Writing my Kampala
Reading Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s David Mogo, Godhunter (hereafter DMG) made me smile so much that by the time I was past the two-chapter mark, it actually hurt to spread my lips. I had to massage my cheeks, for a bit, and promise not to enjoy myself so much over the next couple of chapters!
I’m not one of those readers that are esteemed for their attention to detail. Usually, a few months after reading a life-changing book, the kind I’ll recommend to friends with three heart-eyed emojis, I’m hard-pressed to remember the name of the protagonist. Nonetheless, I can always be counted on to remember how a book made me feel.
To my credit, I do not judge books by their covers. My mental filing system is so simple and straightforward that when a friend asks if I think they should read book X, I’ll quickly say, “You must! I wept when I finished it! I’m still sad!” And to their credit, my friends know better than to ask irresponsible questions like “Why did it make you sad?” or throw passive-aggressive shade like, “Hmn! Anhaaah! Kyokka people! I don’t know if I should be friends with someone who wants me to become as sad as she is, but OK! I’ll read.” They simply hunker down and start reading book X.
What I liked most about DMG was how it made me feel: I felt for the most part as if I could have written it. I think a big part of the reason why I felt this way is that the narrative is so relatable. The power cuts. The potholes. The encounters with the police. (Do you know how many times I’ve wished I could speak to a police officer in their mother tongue if that might mean being granted an exemption from paying a fine?!) I kept thinking, “My God, this could be Uganda! I swear this isn’t Nigeria: this is Uganda!”
Now, imagine supernatural phenomena set in the context of things as underwhelming as potholes and corruption. And then factor in the characters’ diction (I was impressed that they spoke ‘normally,’ i.e. the way I imagine they speak outside a fiction novel) and the narrator’s droll tone. The net effect all that (and more) had was a narrative whose effortlessness increased my determination; someday, I told myself, I would write a book like DMG, and set it in Kampala. Not Kampala as I wish it were, mind, but Kampala as it is.
For a long time, I guess I’d subconsciously been waiting for Kampala to change. I’d been telling myself that when that happened, I would finally write the perfect story. DMG was a godsend (no pun intended!) because it made me realise that I didn’t have to wait: that I could write about Kampala in its current form. That Kampala’s contra-dictions and double-standards –
Broken sewage pipes this close to a high-rise shopping complex that boasts a KFC, a Carrefour, and a Woolworths; rising crime rates amidst increasing securitization and militarization of civilian spaces; a prosperous middle class with a low standard of living; a fast-growing economy that presides over increasing unemployment rates and widening socio-economic inequalities; public education and healthcare systems that are praised the most by the Ugandans who trust them the least (many government officials from the ruling party educate their children in international schools and then send them to universities abroad; when they have a medical emergency, they usually receive treatment from hospitals abroad, e.g. in Kenya, South Africa, India, the UK, and the US)
– could and should be incorporated into narratives.
I didn’t have to pretend that things were better than they were, if only to counter the negative stereotypes about Africans that abound in foreign media; the chaos and confusion – all the things that infuriate me about life in this city – were useful (at least in the sense that they could scaffold a narrative as I developed it).
Which is why when I learned of the Suyi Davies Literary Laddership for Emerging African Authors Fellowship, I applied.
There was never any question in my mind that whatever writing project I proposed would be a science fiction project, a fantasy project, or a mixture of both.
*
I grew up on a steady diet of genre fiction (I believe some sections call it ‘commercial fiction’ and other sections call it ‘popular fiction’) – police procedurals, legal thrillers, historical romances, etc. – and as a teenager my favourite things to watch were horror and science fiction movies.
While my high school literature classes required me to read a select number of books (think books by the likes of Efua Sutherland, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Meja Mwangi, and William Shakespeare), at the time there was nothing to suggest that a spy thriller or a police procedural couldn’t be categorised as literature. We were never required to privilege ‘set books,’ i.e. the books prescribed by the National Curriculum Development Centre for ‘O’ Level Literature in English, over the books we read during, say, our time off from classes; most of my friends and I considered everything we read, wherever we read it, whenever we read it, to be on equal terms.
Yet, surprisingly, when I started to write, or rather when I started to seriously consider the possibility of becoming a writer, I leaned heavily towards literary fiction (a category which, ironically, I knew next to nothing about for the better part of my existence).
Perhaps I was influenced by the books I was reading at the time. Perhaps I was swayed by the acclaim that it seemed only African writers who identified as literary writers were receiving. Whatever the case, I allowed myself to believe that literary fiction was the only kind of fiction worth reading and writing.
