Dilman Dila on being an all-round storyteller

Dilman Dila launched A Killing In The Sun anthology at this year's Storymoja Festival in Nairobi. Auma Obama, patron of Storymoja, was the first to buy a copy of the anthology. — Dilman Dila launched A Killing In The Sun anthology at this year’s Storymoja Festival in Nairobi. Auma Obama, patron of Storymoja, was the first to buy a copy of the anthology.

Dilman Dila is a Ugandan writer, film maker, activist and photographer. He recently launched Lawino Magazine, an electronic magazine started by writers to promote writing from Africa.

On Tuesday 23 September, he will be launching his collection of Sci-Fi stories, A Killing In The Sun at National Theatre at 5:30pm. Here is what we talked about:

Writer, film maker, social activist and photographer. Which one do you want to be known for?
It all comes down to storytelling for me. People like to make the distinction but I see it all as telling the story. I am most comfortable with writing because with writing I have full control of everything. Film is a bit tricky because you have to depend on money. Even when it is a low budget film, you have to spend some money. It’s also dependent on technology because there are things you may want to do but cannot do because you lack the appropriate camera or appropriate software or just the human resources to help with certain things. Photography is quite the same.

With writing, you sit at your computer and get the work done. And even without a computer you can still work. I used to hand write my stories until, I think, 2004 and still do so sometimes when there is no electricity.

So when a story comes to you, how do you decide that it is better told as a film or as a short story?
Most times I begin with the medium and not the story. I have never had to choose a story for film or a short story. Normally by the time I write a story I have decided that I am writing for a magazine or that it will be a screen play.

Starting to write for film
There was a time when I was writing but I felt I had nowhere to send my work. That was around 2002. At that time, Nollywood was becoming really popular in Uganda and everybody was watching Nigerian films. I started thinking that that could make me some money because I really wanted to earn a living from my work as a storyteller. At that same time I was working with an NGO that works on women’s rights and they also had a programme where they wanted to use film to disseminate some of their information so the idea of writing for film started at around that time.

Teaching myself how to write short stories had been quite easy but writing screenplays was hard. I had no access to screenplays so I had no idea what they even looked like. I joined an email group and one of the people there was Wanjiru Kinyanjui, a Kenyan film maker. I told her about my desire to write screen plays. She was excited about it and she gave me tips and advice but I did not really follow through with it until 2005 when internet became more accessible.

Luckily for me, in 2005 Maisha opened shop in Kampala and it was a school for screen writers. So I wrote my first screen play specifically for that because I knew that there was somebody that was finally going to read it. They did not take me for the first lab but the second screen play I wrote, Felistas Fable, made it for the second Maisha lab.
I was in touch with Steve Cohen and he liked the story so much that he offered to mentor me. I then taught myself how to shoot movies and I went to Maisha and learnt a bit more on that. They told me I might not make much from just writing screen plays so they encouraged me to direct so I went and bought myself a camera and begun shooting. The following year I went back as a director.

Writing for film in Uganda…
There are people who write movie scripts it’s just not like the other writing (say short stories and novels) that have more professional platforms like newspapers, journals, for prizes etc. Screen writers are sometimes undermined even in the film industry itself because you will find a lot of people shooting films without scripts. They improvise the story as they go along which is why you will find it hard to watch certain films from Uganda because the stories are not properly developed. And because the making of one film involves many people, it is harder for screen writers to shine.

On starting Lawino Magazine as another platform for writers to submit their work…
I thought it would not hurt to add one more Lit Mag. There are quite a number of platforms, yes but sometimes even the frequency of these magazines or journals is not good for the writer. If a writer writes for Kwani? for example, which comes out once a year, then they would have to wait a whole year for them to be published again. At the end of the day, if people are to grow, there should be many options for a writer to send their work. In Europe and the US, there are thousands of magazines some of which are specific to age, genre so people have lots of options. With technology making publishing easy [we did not put it in anything apart from the time we put in as the editorial team on Lawino], hopefully we will get more platforms for publishing.

The response to the submission call…
I was surprised! For the first issue we got about six short stories and about twenty four poems. I did not expect to get all that. I was soliciting stories from people I know and those people did not send anything. I was really surprised when I received work from other people. It showed me that there are lots of people out there who are writing and just want their work to be published. Some of them had already been published elsewhere.

Lawino’s future…
We plan to print anthologies periodically. Print of course involves money which we do not have now but that is a plan. We could possibly do free releases but have adverts within the magazine.

What to look out for in A Killing In The Sun…
This isn’t my first Sci-Fi book but readers are likely to connect more with this one. Being Science Fiction, people have to suspend belief more than they do when they are reading books with concrete realities. The stories go beyond the edge of reality; it’s not impossible for those events to happen.

1000 years ago if someone said people would be talking across continents instantaneously, that would have qualified as fantasy and for some people as witch craft, but we now have mobile phones and it happen. I remember in early 2000s when one of my brothers told me, ‘I can send a letter right now to Canada and it will reach this very minute. And if the person receives it and replies right now I will get it.’ He had just discovered email which was way different from the snail mail he was used to. If I had told him about it before, he would have said it was impossible. So A Killing In The Sun is a lot like that. The themes and the worlds are just a bit outside the boundaries of reality but the issues they deal with are grounded in our world. In the print version, there are 10 stories but more in the e-book.

