S1E6 - S1.E6: Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Misty Bloom Book Club

Episode Notes

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Hi its Ada. I hope you are taking good care of yourself and doing well. In this episode, I will be reviewing Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. Ok, guys 2 quick things you have brought to my attention which I'll address real quick. First I know I usually say the author’s full name throughout all the episodes but it’s intentional to you know put respeck on their name as is spelled out on the book cover. My thinking is that that’s how the author wants to be addressed. And that’s that. I”m not gonna call them Jennifer or Angie or Abubakar or Zinzi. We’re not bffs. It’s really that simple. Something else that I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not is I usually avoid mentioning if the book is award winning or whatever. And it’s not to diminish the award or a failure to acknowledge. After all that information is publicly available anyway. The reason I try to avoid mentioning awards or literary prizes where possible is to refrain from making any false distinctions between award winning books and otherwise. Because while awards are incredible especially for minority writers. Awards bring more publicity to the book. Just like you know an oscar winning movie, gets more attention and viewership. Or in the case of books, more readership. People make buying decisions around prizes and awards and all that great stuff. So awards are extremely helpful for writers, especially less visible, minority writers. They can use all the visibility they can get. Also the awards come with considerable monetary compensation which is phenomenal for writers because writing is not like your typical 9-5 guaranteed income stream. Umm look at me. I’m podcasting. So, overall back to my point is that while awards are extremely useful and in many cases, actually necessary, and trust me, I’d love to win a couple of them, but honestly to me, awards are not the final or comprehensive determiner of what makes good literature. Literature like all other forms of art is subjective. There are so many magnificent books out there that could go toe to toe and even surpass award winning books by a clear mile. So that’s the reason I don’t bring awards up. Unless of course it’s mine. To me, great literature is great literature, whether or not it’s award winning. So, let’s start as we typically do with a teaser of what Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is about. Kintu is an intergenerational epic saga set in Uganda. So guys yeah, we off to Uganda in this episode. East Africa, baby! Quick sidebar. My claim to fame with Uganda is I was on a flight once that stopped in Entebbe airport to refuel and pick up passengers. So I’ve been on Ugandan soil or maybe more accurately, a Ugandan tarmac. Anyway this book kicks off in 1750 in the kingdom of Buganda (so the pre-colonial Uganda) Here we meet Kintu, after whom this book is obviously named. Kintu is a powerful and wealthy man, He is the Ppookino or governor of the Buddu province within the Buganda kingdom and is married to identical twins. Kintu has a lot of children, many of whom are twins. And he also adopts a boy, Kalema, who is the child of a Tutsi immigrant, Ntwire, who lives in their community. Kintu loves Kalema just like he does his biological children but something happens between Kintu and Kalema. And in response Ntwire, the Tutsi immigrant aka Kalema’s biological father, I hope you’re following this?, lays a curse on Kintu and his future generations. And so the book follows the manifestation of the curse on Kintu’s descendants. As I was reading this novel, very early on I saw the obvious influence of Chinua Achebe's seminal Things Fall Apart. And not because of the pre-colonialism aspects of Kintu but also because of that pivotal relationship between Okonkwo and Ihemefule in Things Fall Apart echoed in the relationship between Kintu and Kalema. Are you guys still following me? My suspicions were confirmed on page 312 where the author references Things Fall Apart as a work that is being explored as a sociological study by one of the characters. So it felt good to be right haha So let’s talk about what I loved about Kintu. The scale of this novel is grand. If this novel were a building it would be a stately manor. This book runs over 400 pages with about 20something major characters. I’m not gonna lie, when I bought the book and saw it ran 400 pages in small print, I was nervous because I didnt wanna spend that much time reading a book I wouldn’t enjoy. I’ll post a picture of my copy on social media so you’ll see what I mean. At over 400 pages it felt daunting to even start but I’m glad I did. It was compulsively readable, a page turner. Like I mentioned, this novel is intergenerational, spans several descendants of Kintu, the breadth of the novel is formidable. But in the hands of this writer, it was never an unwieldy beast. From Pages 1 to 410, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi was always in charge. She never lost control of her story or characters. It was terrific. This is the type of novel of such an impressive scale that challenges me in my own writing to squeeze myself for more juice, for more story to be told. This is the book that I wish that Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi was. Have you guys read Homegoing? Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi was also intergenerational but to me the descendant stories didn't feel connected. And I get that you could totally argue that Homegoing was about the disconnect, to say the least, that happened because of the transatlantic slave trade. However, the biggest frustration that I had with Homegoing was that it felt to me like a book of short stories, like a collection of vignettes, and not a cohesive novel. Homegoing got a lot of really great accolades and it did have its shining moments and I loved a few of the stories, it had a great theme, but overall I personally found it to be underwhelming.I think it got a lot of buzz because it was an issue book. Listen to Episode 1 for my fuller take on issue books. But although Kintu is not about the transatlantic passage, I just think Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s ability to tell that really good story of generations of Africans interrupted by European influence (in Kintu’s case, colonialism) is just so masterfully done here. This novel is divided into 6 books. Also, I loved, loved, loved, did I say loved, Book I. Book I covers the first 15 chapters. These chapters are where we meet Kintu, his complicated family, and also watch him execute his duties as governor of Buddu province in service to the kabaka, that is the king of Buganda. These 15 chapters of Book I were chef’s kiss, superb. I rarely reread books but I’ll reread these chapters again at some point. And I think what was particularly impressive is that the author balances the plottings of Kintu’s household on one hand, and the political machinations that happen at the kabaka’s palace with such jaw-dropping finesse. For me these were the best parts of Kintu by far. Beautiful, beautiful work. Thirdly, all of the different descendants of Kintu that appear in this novel are all very well done, fleshed out, very solidly three-dimensional, they arrive on the page with a history, you get to pay witness to their current lives and peek into where they're headed. It is so very well done, it’s an outstanding achievement of a novel that Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi has written. So, lemme talk about the writing for a moment. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi writes with such exhilaration and pride. In Kintu, she tells the story of a country through its people. The writing doesn't try hard, it’s not self conscious. It is both masterful and unpretentious at the same time. I’ll read you a few examples of her sentences to illustrate why I mean by masterful yet unpretentious. On page 123, “when there is no one to remind you of who you are, then you belong” you see how profound that sentence is but also like humble at the same time? Here’s another example from the next page 124 “who strangled the toothpaste?” one word, strangle, that successfully captures what the ordinary person would describe as squeezing from the middle of the tube. And one more example from page 228, “From then on the disease accelerated - night sweats, fevers, fatigue, a funny rash on the left arm, sometimes her mind went and her feet hurt. She suffered from this, that, and everything. Then her weight dropped. Before we knew it she had lost her hair. Then her feet hurt so much, I put her in a wheelchair. From the wheelchair, Nnayiga hopped into the coffin.” So I thought this was so well done because it was about the tragedy of a prolonged illness. But there is an effortless humorous affect to the passage. Also, I hope you didn’t miss the irony of someone who lost their ability to walk but still hopping into death. The author has a wry sense of humor which I appreciate. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s insights on colonialism are so incredibly keen. On page 314, she writes. But before I read it, just for context the passage I’m gonna read is about a character named Miisi. Miisi is an intellectual who was raised by colonial-era missionaries, Irish priests who raise Miisi in such a manner that degrades and dehumanizes everything that’s African.The Irish missionaries imbue themselves with a pseudo Messianic nature. You know we’re here to save the savages and bring Christ to the heathens. So Miisi comes to associate whiteness with goodness, godliness,intelligence and he imagines that Europe must be heaven. And so that's the kind of effective brainwashing that the white, European missionaries did on Miisi who ingests these messages and even grows up being grateful to the colonialists for saving him from his savagery and heathenism. At some point later on in his life Miisi goes to Britain to study for a PhD and in the process of studying and living in Britain he finds that British people do not exactly fit the illusion the colonialists brainwashed into him. And in response to the dismantling of this false reality he’s carried all of his life, Miisi builds for himself instead an idealized Wakandaesque narrative of Africa. So with this background and context, I’ll read you the quote on page 314."The image Miisi had constructed in Britain of the noble African rooted in his cultural values and shunning Westernization was a myth. What he returned to were people struggling to survive, who in the process had lost the ability to discern vivid colors of right and wrong. Anything that gave them a chance to survive was moral. To make matters worse people around him including his family called him muzungu. Miisi had become European among his people.” Moving along, so Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi also writes against the backdrop of key historical events in Uganda’s post colonial life. One of them being the rise and fall of Idi Amin. While Idi Amin has never featured too much in my political consciousness, the author resurrects him and makes the reader rethink what they think they know of Idi Amin. He has been widely painted as a wild cannibalistic tyrannical despot. And I’ve never before questioned this caricature of him. But Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi for the first time made me step back and reconsider who has been responsible for painting Idi Amin in such colors? Western media. It’s sad how I never questioned the caricature of Idi Amin. I’m sure he was tyrannical and perhaps unhinged as most depots tend to be. But who created the conditions for an Idi Amin to rise? Who revels in the narrative of the savage cannibalistic African? Those are the questions we should be asking. And we know the answers. Overall, this