Over the last years, as my reading has expanded in both form and range, I’ve learned that the line between genre and literary fiction has always been much thinner than I thought, and that it has been crossed by countless writers to awe-inspiring and breath-taking effects. I’ve made it a point to unlearn many of the biases, against genre fiction, that I’ve absorbed and carefully cultivated since I started writing.
The last 2-3 years have been particularly revelatory. Perhaps motivated in part by the almost supernatural experience of living through the coronavirus disease pandemic, and the current government’s spectacular health governance failures, I’ve gained a deeper appreciation of the potency of science fiction, which Nabutanyi (1) has described as a subgenre that “exists on the edge of unbelievability,” and of its sacred place in the story of my writing story.
In thinking about a writing project for the literary laddership, nothing struck me as more beyond-belief than the reaction of security officials to the murders of young women in 2017. The callousness and indifference with which those murders were treated was exemplified by instructions (from a top security official) that women register their names (and the names of their male partners) with police. Somehow, that was supposed to allay widespread fears and reduce the possibility of becoming a murder victim.
To this day, it seems as if the only way I can properly recover from all the callousness and indifference that were on display during that period is to tell myself that none of it happened – that I misheard much of what was said, and that when I wasn’t mishearing things, my mind was making things up.
Science fiction struck me as the most appropriate genre precisely because I felt it was already well-equipped to deal with the dumbfounding, the implausible, the improbable, the unimaginable, the unthinkable – all the things you must tell yourself that you merely dreamt of in order to outlive their effects on you.
Moreover, a genre that’s as capable as realist fiction of exploring everyday experiences of bad leadership in whatever form they manifest, e.g. famine, inefficient public transportation, unexplained interruptions in power supply, water and food scarcities, and forced migrations.
While I agree with Eatough (2), who argues that “…most publications stress that science fiction is so new to Africa that developing an indigenous sci-fi culture also entails cultivating a new crop of writers,” I reckon that the science fiction writing scene in Uganda will equally benefit from the conversion (to speculative fiction writing) of the existing crop of realist writers.
It seems to me that the time has come for us to stop thinking of science fiction as just another “foreign bourgeois intervention or...colonial mystification” (3) and embrace its potential as a powerful means of social critique (4).
*
About two years ago, I was asked at what moment I realised that I could create stories.
My response was that I didn’t know if such a moment existed. Or that if it did it was more likely a slow progression than a point, P, at time, T.
I’ve always been a reader; while I was growing up, I consumed obscene amounts of fiction – all the novels, which my elder sister and her friends read, were passed on to me. So, rather than speak of a moment when I realised that I could create stories, I suppose it is more accurate to speak of the moment at which I started to wonder what it’s like to be on the other side of the page – what it’s like to be the person whose responsibility it is to create the worlds that I took such pleasure in inhabiting.
I was also asked if there’s a book, or piece of literature, that inspired/motivated me to pick up the pen, what my favourite genre to read is (and why), and whether there was an author I looked up to (and why).
In truth, I don’t think I cared much about what happened to characters after stories ended until I read The Bourne Identity. It seems strange to me, looking back, because now I can’t readily explain why, but I remained quite invested in Jason Bourne’s life long after I finished reading the books. I developed a degree of empathy for him that I hadn’t developed for a character before. There was something about how his story started, the way the first book in the series opened, how he was found, that struck me. He might have been the first character whose head I considered climbing into.
I remained extremely devoted to him, to the series, and to spy thrillers generally, until I learned from my brother’s friend, also a devoted Bourneist, that Robert Ludlum had died. This was maybe 2008 and I’d just read The Bourne Betrayal, I think it was, which was a gift from my brother. But now my brother’s friend was saying, “Oh, but Ludlum has been dead for a while now. You mean you didn’t know?”
Of course, in some corner of your mind, you know that writers are mortal, but you never imagine them actually dying; you just think they’ll always be around—that they’ll write books you like forever. So, you know, I was devastated. First, because he’d been dead for so long and, secondly, because that’s when I discovered that some of the books in the series were written by someone else. The whole thing was just inconceivable.
Anyway, that seed, wanting to climb into someone else’s head, wanting to know what it’s like to be someone else, needing to see the world through their eyes, well, I guess it grew into some kind of inspiration to write; to make sense of some aspects of life through an exploration of what goes on inside [fictional] people’s heads.
