An Eco-Decolonial Narrative: Toward a Dividual Self and Slow Wit(h)nessing in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea

Abstract

This article focuses on the Kenyan novelist Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019) and examines how dividuality as an eco-decolonial move is manifested in the novel. Dividuality, as I argue, derives from an ecodecolonial approach and challenges the human-nature dualism, and at the same time extends the Western-oriented, enlightened image of a firmly insular person into a less bounded and porous presence comprised of both human and nonhuman forces. From this vantage point, this article claims that the notion of the dividual in Owuor’s text helps us imagine the act of witnessing beyond European and Western thought with regard to being in the world, history, memory, and environment at large. Witnessing, as perceived in this article, is recognised as a mode of being in the world from an everyday perspective, be it individual, political, social, or environmental. In this way, The Dragonfly Sea, gestures toward what I call “slow wit(h)nessing” in this study as an open-ended and permeable act which is significantly constituted by slow and entangled interactions and exchanges among humans, animals, plants, seascapes, landscapes, matter, and spirits through transoceanic experiences in Kenya, China, and Turkey. This article draws from and builds on the theories of dividual personhood from McKim Marriott’s seminal work on Indian cultural material analysis to Marylin Strathern’s innovative Melanesian ethnography as well as Bracha Ettinger’s inspiring study on the collapse of boundaries between the “I” and the Other.