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‘Let’s Tell This Story Properly’ by Jennifer Nansubuga
Makumbi; winner of common wealth short story prize 2014
If you go inside Nnam’s house right now the smell of paint will choke
you but she enjoys it. She enjoys it the way her mother loved the smell
of the outside toilet, a pit latrine, when she was pregnant. Her mother
would sit a little distance away from the toilet doing her chores, or
eating, and disgusting everyone until the baby was born. But Nnam is
not pregnant. She enjoys the smell of paint because her husband Kayita
died a year ago, but his scent lingered, his image stayed on objects and
his voice was absorbed in the bedroom walls: every time Nnam lay
down to sleep, the walls played back his voice like a record. This past
week, the paint has drowned Kayita’s odour and the bedroom walls
have been quiet. Today, Nnam plans to wipe his image off the objects.
A week ago Nnam took a month off work and sent her sons, Lumumba
and Sankara, to her parents in Uganda for Kayita’s last funeral rites.
That is why she is naked. 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.
Kayita died in the bathroom with his pants down. He was forty-five
years old and should have pulled up his pants before he collapsed. The
more shame because it was Easter. Who dies naked on Easter?
LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE
Page 40