KenyanBibliophile

“Ayaana was surveying the longest line on the globe’s three dimensional grid, the equator, the first line of latitude. Her special point zero, 40,075 kilometers long; 78.7 percent across water, 21.3 percent over land, zero degrees, all the Kenya equator places she had never imagined to claim as her own: Nanyuki, Mount Kenya. The invisible equator line crossed only thirteen countries - Kenya, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, São Tomé and Principe, Gabon, Republic of Congo, Uganda, Somalia, Maldives, Indonesia, and Kiribati - thirteen countries that were the center of the world, and hers was one of them.”
― Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, The Dragonfly Sea

“She covered Ayaana’s arms and back with henna whorls. Skin, contact, touch, intimacy mother, daughter, two women. Timeless space.”
― Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, The Dragonfly Sea

“Tell me, sweetheart, what do you love best in the world right now?”
Ayaana deflected: “Pate.”
Delaksha said, “I never made it there. A pity.”
Nioreg asked, “What’s to love?”
The ideal of home, which distance amplified. Ayaana tuned into a vision of home as if she were a home-comer. Her face softened as she clothed her island in her mother’s scents and the Almighty’s stars. In Ayaana’s grammar, her listeners glimpsed Muhidin and Munira, witnessed the surge of Pate’s moonlit seas from a sand dune and smelled a jasmine infused night. Ayaana’s Pate was an antidote to desecrated worlds, so that when Ayaana finished her remembering, there was silence. She picked her chopsticks as the ocean whooshed answerless questions.
Nioreg’s tough-man mask slipped. “Miss Ayaana, we shall visit your home, yes?”
Delaksha took Ayaana’s hands. “Don’t let the world change you.” Delaksha was addressing both Ayaana and Pate.”
― 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