Sifting Dust: Postcolonial and Hybrid Identities in the Novel Dust

Abstract

The writing scene in East Africa has witnessed a rise in the emergence of contemporary literature. One example is Dust, a 2014 novel by the Kenyan Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, who, in 2003, was awarded the Caine prize for African writing. The novel Dust has been reviewed from various angles. Dust introduces two female characters, Akai and Ajany, who are both connected to a key character in the novel: Odidi Oganda. How do the characters Akai and Ajany exemplify forms of hybrid identity shaped by colonial and diasporic contexts? This essay is about these two female characters who provide adequate material with which to explore hybrid identities during the colonial period and in the diaspora. Both experience trauma, which impacts their associations in their local communities and in the diaspora. Akai is tremendously affected by colonialism. She is a contract laborer impregnated by a British colonial settler who later attempts to kill her. Ajany moves in with an abusive man, whom she stabs to death in self-defense right before fleeing Brazil as a fugitive. This essay uses a Postcolonial Feminist lens to explore how these two characters propagate cultural resilience, challenge nationalist narratives, and demonstrate resistance. It employs the method of Narratological Text Analysis in order to present Akai and Ajany in their particular contexts. For analysis, the essay adopts a dialectical type of literary theorising.

1. Introduction

Owuor is a Kenyan writer. Her contemporaries include Kenneth Binyavanga Wainaina, who, in 2002, just one year before Owuor, won the Caine Prize for African Writing, and Muthoni Garland, who was nominated for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2006. Her other contemporary is Lily Mabura. From a historical perspective, Owuor and these contemporary writers handle complex themes. Their work presents narrative techniques that articulate their social visions. These authors grapple with identity, nationhood and gender identities. This essay draws upon these complex themes to situate and highlight aspects of a broader scholarly discourse on postcolonial feminism and hybridity. Owuor and her contemporaries do not shy away from contributing to discourses on gender, nationhood, and postcolonial identity in East African literature. For Owuor and her contemporaries, the individuals in their stories ought to be understood in the context of the communities in which they find themselves. It is clear that Owuor and her contemporaries’ literary careers have influenced and contributed to profiling of Anglophone writers in East Africa.

The novel Dust was written by Yvonne Owuor. In 2003, she was awarded the Caine prize for African writing. In 2015, she received the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature. Owuor was invited to a panel at the Annual Literature Festival (LitFest) in Bayreuth, Germany, in 2016.1 To date, Dust has been reviewed by Burkeywo (2015) from the perspective of fictionalised history. Sibi-Okumu (2014) has considered the novel through the lens of Nationhood. Selasi (2014) in the New York Times considered Dust to be a rewriting of Kenyan history. Christina Kenny (2017) asserts that Dust is about motherhood and nation. Sifting Dust in this essay refers to taking a closer look at the novel by focusing on hybrid identities during the colonial period and in the diaspora as presented in the novel.

Odidi is killed in a gunfight with the police on the streets of Nairobi. Akai is Odidi’s mother, and Ajany is his younger sister. The two characters are situated in different spaces: Akai in a village in Turkana, which is in Northern Kenya, and Ajany in Brazil and Kenya. It is clear that Akai is tremendously affected by colonialism in different ways, and we soon stumble upon her affair with Hugh Bolton, a British colonial official. Ajany is in an abusive relationship with Bernado and must carve her way out of it. Akai and Ajany are forced to negotiate patriarchal conflations of power, hierarchy and competition in the midst of economic subjugation, sexism, racism and colonialism.

Prior studies on East African literature have explored postcolonial identity and gender in East African literature; however, they have not systematically examined how hybrid identities are constructed across diasporic contexts, which this study seeks to address. How do the characters Akai and Ajany demonstrate forms of hybrid identity shaped by colonial and diasporic contexts? In order to address this question, this essay will first present Akai and Ajany in their particular contexts. This essay employs the method of Narratological Text Analysis. This method includes the analysis of different characters’ features, their characterisation, and their constellations in the text. This method thus—according to Toolan (2001)—offers several toolkits that help to deconstruct the text into important components, hence teasing out direct and indirect characterisations. In this essay, we first present a summarised narrative of the two characters, Akai and Ajany, in their contexts. This is purely descriptive. However, an analysis of the characters’ features follows thereafter, integrating postcolonial feminism and hybrid identities in an examination of Akai and Ajany, respectively.

