Obligations to the Wounded is a searing collection of short stories by Zambian author Mubanga Kalimamukwento that spans the lives of different Zambian women. The stories in the collection are about the most mundane things, like breastfeeding a child while grieving your mother’s death, and about the craziest things written in such a soft way that the impact is even more cutting.
Though it deals with themes of sexual abuse, immigration and queerness, the book doesn’t dish out these topics like a preacher at the market square. It weaves them so subtly into the stories that we feel them but cannot immediately name them. More than themes, we are allowed a peek into the lives of these normal women who are navigating this thing called life even while wounded.
With story names like Mastitis, Speaking English, A Doctor, a Lawyer, an Engineer, or a Shame to the Family, Am-e-ri-ca, and It will Be Beautiful Again, the author shows that she doesn’t care about rhythm but about whether each title is true to the story and the person of whom the story is told.
There are 16 stories in the collection.
The first story, Azubah, is a painful sketch of a girl vying for her mother’s love and a mother who refuses to give it. Even more painful is the fact that the mother not only withholds her affection—she refuses to tell why. Why this child? Why not her other daughter? And now that the girl is a woman and has a daughter of her own, she is summoned to care for her mother who suffers from dementia.
What it means to be Zambian is to be considered last even by your own mother who gives pre-eminence to your brothers. We see this in the story A Doctor, a Lawyer, an Engineer, or a Shame to the Family. At Nanozga’s naming ceremony, her aunt writes her a letter about what it means to be Zambian, to be read on her sixteenth birthday.
The story is a witty explanation of the family dynamics and events that happened before Nanozga’s birth, told by an aunty who is the ‘shame to the family’. She explains to her niece how, in Zambia, daughters are dismissed, first because they are female and then, when they do not follow the conventional expectations for women—to be prim and proper in every way.
Mastitis might be my favourite story in the collection, right next to Where Is Jane?, the last story in the collection. You don’t think you could tell a piercing tale about mastitis, but throw in a closeted gay husband, the loss of a mother who was a best friend, the crippling loneliness that results, and the author’s unique writing style and you’ve got a winner.
The mystical elements also contributed to my love for the story, because Mubanga writes a scene where Zaliwe’s dead mother teaches her to feed her baby. It is the African belief of life and death being two permeable sides of a coin.
Where Is Jane? is a painful story about a young girl who goes mute after an ugly encounter with her mother’s customer. Where is Jane? Jane is at school, Jane has gone to the market, Jane is washing plates, Jane is taking care of the baby, Jane is in the hospital, Jane is dead. Jane’s predicament is a result of a neglectful and wicked mother who does not discriminate in what duties she transfers to her daughter.
In Hail Mary, a Zambian woman living in the United States waits to know her fate in an Immigration office where other illegal immigrants like her are getting deported.
In Chidunune, a girl is abducted when she hides in the wrong place while playing Hide and Seek.
In Speaking English, a 25-year-old Zambian on a scholarship to study a master’s in public administration agrees to be called Kate instead of her Kateule because she does not know how to explain that it is not pronounced Kate, but Kateule as in ‘kateule imbale’ as in ‘clear away the dishes’. This is the completion of an assimilation that started from learning English as a child, to shaving her legs and forcing her hair into a sleek ponytail right before class.
In Am-e-ri-ca, a woman takes her daughter to the embassy to apply for a VISA to America. The story highlights the desperation to leave one’s home country for the American dream.
In It Will Be Beautiful Again, a mother on her deathbed tries to cram a lifetime of lessons in a saying to her daughter and ends up telling her ‘There will be bad days sometimes, but it will be beautiful again. Someday’.
The collection boasts of amazing stories, and though I did not mention all of them in this review, I loved each one of them.
The power of this collection is in the author’s ability to show us the wounds inflicted by culture, by society, by family, and sickness, on the Zambian woman in such a subtle manner that you might blink and miss it but will know without a doubt that you’ve become privy to a truth.
The book cover is a beautiful representation of the collection—on it we see a woman walk on a path in a field, simple and unassuming. A representation of normal women traipsing their path in life. Sometimes they conquer, other times they break, but always they just need a little help, and it is our obligation to offer this help, whether through overt acts or through the quiet acknowledgement of their pain.
