Let's Tell This Story Properly

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  I take a breath before I tell my grandmother that Dad is fine but did not send her a message.

  ‘Heh heeh.’ She does that contemptuous laugh old women do. ‘You know, Kitone’—she points at me as if I am my father—‘when I first ran away from Bunjo’s father, people talked: Eh, she has run away from her husband. Look, she’s burrowed with a child in a tiny hole like a rodent. Eh, she’ll have to slut herself. Eh, that boy will amount to nothing. But if that did not move me, why would Bunjo, a child I brought into the world just the other day?’

  I shrug.

  ‘So next time you talk to your father, tell him that I’ve known more pain than he can inflict.’

  I keep quiet. Nnakazaana’s contemptuous laugh was not contemptuous: it was a sob. Luckily her tough face is in place. If it slips, she will collapse into tears. I get up and hug her again. It’s not an I’m sorry hug—Nnakazaana does not do sympathy—it’s I’m so happy to see you again. Strong people are exoskeletal. One crack in the shell and they’re dead. Experience has taught me to reinforce Nnakazaana’s facade of strength before cracks appear.

  ‘But I think Dad pretends to hate you.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘He calls you my mother, very possessive. And he talks about you, your achievements, with pride. When you were sick, he paid the hospital bills. He was always on the phone with the doctors.’

  Nnakazaana beams. ‘I know, the doctors asked me, “Who was that on the phone, is he a doctor?” Apparently, he asked medical questions. I said he’s my son. But he didn’t speak to me.’

  ‘He says you hate white people.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know: maybe because of Melanie.’

  ‘That woman again.’ She pulls away to look in my eyes. ‘All I said to Bunjo was “Don’t marry Europeans.” White women come with too much power into a marriage with us. The relationship is lopsided against your son. Do you see?’

  I nod because her hands are gesturing the imbalance.

  ‘Your son becomes the woman. They know how to emasculate African men. And for those they give visas to, ho.’ She claps horror. ‘The stories you hear. Your son does something trivial and she threatens him with deportation. But if I hate white people, why did I tell Bunjo to apply for the RAF scholarship? Ask him who told him, after his studies, to apply to international airlines? Why would I encourage him if I don’t like Europeans? Didn’t I tell you that I don’t mind you marrying a white man?’

  ‘You did. But Jjajja, not all European women are like that.’

  ‘What are you talking about, child? It’s their culture. I’ve heard a woman, with my very own ears, compliment another about her husband: “You trained him well.” I said, “twaffa dda, is he a dog?” In Britain, children belong to their mothers. You divorce your wife, she takes the children. The court gives you visitation rights! The woman uses those rights to strangle you. Only a few women realise that it’s child abuse to deny their children their fathers.’

  Hmm is the only safe response when my grandmother starts on this topic.

  ‘Melanie told my son that she did not want children. And Bunjo, like the sheep he is, said, Okay, madam, no problem. I tell you, Kitone, your father followed Melanie like a trailer of an articulated lorry—blindly. But I said, “No way, I am going to be a grandmother, come what may!”’

  ‘But Jjajja, Dad and Melanie have been divorced twenty years now; Dad has not had any more children.’

  ‘How can he? He does long-haul flights which means he’s away for at least five days a week. Besides, once Melanie sowed that seed in his mind, that was it.’

  This is not strictly true. In one of our candid conversations, Dad told me that if it had not been for his mother, he’d not have had a child. But I can’t say that to my grandmother’s face; I can’t keep contradicting her.

  ‘If it’s true that Bunjo does not want children, how come he worships you? Tell me he doesn’t love you.’

  I smile and she knows she has won.

  ‘Kitone, people don’t sit down and ask themselves Do I want children? When the time is right to have children, children come. The only question is how many. Love for children is like breast milk; a child arrives, ba pa, you’re overwhelmed.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘If I hadn’t fought to have you, I would be destitute right now.’

  What Nnakazaana doesn’t know is that Bunjo can’t get enough of white women. The more she’s against them the more he wants them. Of all Dad’s girlfriends I’ve met, only Juana, a Mexican artist, and Lorena, a Brazilian student, were non-white. And to describe them as non-white is to stretch the fact: they were white. Once, when Dad was going on about his mother being prejudiced, I said: ‘But Dad, you don’t date black women either.’

