Abstract

The Dragonfly Sea by the Kenyan author Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor moves away from the West as the constant historical and geographical point of reference. This novel rewrites ancient and recent relations between East Africa and China (also Turkey) and puts an emphasis on far-reaching connections in the Indian Ocean. Rather than land, it is the shape-shifting, unsettling sea, larger than human life—its waves, surfs, currents, and scents, but also its pirates and container ships—which takes poetic center-stage in the novel. I start by exploring the ocean as a potent, productively opaque metaphor which defies stable representations, but underlines an aesthetic relationship to place and belonging. I argue, with reference to Glissant, that it safeguards relationships from assimilation into predefined and coercive discourses and also foregrounds a multitude of possible ways of knowing. Furthermore, the novel suggests a similar approach to language. A multitude of language and cultural repertoires figure—often untranslated and unexplained: Swahili proverbs, verses from taarab songs and children’s rhymes, Islamic formulas and calligraphy and Chinese pictograms disrupt the English narrative and challenge the reader. The novel foregrounds each language’s Eigensinn, but also, and even more so, the irreducible sensuous body of every language. With Emily Apter’s notion of ‘untranslatability’, I argue that ‘untranslation’ is a powerful act and meta-comment in the Dragonfly Sea, a novel that makes an effort not to ‘tame’ languages, treating them as easily substitutable. I demonstrate that productive moments of astonishment and discomfort arise in those parts of the text in which we hear, see and are made to ‘taste’, as the novel says, other languages and repertoires.