Sci-fi writers that have influenced you…
It is hard to pick but let me try. Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers inspired one of the stories. Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed whose images have never left my mind. It was also the first Sci-Fi book by a black writer that I read and it was a different experience for me. There is Margaret Atwood, George Orwell’s 1984, HG Wells’ The War of The Worlds and Jules Vern’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. Those were the stories that introduced me to that other world. When Vern was writing Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea he was imagining a submarine but now when you look at it, it might not seem like Sci Fi but at that time they were not there.

Reading that as a boy filled me with imagination. There was a stream where I grew up in Tororo called Mairo Moja that I used to pass on my way to school and I remember thinking, ‘If only I had that guy’s gadget, I would go under that stream and explore things there.’

All the writers you have mentioned are white apart from Octavia Butler. Are there other Africans writing Sci-Fi? Do you think readers are ready for African Sci-Fi?
There are quite a few of them. There is a book of Amos Tutuola that I read when I was younger. He is mostly known for Palm Wine Drinkard but I read Feather Woman of The Jungle which stuck with me. I remember even trying to write a story like that. Most recently, there is Nnedi Okorafor.

Are we ready for Sci-Fi? We have been telling Sci-Fi/fantasy/magical realism for ages. Most of our folktales are steeped in fantasy. There is a folktale in Acholi about a rock that falls from the sky and buries a group of dancers which could translate to aliens and space ships. There is another story, Awili, where a girl marries a very handsome man who transforms into a beast that wants to eat her which is almost the same as present day presentation of werewolves. There is also Kila and Lapogo where a woman turns into a hyena at night to drink people’s blood which combines a werewolf and vampire story. Even our own legends like Gipir and Labong about a guy who goes in the forest to look for a spear which is basically a fantasy quest. The Luo have the one of Lwanda Magere, a man made of stone which is superhero kind of story like Iron Man. There is the one from Buganda of a man who could fly and shoot arrows from the sky and that he killed a lot of Banyoro in war.
So maybe our education has taught to look at our folktales as stories we can not value and yet we have been telling them all this time.

Why Sci-Fi…
It’s a boyhood thing that stuck. As a kid, there was a certain curiosity that you get taken up with. I started reading those stories when I was still in primary. I used to like folktales a lot and sometimes I would be disappointed if I would read a book and find that there was no fantastical element to it. I wanted to read about the Lwanda Magere’s, African super heroes but most of the books did not have them. Also, my father was a newspaper agent so I had exposure to things like comics which I enjoyed immensely.

Have you shot any Sci-Fi movies?
No but I hope to do one when resources allow. I tried to make horror films but people just laughed because they were not really horrifying. The monsters were not convincing in their depiction as monsters. That’s the thing with these kinds of movies. It can go very differently from how you hoped it would. I think though that now with my experience I can try and pull something off. Maybe I will do it. It might need more money but just a lot time. Even the actors would need to adjust their thinking because it would present challenges a bit unlike from the ones they usually have.

Have you made money from your writing? Is this something we should pursue?
I have been surviving on film since 2008. Earning from my other work as a writer is a bit tricky but it is not impossible especially for genre fiction.
You can also make money by publishing your work online in forms of e-books. The cost of production is minimal and most publishers will give a writer about 60% from the sales so if the book becomes a hit, you can make some money.
That said, making money is not a goal you can achieve in the short term. I see even successful writers end up doing something else like teaching, to supplement their income.

For writers just starting out…
You should not fear to submit your work to as many platforms as possible. That is what got me going. There are several magazines online to which you can submit. Some of them pay, while others don’t and if you want to get into the habit of writing, you just set out to write for different platforms and send your work. Even if you do not get accepted, it will help you to practice and eventually get better. I think most writers get attached to one story and when it does not make it, they fail to move on to write other things.

Other writers try to go for novels first, which I did also (I think I have written six novels that I have never published) but it takes a much longer time which means you are stuck with one story for a long time. I think that limits your ability to create stories but when you write more stories, you sort of train your brain to create.

Thanks a lot, Dilman for this interview!

7/7: 10 Books That Have Impacted My Life

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For a couple of weeks now, people on Facebook have been listing the 10 books that have impacted their lives and tagging their friends to do the same. This is one Facebook challenge that I am loving. If the lists of books are anything to go by, perhaps we should stop saying that there is a poor reading culture. People may not be reading what you are reading (and so when you ask they say they do not know who Chimamanda is *shock! horror*) but that does not mean they are not reading.

I have had time to think about my list and here goes:

1. Always and always, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. I first read this book as part of my s.6 curriculum but it is the only book that I had to read for exams that has stayed with me the longest. This book made me incredibly sad throughout and the ending made me cry so hard! And yet, it is such a beautiful story of hope and one of my favourite love stories. At our wedding we had bookmarks with quotes from our favourite books and movies. People who know my Jane Eyre love were not surprised to find “Reader, I married him” on those bookmarks.

2. Zenzele. A Letter For My Daughter by J. Nozipo Mararaire. This book is written as a letter from a mother to her daughter going off to study in the U.S. The advice she writes ranges from identity, to their country’s fight for independence to love to life! This made so much sense to me. I can paraphrase chunks and chunks of passages from this book because it changed my life.