book is a mic drop, a feat, an achievement. It's the kinda book if a random stranger by way of conversation as Americans tend to do, were to ask Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, what she does, you know like hey girl hey Jennifer nice to meet you what do you do and then Jennifer can be like THAT while pointing to Kintu. She can die happy knowing she wrote this novel and accomplished something astounding. And I don't use astounding flippantly. So there it is, you guys. That is what I loved about Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. But before I launch into what I didn’t like quite as much, here is a message from my sponsor. Stay with me. Welcome back to the Misty Bloom Book Club. Thank you for hanging with me. So let’s jump into what I didn’t care for about Kintu. I hated the prologue. I felt like the novel should have started with Chapter 1, Kintu’s story. So the prologue was a narrative of the grisly, violent murder of one of Kintu’s descendants. It was impactful in the sense that for the novel’s opening it grabbed your attention but it left me with a very bad taste in my mouth that took me a good while to shake off. For me, there was no literary merit to the outright violence. It was disconcerting and felt like it was done for shock value and I always find shock value to a cheap ploy. Also the prologue had your classic,almost paint by numbers style MFA writing. I even googled to see if Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi had an MFA and she does. While MFA writing is good writing don’t get me wrong, but it feels the same to me, I can spot it anywhere, churned out from the same creative writing workshops and factories and for that reason it feels soulless to me. So I was immediately disappointed starting this novel. But I was so glad I stuck with it and I didn’t have to wait long at all because the tides quickly turned on Chapter 1. But basically I didn’t care for the prologue. Okay so moving along, So let’s talk about the character, Miisi. On one hand Miisi is vehemently intellectual, you know an atheistic, cerebral and rational person who is out of place and sticks out like a sore thumb in the village because of his you know intellectualism. But Miisi also has visions and has some metaphysical experiences. And while I do think people can be both, I don’t think the author did a great job of reconciling the two aspects of Miisi. Miisi himself, the staunch atheist rationalist does not interrogate these opposites within himself. It was not believable at all. Also, Miisi arrived late in the book and we spend the final 16, yes you hear that right, 16 chapters on this guy. I was sick of him. He was cool for like 2 or 3 chapters tops but I did not find him to be particularly interesting or fascinating for 16 chapters so I got tired pretty quickly reading about the character, Miisi. And here’s a tip for new or aspiring writers. Please do not introduce important characters late in your novel. Bring them on board early on or in the middle somewhere. Otherwise the reader, like me in this case is constantly questioning the character’s significance instead of focusing on the story. It’s very distracting. Also when you delay introducing us to a character who has a very important role to play in your story, they end up not feeling like real people but like plot devices. It’s very deus ex machina. Imagine meeting Jon Snow for the first time ever in Season 6. I found two typos in this book. I think finding a rare typo is super cute. I forgot to log what the first typo I found was. But I smiled when I encountered the second one. The second one I found was on page 335 and it reads "Miisi changed subject.” Did you catch that? Miisi changed subject not Missi changed the subject I find typos like that to be cute in the sense of someone forgetting to fix their collar or a strand of hair is out of place. Of course like everyone else I don't want to see typos galore, typos everywhere. It’s horrible, that’s not cute, it’s poor quality control but seeing the odd, rare one or two throughout the book is super cute. I don't know it. It just makes me smile. Those imperfections are sweet and it feels relatable you what I mean. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just weird. Ok, finally the ending was a jumbled mess of a resolution. It was similar to how I felt reading the ending of The Hate U Give. The writing itself, in terms of artistry was still fantastic. But it was the cramming of too much into the final chapters, the author’s manic dedication to giving all of the characters a resolve. It was an exhausting note to end on. Another tip for writers, watch your pacing, please. It’s like being a conductor of an orchestra. All of the musicians and instruments can’t all be playing at the same tempo during the crescendo. So that’s what I didn’t care for about Kintu. Let’s turn now to guessing who Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is like. But before I do that, here is a super quick message from my sponsor. Stay with me. Welcome back to the Misty Bloom Book Club. Thank you for hanging out with me. So, what do I think Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is like? I think she is a person of integrity, the kind of person whose word you can rely on. But also expects the same in return and will hold people accountable to what they’ve said they’re gonna do. I also think she is a hardworking, grounded, sensible type individual. So that’s my guess of who Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is. If you know her, let me know if I pegged her correctly or got it wrong. Final thought, I profusely, enormously loved Kintu. It’s freaking epic in the truest, most authentic sense of the word, epic. If you’re in the mood for a novel that straddles the traditional and the modern in the vein of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, definitely check out Kintu.

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