Narrative reproduction: plotting land in Yvonne Owuor's Dust

This article argues that the postcolonial African novel identifies land as the centre of social reproduction. Beginning with an analysis of Silvia Federici's Nigerian writing and a further investigation into social reproduction theory from and about Africa, this article develops a reading method which traces the novel form's use of land as the generator of plot. Yvonne Owuor's Dust exemplifies how the novel as a colonial form falls into crisis around an attempt to reach for the narratively reproductive potential of disavowed, arid lands at the borders of the postcolonial nation-state. As the readings in this article demonstrate, Owuor's novel both chimes with the interventions of those theorists who depict social reproduction in Africa as a general theory of feminisation – of people and land alike – and offers an answer to how social reproduction might be rendered in literary formal terms. This article is therefore an investigation into the ‘where’ of social reproduction in the contemporary African novel.

Not only were austerity measures radically reconfiguring New York but, in Austin and Federici's words, 'both the Zerowork collective of which Caffentzis had been a founding member and the Wages for Housework movement for which Federici's work was so crucial had largely dissolved as international endeavours' (Federici and Austin, 2020: 119).The Wages for Housework campaign within the International Feminist Collective had brought together a cross-racial and international network of feminist activists and scholars around the demand that housework, which sustains the worker, should be compensated with a wage.In making these claims, Wages for Housework constituted one central component of what would become known as social reproduction theory, a model that, as Tithi Bhattacharya has recently written, considers 'labor dispensed to produce people as part of the systemic totality of capitalism ' (2017: 2).For Federicione of the foremost theorists of social reproductionthe dissolution of Wages for Housework was accompanied by both a geographic and theoretical turn towards what she would refer to as the '"strategic center" of primitive accumulation', namely 'the former colonial world' (Federici, 2012b: 103).As the activist world that had sustained Federici and Caffentzis began to take on new shapes, the couple embarked on a journey to capitalism's African frontiers.
Like those left thinkers who theorised capitalism from the critical standpoint of Africa and Asiaincluding Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), Samir Amin (1974) and Giovanni Arrighi (1966) -Federici, too, reframed the central preoccupations of her earlier work in light of her new surroundings.Her subsequent writing often attempts to confront the racial politics of reproduction on a global scale, and sees Federici engaged in efforts to reconcile those claims about women's work and the home that were so central to her earlier theoretical contributions with the circumstances that organise colonial and neocolonial societies.The question of land and what Federici called 'the new enclosures ' (1992) began to take on renewed analytical purchase in her critiques of both capitalism and those Marxist theories that refused to look outside of the wage relation in their assessment of political economy.Federici's interest in both land and farmingarticulated in 'The Debt Crisis, Africa & the New Enclosures' (1992), 'Women, Land Struggles, and Globalization: An International Perspective ' (2004), as well as 'The Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution ' (2008), to name a fewdraws directly on experiences and interactions that took place at the University of Port Harcourt and through her subsequent involvement with the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (Federici and Austin, 2020).This is not to say that housework no longer figured as a central pillar of Federici's thinking; African women, in her formulation, are as likely to be burdened by the demands of the home as all women due to the homogenising forces of colonialism and capitalism.These circumstances did, however, open up the theoretical apparatus around social reproduction to include not just the specific circumstances of 'women' but also the more general hierarchical distribution of reproductive labour, and the false division between the perceived central spaces of production and those often-disavowed marginal spaces of feminised, racialised and otherwise minoritised life in which capital renews itself.
In her 2004 essay 'Women, Land Struggles, and Globalization: An International Perspective', Federici outlines a theory of reproduction that focuses on the specific role of subsistence farming in both the maintenance of societal relations and the struggle against the advancement of a specifically capitalist mode of production into the lives of rural populations.Though 'in the aftermath of massive urbanization, land no longer appeared to be the fundamental means of reproduction', those activities taking place outside of urban centres were in fact becoming indispensable to the continuation of both society and the economy because, as Federici argues, 'land is the material basis for women's subsistence work, which is the main source of "food security" for millions of people across the planet ' (2012a: 127).Out of this assertion, Federici extrapolates the memorable and bold claim that 'women are the subsistence farmers of the planet' (2012a: 127).The assertion that subsistence farming in the global South constitutes the disavowed labour that is at the centre of social reproduction theory echoes the French Marxist anthropological tradition and the work of Claude Meillassoux, who proposed that the ability of workers to return to rural regions is a foundational principle of an African mode of capitalist production (Meillassoux, 1981(Meillassoux, , 1972;;see also: Seddon, 1978).Though, unlike Meillassoux, Federici does not see these spaces as 'functional to capitalism' (Federici, 2012c: 91-113), she similarly insists that land is at the centre of reproductive activities in the African context.Ultimately, her later work contends with the possibility that social reproduction is as much a question of whothose persons who carry the burden of feminised labouras it is a question of wherethose feminised spaces that sustain capitalist production.
