"He wanted neither to see nor to meet a Caucasian any day soon." Thus one of the minor characters in a big novel I just finished reading, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's The Dragonfly Sea (Knopf, 2019, 444). I ordered the novel because a Chinese journalist who's written about China's ventures in Africa recommended it (though I can't recall where I read this; it must have been April Zhu), and I'm very glad I did. Here's a novel which takes place neither in the Atlantic world nor the Pacific but in the worlds connected by maritime trade between East Africa and East Asia. I don't want to spoil it for you, but let me add that this is also largely a Muslim story. The character quoted above has just emerged from an American base in the Middle East where suspected members of al-Shabbab, including innocents like this one, are tortured. But the more Sufi world of the novel is one in which al-Shabbab is as much an outside agitator as the western war on terror.The inspiration for the book was the discovery, on the island of Pate on Kenya's northeast coast, of some old and odd-looking tombs. They have been confirmed as tombs of survivors of the famous Chinese (Muslim) admiral Zheng He's voyages in the early 15th century, the last of which foundered on the far edge of the "Western Ocean." Some Pate inhabitants seem to have some Chinese features and surnames; in recognition, a "Descendant" was invited to study in China in 2005.
Uwuor takes this premise and runs with it, doing it so confidently - among its many languages the novel uses Mandarin - that I assumed she must have been a student in China herself. Yet nothing in the acknowledgments at the back of the book suggests she's even been, though one friend thanked ("you will recognize adaptations of your hilarious China adventures") clearly has. Instead the book was germinated in Australia and Europe, and launched in Nairobi, where Owuor lives. But The Dragnfly Sea lets you feel that connections are being forged beyond the template of western empires and the networks they've left behind (including nation states and literary residencies).
The protagonist, a fatherless young woman named Ayaana, feels that China's interest in the world of Pate is as self-serving as that of al-Shabbab. But the novel's characters - here's what literature can do - have lives and choose affiliations beyond and despite the larger constellations of global power. At one important point, for instance, a Chinese character who has found his way to Pate takes Shahada. I'm impressed also that Uwuor imagines romance between her Pate protagonist and a Chinese man, although neither is at east with their nationality. It feels like the history of a new world being written.
Zhu (in a review I only just read) describes the space this novel opens:
At the center of this story is a question: how does one complicate the present “return of China to Kenya?” “China in Africa,” a category so broad it means nothing (or, rather, chooses only politically important meanings), is meant to embody an impossible multitude of stories: aid and debt, migration, proliferation of informal and illicit trade, cultural diffusion, cultural imperialism, demographic anxiety, racism, and coloniality. But coverage of these issues is so often flattened to a geopolitical plane populated almost entirely of elite men, one that exists in official, poorly translated English on banners, speeches, press releases, and mottos. ... Owuor is hardly naïve about modern (or historical) Chinese involvement in Kenya and the injustices and humiliations it has exacted on Kenyans. What she does do is ask what seismic geopolitical shifts look like when seen from the margins.
All that is happening in the background, but the novel's characters do more than give it a human face. They make their own stories, tangling with each other in tender and confusing relationships, consoled through difficult times and terrible losses by the constancy of the sea:
No gaps in the ocean, no distances between things. (125)