  Ho ho! It was as if I had opened his door by the hinges. He didn’t talk to me for days. It didn’t help that soon after he had a flight to Sydney and didn’t come back for a week. When he spoke to me again, he made it clear that he would not tolerate that kind of talk in his house. Then he relented and explained that black women, especially Africans, bring too much baggage into a relationship.

  ‘They come looking for stability,’ he said, ‘with plans to marry you, have children, and while you are at it, you must act married—Sports cars are for young men; you have to act your age—tight jeans?…nothing says bad boy like a leather jacket; and by the way, Why don’t you go to church? Oh, Mother rang, she’s asking about you, when will you visit them? I’ll never inflict my mother on another woman again but equally, I don’t want a family inflicted on me. Everyone must carry their stability in themselves. Don’t look to me to give it to you.’

  Like mother like son, I had thought, but I kept quiet about his essentialising African women in case he sulked at me again.

  After a cup of tea, I give Nnakazaana the stuff I brought for her from Britain. A pack of Chloe perfume and body lotion, shoes, Marks and Spencer bras and underwear—she insisted on them—a handbag, a watch and other toiletries. Then I give her the foodstuff I bought in Kawempe. We walk to the half-mansion—that’s what we call the smaller house Nnakazaana built on the premises—and look around the house I’ll be moving into once my containers arrive. The walls need a lick of paint. Nothing I can do about the small windows. I don’t like the red cement floor. I think I’ll carpet it all. That will give me something to do while I wait to start my job.

  ‘You know, Jjajja,’ I say, ‘because it needs a little bit of work, I’ll move in with you in a few days and start working on it.’

  That puts a smile on her face. As we walk back to the main house she puts her hand on my shoulders. ‘You’re enough for me, Kitone,’ she whispers. ‘You’re me.’

  ‘Maybe I love you more, Jjajja.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Her smile is sceptical.

  When time comes to leave, it’s a struggle to extricate myself. She thought I would spend the entire day with her. But when I explain that I am going to see Mother, she smiles because I visited her before my mother, especially as Mother lives in the city where I came from. To say that Nnakazaana and Nnazziwa, my mother, don’t get along is to say that Mr Lion and Little Miss Antelope don’t see eye to eye.

  • • •

  Mother lives in Wankulukuku, just after the stadium as you go towards Bunnamwaya. My mother doesn’t wrestle with life. What comes her way she accepts; what does not, is not hers. From rumours and whispers I’ve heard, I imagined Nnakazaana marching up to my mother soon after I was born and saying Where is my grandchild, plucking me out of her arms and handing her a cheque for her troubles—Thank you very much—then giving Mother terms of visitation. Mother could not fight back; she doesn’t know how to. Tradition was on Nnakazaana’s side, being Dad’s mother. Besides, Nnakazaana had a lot of resources at her disposal, but that does not mean that Mother did not hurt. Like today, when she finds out that I visited Nnakazaana first, she looks down to hide her pain. I had not planned to tell her, but she asked, ‘So how is Nnakazaana?’
and I was tempted to say Why ask me, who’s just arrived from Britain, but I said, ‘Same old Nnakazaana.’

  If my mother was a car, my father clicked the central locking button and walked away. She’s still parked where he left her. I suspect I’m the result of a one-night stand. Probably a drunken night, because Mother’s not the kind of woman Dad would go for sober. Besides, there is no record of their relationship—no pictures, no stories, not even anecdotes. Some parents hear a song and sigh Oh, that song reminds of your father, or point to a place and say That’s where me and your father once lived, or kdto, we ate life in that club, me and your mother. The only record of their relationship is me. It makes me nervous, Mother not knowing Dad. When I started a relationship with Dad, I visited him once a year. Every time I came back from Britain, I brought pictures of him and Mother pored over them like an opportunity lost.