I begin this contribution to a special issue on social reproduction and world literature with Federici's time in Nigeria because it is indicative of how Marxist feminism has, over time, reconsidered fundamental assumptions about the location of gendered and, more specifically, feminised labour after an encounter with what we might call African modes of production.Federici's interest in rural regions, for instance, mirrors the geographer Cindi Katz's early writing on spatial organisation and reproduction, which emerges out of a close engagement with the politics of agriculture in rural Sudan.In Katz's observation, the arrival of a development project highlights the central role that children play in maintaining environmental knowledge.For Katz, the children's activities demonstrate that 'in an agriculturally based economy, learning about the environmentabout farming, animal husbandry, and the use of local resourcesis an aspect of socialization essential to maintaining and reproducing society ' (1991: 489).Such interventions predict recent work in social reproduction theory which centres the character capitalism at its frontiers and, as a result, pays close attention to the position of the rural household (Rodríguez-Rocha, 2021; see also : Li, 2014;Green, 2020).When social reproduction is framed as a process of spatial organisationwhere rural regions act as the space in which urban workers reproduce themselvesit becomes ever more prone to the perpetual crisis that Nancy Fraser theorises as immanent to capitalism's reliance on its dwindling 'outsides' (Fraser, 2016).In regions that have been subject to settler colonial dispossession, which functions primarily through the appropriation of land, precisely those rural regions of social reproduction that are indispensable to capitalist production are routinely exposed to the expansionary impulses of settlement.Fraser's crisis is here primarily one that unfolds through the simultaneous and contradictory demands that colonial capitalism makes of land; rural spaces are central to the reproduction of the urban African worker, but they are also targeted for wholesale appropriation on the part of settlers whose activities are often antithetical to capitalist production because their primary mode of accumulation is dispossession.
In what follows, I propose that a similar encounter with an African context on literary critical grounds should likewise serve as the occasion for a reassessment of where the novel form locates its own crises of social reproduction.As the capitalist form par excellence, the novel mediates those simultaneous gestures of overreliance and disavowal that characterise the role of social reproduction vis-a-vis the centre of production within capitalist economic relations.While, as Edward Said (1993) famously argued, the nineteenth-century English novel staged the potential for colonial expansion and represented the making of an imperialist form, those novels produced after the event of independence are more likely to stage how colonial land relations which depend on the reproductive capacity of rural locales come undone by virtue of their contradictory relationship to capital.At the level of form, the question of rural return becomes intertwined with a separate set of concerns related to the difficulty of propelling plot.If, for the purposes of this article, we identify plot as the novel's centre of production, then the plot's relationship to rural spaces reflects the disavowed but necessary status of labour categorised as social reproduction.Even when the rural stands at the periphery, it is nevertheless maintained to sustain the continued function of plot just as the sphere of social reproduction must be maintained to sustain capitalist production.And even as crises of this model abound, the novel remains intact because it is itself reliant on the narrative momentum that perpetual crisis produces.
As I want to suggest, the case of the postcolonial African novel that this article is concerned with also stages a related but slightly different crisis of settlement and social reproduction that plays out in rural locales.If one of the main interventions of Federici's African turn is the recognition of land's centrality to social reproduction, then a resulting method of feminist literary analysis that takes capitalism's composition in Africa seriously must also be structured around a focus on land and rural landscapes in particular.And where Federici's assessments were made in the context of Nigeria, this article turns to Kenya, where an impulse towards settlement stood at the centre of the colonial project.This article seeks to take up the challenge posed by a reading method that confronts how the novel theorises the dual pressures on rural locales as the primary site of social reproduction and the target of settler colonial expansion through an engagement with Yvonne Owuor's 2014 novel Dust.Set in Kenya against the backdrop of the disputed 2007 election, the novel's primary geographic conceit is that all of its central characters eventually make their way to a remote region of northern Kenya in order to uncover the truth of their familial histories and solve a murder that took place in Nairobi and with which the novel opens.The historical drama staged in Dust plays out in a region that is 'parochial', in Tsitsi Ella Jaji's definition of the term.For Jaji, 'the parochial usefully identifies what is out of the way, out of date, and, too often, ruled out of bounds for producing theory' and, importantly, 'in contrast to the related terms provincial and peripheral, the parochial centers local epistemologies' (2021: 293).Jaji's terminology, which extends existing scholarship on the novel's negotiation of urban-rural divides (see: Williams, 1975;McDonagh, 2013), offers a compelling formalist intervention which redraws the maps produced by fictional accounts of political and economic tensions in a recently independent Kenya.Where Ngugi wa Thiong'o's novels famously focus on Mau Mau resistance and are largely set in central Kenya -Apollo Obonyo Amoko, building on Simon Gikandi, notes a specific type of 'anticolonial Gikuyu nationalism ' (2010: 30) in these texts -Owuor instead locates the dynamics that have shaped contemporary Kenyan politics in the nation's North which, through the machinations of the colonial and immediate postcolonial era, has come to represent an economically and politically disavowed margin.Dust therefore renders colonial capitalism's reliance on patterns of rural return and the concomitant erosion of such spaces through the process of settlement legible by tying the reproduction of plot to a region that is peripheralised but that functions according to its own parochial narrative economy.On land that literally refuses to yield to the reproductive expectations of both capitalist production and settler colonial expansion, Owuor stages the crisis of reproduction through the consolidation and dispersal of plot.
