ABSTRACT
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s novel Dust – set during the 2007/2008 post-election violence – has justifiably attracted considerable critical attention probably because of its candid and poignant exploration of the Kenyan postcolonial polity and its related violent experiences. By foreshadowing and/or establishing a link between 2007/2008 post-election violence and previous bouts of horror, literary scholars read Owuor’s Dust as a literary illustration of Kenya’s history of violence. While reading Dust as an allegory of Kenyan political and historical regimes of violence is persuasive, this chapter argues that the text offers itself to alternative readings. The chapter argues that Owuor’s Dust crafts a register for characters like Akai Lokorijom and Aggrey Nyipir Oganda to disclose their impossibly suppressed traumatic experiences. While the chapter depicts Akai’s loss of her twins after being abandoned by her family and lover as an example of a tragically traumatic Kenyan colonial experience, it focuses on Nyipir’s torture after his refusal to take the oath in 1969 as a case of a state-inspired violation that defies articulation in normal diction. Therefore, when Akai and Nyipir finally reveal their painful past to Ajany after the death of Odidi, the chapter posits that they do so because Ajany assumes the position of a Felman and Laub empathetic listener. She becomes that someone who not only empowers the victim to talk about his/her traumatic past, but also one, who as a surrogate narrator, constructs for them an appropriate register to do so.
