Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Kenyan writer
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (born in 1968) is a Kenyan writer who is the author of novels, short stories and essays. She won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story "Weight of Whispers".
Quotes
edit- “There are presumptions, in the world as it is now framed, of who the worthy victim is and who merits the power of full witness,”
- We know, nyara, that to name the unnamable is a curse [...] Even if you plant another story into silence, see, the buried thing returns to ask for its blood from the living.
- She would have to relinquish her feelings for water to the power of numbers, navigational compasses, Napier’s Rules, coordinates and geopolitics. She watched her lecturer. Could she propose that the sea sweats differently depending on the time and flavor of day and night? That there are doorways within the sea and portals in the wind? That she had heard the earth and moon and sea converge to sing a single storm-borne wind, and these had called her to dance, and that she had danced at night with them under a fecund moon?”
- On the map she looked at, there was no place marker for Pate Island. No color brown or green to suggest her own existence within the sea. So she wanted to know about places that could be rendered invisible.”
- He would learn to always stoop to meet her eyes. She expected this: eye-to-eye conversations. She needed to see everything his soul suggested.
- Ayaana would learn that there seemed to be no absolutes in the world, only codes and questions and a guarantee of storms.
- Ayaana was surveying the longest line on the globe’s three dimensional grid, the equator, the first line of latitude. Her special point zero, 40,075 kilometers long; 78.7 percent across water, 21.3 percent over land, zero degrees, all the Kenya equator places she had never imagined to claim as her own: Nanyuki, Mount Kenya. The invisible equator line crossed only thirteen countries - Kenya, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, São Tomé and Principe, Gabon, Republic of Congo, Uganda, Somalia, Maldives, Indonesia, and Kiribati - thirteen countries that were the center of the world, and hers was one of them.
- Ebbing: disappearing, becoming of the sea. Flowing: returning, rolling on the sands, returned to earth.