As a novel that is interested in the particular composition of both narration and capital from the perspective of the parochial, Dust theorises social reproduction not solely as 'women's work' but as activities that are necessary to maintaining broader developments of plot, activities that are in turn intimately tied to the economic and formal capacities of land.Whereas modernist and postcolonial literature has often been associated with a refusal to adhere to the requirements of literary plot, Owuor's novel represents the 'far more complex, if vexed, relation to plot than rejection or liberation' (Dabashi, 2020(Dabashi, : 2070) ) that Pardis Dabashi has recently identified as a feature of modernist writing.Owuor's Dust is not unique in centring a return to the rural: the rural locale's role as a reproductive component of the novel is, for instance, one of the central features of Tsitsi Dangarembga's Bildungsroman trilogy Nervous Conditions (1988), The Book of Not (2006) and This Mournable Body (2018), where the protagonist Tambu repeatedly returns to her rural home to re-animate her capacity to propel the plot.Instead of refusing plot wholesale, Dust, as the title suggests, sees land becoming the primary formal determinant of the novel, with a house in northern Kenya by the name of Wuoth Ogik in turn becoming its raison d'etre.Land, as I want to insist, is not allegorical or a stand-in for the birth of the new nation, as the frequent invocations of history might suggest.Rather, land seeps into the various components of the novel form through its intertwinement with the structurally integral component of plot.The question that arises out of this particular composition of land as the locale of plot's reproduction is: if the novel is both a capitalist form and one that, in Brenna Bhandar's (2018) reformulation of Said, is uniquely tied to the consolidation of colonial regimes of property relations and ownership, then where does the novel go to reproduce itself?
As the readings that follow demonstrate, Dust should be read as a novel that reflects and refracts what Lyn Ossome and Sirisha Naidu have identified as 'the inability to distinguish production from reproduction' in postcolonial rural contexts, which in turn means that 'gender roles, despite being delineated, do not sufficiently interact with capitalist market forces to deepen the divide' (2021: 72).Social reproduction is therefore represented both through land and on the level of cultivation, a task that is by no means limited to the work of women in the novel.In line with recent interventions in Marxist feminist ecocriticism, narrative reproduction within the space of this article refers to those activities taking place in settings and by characters that are feminised by being rendered integral to and available for plot development but otherwise positioned at the novel's peripheries.But while Dust often sees women cast in the role of reproductive agent, the novel also highlights instances in which the feminised work of narration is redistributed amongst other characterslike Raro Galgalu, the caretaker of the home in Northern Kenyawhen the generation of plot risks falling apart.Owuor's novel theorises on a literary formal level Ossome and Naidu's insistence on how rural locales highlight the instability of gender divides when it comes to questions of social reproduction.As such, this article suggests that, in the case of the contemporary African novel, a focus on the participation of the parochial in the production of plot allows for a development of a theory of social reproduction as a theory of the novel.

Mapping the plot
Although Owuor's novel opens with the murder of a central character in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, much of the remainder of the plot takes place in the country's northwest, close to Lake Turkana, and centres on a house called Wuoth Ogik.When two charactersthe family patriarch Nyipir and his daughter Ajanymake their way to the region by plane to return the body of the murdered Odidi, the novel offers a precise description of Wuoth Ogik's place in the Kenyan landscape.First, 'the pilot scans the horizon and swings the plane right to circumnavigate Mount Kenya', before telling his passengers that they are flying over 'Batian, Lenana, Macalder' then traversing other landmarks like 'Anam Ka'alakol-Lake Turkana' and 'Lake Logipi' (Owuor, 2014: 26).Immediately following this initial introduction of the route to northern Kenya, the pilot disappears from the paragraph with a brief indication coming from the narrator that his passengers do not require an explanation: 'They know' (Owuor, 2014: 26).Nyipir and Ajany subsequently take over the task of guiding the reader through a landscape that is 'their territory', first flying over 'Loiyangalani toward Mount Kulal' and 'Kalacha Goda' before seeing 'salt flats fringing the Chalbi' and 'Hurri Hills' (Owuor, 2014: 26).As the pilot attempts to land twice, Ajany 'prays they stay suspended in time and space' (Owuor, 2014: 27), as though the novel's plot could be stopped in its tracks in the brief moments before it begins in earnest.It is herein Kenya's Norththat 'Wuoth Ogik' stands, a place to which all of Dust's central characters eventually return as they attempt to piece together the lives of various family members and, alongside these, the history of the Kenyan nation.
Originally designed and constructed by the settler Hugh Bolton in the years immediately preceding Kenyan independence in 1963, Wuoth Ogik changes hands multiple times.It first passes from Bolton to his former police deputy Aggrey Nyipir Oganda, the man who had, in a moment of frustration and sarcasm, suggested the name for the house (which translates to 'Journey's End') because he was himself 'weary of … three and a half years of seeking, recording, and plotting new journeys' (Owuor, 2014: 316).When Bolton later attacks his lover Akai, Nyipir shoots the white settler and claims ownership of the house.Nyipir and Akai later marry and make Wuoth Ogik their family home, raising two children, Odidi and Ajany.They are left in relative peace until Odidi decides to write to Isaiah Bolton, son of the man who once owned Wuoth.Though Isaiah Bolton is later revealed not to be Hugh Bolton's biological son, but the product of an affair between Bolton's lonely and depressed wife Selene and one of her Kenyan servants, Nyipir eventually offers Wuoth's title deed to Isaiah, after the mystery of Hugh Bolton's death is solved.By tying the plot to a house and thereby tracking patterns of originary dispossession, colonial appropriation, postcolonial expropriation and eventual reinscription of the colonial order, Owuor identifies the novel itself as primarily a genre of property that constantly participates in the foundational gestures of colonial expansion and the subsequent instantiation of a neo-colonial order.Its very location in the peripheralised and parochial regions of Northern Kenya, however, also undermines the settler's narrative spatial fix.Nyipir's exasperation with the pursuit of plot and the subsequent naming of the house to reflect his frustration turn this narratively integral architectural structure into a near constant obstruction to narrative momentum.Though Hugh Bolton intends to restart the plot of settlement in Wuoth Ogik after a failed attempt at both biological and agricultural reproduction in Kenya's Central Province, the unforgiving landscapes of what was then the Northern Frontier District produce only a series of abrupt and unresolved endings.
