Silence as resistance and identity formation in Kenyan young adult fiction: A narratological analysis of Muthoni wa Gichuru's Breaking the Silence and Anthony Mugo's Never Say Never
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Abstract
Kenyan Young Adult Fiction (YAF) has grown as a genre, yet scholarship on it has stayed largely thematic, tracking the poverty, gender-based violence, and institutional failure these texts depict without examining how narrative form constructs those conditions. This article reads two Kenyan YAF novels, Muthoni wa Gichuru's Breaking the Silence (2009) and Anthony Mugo's Never Say Never (2012), through narratology, treating silence not as absence but as a deliberate mechanism that determines what a young protagonist may say and who they are permitted to become. Drawing on Gérard Genette's concepts of voice and mood and Mieke Bal's concepts of focalization and characterization, the study applies a descriptive-analytical qualitative design to close readings of both texts, selected through purposive sampling for their institutional recognition and their shared focus on young protagonists negotiating identity under pressure. The analysis finds that silence functions as a strategy of resistance in both novels, letting Wanjiku and Daniel preserve agency and negotiate identity within patriarchal and institutional structures, whether through testimony that finally registers or through survival sustained in silence itself. Five representational techniques, focalization, ellipsis, narrative voice, temporal manipulation, and characterization, recur across both texts despite separate authorship and different forms of harm. This consistency indicates that silence operates as resistance and identity formation at the level of the genre, extending narratological method, built mainly on Western fiction, to a Kenyan corpus where poverty and institutional processing function as narrative forces of their own.
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