3. Tar Baby by Toni Morisson.

4. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.

If there is a writer I have recently fallen head over heels in love with it is Toni Morrison! I love how poetic her sentences are. I love how she knows how to deliver what, when. She knows when to use songs to deliver meaning, when to be bold and unapologetic and when to be delicate. I read her sentences over and over again just so I can sigh contentedly! I hope I get to own all the books she has ever written.

5. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden.

6. The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Both of these books I love for the language and style of writing. There are parts of those stories I don’t remember so well but there are several sentences I remember very, very vividly!

7. Not a book but my favourite poem: A Letter From A Contract Worker by Antonio Jacinto. I remember the first time I read this poem. I was in senior three in a dark, lifeless classrooom that we referred to as Dungeon. I was thoroughly heartbroken by how that poem ends.

8. My most recent love, Kintu by Jennnifer Makumbi Kintu.

I will admit that there are emotional reasons for my love for this book. I grew up near the Kasubi Tombs. If you stood there and shouted my name I would hear you from my home. My primary school was right opposite. If you stand at the tombs, you will see a hill called Lubya. While growing up, there was a house on top of that hill, sorrounded by tall, tall trees and we were told that the house was haunted and there were ghosts on that hill. I never went there. Imagine the pleasure I got just seeing “Lubya Hill” in a nicely written book that was not a text book?! It is the same way I felt when I saw Nateete, Wakaliga, Kitunzi, Bulange, Bukesa, Bwaise etc. Places I know. Names I know. I was not reading about people somewhere in Virginia but in Bwaise! That alone gave me so much pleasure!

Emotions aside, I have so much respect for Jennifer Makumbi for being able to tell a story from 1750 to 2004 without missing a beat, without losing me!

9. The short stories I have read by Junot Diaz. I do not yet own a book by Diaz but I have read the stories that I could get online: Miss Lora, The Pura Principle and I have listened to Edwidge Danticat read his How to date a brown girl (a black girl, a White girl or halfie). I love how unapologetic he is of his language and of his roots. I copied and pasted these stories into Word,saved them and go back every so often and re-read them.

10. There is a Sidney Sheldon I once read but whose title I don’t remember. All I remember was that throughout the book I was certain the assasssin was a dashing, slim man who wore Italian suits as he took down his “assignments”. Towards the end of the book it turned out to be a fat woman called Angel!! I re-read the book to see how on earth I had missed that and created my own dapper character in my head! One of my sweetest, surprising endings ever!

I hope my list will have more Ugandan/African writers in future!

Are you reading? Which books have impacted your life? Play along, will you?

7/7 is Sooo Many Stories’ way of helping you beat the Monday blues. 7 things that are making me happy in the literary world that will make you happy too!

Loud And Bumbling | Carol Beyanga

angry

Stecia has a way of making her presence felt, in the most unflattering manner. She announces her entrance into a room or space always saying something silly, controversial or unneeded. It does not help that she weighs 95kgs or more. Because of that, somehow, everything she says or does seems exaggerated – the way she plonks her bag on the desk when she arrives at work, the noise a chair makes when she drags it across the room and the way her body shakes when she sneezes. When she is tired or frustrated, everyone can tell because she makes annoying sounds, sighing heavily every few minutes and exclaiming, “Ah!” all the time.
During meals she eats loudly, sucking the marrow out of the chicken bones or the flesh off the fish gills almost greedily.

And it irritates Prossy, so much, she does not even know why. In fact Prossy does not like to find herself in the same place as Stecia. But somehow, she does. If it is not at the office canteen, then it is at the gate of the building, at the end of the day, waiting for a boda boda or a taxi. If it is not during inter-departmental meetings, it is the office bathroom, never mind that the two have their offices three floors apart. That’s one of the things that Prossy has never been able to figure out. Why Stecia walks three floors up to use the bathroom on her floor yet there is one on every floor, Prossy cannot tell.

Prossy has also failed to understand how Stecia got the job of Business Sales Executive. She does not seem to be good at selling stuff. ‘And why do they have to give them such long titles? They are just selling and there is nothing quite executive about that,’ Prossy always says quietly to herself. Quietly because her closest friend at work, Opio is a Business Sales Executive. She was excited when he told her he was promoted, after being a junior sales person for three years. They celebrated by buying themselves expensive lunch at the office canteen. They usually have beans or groundnut sauce, with rice, matooke and pumpkin at Shs2,500 a plate which Prossy feels is costly. That day however, they had chicken, and capped it off with a bottle of soda each and fruit salad. The food was nice, but the pineapples were limp and fene pieces hard and she had spent Shs14,500 on the treat. Prossy did not complain though. They were celebrating, and complaints, especially about food, do not go well with celebrations.

Prossy does not know how long Stecia has been working at the company. The first time she saw her was a month ago at the office canteen as people queued up for lunch. It was 1pm and the line was long, with hungry and thirsty people murmuring about this and that, when Stecia burst in.

“Banange enjala ennuma!” she exclaimed as she walked in, scanning the area to see where she would sit. The loud conversations people were having stopped as everyone turned to look at who this woman was, advertising her hunger, as though their yawning, and grumbling stomachs did not tell a story of their own.

