Doreen Baingana

21/2021. This is a suite of short stories revolving around a Banyankole family of three young women growing up in Entebbe in Uganda in the 1980s. This book has all the usual middle class Middle Africa stories but better written than average: childhood nostalgia for grand/parents' material possessions, boarding school, university, emigration, and return. It also has the inevitable AIDS story but from a young female and very middle class point of view. All the stories are told from an individualist perspective, with only a limited sense of family or community life. Intelligent, interesting, and very much of its time / place / class.… (mais)

Beautiful, loosely related stories of three sisters coming of age in the violence of post-independence Uganda and making different choices.

Doreen Baingana was herself born and raised in Uganda in the years after independence. The horrors of those years provide the background for the stories she tells. In the introduction to her book, she explains that her stories are “possibilities, instances and imagings.” She does not seek to present representative women of Uganda or Africa or tell her own autobiographical story.

Rather, I used some of my experiences and observations as clay, added all kinds of water and paint, shaped and molded this into various pots: these stories. . . . The stories are linked, like sisters, forming a family that is stronger than its individual parts.

Read more: http://wp.me/p24OK2-1ag… (mais)

Uganda

This short story collection is comprised of stories about and narrated by three Ugandan sisters. It focuses on the youngest (and presumably most autobiographical), Christine, and various aspects of her coming of age. Themes of family strife, beliefs, and place in the world are set against the lightly sketched but very present backdrop of Idi Amin's regime. Most affecting is "A Thank-You Note," in which the harsh realities of AIDS are juxtaposed with the joy and freedom of sexuality, neither negating the other. "Questions of Home," like many other narratives of travel and culture, nicely illustrates both culture shock and the reverse culture shock of return.… (mais)