The Subversion of Archipelagic Memory in Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea

Abstract

Archipelago memory and history are often scripted as inherently colonial and patriarchal obligations. This is anchored on the belief that it is the dominant power that connects the archipelago and curates its history-making enterprise. This logic, which affirms the agency of colonial power and institutions in an archipelagic history-making enterprise, unfortunately erases the contributions of the female and/or the creolised figure’s agency in the process of self-enunciation of its insights into islandic experiences. The erasure of a feminised enunciation of archipelagic memory and history has been subversively reconfigured in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea, in which the role of chronicling Pate’s history and memory are bequeathed unto an unlikely custodian: the female protagonist of the novel. Owuor expertly deploys focalisation, characterisation, and plot to create a female narrator of Patean history. Owuor also uses Ayaana’s ancestry and nautical education from experts of the material and immaterial knowledge of the ocean — Muhidin Mlingoti and Fundi Almazi Mehdi — to portray her protagonist as a curator, mediator, and translator of Pate’s history and memory.