KenyanBibliophile

“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

“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

“The old days were over, when sorrow could be sheltered by the empathy of the many, confronted by imported rage, a most foreign beast at war with a human emotion - terror. The invaders, such angry strangers steeped in madness, paraded the island as if they were its new and infernal overlords. How fathomless was Fazul the Egyptian’s betrayal of Pate and it’s people. The amorphous war he had stimulated cascaded over so many simple lives. It seized the best of Pate’s men, implicated in this sickness only because they were the best of men. Most of the taken would never return, not even as corpses. Those they left behind were forced to learn the languages of eternal hauntedness and silence.”
― Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, The Dragonfly Sea

“Ayaana would learn that there seemed to be no absolutes in the world, only codes and questions and a guarantee of storms.”
― Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, The Dragonfly Sea