![]() ![]() If I can understand Shakespeare, you can understand me.” Makumbi is quoted elsewhere saying: “I don’t write for a Western audience. In Makumbi’s sweeping intergenerational tale, “history sts on everything, howling,” producing layers of complexity that resist the postcolonial impetus to make oneself legible to empire. ![]() In many ways, it is this lack of difference that Kirabo and the women in her life-from her grandmother to her stepmother to her missing biological mother-must contend with at every turn. For example, Kirabo’s favorite aunt calls her vagina “your flower,” while a girl at her missionary boarding school terms it “her beautiful.” But as one woman astutely reflects: “Worship, persecution, where is the difference?” In Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s expansive coming-of-age novel, we follow Kirabo as she makes her way from rural Uganda to urban Kampala-a deeply embodied experience in which the language surrounding her body plays a crucial role. The question of how women’s bodies are articulated in “a patriarchy that cannot make up its mind whether to fall on its knees in worship…or flee the crisis” is at the heart of A Girl is a Body of Water. ![]()
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