Like the house which functions as a setting that generates plot, Owuor's other descriptions of landscape also direct and shape the constituent components of the novel.As Dust's Prologue suggests, at least two central components of the novel formplot and characterhave been arranged to replicate a greater organisational frame specifically related to geography.During the opening pages, in which Odidi attempts to escape his pursuer and eventual murderer in Nairobi, readers are offered glimpses into Odidi's personal history and fragments of the place he once called home.Fleeing from an assassin's gunfire and into the arms of a policeman with a personal vendetta, Odidi 'soars into the desiccated terrains of Wuoth Ogik' where he envisions 'his people reaching out for him' (Owuor, 2014: 5).But instead of people, the passage in which Odidi returns to memories of his childhood home are full of livestock: 'cowbells, bleating goats, sheep, and far mountains' and 'Kormamaddo, the grumpy family camel, dashing home from pasture' (Owuor, 2014: 5).Odidi's murder and the mystery surrounding it function primarily as a means of directing the novel's plot towards Wuoth Ogik.This overdetermined invocation of herding activities suggests that the Prologue is most of all an introduction to a place.And while this opening signals a hierarchical distribution of the novel's constituent components in which characters are subordinated to setting and space, it also locates the distinguishing features of Northern Kenya in a particular use of land.This is not farming territory; rather, Odidi's recollection of herding activities suggests that this region is one in which trade, rather than the cultivation of cash crops, organises the local economy.As the novel unfolds and reaches back into the colonial past, this particular composition of landscape and economy becomes a crucial juncture at which the expectation of narrative reproduction and the reality of a semi-arid desert ecology diverge.Where Central Kenya contains fertile, arable lands and functions as a spatial component of the colonial economy that works in tandem with the administrative centre in Nairobi, the Northern Frontier District undermines the very project of national cohesion, one that is itself characterised by particular practices of cultivation.
As the novel constantly reminds its readers, Wuoth is located in a region that is both geographically distant and politically minor within the broader history of Kenyan colonialism, independence and the era of postcolonial disappointment.Multiple characters are sent to northern Kenya as a form of punishment, expelled from the administrative centres of the nation to its borders.The policeman Ali Dida Hada is sent to the Northern District to investigate the disappearance of Hugh Bolton after Mboya's assassination in 1969, and goes there 'grinding his teeth' (Owuor, 2014: 233).Hugh finds himself on the same path after his colleagues in the colonial police force decide 'to dispatch him to the Northern Frontier District, a closed district and an official destination for exiles' (Owuor, 2014: 103), along with Nyipir Oganda, 'a recruit of the tribal police' (Owuor, 2014: 110).That Hugh Bolton would choose the Northern Frontier District as the location in which he would fulfil his visions of settlement speaks to his participation in a process of national consolidation that connects the political projects of the colonial and postcolonial periods.
When Hugh is transferred to the 'Northern Frontier District' from his post in Athi River as punishment for insubordination, the region signifies a history of territorial conflicts reaching back to the early colonial period.The colonial administrative unit of the Northern Frontier District (NFD) stretched from the northernmost parts of Lake Turkana to the Indian Ocean coastline in the southeast of the country and included portions of what is the contemporary North East Province (see : Simpson, 1994;Abdullahi, 1997).The NFD emerged from a period of intense territorial disputes between Ethiopia (Abyssinia), Italy (which had invaded and occupied large swaths of modern-day Somalia) and Britain during the early twentieth century.The subsequent establishment of the NFD as an administrative zone of Kenyaor what was then the East African Protectoratethrough the imposition of borders conceived by colonial powers reshaped the lives of pastoralists who inhabited the region and relied on movements across the new borders with Somalia and Ethiopia, as Gufu Oba's (2011) detailed study of the early colonial period shows.Historian Hannah Whittaker (2017: 386) notes that the NFD's environment and the economic structures constituted an administrative problem for the British colonial government.Though colonial officials dismissed the region as economically unproductive and its people as racially backward, the NFD later became the target of attempts at development related to the rearing and sale of livestock, attempts that were themselves 'used to serve a broader purpose of disciplining and controlling what local officials believed to be unruly Somali pastoralists' (Whittaker, 2017: 391).When the Republic of Somalia gained independence in 1960, the British colonial administration considered ceding the territory.
But the event of Kenyan independence in 1963 instead resulted in the integration of the NFD into the boundaries of another new nation, leaving the region and its people in a condition that Natasha Issa Shivji describes as 'neither within nor without two postcolonial states ' (2019: 123).The colonial administrative unit on which Wuoth stands contains within it a fraught history of political and economic gestures of integration and disavowal, but the primary material from which the house is made performs similar acts of colonial consolidation.Even as the novel places Wuoth Ogik at the centre of the plot, the house is itself only an amalgamation of the material that the land affords.Less of a dwelling place than an outgrowth of the environment from which it emerges, Wuoth Ogik comes into view as slowly as the novel's characters, as though the land on which it stands takes precedence within the organisational hierarchies of the form.It is through the eyes of Isaiah Boltona character for whom the house is a physical structure rather than a historically laden memorythat readers first encounter a detailed description; here we learn that the house consists of 'colored tiles, mostly brown', with 'walls of termitemound soil, wood mixed with crushed coral' (Owuor, 2014: 72).Looking up at the roof, Isaiah concludes that this was 'a palette of colors from the stark landscape' and a house that was 'designed to sneak the landscape in' (Owuor, 2014: 72).When Selene first sets eyes on the house Hugh Bolton built, she describes it as 'a pink mouth made of the land's eclectic matter' (Owuor, 2014: 112).For both characters, Wuoth appears as an organic outgrowth of the land on which it stands.
