Rhizomic writing and reading of a nation coming to birth in Yvonne A. Owuor’s novel, dust

Abstract

Anchored on Deleueze and Guattari’s notion of rhizome, this article inspects the narrative strategy in Yvonne Owuor’s novel, Dust, in imagining the Kenyan nation, especially in the context of the contested presidential elections of 2007. It subsequently grapples with how Owuor weaves and patches different instances and moments of remembering into connected rhizomic-like narratives, coalescing into the vision of a nation; fragmented, but hankering for forgiveness, healing and a wrestling with a sense of coming to birth and nationhood. From a rhizomic reading of the novel, the article scrutinises how the private and public remembering intersects and inter-texts with fiction and real lived experiences (history) in narrating the evinced vision of the coming to birth of the post-independence Kenyan nation.