Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi in Conversation With Tayari Jones
Online N/A, Portland, OR, United StatesInternational award-winning author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s new novel, A Girl Is a Body of Water (Tin House), is a sweeping and powerful portrait of a young girl and her family: who they are, what history has taken from them, and — most importantly — how they find their way back to each other. In her 12th year, Kirabo, a young Ugandan girl, confronts a piercing question that has haunted her childhood: Who is my mother? Kirabo has been raised by women in the small village of Nattetta — her grandmother, her best friend, and her many aunts — but the absence of her mother follows her like a shadow. Complicating these feelings of abandonment, as Kirabo comes of age she feels the emergence of a…