The Greatness of Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
I’d never heard of Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi until Marlon James mentioned her on Facebook. And now that I’ve read her story “Let’s Tell This Story Properly,” I can’t help but admit that I’m envious of her talent.
She’s a heck of a writer. And as James noted in his post about her, she does new things with the short story form.
Her writing is authentically cinematic. It behaves and moves like film. It’s divided up into multiple scenes, all crisscrossing the past and the present, and all in different tenses. The story, which is about a woman named Nnam who is dealing with her husband’s death and the secrets he harbored, gives us the time after his death, the death itself, the funeral and its preparations.
But its uniqueness is in how seamlessly she transitions through these moments. There is no awkwardness and no slowing the story down to tell us who these people were and are. Really, there is nothing extra. The prose, chiseled and cool, does what it needs to do, and it does it in spare yet achingly vivid detail.
Her more conventional elements are excellent, too. Nnam’s husband’s secret, which I won’t spoil here, is, in retrospect, somewhat unsurprising. But its revelation comes as a major shock. It’s like the monster creeping in the dark corners of a horror movie, only to reveal its hideous face in the climactic final moments.
That brings me to the title. It’s taken from something one of the characters says. I can’t help but think, though, that the title is Makumbi also taking ownership of a genre that has really been — pardon the pun — done to death. We’ve all read many stories about broken families. But this one feels different. It feels new.
There is also the theme of nakedness. When we first meet Nnam, she’s naked, and she’s cleaning her house as a sort of therapeutic exercise. The third person narrator offers the following observation:
Being naked, alone with silence in the house, is therapy. Now Nnam understands why when people lose their minds the first impulse is to strip naked. Clothes are constricting but you don’t realize until you have walked naked in your house all day, every day for a week.
Nakedness is cleanliness. You could say, in a way, that an unclean house — which, in all honesty, means the things inside are covered with dust, obscured by clutter, caked with dirt — is not naked. Nakedness is the root of things. It’s the stuff below the surface we don’t want to see.
And this story is full of the stuff we don’t want to see: Nnam’s discovery that her husband was not who she thought he was; that his family was not what she thought it was; that people are in control of facts and so can obscure and twist them. An objective look at what’s true and false doesn’t often come easily.
But nakedness is also what separates a great story from a good one. A writer must be willing to bear all, so the reader will be shocked, moved, angered — whatever emotion the writer wants to generate. And this is a tale that is utterly naked and raw. It comes at us hard.
It’s a story, we might say, that’s told properly.