“Tulina mmere ki?” she asked no one in particular. And so no one replied her. But she was not expecting an answer. It seemed she just wanted to let people know she had arrived. When she was done looking behind the counter at what was in the huge saucepans, and deciding what she would eat, she walked to the front of the queue, begging to be served first because she was so hungry she felt she would faint if she did not eat something in the next few minutes.

“Nsonyiwa, naye I need to eat please. I did not have breakfast and yet I have a meeting at 1.30,” she stated as she planted herself in front of the man who had been the first in the queue.

Prossy stared at her, her eyebrows raised, as if asking how dare Stecia did that, irked that she had jumped the queue. Jumping the queue, Prossy felt was a sin. Queues were there for orderliness. The only people allowed to jump them were the sick, pregnant women and little children. Not some woman who felt too hungry to wait for the rest, or too unbothered to ask politely and calmly.

There are many people like Stecia. Loud, in-your-face, bumbling people. Most have redeeming qualities, like Musa, one of the friendly drivers. Prossy thinks his meddling in people’s affairs can be off-putting, just as his farting in the car on a hot day. Moreover he is never ashamed about passing gas. Instead he laughs, trying to figure out what meal it is giving him stomach troubles, depending on the smell. But Musa is happy to lend people money any time they need it. No one knows where he gets it from but he always has enough to lend. The funny thing is that he never charges interest. What you borrow is what you return, nothing more, and he has bailed Prossy out a few times.

Then there is Akello, the manager of Prossy’s department. Akello loves to gossip as much as she likes to complain. “This is too much work. These people want to kill us. Do they think our parents gave birth to us to work like slaves? Do they want our children to become orphans? Omera! Everyone is just against me today. My husband refused to drop me to work. He said he was late for his meeting and he put me at the Wandegeya traffic lights. But I know he was annoyed because I refused to lend him 100,000 shillings! He is not serious. A man should never borrow from his wife! And I know he was just going to spend it on the car, fixing what does not need to be fixed. And then the boda boda I took from Wandegeya to here was charging me 5,000 shillings! Imagine!” On and on she can go the whole day. She will laugh at anything and involve herself in every conversation. Akello gets on Prossy’s nerves sometimes. Still, Prossy admires the way she works hard. No group assignment steered by Akello has ever gone wrong. She is always doing even more than expected. Plus she is so motherly; carrying cookies, roasted groundnuts and simsim balls for her workmates to share; befriending the young interns and telling them which men will want to break their virginity; attending every baby and bridal shower with the most thoughtful of gifts. Yes, there are many loud people with redeeming qualities but Prossy has failed to find any in Stecia. She wonders how Stecia makes friends and whether she has a boyfriend. And she feels guilty for thinking these bad thoughts.

‘Stop it Pross!’ she admonishes herself, gazing ahead of her, on this dull Wednesday afternoon. She cannot focus on the report she needs to type out and so her mind has wandered to Stecia. She tries to pick something about the woman that is nice. ‘Her fashion? No. Her work ethic? Not even. Her hair? Mmmm… 50/50. Oh, there was the time she was kind enough to get me earrings she thought I would like. We are not even friends but she thought of me, and that was kind. Yes, Stecia is not as annoying as I think. I just need to get to know her better. Perhaps I should sit with her at lunch one of these days. Maybe tomorrow. I could even pay for the…’

DOMMMM!!

Prossy jumps with a start and turns around to see what is causing the noise that has broken her reverie, when she feels her chair swinging too hard and suddenly she is facing Stecia, who has banged through the door and swung Prossy’s chair to face her.

“Banange you chick!” Stecia says with such force, causing little specks of saliva to leave her mouth and land on Prossy’s forehead. “Nga you didn’t tell me you once dated my brother,” she continues, in a teasing tone, getting the attention of everyone else in the office.

Prossy looks at her and gives a tight smile, feeling all the eyes in the room looking at them, waiting for her answer. And at that moment, she can practically see those good thoughts she was having about Stecia flying out the window on her right. And never coming back.

Carol Beyanga is the Special Projects editor with the Daily Monitor. She has always wanted to write stories and this is a start. But even more, she loves to read all kinds of stories and works of fiction and truth. She has a weekly column, Living and Loving It – about her musings – that runs in the Daily Monitor.

Becoming A Man | Joel Benjamin Ntwatwa

If you’re going to tell a woman you love her;
Do it stark raving mad
Like a Spartan without a breastplate facing Persian hordes.
Mouth open with a roar,
Spear raised to the sky
One foot forward
Read to fly!

Not unsure and jittery
Like Roman before Barbarian
Donning pounds of armour
Protected from head to toe
Yet shivering from vein to skin
Knees knocking, foot backward
Ready to die.

Tell her and mean it,
Don’t hold back-
Fly into the foray with open chest and open mouth
Let your heart ablaze upon the battle
Consume her reservations with your fire!

Not with stammers, stutters
Withholding, reserving the fullness in a dam of fear,
Sneaking into battle, reserving your pride
Ready with hose to apologize for half fire-
About to drown in flood of regret.

If you’re going to tell a woman you love her,
Do it in all its fullness-
Live and love that moment,
There is nothing to lose but all to gain-
For in that moment, my friend
You were not afraid of becoming a man.

