As a child, I was aware of Asians killing themselves during the expulsion, throwing themselves into the source of the Nile. The book starts in 1975, three years after Idi Amin expelled the Asians from Uganda. You unflinchingly show how Uganda was affected by brutal dictatorship. All that history wasn’t taught to me at school so a lot of people don’t know about their regions. She gave me a lot of details into how her ancestors suffered. She won’t read the book as she doesn’t read English. Kintu is mainly set in my father’s world for this book, I set it where my mother was born. In the acknowledgements, y ou thank your mother, Evelyn, “who shared her family history and the history of her villages”. Those kind of losses I wanted to deal with. When Kirabo meets her mother, she mourns the loss of the mother she had created. I wanted to explore the idea that if you don’t have a mother you create the idea of one yourself and turn her into a perfect goddess. As a child, I lived with my dad, but he was brutalised during Idi Amin’s regime and lost his mind, so I went to live with my aunt aged about 10. I didn’t meet my mother until I was perhaps 10 and used to have to think about that question. “How does it feel to have a mother?” is one of the questions at the core of the book.
Her new book, The First Woman, is a powerful feminist rendition of Ugandan origin tales, charting the young girl Kirabo’s journey to find her place in the world. She was awarded the prestigious Windham-Campbell prize for fiction in 2018. Her first short story collection, Manchester Happened, was published in 2019. Her first novel, Kintu, was longlisted for the Etisalat prize in 2014 and she won the Commonwealth Short Story prize in the same year. J ennifer Nansubuga Makumbi was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1967, and now lives in Manchester.
0 kommentar(er)
