XXXI Международный конгресс ИИСАА. 23–25 июня 2021 г. Т. 2

Россия и Восток. К 100-летию политических и культурных связей новейшего времени. Т. 2 11 Секция африканистов: «Чтения памяти Д. А. Ольдерогге» (1991) by Yussuf Dawood. The founder of the genre in Kenyan women’s writ- ing is Margaret Ogola, with her dilogy about Sigu family —  The river and the source (1994) and its sequel I swear by Apollo (2002). The female characters of the dilogy embody the author’s vision of a brighter future not only for Kenya, but for the entire mankind, in compliance with the ideal of harmony between peoples, genders and races. Ogola’s successful venture into the family epic genre seems to have inspired female writers of the new generation, such as Yvonne Owuor, who established her reputation as one of the topmost modern writers in Kenya with her novels Dust (2013) and Dragonfly Sea (2019). Both novels rather confidently fit into the category of a family epic/saga, since they portray the fortunes of one family over several decades ( Dust ) and even centu- ries ( Dragonfly Sea ). However, in the “her/story” of Kenya, which Owuor presents in Dust , she stands rather far from bright optimism intrinsic to Ogola’s dilogy. In her novel Owuor sees Kenyan history, represented by the Odango family, as a vicious circle of dereliction. Each of the male characters of the book, regardless of origin, has in this or that way contributed to the horrors of modern Kenyan history — which largely shapes the fates of the female characters, Ajany Oganda and her mother Akai, turning them into victims of the “male-shaped” plight of the family and, on a larger scale, of the nation — “a country shooting its people and tearing out its own heart.” In Dragonfly Sea the dereliction, that shaped the recent history of Kenya in the previous novel, acquires a new scale. The main female character Ayaana, a young girl living on the island of Pate off the Kenyan coast, discovers her par- tial Chinese ancestry, that has its origins in a 15th-century shipwreck on Pate involving Chinese admiral Zheng He’s fleets. Ayaana’s heritage gives her the chance to study in China; to fly to Istanbul where she is victimized by a descen- dant of a powerful Turkish business family; and to return home to Pate — her only shelter from the dangerous world, permeated by the structures of violence. The novel harvests abundantly on various literary trends and methods, history, religion, and may be rendered as the most daring attempt of an epic in East African women’s literature. Among the writers who seem to follow the same trend of family saga one can mention the name of Joy Odera, who debuted in 2012 with her novel Under the Jacaranda . In the same spirit of narrating the fortunes of a family over a large time span, spinning between the present and the past, crossing four decades, three countries and two continents, the author tells a moving story of Serene, the novel’s main character, in search of her own past and her fraught family history, delving into the trials of an African family through the upheavals of post-colonial and modern Kenya.