In the novel, Akai and Ajany are described through the voice of the narrator, self-reflection, or other characters, comprising direct characterisation. Similarly, there are aspects of indirect characterisation, as their characters are also developed through emotions and thoughts, actions and speeches, or stream-of-consciousness writing. In general, Akai and Ajany are important characters in this novel, characterised and analysed within the novel itself.

For analysis, this essay adopts a dialectical type of literary theorising. Ketu Katrak suggests three broad types of literary theorising. One method she proposes is for the reader to work out a dialectical connection between the theoretical concepts drawn from the creative work and the ideas taken from theories external to the creative work. In this essay, we adopt this method, forming a dialectic connection between Akai’s colonial context and Postcolonial Feminist Theory that enables a probe the dilemmas of tradition and modernity in postcolonial societies (Katrak 2012, pp. 138–46). Akai is thus examined in the light of Postcolonial Feminist Theory. The character Ajany is analysed in the light of hybrid identities rooted in migration and diaspora identities.

Owuor is writing from a context in which issues regarding gender and sexuality have surfaced in the Kenyan literary corpus. Wa Thiong’o (1978), in his book Petals of Blood, touches on ways in which patriarchy and its manifestations of domination, power and control have objectified women. A number of women in the book are abused mentally, sexually and physically. Despite their efforts, these women are paid low wages and subjected to rape and verbal abuse. In the novel Petals of Blood, Wanja works as a barmaid. Her salary is not consistently paid, and, in view of this exploitation, she is pushed into prostitution. Muthoni Garland has written stories about woman-related problems in contemporary Kenya. Her works are structured around a female character facing the social challenge of everyday patriarchy in its myriad forms. She demonstrates in her writings the mistreatment that Kenyan females face, how they are victimised, and even how they rebel. Besides Muthoni Garland and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, other writers present the state of Kenyan women, including their various origins, backgrounds, and statuses. Further, these characters portray victimhood and include empowered women who subvert the patriarchal regime.

2. Akai Lokorijom

Akai Lokorijom hails from the far northern territories. Akai flows like magma; every one of her movements is considered. She is tall, willowy, and wasp-waisted, with large and firm breasts even in her later years. She is made of and coloured by the earth itself. Her voice is a bassoon sounding, and she is gravel-coloured. She is dark, dangerous, difficult and mystifying. She first meets Hugh Bolton and Nyipir when they come to her locality. Originally from a pastoralist community, she was exposed at an early age to long-distance travel alone to look for and dwell with her family members. She abhors herding duties and always burns food. As a girl, Akai preferred to hunt, swim and wrestle young men. Akai’s family lost cattle; thereafter, she was taken to join missionary camps to learn religion and education. Akai quickly learned English vocabulary tinged with an Irish accent from her teachers. She excelled in all her subjects and plagued her teachers with questions. After her first menstruation, Akai was sent off to seclusion to learn the ways of women, manners, expectations, cooking skills, animal husbandry, about birth, about pleasure, how to weep, about raising children, how to invoke God, and how to kill a man (Owuor 2014, p. 225). She returns to school and plans to become a teacher and traveller. However, while there, she organises a boycott to demand for more meat and milk. Her headmaster-priest, booming, scorns her for being “Mutinous, indecorous and impious” and suspends her. She is required to return to school with her parents, who are expected to publicly chastise her (Owuor 2014, p. 226).

Akai departs for a five-night journey to deliver the suspension letter to her stepfather. On her way, she detours in search of a seasonal watering hole with fragrant waters. When she reaches the edge of this watering hole, she sees two people, Hugh Bolton and Nyipir, already in the water. Akai says “I became Turkana, but before that, I was Dodoth. I left school to meet one man, my father. But I met two. One is Nyipir and the other, Hugh Bolton. They were together” (Owuor 2014, p. 343). For both, meeting Akai, for whom it is said that “even her most tender glance scalds as something ferocious peers out of her dark-brown eyes” (Owuor 2014, p. 33), is fatal.

Akai is married to Nyipir, who, from the first time he saw her, desired to hide her from the world and contemplate her for and by himself. Together, they had two children, a boy, Moses Odidi, and a girl, Ajany. In the 1960s, Akai interacted closely with Hugh Bolton, a colonial government official who, in the late 1950s, was sent to the Northern Frontier District to arrange for security. Hugh liked to paint, and in many of his journeys, he ended up with several paintings. Nyipir was his servant and serviceman to whom he paid 23 shillings each month. Hugh drew the plans of a house in the dust with his fingers, and five months later, a house was built and named Wuoth Ogik (Owuor 2014, pp. 313–15).

