From Grace Ogot to Yvonne Owuor: Fifty Years of Depicting Kenyan Lands & Landscapes

Summary

Since the mid-1960s, women artists from Kenya have demonstrated sustained interest in depicting land and landscapes. This essay scrutinizes the representation of land and landscape by two Kenyan female writers starting from the early years after independence to the twenty-first century. I argue that, in comparison to earlier fiction, more recent publications by Kenyan female authors often portray landscapes as dynamic and embodied. Grace Ogot's pioneer text, The Promised Land (1966), represents landscapes as deeply contested and as a communal heirloom. I propose, however, that it is in Yvonne Owuor's Dust (2014) that we perceive the culmination of land as not only tactile, but also animate. My article dissects Owuor's portrayal of geographic spaces alongside depictions of terrain by Ogot.

First, I stake out my use of two important terms: land and landscape. James Graham's Land and Nationalism in Fictions from Southern Africa successfully attends to the inherent tension in competing definitions of the land: land as terrain, versus metaphors of land which suggest identity, belonging and black nationalism. I will expand on his discussion of land and its role in the literary ‘symbolic economy’ (8). My use of the term ‘landscape’ emerges from the seminal essay ‘Landscape in Africa: Process and Vision’ by Ute Luig and Achim von Oppen. In Western thought, Luig and von Oppen (15) identify two primary understandings of the term, one using landscape to refer to spatial units, and the second associating landscape with ways of seeing the natural environment. Per the second definition, they further argue that landscape is best understood as an ongoing praxis – one continuously mediated aesthetically, historically, politically and imaginatively (38). In Landscape and Power, W.J.T. Mitchell upends conventional readings (and sightings) of landscapes. Contrary to previous scholarship which thought of landscapes as objects, Mitchell foregrounds, instead, an understanding of landscape as a ‘process by which social and subjective identities are formed’ (1). He is particularly keen on unveiling landscape as an ‘instrument of cultural power’, especially within the rise of imperialism in the nineteenth century (2). What Mitchell and Luig and von Oppen successfully lay out is that landscape is best understood as cultural, creative and ideological labour, manifest on geographical terrains. Writing about representations of landscape in South African literary and visual arts in the long nineteenth century, J.M. Coetzee zeroes in on the elision of black labour.