How do you solve a problem like the Bildungsroman? Whereas some literary genres tend to fluctuate in popularity over time, rolling in and out of vogue like the waves, the coming-of-age story has stayed firmly buoyed – part blinding in its familiar orange glow, part covered in guano.
Apart from obvious cultural changes, it is a genre that remains largely untouched since it was in the hands of Frances Burney and Henry Fielding. Of course it’s the relatability that keeps us going back: we all came of age, so we implant ourselves upon the characters.
Then again, it is likely a side effect of my own terminal maleness to actually relate to characters in books. Therefore, every now and then this creaky genre needs something of an overhaul, a firm rip at the pull cord to shudder everything back into life. This is provided to us in abundance by The First Woman, the latest novel from Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi.
As Makumbi established with her first novel, Kintu, she has absolutely no interest in writing for a western audience. Kintu is a complex tome that chronicled several generations of the Kintu bloodline and the hereditary curse that plagues the family tree. The novel, unashamedly Ugandan, dense with mythology and Ganda lingo, rewards slow and close reading.
For those who find Makumbi’s storytelling to be infuriating or wholly impenetrable in its Joycean hyperlocalism, she has a wonderfully succinct rebuttal: if I can understand Shakespeare, you can understand me.
The First Woman is a brilliant distillation of the style Makumbi introduced in Kintu. Gone is the vast timeline spanning generations. Instead the focus is mostly on one character: the defiantly headstrong Kirabo, a burgeoning teenage girl in mid-1970s Uganda, already several years into the dictatorial rule of Idi Amin. Amin is a constant grim shadow but rarely mentioned or focused upon. Makumbi refreshingly refuses to have him take up space in her work.
The main focus of Kirabo’s life is her mother, or her lack of one. Raised by her grandparents through childhood while her father lives and works in the city, Kirabo knows nothing about her mother, not even her name. At the beginning of the novel, she decides to glean some information out of the local village witch Nsuuta, thus sparking the quest to track down her mother that will act as the book’s basic plot.
Effervesces
It has been quite a while since I have read a character as fully fleshed out, as wholly real, as entirely befitting of over 400 pages of dense prose as Kirabo. She just effervesces off the page.
Another point of concern for Kirabo, apart from her absent mother, is her other form. At times she feels as if she “flies out” of her body and is possessed by some force that causes her to act brash and frenzied. Nsuuta assures her that this is the “original state” of woman still inside her, that Kirabo is possessed by the remnants of the first woman.
As much as in Kintu, legend and oral tradition are paramount to The First Woman as Makumbi interweaves many of the stories she was told as a young girl, resulting in a novel that is as rich in its own legend as it is evocative in its storytelling.
It is also not difficult to notice the many similarities between Kirabo and Makumbi herself. They both have an assertive confidence and revel in railing against the conventions by which they are confined, all of this leading to Kirabo often reading like a proxy Makumbi at certain points.
For example, Kirabo proudly practises labial elongation, a tradition taught to her by her aunts and dating back through several generations of the family. To Kirabo, labial elongation is part of achieving “mwenkanonkano” or the traditional Bantu state of feminine empowerment.
When her boyfriend Sio discovers this, he (very much reflecting the western point of view) claims he believes in mwenkanonkano but utterly disavows Kirabo disfiguring her body and performing “genital mutilation”. Kirabo scoffs at his words, a scoff seemingly endorsed by Makumbi, making Sio’s argument read as wholly foolish.
I find it difficult to fault The First Woman. Makumbi is an unequivocally brilliant writer who, despite already having two excellent novels under her belt, has still not achieved a status that matches her virtuosity. She is a writer whose name should absolutely be uttered in the same breath as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
It is my hope that young Kirabo will finally lead Makumbi toward legendary status but, really, it’s up to all of you. Don’t let me down.