Akai, a slender ebony-hued woman with a long neck, stumbles upon Nyipir and Hugh at the water point, the latter a pale, wiry man who is scooping up black mud and rubbing it into his face. She had stopped to laugh. Nyipir waves her away and urges her to run off. Akai comes to stay with the two and serves as Hugh’s mistress (Owuor 2014, p. 316). His wife Selene comes over to Wouth Ogik hoping to persuade him to come back to her to dwell in their posh Naivasha home; he declines. Hugh is obsessed by Akai: her angular features and dark-skinned lifeform that seems to pour itself into the object of its focus (Owuor 2014, p. 329). The object of its focus wants to touch her skin, know its texture, and imagines all kinds of warmth. She is painted severally as a nude, pregnant woman on canvas by Hugh.

Akai never delivers her suspension letter to her stepfather. Instead, she becomes Hugh’s mistress. “For me, he was the face of life. His hair was fire. He had answers. He had travelled further than anyone I knew. Such a person was what I wanted. This is how I wanted to be” (Owuor 2014, p. 344). The promise of a lofty and good life allured her. Hugh reads her things from his books and shows her how to feel from his music. He fondles her and toys with her in public to the disgust of Nyipir (Owuor 2014, p. 344).

A year later, Hugh commands Akai to stay in the rain so that he can sketch her. He works all through the afternoon. After his sketch, Akai runs in, shivering, pouting, and snarling. “Shut up, cow” Hugh screams. “Can’t you see I’m painting”. Hugh works through the night. Nyipir does not sleep at all (Owuor 2014, p. 345).

In one instance, Hugh gets up, pulls Akai off her seat and strips her in front of Nyipir. She stands unclothed. Hugh tears the paper with his paintbrush, throwing the paint and staining Akai’s body and clothes. He commands Akai to leave them on. Akai becomes pregnant, and one Saturday, she starts to bleed. Hugh retorts, “Is that the end of the bastard”, hoping Akai will lose the pregnancy. Nyipir carries Akai to his small safari bed, nurses her and prays that the bleeding will stop (Owuor 2014, p. 346). Akai discovers that she is pregnant with twins, whom she delivers at her parent’s home.

However, three months before giving birth, Hugh arranges a safari to Lokitaung, where he pushes Akai onto a boat with a guardsman who tied sheep aboard, and Hugh gives her fifty shillings. She goes home and tells her family, who are happy to see that the father of her children was a senior officer preparing his army to come for her. He never does. In spite of the sheep and money, the larger Akai becomes, the more her family becomes a laughingstock among the elders. Her stepfather moves Akai and her mother away from their real home, and there, she gives birth to Ewoi, the boy twin, and Etir, the girl twin. The twins die under very harsh conditions, but her mother struggles to get back to Wuoth Ogik to die.

Upon her return to Wuoth Ogik, Hugh shouts “Whore! Whore! Whore! Rain Preventer!” They are two, Akai says, and their names are Ewoi and Etir. Hugh shouts back “Liar! Liar! Prostitute, Monkey, Slut, Slug.” Hugh rushes at her with his small army knife and slashes her arms, shoulder, and stomach, aiming for her womb. Akai sticks to him, and, having raised his knife over her neck, Nyipir shoots Hugh in the head. Nyipir reloads the rifle and shoots Hugh in the throat (Owuor 2014, p. 350). Nyipir and Akai, in fear, drive very far away and hide Hugh’s body. Both return to the house and wait to be found, but no one comes looking for them.

Akai lives together with Nyipir as husband and wife, and later, they beget two children, Odidi and Ajany. Ajany is born premature and feverish. After refusing to suckle, she is abandoned by Akai under a tree. After four days, Ajany is found alive and rescued by Galgalu and Odidi. Akai states that since Ajany was born hot and fevered, she was not meant to live. Akai separates herself early from Ajany, vowing indifference, and, peradventure, death would not take her (Owuor 2014, p. 341).