Joel Benjamin Ntwatwa loves art and its aesthetics. Keen on poetry, prose and drama in that order. He has been a silent observer of the Ugandan literary scene for over two decades and is planning to add his own work to it. Currently, his prose and poetry is available on Hope…Never Runs Dry.

7/7: Dilman Dila’s A Killing In The Sun

1. Great things are happening for Ugandan writer and film maker, Dilman Dila and we couldn’t be prouder.

Dilman launched his first issue of Lawino Magazine recently. If you haven’t downloaded it already, do so here.

His short story has been longlisted for Short story Day Africa’s Terra Incognita and his film Felistas Fable took home awards for Best Feature Film, Film of the Year, Best Screenplay and Best Actor last Friday at the Uganda Film Festival (UFF) awards.

And in more great news, Dilman will be launching his novel, A Killing in the Sun on September 20 at Storymoja Hay Festival in Nairobi. The Kampala launch will be on September 23. Do save the dates!

A Killing In The Sun, published by South African-based publisher, Black Letter Media, features stories that are set in a futuristic Africa, or in the present day, with refugee aliens from outer space, ghosts haunting brides and grooms, evil scientists stalking villages, and greedy corporations creating apocalypses. There are tales of reincarnation and of the walking dead, and alternative worlds whose themes any reader will identify with.

Congratulations Dilman and thank you for the inspiration!

2. The Babishai Niwe Poetry Award has lots of activities this September, October and November. Have a look at the programme here and save the dates.

3. Here is an interview with Jaladan friend and Africa39 author, Mehul Gohil.

“But I would also like to point out there has never been a better time to be a talented and promising writer in Kenya than today. Perhaps this also applies to the rest of the continent. The scene is full of positive vibes, a great sense of hope. There is joy and fun in the literary scene. And all this actually outweighs the negatives I have mentioned above. Possibilities for good writers are opening up like crazy.”

Read the rest of the interview here: Mehul Gohil On His Storifying Personality.

4. Esther Karin Mngodo is a Tanzanian poet based in Dar Es Salaam. I “knew” Esther from Twitter and finally met her when she was in Kampala in June for the Commonwealth Non-fiction workshop. I had not read any of Esther’s work until I landed on these poems on the Badlisha Poetry website.

Here. Have a look at them!

5. Have you read Joel Benjamin Ntwatwa’s response to Tee Ngugi’s article on how Lawino crippled our art and ideology?
Read it here: A Response: Lawino is a classic if not for its historical or political value, for its art.

6. Here is Raymond Mujuni Qatahar’s This I Ask Of You (a poem).

7. Doesn’t David Tumusiime’s Séance on a Wet Afternoon fit perfectly into our wet season? Read it!

Have a lovely week!

7/7 is Sooo Many Stories’ way of helping you beat the Monday blues. 7 things that are making me happy in the literary world that will make you happy too!

Séance On A Wet Afternoon | David Tumusiime

I’m in my lover’s room alone waiting for him. It’s afternoon but the room is dark. He likes the dark. If only for that he will come.

It’s raining very heavily outside. From time to time the roof groans in the rain and the room fills with whispering. I’m not afraid. He will have to come back.

I sit on his unmade bed. The faded white nylon bed sheets are crumpled in whorls of uneasy sleep. The thick black sisal cover dangles from the left side of the bed, the soft tip of the blanket suspended just above the very cold grey cement floor. It’s a large strong roughly built wooden bed he made himself. Covers one side of the room.

In the corner opposite me, I can make out a huddling shape of a bunch of matooke. The two aluminium saucepans cupped in each other glint in the darkness like silent silver cat eyes. Next to them is the one chair in the room. It’s an old sofa chair with some of the sponge sticking out where the red leather is worn. We bought this chair together. We bought it on a very hot Sunday afternoon in an auction outside a bankrupt minister’s gate. But I didn’t want him to buy it.

I kneel on the bed, my toes hardly sinking in the mattress and look through the glass paned window. His window does not have the thin steel bars to keep out burglars. I can hardly see anything outside. The wind and the rain have made a grey mist with many tiny silver rivulets on the glass pane. Outside, dimly, I can see mud, mud, and a black running figure!

I fling the windows open and the wind and the rain rushes in for a cold, for an icy prickly, for a happy engulfing embrace. He’s on the door pounding, shouting at me to open. And then he is in.

He runs the short distance in his room from the door, slams his shoulder against the wall, then his back, his foot smashing into the saucepans. He is cursing. Cursing. He kicks the saucepans away. They glide across the cement floor screaming to the door.

He shakes himself, holding his blue shirt away from his body between his fingers. Tiny droplets of rainwater fly away from him in all directions like little sparks.

His black face is pale, his eyes closed tightly, it’s almost as if he were dead. I move to him. Droplets are sliding from his kinky, charcoal-black hair. His teeth are chattering slightly. He is cold. I wipe his forehead, the back of his neck, his throat, around his nose and cheeks, his eyes. He opens his eyes.

“You’re wet” he says, annoyed, pushing me away.

I make his bed quickly, as well as I can. He is undressing.

He is impatient. He fumbles with his shirt buttons. Almost tears the zip of his black trouser. He is breathing hard from bending and straightening very fast too much.

I’m on the bed. Against the wall, cross-legged. He stands before me, self-absorbed bewilderment on his face. He has on the red underwear. It is too small for a man and looks funny on him.

