KenyanBibliophile

“In all his fleeing, seeking, tricking, escaping, negotiating, working, whoring, wondering, reading, lying, learning, wrestling, questioning, seeing, tasting, hearing, and journeying, nothing had suggested a vision of “home” or “belonging” until that light-splattered dawn when he glimpsed a little creature dancing with the sparkling Pate sea.”
― Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, The Dragonfly Sea

“Music amplified what they could not find in books. Ecumenical music lessons. Algerian raï, Bangla, Kora, the symphonies of Gholam-Reza Minbashian and Mehdi Hosseini, and every sample of taarab they could get their hands on. No contemporary outpourings which Muhidin told Ayaana were the residues of the disordered screeching of Iblisi. Thus they roamed soundscapes. Hearing a melody, Ayaana often cried out, “What she sing?” or “Read”, while pressing clenched fists to her heart, where a stranger’s musical yearnings throbbed. Mid-afternoon, one Tuesday, Muhidin reread to her the poetry of Hafiz. First in broken Farsi, followed by his Kiswahili translation: “O heart, if only once you experienced the light of purity,/ like a laughing candle, you can abandon the life you live in your head...”

“What is it saying?,” she asked

“One day you’ll know. Today just listen.”
― Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, The Dragonfly Sea

“He would learn to always stoop to meet her eyes. She expected this: eye-to-eye conversations. She needed to see everything his soul suggested.”
― Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, The Dragonfly Sea

“On the map she looked at, there was no place marker for Pate Island. No color brown or green to suggest her own existence within the sea. So she wanted to know about places that could be rendered invisible.”
― Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, The Dragonfly Sea