Akai assures her last remaining child, Ajany, that she loves her and wraps her arms around her. She lets her know for the first time that she remains in her heart, breathing in her; she belongs to life and has a mother. Akai leaves Wuoth Ogik with another man, Ali Dida Hada, as they walk with slow steps to start afresh. Earlier, Akai had also mesmerised Ali Dida, an Eritrean who travelled into the Northern frontier and changed his identity to become Kenyan. He joined the Kenyan police. Ali Dida had come to Wuoth Ogik in search of traces of Hugh Bolton, pretending to be in search of a job as a herdsman. His encounter with Akai made him fixated, and he forgot to ask further (Owuor 2014, p. 240). He was a rival to Nyipir and stayed on with Akai when Nyipir went away for more than six months (Owuor 2014, p. 242).

3. Arabel Ajany

Ajany was born at a time when her father Nyipir was away. Her survival in infancy is revealed to her at a time her mother is about to leave their home. Her mother had not expected to have another child, as she found out quite late that she was pregnant (Owuor 2014, p. 342). Ajany was born feverish, with there being no midwives close by; her mother had heavy bleeding. Ajany did not cry, and her mother did not name her. Later, when her mother was able to walk, she carried Ajany along with her in search of her father. Ajany was taken through watering holes and trading centres, nameless and strapped on her mother’s back. Six days later, she refused to suckle, and her mother had nothing to give her. Her mother put her under a tree, leaving her for dead. She was rescued, and her then 4-year-old brother Odidi gave her a name, insisting she was his baby. At the age of ten, she sucked her two fingers and did not want to be left behind alone with her mother (Owuor 2014, pp. 117–18). Ajany is thin-faced—all bones and angles. She is tiny, with a lot of hair and large eyes (Owuor 2014, p. 23).

Ajany grows up without knowing her relatives. She and her brother conjure images of cousins, uncles and aunties whom they never meet. She learns how to milk camels and is an able helper in the home. Ajany goes through boarding school and does well. Later, she enrols at the University of Nairobi to pursue art and design. In the middle of her first year, she is accepted by a Nova Scotia-based centre of fine arts for a two-year programme (Owuor 2014, p. 120). Ajany and Odidi do not agree on her departure from the country.

In Brazil, she visits places, and at one club, she meets a local male musician named Bernardo. This club is visited by remnants of the colonised, Portugal-infused Africans, wounded immigrants, and the like. Five years prior, in this club, she had found five music makers and sat at the back. She moves in with Bernado and does not care; rather, she writes home that she is happy, loved, and is loved (Owuor 2014, p. 140). Her body opens a way for her soul to fall into his, and for an entire season, she forgets about Wuoth Ogik. Soon after, she stops writing home.

After a while, her life with Bernado is lived in fear. She becomes sad and starts missing her family each day. She is fearful to speak to anyone else and is like a captive. On one occasion while speaking to Odidi on the phone, her apartment door rattles, a key being inserted. It is Bernado. She has to cut off Odidi, switch off her phone, and pretend that she had not been speaking to someone else. Bernado, her lover, is violent. He breaks his guitar on her arms (Owuor 2014, p. 223). She feels stuck in this relationship. This relationship ends badly on the same day that she receives the news of Odidi’s death from her father. Ajany discovers that Bernardo has another woman, aside from her. She decides to attack him with a knife.

Her father calls her to inform her of her brother’s death. She receives a phone call from Nyipir telling her that Odidi is gone, and he pleads with her to come home (Owuor 2014, p. 48). Earlier, she had tried to phone Odidi to no avail. Odidi had planned to travel to Brazil to visit Ajany. He did not make it. Ajany takes the next immediate flight to Nairobi. While on board and before take-off, she expects to be arrested since she is fleeing a crime scene. In Nairobi, she is picked up by Nyipir. Head on shoulder, with tears that will not stop, her father pats her back, calling her his own. Arms linked, they proceed to the morgue, where they rummage through the bodies until they find Odidi’s body at the City Mortuary (Owuor 2014, p. 19). Together with Nyipir post-autopsy, they dress Odidi up and leave in a white hearse for the airport.

Odidi’s casket is loaded at Wilson Airport into an eight-seater plane, where Ajany and Nyipir are nested amid bales of green herbs. Upon arrival home, her mother hardly notices her and moans for her son Odidi. Akai demands the casket be opened and then embraces her dead son close to her chest. For a moment, Ajany wishes she is the one being held in her mother’s arms.

