A tale of women's hard-won wisdom

A Girl is a Body of Water Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi Tin House

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi sets her blazing new novel, A Girl is a Body of Water, in the conflicted nation of her adolescence: 1970s Uganda, under the brutal rule of dictator

Idi Amin. Protagonist and heroine Kirabo is 12, growing up safely and happily in the village of Nattetta, raised by her paternal grandparents. She doesn't know who her mother is, and her father, Tom, flits in and out, busy with his position on the country's coffee marketing board.

We meet Kirabo as she decides she must learn more about her mother. She asks the “village witch,” Nsuuta, to help her. We learn Nsuuta is not only wise, she's also tied to Kirabo's family. Their first conversation reveals both Nsuuta's high hopes for her young friend and a running theme in the novel: a woman's hard-won wisdom.

Kirabo has desires and ambitions that she defines as a second self ready to fly out of her and misbehave. These feelings terrify her. Nsuuta explains that this “flying out” is a special ability, stemming from woman's “original state.” Women, Nsuuta says, terrify men, which is why men keep them under such rigid control. In another time, “we were not squeezed inside, we were huge, strong, bold, loud, proud, brave, independent,” Nsuuta says. “But it was too much for the world and they got rid of it. However, occasionally that state is reborn in a girl like you.”

The author brooks no sentimentality, especially once Kirabo goes to live with her father, his wife and their children in the city. There, her

Aunt Abi instructs her on how to elongate her labia to enhance her sexual experience, but Kirabo's first great love, Sio, refers to the practice as genital mutilation. As Kirabo protests that this traditional practice is the opposite of female circumcision — “On the contrary, we enhance” — the hypocrisy is evident: Women cannot win, whether the system is set to deprive them of pleasure or to heighten it.

In fact, the system seems to be continuously working against the female characters. In Makumbi's glorious telling, their connections are as complex as they are.