I admitted that I’d gone through several phases – a genre fiction phase, a literary fiction phase, a creative non-fiction phase, etc. – but that I was now enjoying a phase where I read anything with an interesting title.
As for the writers I look up to, I said there were many writers whose work I admired, and that an exhaustive list was impossible. But that I tended to look up to writers whose ideas, styles, themes, give me something to think hard about:
“I’m trying hard not to use words like “original” and “authentic,” but really any writer who offers me an opportunity to look at things differently, or has me obsessing for a week about a subject they’ve explored, or challenges my understanding of what a story is (or should be), is a writer from whom I have much to [un]learn and therefore one that automatically secures my respect.”
For the duration of the Literary Laddership, I answered similar questions – this was usually during our small, intimate, informal meetings.
Questions about who some of my favourite writers are.
Response: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Aminatta Forna, Teju Cole, Maryse Condé, Helen Oyeyemi, Orhan Pamuk, Nadifa Mohamed, Sarah Lubala, N. K. Jemisin, R. S. Thomas, Milan Kundera, Zadie Smith, Sefi Atta, and Matlwa Kopano.
Questions about whose work I’ve recently read and enjoyed.
Response: Elena Ferrante (The Lost Daughter), Rachel Cusk (A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother & Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation), Amy Niang (The Postcolonial African State in Transition: Stateness and Modes of Sovereignty), NoViolet Bulawayo (Glory), Nanjala Nyabola (Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move), and Robert Macfarlane (Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination).
Questions about the occasions that supply inspiration for reading and writing
Response: While I love to entertain, and to be entertained, I am especially drawn to stories that entertain while challenging my perspective(s) and position(s) – stories that give me space to relearn, and to have conversations with myself that society might not want to have with me).
Questions about where and how I’d like my writing journey to end.
Response: At this point, I drew a blank. For while it is easy enough to locate that moment when you were suddenly obsessed with the idea of becoming a writer, when telling a story in a certain way through a specific character was a matter of life and death, figuring out why you’re still writing (and why you intend to keep writing), especially amidst demotivating circumstances, isn’t always straightforward. And although I’d had conversations with myself about this long before applying for the Literary Laddership, the meetings with Suyi and Ola, as well as the Q&A sessions with special guests like Olisakwe Ukamaka, Pemi Aguda, and Sussie Annie, helped crystallise my thoughts about a host of things.
Over the course of three months, in online platforms like Zoom and Discord, we explored a variety of topics – the mundane, unromantic practicalities of a writer’s life (such as making and adhering to a work plan); [un]acceptable reasons to fire your agent; how to run a literary magazine on a tight budget; why marketing isn’t a dirty word; the state of the writing industry on and off the continent; publication processes and life cycles; popular myths about MFAs; plagiarism; the line between broaching difficult conversations (sexual abuse; racism; xenophobia) in your writing and needless provocation; how to situate yourself and your writing within the past and present of literary production and engagement on and off the continent; etc.
I especially appreciated and benefitted from discussions about form – discussions which allayed all my fears about whether the novella was the right form to choose (I initially conceptualised my proposed project as a novella). I’ve always been partial to novellas, and since in the last few years it seems that the novella has been revitalised (although some might argue that it never stopped being a vital form), I am excited about writing one.
In The Rise of the Sci-Fi Novella: All the Imagination, None of the Burden, Jason Kehe describes the novella as science fiction’s “most vibrant—and, in the crazed modern era, readable—option”:
The joy of the sci-fi novella, by contrast, is in its one-off-ness, its collapsed space, its enforced incapaciousness. Authors can’t indulge family trees or maps; they must purify their storytelling. One or two main characters. A single three-act quest. Stark, sensible rules. (And no Starks.)
Purified storytelling. That’s precisely what I’m going for, these days, and what I hoped the Literary Laddership would help with. It has thus been an incredible privilege to interact with writers who have been willing to offer their time, and have happily let me benefit from their expertise and experience.
References
1 Nabutanyi, E. F. (2022) Dystopian Futures: Ugandan Science Fiction and Post-Apocalypse Contagions. Journal of Literary Studies, 38 (1):15 pages.
2 Eatough, M. (2017) African Science Fiction and the Planning Imagination. The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 4(2), pp. 237-257.
3 Maurits, P. J. (2020). Legacies of Marxism? Contemporary African Science Fiction and the Concern with Literary Realism. African Identities, DOI:10.1080/14725843.2020.1773237
4 Armillas-Tiseyra, M. (2016) Afronauts: On Science Fiction and the Crisis of Possibility. Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 3(3), pp 273–290.
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