Ajany returns to the city to find her brother’s ghost. She goes to the site of Odidi’s death to keep vigil. She pours water onto the ground at the spot and washes it after she rests her head on the warm tarmac to touch the memory of Odidi’s blood with her face (Owuor 2014, p. 189). She is grabbed by a big woman who tugs her off the road and away from an approaching orange lorry (Owuor 2014, p. 191). Later, she meets Justina and wonders how Odidi could live in a place with flickering lights, a stench and ceaseless noise. She grabs Odidi’s brown leather rugby ball, clutching it close to her body, and cries (Owuor 2014, p. 197). In Nairobi, while seeking answers about her dead brother, she accompanies Odidi’s girlfriend to a nightclub, where she dances the whole night until daylight (Owuor 2014, p. 200). Later, she becomes the lover of Isaiah Bolton, who had come to Kenya in search of answers regarding the death of Hugh Bolton.

4. Akai and Postcolonial Feminist Theory

A development in gender scholarship has pointed out that gender too should be understood as a process and that this will have an effect on how we understand the workings of society at both the micro and macro levels. According to sociologist Judith Lorber, if gender itself is understood as a dynamic process, some will refer to the same process as ‘gendering,’ while others will use the notion ‘doing gender’. This implies that both men and women are seen as embodying constructed roles and identities at all levels—interactional, interpsychic, organisational, and institutional and at the level of cultural practices of entire societies (Ferree et al. 1999, pp. 10–30). Akai is doing gender in all the ways she embodies constructed roles from childhood into adulthood. These roles are prescribed by her culture, in which there are expectations for conformity. Previously, gender had been confined to sex difference and sex role debates. Within sex difference debates, the intention was usually to define the nature and extent of sex differences. Sex role debates shifted questions to those of origin, such as biological versus social and historical factors, and those of purpose, such as functionality versus relations of dominance. Using gender as an analytical category is important to identify the conditions and structures that privilege men in most areas of social life and raise awareness of these structures (Tong 1989, pp. 2–9; Jones 2000, pp. 79–80).

In the Postcolonial Feminist analysis of Akai’s life that follows, the workings of the Kenyan society in which Akai finds herself shall be shown to be ones that privilege men over women and are grounded in deep-seated colonial processes exposing her to bodily harm. This analysis shall not delve deeper into the finer nuances of how patriarchy and imperialism are comparable and overlapping. Indeed, both patriarchy and imperialism are driven by competition, hierarchy and power. They are characterised by inscribing inferiority over the other. Furthermore, it shall neither present the disabling master discourse of colonialism in Kenya, which has an elaborate history and denies the agency of the colonial subject, nor cover the totality of Postcolonial Feminist inquiry where Akai is concerned.

The colonial and postcolonial contexts in which part of Akai’s life is lived are presented in the novel through flashbacks, indicating a somewhat grim future for Akai, her relationships, and her marriage. It is clear that the characters in this novel are tremendously and diversely affected by colonialism.

According to Tong, Feminist Theory is not one but many theories or perspectives. The rendering of each feminist theory or perspective attempts to describe women’s oppression, to explain its causes and consequences, and to prescribe strategies for women’s liberation (Tong 1989, p. 1). According to Hooks (1989), previous versions of feminism overlooked important distinctions of race, class, and nationality that exist between women. Postcolonial feminists insist that national and cultural sovereignty and economic enfranchisement play a significant role in third-world women’s liberation. A Postcolonial Feminist perspective considers the conflations of power, hierarchy and competition to be exacerbated within the histories and legacies of colonialism and postcolonialism.

Akai becomes Hugh’s mistress in the colonial context. She is enchanted by what she thinks he knows. Her readiness to learn and understand more about other places in the world drives her into an abusive relationship, whose unfair power relations, domination and hierarchy are evident. Hugh shouts at Akai, calling her a whore, slut, monkey and other profane words. In this essay, Akai’s life is analysed by way of Postcolonial Feminist theory, which is useful for interrogating the dilemmas of women’s sexuality in postcolonial societies. Akai’s relationship with Hugh is a site of gendered domination. He mistreats her in full view of his other workers and causes her grief. From the narratological excerpt above, we can note that Hugh dominates Akai in a very strange manner. His interaction with her mirrors the colonial landscape in which he was an officer and everyone else was to be lorded over by him. This interaction should primarily be seen as a site where colonial authority and patriarchal control intersect, positioning Akai’s body as a space of both exploitation and constrained agency. For Akai, western education filled her with a longing to explore foreign lands. Her education at a boarding school did not provide her with a route to meaningfully re-enter her own pastoralist world, thus confusing her. Western education at the time did not equip her with the skills she needed to function in her pastoralist community; hence, she later had to be whisked off for further training.

