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Paper short abstract:

This paper traces representations of rain in two East African novels: Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust. It observes rain’s materialism in the novels to explain how animism is a storytelling practice (Garuba 2003) and a relational epistemology (Bird-David 1999).

Paper long abstract:

Ben Eherenreich recently observed that “only once we imagined the world as dead could we dedicate ourselves to making it so” (2020, 76), highlighting how capitalism has enabled environmental degradation by casting the natural world as ‘dead’ extractable resources. Conversely, many societies have conceptions of the world being ‘alive’ that are premised on a “relational epistemology” (Bird-David 199) of interconnectedness between humans and non-human entities including storms, rivers, animals, and spirits (e.g. Ghosh 2016; Mwangi 2019). As Harry Garuba notes, a predominant way through which this relationality is recognized is through narrative, by “according a physical, often animate material aspect to what others may consider an abstract idea” (2003, 274).

This paper focuses on the way rainfall registers such “animist materialism,” tracing how rain is described—and ascribed material aspects—in two East African works of literature, Kyomuhendo’s Waiting (2007) and Owuor’s Dust (2013). Looking at the planetary consciousness encapsulated in narratives of rainfall, I follow Sarah Nuttall’s recent call to “read for rain,” that is, “focus[ing] in a sustained way on what is happening to rainfall in and as climate crisis” (2020, 456). By “reading for rain,” I examine the narrative strategies used to describe rainfall, drought, and flooding, suggesting that the novels use “animist materialism” to convey a practice of relationality. As such, understanding literary modes of animism is fundamental not just for recognizing the world’s ‘aliveness’, but for countering the “epistemic injustice” (Musila 2017) that African ways of knowing have been, and are still, subjected to.