Colonial monuments, postcolonial selves: History, trauma and silence in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’sDust

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.