Much of the 'matter' that Isaiah and Selene understand as evidence of Wuoth's organic relationship to the land has, however, been imported from other regions within East Africa.When Bolton initially describes the location of the house he is building to his wife Selene, he states that it is 'the perfect house near a perfect oasis in Kalacha' and that he is using 'pink and coral stones' from 'Dar es Salaam', to which Selene responds with 'Tanganyika' and 'frightfully far, isn't it?'(Owuor, 2014: 109).But Hugh laughs, responding with 'Dar es Salaambelow Somaliland.On our side of the map' (Owuor, 2014: 109).Hugh's insistence on using the collective 'our' lends stability to an otherwise precarious empire in East Africa.His use of imported coral stones from a coastal region that was itself at the centre of territorial disputes renders Wuoth as a physical manifestation of such efforts at national consolidation.Cobbled together from fragments and matter from lands that do not belong to the Kenyan nation-state, Wuoth is a symbol of a nation that grew out of the twinned desires of a colonial apparatus and a postcolonial political elite.The house's status as the wish-fulfilment of a white settler positions it as the exact opposite of a natural occurrence within the landscape.In fact, Wuoth as an extension of Hugh Bolton comes to represent the impulse to accumulate that acts as the foundational gesture of colonial expansion.Hugh's decision to build a new home for himself and his wife appears to represent the culmination of Selene's observation that 'Kenya was seeping into Hugh' (Owuor, 2014: 93).But both the material composition of the house and its location suggest that it is Hugh who is using the land to naturalise his own presence in Kenya through an enactment of national cohesion.Because Wuoth is also the location around which the novel is structured, it reflects the novel form's own participation in precisely these acts of colonial expansion.Through this connection between house, nation and novel, Owuor identifies the literary genre as equally reliant on an exploitation of the land's resources as the architectural structure and the political unit.
The move to Wuoth Ogik and the attempt to transform the Northern Frontier District into a home for Hugh and Selene should be read as part of an effort to re-activate the fledgling narrative of settler colonialism and, as such, the form of the novel.For Hugh, the Northern Frontier District and the house that he would build represent the possibility of restarting the story of settlement that had failed when he first arrived in Kenya with Selene.Prior to his transfer to the Northern Frontier District as punishment for insubordination, Selene and Hugh had settled in Central Kenya.Their arrival in Kenya is almost comically cliched as they make their way to Naivasha 'on a steam train traveling through the Kenyan landscape', with Selene '[discovering] pure air and light, a proliferation of life, and the might of the Rift Valley' (Owuor, 2014: 92).Though they have no home and no social life, Selene can '[smell] roasting calves at parties to which they had not yet been invited', and sees 'the sight of a lake of myriad moods around which assorted species gathered, with seasonal pastoralists bringing livestock down to drink' as 'vestiges of paradise' (Owuor, 2014: 92).Hugh and Selene consider a range of agricultural uses for the land, from 'long-haired sheep and Jersey cows' (Owuor, 2014: 93) to all kinds of 'grass, herbs, and flowers', before settling on '[becoming] vintners' with 'vines from Italy and South Africa' (Owuor, 2014: 93).But these vines, initially full of promise, are destroyed by torrential rains that arrive 'three years later, expanding the lakeshore' (Owuor, 2014: 95).As they are confronted with a refusal of the land to yield to their will, the narrator returns to Selene's initial assessment of the land by stating that 'it should have been paradise' (Owuor, 2014: 95).At this point, Kenya has also proven destructive to Selene and Hugh's plans for a family.Selene suffers numerous miscarriages, while Hugh turns away from dreams of cultivation and towards a new penchant for big game hunting.Here, the feminised colonial landscape directs its refusal of social reproduction towards the biological reproductive desires of white womanhood and the settler colonial romance plot that could have unfolded.Even as Selene and Hugh find themselves embedded in the colonial fantasy of abundance, their thwarted efforts at biological reproduction drive the heterosexual settler couple into disparate territories, entrenching them further in a crisis of narrative reproduction.
Wuoth is therefore borne out of Hugh's and Selene's desire to remake and expand the dream of a self-sufficient life as agriculturally active white settlers that had failed earlier on in the novel.Though it is the house around which the novel is structured, it is not the first house that Hugh Bolton attempts to build in Kenya.Part of the imagined paradise in central Kenya is a 'five-bedroom stone bungalow' (Owuor, 2014: 93).For Selene, multiple journeys back to England (Owuor, 2014: 97) briefly counteract the Kenyan landscape's symbolic and literal hostility; only when she decides to eventually leave Wuoth, Hugh and Kenya behind for good is she able to carry a pregnancy to term.The narrative conceptualisation of reproduction outlined below here meets the frustration and interruption of biological reproduction.Not only does the Kenyan landscape refuse to provide a basis for the continuation of the settler plot but it also obstructs the making of the heteronormative settler family.Hugh, on the other hand, doubles down on his commitment to forcing the land he has violently occupied into submission and enabling the continuation of the plot of colonial settlement.After the disastrous rains, Selene imagines that 'it was sensible to return to England' but Hugh exclaims that they should 'Start again!!' (Owuor, 2014: 95), as though he was not just prepared to remake the economic basis for their lives in Kenya but would also restart their personal narrative of settler colonialism.And though Hugh restarts the story of settlement, he does so by proving that he can turn even its least forgiving landscapes into a sustaining resource solely for himself.