  Mother has a tiny house. Smaller than the half-mansion. Word has it that she built it with the money Nnakazaana paid her for me. Mother is mumsy in a Ganda way. The kind of woman a Ganda husband would not lose whatever he did. The kind of wife who says I came to cook; I am not leaving, whatever he does. Their ability to endure marital abuse is the epitome of Ganda feminine strength. Mother is appropriately plump. She only wears kitenge gowns or busuuti. She still bleaches. Her hair is very long and worn in a straight perm. When I arrived, I saw her worried glance at my hair—short, natural and uncombed.

  I only agree to have tea with her because it would be rude if I left her house without eating something. Thank god I am going to meet my sisters for lunch, thank god they’ve told her about it, otherwise I would have had lunch to compensate for seeing Nnakazaana first. I give Mother the bag containing all the stuff I brought for her from Britain. I always bring her more than I do for Nnakazaana. If Nnakazaana needs stuff from Britain she gives money to her friends who are travelling.

  I pass on the pictures I printed off. In all of them, I am with Dad: I know it’s him she wants to see. For a moment, she is silent as she riffles through them. Then she sighs, ‘Yes, that’s him: those are the eyes.’ Then she looks up. ‘When did his head start cutting bald?’

  I smile without replying.

  Mother has always treated me like an indulgence. With her, I feel like an ornament. As a child, whenever she visited she brought presents—you don’t need presents from your mother every time you see her. When she picked me up for holidays, funerals, weddings or baptisms in her family, I was stared at. She never told me off. I imagine that relationships with parents come from moments of intense emotion. When they scream at you or spank you, when they praise you, or save you from danger and you see their fear, horror, or when they embarrass you, when you hate them, when you fear for them or miss them—it’s all those emotions, and more, that coalesce and congeal with the sensations of feeling their heart beat when they carry you, that form a bond. There is none of that in my relationship with Mother—only stares and smiles.

  At her house, she treated me as if she dared not return me to Nnakazaana’s chipped or cracked. My sisters seemed unsure of what to do with me. They liked and resented me equally. Ddembe, the eldest, would pinch me for no reason and run. If I did not make a noise, she’d run back and dug a deeper pinch and twisted until I winced. She preferred to take me by surprise because I would jump. Now I know why I never complained. If our mother was going to pamper me, Ddembe was going to hurt me. Then we were equal.

  One day she got a pair of scissors and shredded all my clothes. Mother bought me new ones before I went back home.

  I don’t know when my sisters and I normalised. The change crept up on us like puberty. Later my sisters told me that whenever I was around Mother fed us sumptuously. They also said that once they started to come around to Nnakazaana’s house they understood Mother’s behaviour. But Mother never normalised. My conversation with her skims on the surface. Thus, Mother asking when Dad started going bald is skimming the surface. After all, ever since I first visited Dad—I was thirteen then—he’s been going bald. All the pictures I brought back since then have showed Dad at some stage of balding.

  Dad does not feel paternal either. He loves me, but sometimes I suspect he would rather be my best friend. The first time I visited him back in 1999, he picked me up in a convertible sports car. Talked to me like a friend. He was too sleek, too well-groomed, too into his gym body, expensive clothes and his pleasure-seeking life to feel like a dad. His home was a bachelor pad. Two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The rest were spaces filled with gadgets, vinyl records, DVDs, PlayStation games, books. Every room had speakers inset into the ceiling. Coloured lights. When he introduced his girlfriend, it was clear from their body language that it was all about having a good time. What shocked me most was him telling me I didn’t have to call him Dad. After all, he said he had not been a dad so far. I snapped, ‘I’ll call you Dad.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what my mother has told you; I mean, about the circumstances of your birth.’

  ‘What’s there to tell? You’re here in Britain, I’m there in Uganda.’

  ‘Oh.’ He had stared at me for a while. Then he asked the weirdest thing: ‘Do you have a relationship with your birth mother?’

  ‘My birth mother, what does that even mean? Why wouldn’t I have a relationship with my mother?’

  ‘I just want to know.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I don’t live with her, but I see her all the time.’

  At the time, Dad cleaned and washed up and did the laundry. At first, I thought he just didn’t want me to touch his gadgets. Then one time he had a long-haul flight and I asked him to show me how to use the washing machine and the drier. He said, ‘I don’t want you to think that I’m making you my servant.’

  I was like What? I mean, how Zungucised is that? I said, ‘Am I your daughter or not?’

  He was startled.

  I said, ‘Let me put it this way: are you still a Muganda?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because this Britishness is killing me, Dad. Back home, children do chores; it’s not child abuse.’

  He laughed. ‘You take after my mother. She must be proud.’

  I didn’t know whether it was a reprimand or amusement. I didn’t care. From that day, our relationship improved. One thing about Dad, he’s dutiful. Back then, I didn’t have to carry clothes when I travelled. I always found my wardrobe full of clothes. He bought them on his travels. I started wearing labels before I knew what they were. He took care of all my needs, from tampons, knickers, deodorant and perfume to going with me to Marks and Spencer to get my bust measured for bras. Even now, Dad books my visits to the dentist and GP for check-ups.

  ‘Is Bunjo still single?’ Mother asks.

  ‘No, he has a girlfriend.’

  She laughs. ‘Only you young people have girlfriends. We have a man or a woman.’ She pauses. ‘White again?’

  ‘No, Kenyan.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she laughs. ‘He learnt his lesson!’

  There it was again. Evil Melanie. Then again, why did I say Kenyan? To protect Mother from the suspicion that Dad rejected her because he prefers white women, which in her mind elevates white women above her? To protect my father from Mother’s suspicion that he’s an insecure African man on a trophy trip? I would like to believe that I don’t challenge my mother because I’m exhausted, but something far worse has happened to me. After America voted Trump I started to rationalise Uganda’s right-wing views. After all, liberalism is a by-product of prosperity.

  I barely make it to lunch with my sisters, Nnannozi and Nnalule.

  • • •

  I am in a taxi to Ntinda after walking out on my sisters. My head is boiling.

  People talk a bit too straight. And by the time I met my sisters my nerves were already frayed. Apparently, my failure to look right, like a kivebulaya, disconcerts them. I am too skinny and my hair looks like I’ve just walked into civilisation. ‘You’re even wearing lesbian shoes!’ Nnalule had moaned.

>   In the past when I visited, I played to the kivebulaya expectations—the latest fashion in Britain, outrageous accessories, going out every night. It was easy then because I visited for two weeks and returned to Britain. But I am back for good; I am older and no longer interested in wearing the First World on my body.

  ‘Look,’ I tried to explain, ‘Dad’s not buying me clothes any more and I’m not interested in labels.’

  ‘But still, Kitone, you try. People will think you were deported.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Come on, like you’ve just returned but already are scraping the bottom? Have mercy on us.’

  So it was not about me per se; it was about them. They’ve spent years constructing themselves through dress, associates, cars, jobs, boyfriends, houses and even areas they live. In my absence, I was co-opted into the masquerade. Now they needed me to perform kivebulaya.

  ‘You people, this keeping up of appearances is tragic. We’re in the developing world, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘That’s exactly why,’ Nnalule said. ‘We poor people are embarrassed by poverty. We hide it. There’s no need to look at a person saying I’ve tried Britain and failed. Where is the hope for a dreamer?’

  ‘Looking poor while rich is a virtue in the West. Here you just look crude!’

  ‘Yeah, the West is so rich it performs poverty. Aspects of poverty have become fashionable. They started with faded jeans, then they frayed their jeans, now it’s gaping holes like they miss wearing rags.’

  ‘Look, Kitone, we know you’ve never been poor. We get it. You may even look down on us pretending to be rich. But this idea of I’m in the Third World and it’s vulgar to display wealth is just depressing.’

  I ate quietly. Did not respond to what they said. Finally, they too fell silent. After eating I stood up, went to the counter and paid the bill even though it was their treat. I waved goodbye and walked out. I drove Ddembe’s car back to Mutungo and caught a taxi to Ntinda. Only one day in Kampala and already I’ve disappointed my mother and fallen out with two of my three sisters. I can already hear them saying Kitone came back, but she’s too white for life.