After starting to menstruate, Akai is sent off to seclusion to learn the ways of women, manners, expectations, cooking skills, animal husbandry, about birth, about pleasure, and how to weep, raise children, invoke God, and kill a man (Owuor 2014, p. 225).

This cultural specificity comes with problems at different levels. At the level of her living in this colonial society, it is clear that the education she attained was more geared towards helping her to adapt to western ways as opposed to her own people’s ways, hence creating dilemmas regarding her choice of and desire for a spouse or life partner.

She aptly reminisces that “For me, he was the face of life. His hair was fire. He had answers. He had travelled farther than anyone I knew. Such a person was what I wanted. This is how I wanted to be” (Owuor 2014, p. 344).

Her desire to travel far off and traverse the world occupies her mind over and above what would be the norm in her society. Indeed, as a colonial subject, she is amazed at the vestiges of the colonial masters all around her. The home in which she lived with Hugh was decorated with artefacts from the United Kingdom. A closer look at the varieties of imported household goods, kitchenware and mannerisms in Hugh’s house makes it clear that she preferred to adopt western ways over the ways of her people (Prasansak 2012, p. 161).

On the other hand, the cultural expectations of her parents present a context that complicates her relationship with Hugh. Her pregnancy out of wedlock makes her stepfather the laughingstock of the elders. He is pressured to send Akai and her mother away to settle far away from him. Akai finds herself in a predicament that involves many other players from her clan, who appear to have a say in what should happen in her parent’s home. Akai’s body, in the colonial context, is physically starved. She traverses arid lands for days on end searching for food and water for herself and her twins. Indeed, she has to cut her wrists to drain blood with which to feed her children, though they later die.

Akai does not resist victimisation in the hands of Hugh. It appears as if he has total control over her body and life. He cares about her less and less over time, as evidenced through his actions and name calling. Yet, to her, he is indispensable. Like colonial subjects, she is a victim of many forms of abuse, which she takes without putting up resistance. Akai is unable to negotiate her sexual encounters with Hugh. She must play along with his music. In this space, she experiences multiple dilemmas of tradition and modernity, which conflict and contrast with each other as she lives on beyond independence and into the postcolonial times.

In general, colonisers, in line with historical systems of power and dominance, had the authority to portray the colonised in demeaning ways. Hugh, as a figure of a colonial encounter, is all-powerful and all-knowing in the mind of Akai. Indeed, colonialism imposed itself upon communities but did not resolve tensions that were imminent owing to the co-existing alternative and different ways of life. Akai is unable to navigate hegemonic struggles nor exercise agency in the presence of Hugh. Rather, she is an object of pleasure and dispensable in Hugh’s economy.

5. Ajany and Hybrid Identities

Reflecting on postcolonial hybridity, Bhabha (1990) proffers that hybridity emerges from encounters between cultures, especially after colonialism. Hybridity disrupts claims to cultural purity and produces “in-between” identities. In all this, identity is negotiated and not inherited.

Ajany is born and raised in Northern Kenya. She relocates to Brazil before completing her bachelor’s degree in Kenya. She encounters other cultures after Kenya’s independence in her sojourns. It is clear that she experiences multiple layers of cultural negotiation and identity transformation upon relocating to Brazil, having grown up in the rural areas of Kenya. Upon moving to Brazil, she takes with her a cultural framework or culture, art, religion, gender roles, and social expectations, which clearly were shaped by her Kenyan context and the postcolonial influences. For Ajany, these are her embedded cultural memories, which she will move with across the world on her travels.

It is not only Ajany who relocates: in a certain music club in Brazil, she finds that many who visit it are what she terms “remnants of the colonised”, Portugal-infused Africans, wounded immigrants, and the like. In this club, she finds five music makers and Bernado, with whom she moves in (Owuor 2014, p. 140). It is clear that all these remnants of the colonised bring their frameworks of thought and life with them, expressed in their music, food, lifestyle, etc.

