Electric Literature: A Coming-of-Age Novel that Weaves Ugandan Folklore and African Feminism

For girls growing up in India, there are several names used for our vaginas: susu, nunoo, and perhaps most tellingly, “shame-shame.” As in, “Close your legs, your “shame-shame is showing.”

Across the ocean in Uganda, there is another set of names that carry similar echoes; for example, “ruins” or burden”—as in, “Did you wash your burden properly?” This failure to name female bodies straightforwardly is not a third-world problem (what on earth is a “hoo-ha”?), but the forms that this naming takes tells us something about the way society views girls and women: forcibly infantilizing, shameful, dangerous.

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. In Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s expansive coming-of-age novel, we follow Kirabo as she makes her way from rural Uganda to urban Kampala…

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