In an enactment of hypermasculine fantasies in which the feminised landscapes of the colonies must eventually be rendered into a sustaining resource for the settler population, Hugh presents Wuoth as a family home to Selene just as he is embarking on an affair with a local Turkana woman, Akai.Akai, the children's mother, is introduced as a character that is not of the land but literally one with the land.On first appearance, 'she flows like magma, every movement considered, as if it has come from the root of the world … she is made of and colored by the earth itself' (Owuor, 2014: 33).Likewise, her two children Ajany and Odidi are the 'chance offspring of northern-Kenya drylands' who grew up 'hemmed in by arid land geographies and essence' (Owuor, 2014: 6).Though this close association with the landscape also exposes the children to taunts and mocking at their boarding school in Central Kenyathe two are subjected to stories of 'northern land famines' and are forced to participate in charity events for Northern Kenya, with Ajany acting as 'a useful facsimile for the occasionreed-thin, small, dark, bushy-haired, with large-slanted eyes' who appears in 'newsletter photo shoots' (Owuor, 2014: 14) it also detaches them from the structure of beginnings and endings in which Hugh Bolton is so openly invested.Northern Kenya allows them to grow up 'in the absence of elders' leaving them 're-created myths of beginnings' (Owuor, 2014: 7).And while Hugh's relationship with Akai is yet another dimension of his attempt to transform Kenya into a sustaining resource, neither the land nor the people who tell its stories are easily integrated into the settler's imagined new beginning.Akai's refusal to participate in the reproductive labour of storytelling creates space for the narrative labour of other characters.The novel's subsequent theorisation of narrative labour as feminised reflects precisely the kind of collapse of gender categories that Ossome and others outline in their work on the rural manifestations of social reproduction.After Akai's departure, the task of synthesising and transmitting crucial components of the plot is left to two men who participate in the economy of the novel in two ways: as traders in goods and as traders in stories.

Rumour, circulation and the economy of plot
The particular economic composition of Wuoth Ogik and its surrounding areas which are structured around movement and trade rather than settlement and farming, however, prove more reticent than expected, extending the crisis of reproduction for Hugh and Selene rather than solving it.Within the structure of the novel, the attempt to fix the already existing crisis of biological reproduction through the construction of a new family home in northern Kenya exposes Hugh and Selene's settler plot to the unpredictable influences of a hostile ecological and economic climate.Away from the agricultural possibility of central Kenya, the already precarious attempts at guiding the plot are derailed by the narrative economy of the Northern Frontier District, where the dynamic forces of trade and rumour dislodge both the source and direction of plot development.Those acts of narrative reproduction that the novel form relies on still take place, but they no longer purport to sustain the settler plot.Instead, the Northern Frontier District and its inhabitants begin to exploit the plot's relationship to narrative reproduction in order to tell their own stories.
Most characters register the distinctions between the economic organisation of Naivasha and Kenya's northern border regions.Echoing Odidi's memories of livestock, Selene observes 'camels and goats, cows and donkeys and sheep' as she journeys through 'broody mountains' (Owuor, 2014: 112) towards her new home.After making his way from England to Kenya, Isaiah Bolton arrives in a neighbouring town and asks the local shopkeeper Babu 'how far it is to Kalacha Goda', to which Babu responds 'wery far' (Owuor, 2014: 28) and suggests 'that if he did not mind riding with livestock destined for an abattoir, a lorry leaving the following evening was heading in the direction of Wuoth Ogik' (Owuor, 2014: 30).For Isaiah Bolton, Wuoth Ogik becomes reachable only through a direct association with the trade that dominates the region.Traversing northern Kenya's landscape involves both the recognition of literal distancethe region is, in fact, so remote that plane and cow transporter are the most convenient means of making one's way to Wuoth Ogikand a related and willing entry into a border economy of circulation.The novel, however, also relates the presence and trade in livestock to a different economy of circulation, that of rumour and gossip.
Rumour initially enters the space of the novel after the event of independence.In a brief flashback set in 1963, the novel retells the story of the early days of Kenyan independence and the slow descent into a regime of repression and violence.Owuor writes of the way that the population internalised violence and kept things quiet: 'when bodies started showing up mutilated and truly dead, the loudest protests were created out of whispers' (Owuor, 2014: 26).In the novel there is the repeated invocation of silence, which becomes one of Kenya's official languages (Owuor, 2014: 273).Both Nyipir and Hugh participate in the production of these silences at the end of the colonial period: Hugh starts working with the 'British Security Service' (Owuor, 2014: 101), initially working at Athi River where his paths cross with Nyipir (Owuor, 2014: 172), who was born in Nyanza and was moved across various colonial institutions around the country after his father was conscripted to fight in Burma (Owuor, 2014: 155, 166).Nyipir has been charged with 'processing documentation', likely a euphemism for extracting and storing confessions from Mau Mau rebels.Later, when Ali Didi Hada is sent to the NFD to investigate Hugh's death, his imperative is the 'quelling [of] riots and rumours' (Owuor, 2014: 233).The events occurring in Wuoth Ogik are, therefore, novelistic counterparts to those 'accurate commentaries on the political elite's sense of its ownership of the country' (Musila, 2015: 1-2) that Grace Musila identifies in her study of songs that refer to gossip and rumours.For Musila, 'narrative works as a cognitive device which sometimes excavates repressed knowledges in an unexpected enactment of the return of the repressed' (2015: 4), especially in contexts where ownership of narrative, mimicking the transition of land ownership from colonial to postcolonial political regimes, is seamlessly handed over from white settlers to an indigenous Black elite.