Ajany’s encounter with Brazilian culture depicts Brazil’s distinct mix of Indigenous, African, Portuguese, and immigrant influences. These confront her with new cultural norms, such as moving in with a man who had not been introduced to her family. There are also new expressive practices and gestures through music, religion, language, and social structures. Such an environment encourages Ajany to take other steps and to learn Portuguese in order to navigate the country, thus undergoing cultural adaptation. But, at the same time, she has to create new practices that mix elements of both the Kenyan and Brazilian worlds, such as blending types of foods, spices, clothing and art. Effectively, this means moving toward transculturation (Arroyo 2016).

Bhabha (1994) suggests that there is likely a third space that people must negotiate. Here, Ajany does not preserve all her original identity or wholly adopt Brazilian identity; rather, she inhabits a liminal space where she creatively negotiates belonging—an identity, neither exclusively Kenyan nor Brazilian but both and more. Hybrid identity theory frames this as a “third space” where difference is not erased but reconfigured (Bhabha 1990). Regarding Ajany, this third space is exemplified by her cohabitation status, her regular visits to clubs, her apartment décor, and her capacity to enact deadly violence on Bernado.

Due to experiences in particular socio-historic contexts, individuals tend to accumulate sets of experiences that guide them in their adoption and rejection of behaviour, attitudes and lifestyles. A critical analysis of this novel enables us to understand how Ajany, in the context of African traditional religion and culture, develops and determines her own behaviour and activities while in Brazil.

Ajany quickly accepts advances from Bernado, whom she hardly knows. They become lovers, and he even gets the keys to her apartment. Her preference in this scenario is acting in the third space, where her actions are not based on Kenyan culture or purely Brazilian culture. Ajany’s experience in this third space is marked by cultural negotiation but also by contradiction, where vulnerability within an abusive relationship coexists with acts of resistance, illustrating hybridity as a site of tension rather than resolution. Ajany’s choices when in diaspora, away from her kin, seem to ignore all the cultural conventions of her pastoralist society. The traditional tapestry of life available to Ajany in the novel and gleamed from the life of her mother constitutes the teachings that her mother received when in seclusion and, after her menstruation, included the manners expected of women, who were not seen as being at the same level as men. The cultural scripts define the place of women and the place of men. This includes how to keep a man happy, care for him, and raise his children. These scripts from Ajany’s religio-cultural heritage carry the lessons of acceptable behaviour. We read that after she had begun menstruating, Akai was sent off to seclusion to learn the ways of women, manners, expectations, cooking skills, animal husbandry, about birth, about pleasure, and how to weep, raise children, invoke God, and kill a man (Owuor 2014, p. 225).

Wade and DeLamater (2002), in their studies, show how the termination of marital and cohabiting relationships represents a life transition. This subsequently makes it possible for people to adopt new sexual scripts. Ajany is faced with a violent and abusive relationship. She must reject the sexual script within this relationship. By ending her cohabiting relationship, she is faced with a transition that opens room for another set of scripts when she returns to Nairobi.

At the interpersonal level, Ajany and Bernado’s relationship degenerates. Violence and abuse against Ajany become the order of the day. In Ajany’s attempts to change the situation, she takes a rebellious stance, where she actively desires to be something more and free from the suffocating relationship. This tension adds to the trouble already in the relationship and affects their behaviour. Bernado has power over Ajany and a kind of hold over her person.

6. Conclusions

Collectively, the experiences of Akai and Ajany demonstrate that hybrid identities are actively negotiated through intersecting forces of colonial history, diaspora, and gendered power, contributing to a more dynamic understanding of postcolonial identity in literary analysis. The hybrid identities of the food, music and life emanating from Ajany’s socio-cultural constellations reject static definitions of identity and promote the idea of identity being a process shaped by history, power, experiences and location in a diaspora. Ajany’s diasporic identities, together with the people she meets, whom she calls remnants of the colonised, are seen as always in flux, producing and reproducing themselves through difference. Ideas emanating from traditional culture seem to be continually contested and, in many instances, rejected as Ajany negotiates life in Brazil and Kenya. In the end, she redefines and constructs her ideals, which signify her need for protection and affection.

Postcolonial feminism and hybridity together illuminate the experiences of Akai and Ajany. The hybrid identities and the “third space” are experiences of the former colonies in which both characters have lived. When using the dialectical type of literary theorising, it seems apparent that a Postcolonial Feminist perspective of the character Akai reveals the gender politics in the realm of everyday life under imperialism and patriarchy. Regardless of age, locality, or academic status, Akai and Ajany acquire identities emerging from the situations they encounter and the relationships they enter.