A Girl is A Body of Water by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Somehow I ended up with the
American edition. In the UK
the book was published as
The First Woman

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a Ugandan born writer. She is linked to our last author, Kenyan Binyavanga Wainaina, by the Kwani Trust. Wainaina was one of the writers who set up Kwani? an African literary magazine based in East Africa. This expanded into the Kwani Trust which held events and gave out a prize for the Kwani? Manuscript Project, aimed at unpublished African authors. The first such prize was awarded to Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi in 2012 for The Kintu Saga, which went on to be published as Kintu, her first novel, winning her a raft of prizes.

Makumbi grew up in Kampala, her father fell foul of Idi Amin's regime and was brutalised, a treatment he never got over. Though she has since moved to the UK, her writing is rooted in the oral traditions of the Ganda people.

A Girl is a Body of Water (also published as The First Woman) is a take on a bildungsroman (literally 'formation novel' in German). Bildungsroman is a designation from western literature and follows the protagonist on a story of emotional and cognitive growth, as they come to understand both themselves and the world around them a little better.

Though the term comes from European literary criticism it is a universal form of story, dating back to the very earliest folk tales across the world (The Epic of Gilgamesh could be considered a bildungsroman). The Ganda people (from where Uganda takes its name) are no exception.

Makumbi at the Festival Atlantide 2021. 

Needless to say, in most traditions, including European and Ganda, the vast majority of protagonists in these tales were male, with the females' roles being reduced to bit parts and love interests. 

In the western world the publishing industry has been awash with women for the past generation or two. After a couple of hundred years of male domination the pendulum has well and truly swung the other way. Once literature was not seen as suitable for women (with Jane Austin and a few other notable outliers), but now look at the staff list of any UK or US publishing house, or their list of authors - and I would bet you a penny to a pog that at least 80% of them are female. I don't for a second argue this is a bad thing, there is big historical imbalance to address - but no reader of modern occidental literature can say they are unfamiliar with the female voice.

In Uganda though, society is still very male dominated. In a recent list of 15 Essential Ugandan Books - 10 were by male authors, 4 female (and 1 a collection of poems by various authors). And that is in published literature, the vanguard of modern Ugandan culture, most of the populace will be far more familiar with oral tales - which are more rooted in the androcentric traditions. 

The Ugandan flag features a grey crowned crane,
an endangered and impressive bird found across
much of Africa. 

With this in mind, I feel the reader of A Girl is a Body of Water will get a very different experience depending on whether they are Ugandan or from a society more familiar with western literature. Being in the latter camp, the fact that Makumbi had made the protagonist female did not stand out as unusual. British bookshops are awash with female bildungsromans, and there modern descendant the 'coming of age novel'. The defining points of the novel for me were the oppressive tribal culture, the inequality of futures for boys and girl and a resistance to change that was seen as running rough shod over centuries long traditions. However, I imagine a Ugandan reader, already being familiar with these facets, would find the female focus and the fact that Kirabo goes through a metamorphosis which would normally be associated with a male protagonist to be the central themes. As such, for western readers, or for me at least, the novel looses some of its power. But then does that really matter? I'm not the target audience for this novel, yet I still got a lot from it. It is undeniably well written, with strong and sympathetic characters, a good deal of setting detail and a strong and believable emotional arc. It was interesting how, even though this is undeniably a feminist tract, there are many instances of misogyny which are not challenged by the writing, and even supported by the female characters. Such attitudes are a way of life in rural Uganda, and it would not have been realistic to portray all the women in the book as enlightened souls with views akin to someone brough up in London or New York. Sometimes you can challenge attitudes just by shining a spotlight, without actively arguing against them. Overall this was a strong novel, with the quality of writing and characterization keeping it from the prosaic, but it fell short of being great as neither its style nor content had a freshness or originality that one would hope for.