In Owuor's novel, those rumours that circulate in Kenya's border regions represent an oppositional force to both the beginnings and endings that Hugh's Bolton's settler imaginary seeks to project onto the landscape and the stifling of dissent that Ali Didid Hada, Nyipir and Hugh practise in their roles as agents of a simultaneously residual and emergent state apparatus.The event of independence, however, sees Nyipir use those skills he acquired during his time as a manager of rumours for different ends.Though he works with the 'Anti-Stock Theft Police Unit' (Owuor, 2014: 123) that secures the trade boundaries of the new nation, after independence Nyipir turns to 'an alternate existence' which involves 'bartering intelligence' with neighbouring nations like 'Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Uganda [which] paid for Nyipir's knowledge' (Owuor, 2014: 205).As part of this new economy of cross-border espionage, Nyipir also cements the symbiotic relationship between the trade in goods and the trade in rumour.While Nyipir sells guns and intelligence across the border he also engages in the illicit practice of cattle raiding, an activity that serves partly as a source of income and partly as a distraction from the other treasonous economic exchanges he engages in; as the narrator puts it, 'the rustling diverted attention from the business of helping arms flow across the boundaries and landscapes' (Owuor, 2014: 205).At the centre of the war is gossip or intelligence, a kind of storytelling that differs from the desires of neat beginnings and endings that Hugh panders in.The Northern Frontier District's ecological, political and economic status together impede the settler's desire for a regenerative relationship between the assumed centres of the plotthe heterosexual settler couple and their desire for dispossession through cultivationand those seemingly far-flung regions that are sustained but do not direct the plot.The parochialism of such regions is what renders them more likely to manipulate the production of plot rather than simply sustain it; those characters who, in Owuor's rendering, grew out of Northern Kenya's unique climate and landscape operate within their own internal economy of plot.
It is within this economy that Akai leverages her capacity for storytelling as a means of withdrawing crucial information from the central plot.On multiple occasions, the novel positions Akai as a central node in those mysteries that drive the plot.When Nyipir first sees Akai, the narrator notes that not only could Akai 'make him talk as if he had never spoken before' but she also 'drained Nyipir of his stories before she would allow him a small glimpse into her universe' (Owuor, 2014: 224).Their exchange is uneven; where Nyipir offers everything, Akai gives nothing.Later, when the policeman Ali Dida Hada remembers his own interactions with Akai, he sees a woman appear in flames 'begging for a poem' and he also remembers someone asking 'Herdsman … a poem?' (Owuor, 2014: 232).In both instances, stories become concentrated in the character of Akai, who subsequently withholds crucial information from the novel's other characters when she temporarily abandons Wuoth Ogik at the beginning of the novel.The scene of her disappearance marks a rejection of Akai's role as both mother and narrative device; filled with grief from the news that her son has been murdered, she flees into the desert.Her departure from the house that Hugh constructed as a means of salvaging his own settler plot and that then became the setting of this plot's dissolution underscores the antagonistic relationship between northern Kenya's landscapes and the characters who seek to transform them into a site of social reproduction.When Akai chooses the desert over the family home, she makes a statement of reproductive intent via the medium of land; she is no longer available to any acts of narrative labour and will solve neither the mystery of her son's death nor those previous unfinished plots of settlement and nation-building.Though it is land that remains at the centre of the novel's theorisation of social reproduction, character and narration subsequently become imbricated in the continuation of plot by virtue of their relationship to land and cultivation.
If the novel locates social reproduction in the initially disavowed but then forcefully integrated feminised landscape, then Akai's refusal to extend the localised economy of narration to the novel's other characters is also a refusal of reproduction.In Akai's absence, the novel searches for another willing propeller of plot, one who is not a woman but who is associated with the feminised labour of reproduction.As Ossome writes in a recent essay, the particular composition of capitalism in Africa produces 'a relation of exploitation and self-exploitation that approximates men and women's unpaid, unremunerated and self-exploitative reproductive labour' (2021: 558; emphasis in original).Raro Galgalu, the caretaker of Wuoth Ogik, reliable to a fault and a central pillar of the family, comes to take on a range of reproductive activities which include both those tasks often associated with women's reproductive worksuch as child-rearingand, at the level of form, the task of narration.As though he embodies the independent sense of time and narration that characterises Northern Kenya, Galgalu is initially described as 'an intermediary between fate and desire, a cartographer of unutterable realms' and someone who 'has lost faith in tangible things' (Owuor, 2014: 38).His personal history is recounted at the beginning of the novel; he is the son of an 'ayyaantuuan astrologer' (Owuor, 2014: 38) who predicted that a series of disasters would afflict his own village.Galgalu is then 'chosen as scapegoat' (Owuor, 2014: 39) and is chased away from his home.He wanders through the region 'intending to walk himself to death' (Owuor, 2014: 39), and arrives at Wuoth on 'December 12, 1963' (Owuor, 2014: 39), where Akai, who 'carried a headrest and clubthings men carried' (Owuor, 2014: 39), finds him and saves his life by taking him in.When Akai gives birth to her second child, Galgalu cares for the newborn Ajany, delivering her 'into life from Akai's womb ' and '[scooping] her from beneath a tree where patient vultures watched over her' (Owuor, 2014: 38) after her mother abandons her in the wild.Once again, the landscapes of northern Kenya become the means through which Akai enacts her refusal to perform a prescribed and expected biological and social act of reproductive labour.This pattern, in which Galgalu takes on those reproductive tasks that are expected of Akai, extends to the sphere of narration.In contrast to the fragmented mode of narration produced by the deliberate concentration of narratively integral information in Akai, Galgalu provides full plot summaries.In conversation with a character called The Trader, Galgalu recounts the plot or 'the current season's' (Owuor, 2014: 81) story in six lines: Police in down-country Kenya had murdered Moses Odidi Oganda.
