Nyipir’s immediate attraction to the younger Akai, Hugh immediately decides that he wants her for himself. The narrator relays Nyipir’s responses to this encounter:
Nyipir had prayed as Akai jumped into the watering hole and splashed muddy water on Hugh’s face. He grunted when Hugh reached forward to drag the girl to himself. Akai came to stay […] Nyipir cleared his throat, “When Madam Bolton comes, what happens to . . .” Hugh rounded on Nyipir, face red, ginger hair disheveled, and through gritted teeth ground out, “Mtu kishenzi, sweep the veranda, mara moja”. (316–317; emphasis in original)
Hugh’s possessive appropriation of Akai here is reminiscent of his overriding sense of entitlement and further illustrates his tendency for regarding people as possessions. He further enacts this proprietorial attitude when he begins to sketch Akai nude, while forcing her to maintain her poses despite her stated expressions of discomfort. Both his egotistical displays of power over Akai during the process of creating the portrait and his implicit fetishization of her by relating to her only as an object to fulfil his desire for excess are a function of his dehumanization of her. Akai appears to be blissfully unaware of his disregard for her, even when he verbally abuses her for falling pregnant and, subsequently, sends her away because she has become an inconvenience. His disregard for Akai’s humanity is also signalled by his indignation when Nyipir reminds him that he is married and that his actions have consequences — a disregard consistent with his careless exercise of unbridled lust.
Even after she is sent away, Akai still believes that Hugh is truly in love with her, and that he will eventually come to pay her dowry. He does not. Instead, she gives birth to twins and, shortly thereafter, is evicted from her home following an argument with her mother.
Akai then embarks on a journey through an arid desert firm in the belief that she will be welcomed by Hugh. This journey, however, proves treacherous since she runs out of water and her infant children, Ewoi and Etir, die of thirst. When a grief-stricken Akai finally arrives at Wuoth Ogik, Hugh condemns her as a “Whore! Whore! Whore! […] Prostitute, monkey, slut, slug, Ngikakumok!” (350; emphasis in original) before he is shot dead by Nyipir, who has been observing the exchange. Akai is so irrevocably altered by the experience of losing her twins that she is barely able to form bonds with Odidi and, most noticeably, Ajany, when they are born. In this regard, Akai’s experiences of trauma exist in parallel to those of Nyipir and result in a retreat from the forward momentum of life. The Oganda parents’ trauma may thus be described as “a transformative experience […] a bizarre encounter with atrocity […] that can never be purified again” (Tal 1996: 119). This description is especially salient during the time when the parents still inhabit the house stained not only with Kenyan blood but haunted by Hugh, a time which thus signifies the beginning of the end for both of them.
Akai’s past is, furthermore, a function of the dehumanization which necessarily accompanied the colonial project and fantasies of black women as inherently oversexualized and promiscuous. These fantasies were notoriously embodied in the treatment of historical figures such as Sara Baartman (1789–1815), who was given the derogative appellation “Hottentot Venus”. Hugh’s nude portrait of Akai plays the same symbolic role as the European museums in which Sara was displayed. In both instances, the oversexualized black woman is transformed into an object of the colonial gaze. It is a result of this very consistency in the racialized destructive practices of the Empire and its agents that Akai comes to represent a transhistorical experience of gendered subjugation suffered by black women in the colonies. The character stands as an allegory for the exploitation of the African continent’s natural resources for the economic enrichment of Europe.
It is worth noting too that although Hugh takes it upon himself to learn Kiswahili, he only uses the language to insult and belittle those over whom he perceives himself to have dominance. His words, actions, and sense of entitlement vehemently place him as the only one with agency in this setting, while those who “serve” him are positioned as his subjects. Nyipir’s murder of Hugh, his subsequent marriage to Akai (however dysfunctional), and their decision to raise their children in Wouth Ogik are therefore highly significant because they symbolically reverse the unequal distribution of power by seizing the position of agent: one who acts rather than being acted upon. Their decision to inhabit Wuoth Ogik is arguably the most politically potent of their actions, primarily because the land on which Hugh built the house was neither his nor the British Crown’s to begin with. In assuming ownership over the house and the land upon which it is built, therefore, the Ogandas enact a version of restorative justice which they literally have to pry from the cold, dead fingers of the deceased colonialist.
Conclusion
While predominantly tragic, Dust is characterized by a sweeping lyricism which paints a provocative picture of atrocity and trauma as contained within Wuoth Ogik. The narrative moves from trauma and silence to redemption and speech. It is thus fitting that the novel should conclude with a flood which finally washes away Wouth Ogik, after which each of the characters begin moving towards some kind of future. This flood sweeps away with it the phantoms which have hitherto haunted the colonial mansion, thus suggesting that their potential future is contingent upon the destruction of that which keeps them tethered to the past. In other words, each character’s movement out of the house facilitates their letting go of the spectres of a history, personified by everything Hugh represents, which has held them captive. “The journey ends” (316) is reversed by this migration out of the monument to imperial and interpersonal violence, since the journey does not, in fact, end. Implicit in the destruction of the house, then, is the suggestion that the struggle for some kind of life after atrocity experienced by postcolonial, post-independence people is a struggle against the onslaught of a history whose material repositories must be destroyed.