Suddenly he is on his knees, bends forward, and drags from under the bed a large cardboard suitcase. His spine, in his arched back, in the lightening darkness, is a black-beaded necklace.

He is sifting through his home clothes. Shirts, trousers, t-shirts, shirts, jackets. They are all colours. He never arranges them. He chooses from this confusion what he wants to wear.

The rain outside has settled. The room is now filled with a low hum of raindrops on the roof. The glass panes in the window have begun to clear. I can see outside. I remember a childhood rhyme.

Rain, rain go away
Come back another day
Little Children want to play
Rain, rain go away

Rain, rain go away
Come back another day
Little children want to play
Rain, rain go away

I feel hands on my breasts. His ticklish breathe against my neck, ear, cheek. His chin on the bare part of my shoulder, I feel the bristles of beard. I try to wriggle away but it’s useless. His body is locked into mine shell-like.

“How long have you been here?” he asks.

His voice is deep and measured. It reminds me of the spiky hairs that project out of the smooth skin of a caterpillar.

“Not long” I lie.

His hands around my stomach, under my red-floral patterned blouse, hesitate. He does not believe me. He slides them down my hips and makes them meet between my thighs. This is what he expects.

He pulls me down to the bed. I lie with my back to him. He is pressing very closely to me. His hand is under my skirt. Out of the darkness, in the corner, the bunch of matooke is watching.

He tosses my g-string underwear onto the sofa chair. It lies on his black trouser glowing yellow-white.

“Turn over,” he whispers.

I do.

“I love you,” he says.

“I love you,” I reply.

“I love only you,” he says.

“I love only you,” I reply.

We are silent facing each other, listening to the rain. I’m looking into his black eyes and he is looking into my brown eyes.

I’m lost in his eyes.

The rain has stopped. The sky is grey-white and there are no clouds. The air is cold and chilly and clean. The trees and the shrubs on both sides of the road are shiny green, drooping downwards.

I’m alone on the tarmac road walking quickly. Walking on the edge. The road stretches out before me like a wet diamond snake in mud. I’m hurrying home to make my husband supper. I ‘m hurrying so that my lover’s lover will not meet me on this road.

David Tumusiime is a writer, used to live to write, had to write to live and is happiest back to living to write.

Recently, Why Don’t You Say The Words?, another beautiful story by Tumusiime, was published in the East African.

Read more of his work here. And here.

This I Ask Of You | Raymond Mujuni Qatahar

Photp by Edward Echwalu http://echwaluphotography.wordpress.com/ — Photo by Edward Echwalu
http://echwaluphotography.wordpress.com/

So the villages are strewn with blood litter,
Bullet patters on the floor in feign hope pattern,
Pressmen pulling cameras in straight shot shutters,
As tears grace the cheeks of those whose hearts are shattered.
What shall we tell of our future that was the matter?
Let’s sit and write for our grandchildren this blood-clotted letter.
Telling of the greed that our leaders chose over making our lives better,
Let’s tell them of how pot-bellies were a need much greater
Than the chalk and boards for which we learnt to put pen to paper
Let’s tell them of how children’s feed was not a government need
That a politician’s greed saw our youths employed in smoking weed
For they had not, the money or the land to sprawl the soils and plant seed.
Let’s write this deed and recite for ourselves the broken creed
In this letter, let’s tell of the desert that their baby mama sees,
Created by the trees cut by an oil company all the way from overseas,
Of how we fought to have this leader listen to our pleas,
But for the silence from the bank accounts that were appeased,
We sat to the ground and waved, go on as you please!
Tell our babies of the multinationals that stole our ancestors’ land,
Set-up choky-smoke factories that took the profits back to their mother-land,
Disposing off waste in the only clean safe water we ever had.
I am talking of a tale so sad, really sad!
But you know what? When all is said and heard
You will be corrupted to say that what I say is bad,
They will turn you against my word
And before you know it, this letter will be a sword.
The sword with which the imperialists, chauvinists and dictators will make you bay for my blood!

Raymond Mujuni Qatahar is a lantern meet poet and journalist. Read more of his poems on his blog Poetic justice.

Twitter: @qataharraymond

7/7: Ugandan writers at the 2014 Storymoja Festival

There are six Ugandan writers that are doing big things at this year’s Storymoja Festival in Nairobi. That’s right. Six of them. Here is what you need to know about them.

1. Angella Emurwon

Angella is a writer, stage director and award winning playwright. I first heard of Angella (the writer) when her play, The Cow Needs A Wife won third prize in the 2010 BBC African Performance Playwrighting competition. I interviewedd her after her win back then. She adopted the play for stage and directed it. She went on to win the BBC World Service’s International Radio Playwriting Competition in 2012 with her play Sunflowers Behind a Dirty Fence. Angella is such an inspiring person and someone that often reminds me that as writers, we did not dream the wrong dream.

2. Doreen Baingana

She is the one budding Ugandan writers want to be when we grow up. She is the author of Tropical Fish which won an AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Prize for Short Fiction (US), and the Commonwealth Prize for First Book, Africa Region in 2006. Stories in it were nominated twice for the Caine Prize for African Writing.

At the Festival, Doreen will have a masterclass on Fiction For Beginners on Wednesday 17th September at Nairobi National Museum.

