With every new mysterious turn from being denied knowledge of her mother, to the hostility of her stepmother, to being taken away from her father’s house, and going to boarding school, her life revolves in unprecedented ways. As Kirabo’s life progresses, her identity crisis intensifies. Her father then hands her over to her aunt who raises her, and eventually, Kirabo is sent to a boarding school. But then a new window opens into Kirabo’s life that spanned through the years of her coming of age.Įventually, Kirabo goes with her father to the city to live with him in Kampala, where she faces the tough challenge of a stepmother unwilling to raise her. Her questions are mostly met with deafening silences, the kind which met one head on and left one powerless to prod further. Secondly, she begins to ask a lot of questions about her mother. To solve the first problem, she forms a friendship with her grandfather’s other lover and sworn enemy of her grandmother, the blind and beautiful “witch” Nsuuta. At twelve years old, when Kirabo’s coming of age set in, she decides two things: first, she was no longer satisfied with having two selves, and she wanted to get rid of the derision-causing one secondly, that the life she had with her grandparents, in which she saw her father intermittently when he came to visit Natetta, and where she did not know her mother, left a gaping hole in her mind as to who she was. This eventful childhood included an inseparable friendship with Giibwa with whom Kirabo did everything and went everywhere, and a relationship which began as an antagonism with Sio, one of the handsome boys in the village with whom she would later fall in love. Kirabo is brought up by her grandparents in their home where she is afforded an eventful childhood in the village of Natetta, among many other children. In A Girl is a Body of Water, Makumbi takes on Kirabo Nnamiiro, a 12-year-old restless girl, haunted by the belief that she is possessed by a second self, and the unspoken mystery of her absent mother. In Kintu, we find the clan of a long dead powerful patriarch go back centuries in time to atone for their father’s mistake in order to find restitution from the curse which haunts them. Her third published book and her second novel, A Girl is a Body of Water also known as The First Woman, like her epic debut, Kintu, carries on the gargantuan task of self-rediscovery and interrogation of unspoken history. Ugandan novelist, Jennifer Makumbi, has gained a reputation for telling epic stories deeply steeped in the Ganda culture and history, and in a language very indigenous to the stories. The lives of the characters are subject to the precolonial Ugandan history which foreshadows their lives, and in most cases, are irredeemably part of the history of how they came to be…
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |