‘A Girl Is a Body of Water,’ by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi book review

We meet Kirabo as she decides she must learn more about her mother. She asks the “village witch,” Nsuuta, to help her. As we’ll learn, Nsuuta is not only wise, she’s also closely 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, spirited and smart, 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 explains. “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. The older wives Kirabo knows, like Nsuuta and her grandmother Alikisa, are forced into polygamist marriages. Tom’s wife Nnambi, despite her upscale city privileges, still fears the idea of Kirabo’s mother, even Kirabo herself. One of the book’s starkest scenes involves Nnambi telling the 16-year-old Kirabo to go sleep in her father’s bed, saying Kirabo is his real wife. This cruelty, born of envy, is a reminder of the huge rifts that can develop between factions in unjust societies — including our own. But sometimes that inequality can also spark bonds.

In one affecting scene, Alikisa, who knows Nsuuta has been carrying on with her husband Miiro for decades, visits her old friend in the hospital. Kirabo marvels at this event, believing the two women are mortal enemies. What she won’t understand for several years is that the relationships between women can have wide gaps and tight ties at the same time. In Makumbi’s glorious telling, their connections are as complex as they are.

By Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Tin House. 560 pp. $27.95