3. Beatrice Lamwaka

Beatrice’s story, Butterfly Dreams was shortlisted for 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing and finalist for the PEN/Studzinski Literary Award 2009. Her short stories have appeared in Caine Prize anthologies, To See the Mountain and other stories, and African Violet and Other Stories as well as in other anthologies including: Butterfly Dreams and Other Stories from Uganda, New Writing from Africa 2009, Words from A Granary, World of Our Own, Farming Ashes, Summoning the Rains, Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction, PMS [poemmemoirstory] journal, among others.

She will have a masterclass on Healing Through Writing on Wednesday 17th September at the Nairobi National Museum.

4. Dilman Dila

Dilman has this year been longlisted for Shortstory Day Africa’s prize. Fingers crossed for him.

Dilman is a writer and filmmaker. He is the author of two short books, The Terminal Move and Cranes Crest at Sunset, and his short stories have appeared in several magazines and anthologies. His films have won critical acclaim, including a nomination for Best First Feature at the Africa Movie Academy Awards.

Recently, he launched Lawino Magazine, an electronic magazine started by writers to promote writing from Africa. Download your copy here.

5. Beverley Nambozo Nsenziyunva

She of the Babishai Niwe Poetry Award fame. Since 2009, Beverley has been coordinating the annual BN Poetry Award that has since 2014, extended to include all African poets. She was shortlisted for the Poetry Foundation Ghana 2013 prize and longlisted for the 2013 Short Story Day Africa prize. She is currently working on her first novel, Elgona.

6. Rashida Namulondo is the winner of the 2013 BN Poetry Award. She is a performing poet and a story teller and thus the narrative in her writings expresses thoughts, emotions, moods of people and situations.

7. Of course there will be other writers, poets, performers at the Festival. My Jalada friends Clifton Gachagua and Okwiri Oduor will be there. Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Boniface Mwangi, Teju Cole and Duduzile Mabaso among others will all be there.

Have a look at the programmme for more details.

I hope this helps to salvage a Monday morning that started with a taxi strike in Kampala. Have a great week inspite of all that!

7/7 is Sooo Many Stories’ way of helping you beat the Monday blues. 7 things that are making me happy in the literary world that will make you happy too!

Selima and the Snake | Bob G. Kisiki

It struck once… Twice… …and slithered away rapidly! Photo by Edward Echwalu — It struck once…
Twice…
…and slithered away rapidly!
Photo by Edward Echwalu

There once lived a young man in a distant land, in distant times, in unfamiliar climes. The land was called Kua. The young man was a gentle soul; never hurting anything or anyone, for any reason. In a homestead where violence reigned – roosters fought all day for hens; dogs fought cats; bulls fought each other off the backs of hefty heifers and the men in the chiefdom earned their honour by fighting and killing their rivals – actual and imaginary, the young man lived by one dictum: No need to hurt. That, my friend, is how everybody knew him.

Before long, he was a teen-aged prodigy, doing the most amazing things in the neighbourhood. He gave up living his own life for the sake of the folks around him. He helped timid little children cross busy thoroughfares and intimidated big bullies off scared weaklings they wanted to torment. He built huts for the helpless aged, fetched water and fuel wood for pregnant mothers, roamed the Kua neighbourhood looking out for the wounded and ailing to take them to the local medical facility… He never settled if he wasn’t serving one person or another.

Many people talked about this young man, whose name was Selima. Selima’s name was on the lips of all Kua wives whose husbands beat them regularly, saying, ‘Why can’t you be like Selima?’ It was on the lips of recuperating patients who, when their herbs spilled or tablets dropped off their capped hands as they took their medication, involuntarily swore, ‘Oh Selima!’ His name was on the lips of parents whose daughters had started ripening, or were beginning to get wild. Then such parents would say, ‘Is there a fine young man like Selima in all of Kua? Selima would be the perfect suitor for a girl like our Nautar!’

Selima, unfortunately, was not looking to marry; or even thinking about women. He was content to live a life of service, retiring to bed every night worn out, but with a satisfied soul. Thoughts of people who might have died, but lived because he was on sight to help them, made him smile benignly in the dark of solemn nights. Memories of girls he had saved from the wrath of their fathers who wanted to murder them to save the families’ honour after those girls were caught ‘doing bad things’ out in the grasslands where herdsmen took their cattle to feed, made him turn from one weary side to another aching one, thinking, ‘One more soul saved!’

Many a young woman would finish helping with the house chores at home in the early evening, when the sun was disarmed of its fiery arrows in a fierce battle that left the sky bloodied and, after bathing and oiling themselves carefully, and hot-combing their hair like ancient princesses, amble away from home, only whispering to their pre-teen brother or adolescent half-sister, ‘I am going to catch Selima’s eye.’ That, my friend, was a target that spread across Kua’s breadths and lengths like an epidemic that only affected maidens. Soon, mothers learnt that whenever their daughters left home in the evenings, it was to catch a whiff of Selima. The mothers didn’t fight the habit and, when the fathers learnt of it, they didn’t devise a vaccine against the pandemic.