Akai Lokorijom had fled Wuoth Ogik with the old car.
A rabid d'abeela had implanted a death wound into Galgalu's soul, which needed to be exorcised.
Nyipir was breaking rocks to build a cairn for Odidi, who could not be buried until Akai-ma had returned.
Sorrow had swallowed Arabel Ajany, who was now like one of the dead.
A man named Bolton had shown up at Wuoth Ogik with a question: Where's my father?(Owuor, 2014: 81) This exchange takes place between two characters who are active participants in the economy of rumours in the region around Wuoth Ogik.And though the plot summary is available to the reader, it provides little by way of plot development.Once the information makes its way to the character of the Trader, it circulates without destination or origin, remaining primarily contained within the region from which it stems.In their brief interaction, the Trader and Galgalu are both positioned as self-aware participants in the novel.Galgalu, in contrast to Akai who withholds narrative resources, shares the knowledge he has acquired thus far and subsequently enables the Trader's participation in the plot.When he is first introduced, we learn that the Trader conceptualises narrative structure as an economy where the aim is to not just participate in the plot but to 'weave' oneself 'into the center of the tales' (Owuor, 2014: 81).Unlike Galgalu, the Trader pursues his own revenge plot and comes to represent the ways in which access to components of the central plot might be used to sustain a subplot.In a series of short flashbacks, readers learn that the Trader's family succumbed to a drought after local missionaries withheld assistance to the Muslim man (Owuor, 2014: 130).The Trader is therefore exemplary of the economy of plot that is internal to the parochial; the plot in which he is intertwined and which revolves around avenging his family emerges directly out of the political and ecological composition of northern Kenya.Where Akai retreats to avoid performing the labour of narrative reproduction and Galgalu attempts to take her place, the Trader operates solely as an agent of the parochial subplot.
It is fitting, then, that the beginning of the end of Wuoth Ogik is marked by both the loss of Nyipir's livestock and the fact that 'the news [of the raid] flew across watering holes' (Owuor, 2014: 203).As the man who made a living out of trading information and rustling cattle loses control of both his animals and the circulation of information, the collapse of the house that stood at the beginning of the novel takes its course.The fate of Wuoth Ogik represents a reversed version of beginnings and endings as the events leading up to Wuoth Ogik's collapse take place prior to the reader encountering the story of its completion; the house starts the novel as a ruin and ends it as a completed structure.In the early pages of the novel, Wuoth is already in the process of decaying, with Ajany and Nyipir watching as 'a white fungus-infected part of their coral house collapses' (Owuor, 2014: 45).And only towards the end of the novel, when many of its central mysteries have been uncovered, does Dust stage the moment in which 'the Kalasinga foreman gave Hugh the hammer that would pound the last nail in a house made of desert stone, coral, crushed obsidian, termite soil, doum palm, rods, acacia trunks and a sprinkling of cement' (Owuor, 2014: 316).This list of components is given only to take them apart once more.Not long after this event within the novel's diegetic time, the house crumbles as the plot moves towards a conclusion and its central characters leave the region.Isaiah eventually describes it as 'falling stones' (Owuor, 2014: 356), and his final conversation with Ajany leaves open the question of whether anyone is willing to rebuild the home that contained both a history of their family and the violent history of a new nation finding its borders.The narrative function of Wuoth is, of course, foreshadowed in the name 'Journey's End' (Owuor, 2014: 133); rather than providing the new start that Hugh Bolton promised to Selene, the house becomes the burial site of both Hugh and Odidi Oganda.At the same time, the house also serves as the central location in which the search for an ending is constantly frustrated.Dust's characters only stop searching for these endings once the house that purports to be one collapses.Yvonne Owuor's Dust interrogates how the novel form's relationship to plot reflects capital's tendency to reach for rural regions to sustain the mass exploitation of workers and land in the centres of production.Crucially, Owuor's novel stages an attempt at placing the parochial regions of northern Kenya in the position of rural lands where the plot of settler colonial fantasy can renew itself, only to repeatedly obstruct the possibility of such renewal.Under the strain of expectation that northern Kenya sustain the development of plot, the land on which the familial home stands ultimately reverses these dynamics by demanding that plot adhere to the organisation of land.The novel, then, reflects social reproduction's ambiguous position vis-a-vis capital.As the location of the home, it can present the possibility of a political and economic space that is extraneous to capitalist production, a kind of 'outside', a space where, in Federici's formulation, both political and economic refusals of the reach of capital can be articulated and lived.At the same time, the novel also allows for a reading practice that credits feminist theory's own indebtedness to those formerly colonised spaces that constitute the raw material of intellectual reproduction.