Narrating the Nation- Images of Kenya Through Individual and Collective Narration in the Dragonfly Sea by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Abstract

In this thesis, I explore Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea and how individual and collective narratives in the novel mirror, interrogate, examine and reimagine the nation – particularly Kenya. This study contends that individual and collective stories provide enough canvas in which we can interpret and understand the nation, nation-state and nationhood. The argument in this research is that Owuor uses individual and collective stories to narrate the nation. This individual and collective narratives create a different platform that we can understand the nation away from the hegemonic narratives of the nation that ignores the stories of the ‘othered’ individuals who, according to this research, possess stories that are relevant in redefining the nation and nationhood. Therefore, the focus of this literary research lies in exploring how Owuor in The Dragonfly Sea documents narratives of individual and collective experiences within the framework of the nation-state. These individual and collective stories significantly provoke a conversation about the nation since they evoke the Kenyan nation’s landscape on issues of ancestry and identity, profiling and terrorism, porous borders and transnationalism, family and women all which are relevant in understanding the nation. Admittedly, this study revealed that individual and collective stories provide the basis of redefining, understanding and negotiating the nation and nationhood.