One day, at the time when a chiefdom about five chiefdoms away was struck by a severe illness, killing off many working residents, an elderly man from that chiefdom came to settle in Kua. Nobody had known him before, yet when he arrived in the village with a family of five sons, three daughters and one ageing, ailing wife, he somehow caught everybody’s attention. It was Kua tradition never to sell land to strangers, but when one arrived in their midst, they put their heads and hands together to help them settle. That is what they did for the elderly man. He settled in, him and his family.

That was how things changed in Kua! That is when a blessing became a curse.

One of the elderly man’s daughters was a serious case of an ascetic. From when she woke up – and she was a remarkable early riser – she took long walks through the village, headed to nowhere in particular, to do no specific thing, walking past the sun’s zenith, till her nimble legs ached. She would then find a tree shade or a big shrub and sit there, ruminating over the universe’s phenomena. She would leave home with the dawn and return on the back of the dark. Many times passersby thought her asleep; a few feared her dead, for when she was in one of these restful trances, she seemed to have ceased breathing. But she was awake, and alive, and sober, communing with things nobody could believe or imagine!

It was during one such time that Selima found her, sprawled out on the grass, a big, black-and-brown snake reclining by her side, unperturbed. Selima was alarmed. Walking on tiptoe so he wouldn’t disturb the lethal serpent, Selima went to break a branch to hit the ancient foe of Eve’s descendants with. The snake, however, was more alert than Selima had suspected. When it heard the branch break, it got into offensive mood and attacked. The only victim – mistaken for a foe – the snake had access to, was the ascetic.

It struck once…

Twice…

…and slithered away rapidly!

Selima saw it go. He literally jumped the bush to where the ascetic lay, a shocked look in her eyes and a kind of defiant scowl on her lips… Breathing, but only barely. Selima lifted the rapidly degenerating body, becoming heavier by the minute due to its inability to support itself, and ran with it towards the health centre…

News travels fast, and before Selima heard the doctor’s words of failure, and supported himself on the wall which he nearly crushed into, the elderly gentleman had arrived, followed by a sizeable crowd, asking, ‘What happened to my girl? What has happened to Mzee’s daughter? Where was she? What? When? Where? Why? Really, why?

Why did it have to be Selima? Why just when he was on site? For, though the elderly man told Selima it was okay, he didn’t cause the ascetic’s death, Selima had only one person to blame for his first failure to save a life: himself. So he walked away, back to the area where the whole episode had taken place. He knew that if he walked the area long and carefully enough, he would find the offending serpent. He would fight it. He would kill it.

Indeed he found it. Indeed he fought it and, as the ancient curse had been pronounced in Eden, the serpent struck Selima’s heel, and Selima crushed its head. There, out in the wild, both lay, heroes of their pride; victims of a curse. Lifeless.

Bob G. Kisiki is a writer and worship leader. He is currently the Literacy Coordinator on the USAID/Uganda School Health and Reading Programme. Prior to that, he worked at Fountain Publishers and New Vision.

He has written and published three novels: The Kind Gang (Fountain Publishers, 2001), Gobah and the Killer Healers and The Rainbow’s End (Cook Communication, 2009). The Kind Gang is available in bookshops in Kampala, but the other two can only be got from the author.

7/7: Thank you…

1. Last week, we did not have our 7/7 because I did not need seven reasons to be happy. Having a small paragraph on Sooo Many Stories in the Saturday Nation (Kenya) was all I needed to be happy.

People get surprised when I tell them that SmsUg has not been here for more that three moths. It will be three months on August 21st. They say they feel it has been here longer…and that makes me extremely happy. I am very grateful to the writers that have entrusted me with their work and trusted the vision of Sooo Many Stories. I am extremely thankful to the readers. Thank you for giving meaning to our work. I am also grateful for our photographers Edward Echwalu and Darlyne Komukama and guest photographers like @spartakussug. Thank you for trusting your work with SmsUg!

2. Right now, I am also excited about the Storymoja Festival especially because of the Ugandan writers that are on their line-up. Doreen Baingana, Beatrice Lamwaka, Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva, Angella Emurwon and Rashida Namulondo will be representing Uganda at the festival.

Here is the festival’s programme. Have a look at it and signup for the master classes that you would like to be a part of.

3. Saraba Magazine has released its newest issue of the magazine published with the theme of Solitude. The forty-page issue includes poems, short stories as well as a nonfiction piece.

To read the stories, poems, and essay related to the theme, please visit http://www.sarabamag.com/the-solitude-issue/ to download a copy of the issue.

4. If you love short stories, you probably already know that The New Yorker, this summer, has allowed you full access to all their magazine’s pieces since 2007. If you have not yet read the stories, rush over and have a look at all those stories that you wanted to read but could not access as a non-subscriber. Slate magazine here tries to help you with the selection.

5. I have read this story, over and over again. Wishing for her strength upon every addict I know.

“I realized my body was not going to save the world. So I took that job away from my heroin and gave it to my soul. Whatever was broken in these men, wasn’t getting fixed in me. Whatever was empty in me wasn’t getting filled by them. I was tired of spending hours on end seated on my bathroom floor mourning for all my deaths.”

Quitting Heroin

6. On Storymoja last week, this is what I was up to: Should Our Education Have Made Us More Appreciative Of Who We Are?

7. And for your Book Lols this week:

Have a lovely week!

7/7 is Sooo Many Stories’ way of helping you beat the Monday blues. 7 things that are making me happy in the literary world that will make you happy too!