Tropical Fish is Doreen Baingana’s debut fiction novel. It is told as a collection of interlinked poignant stories representing varied experiences of girlhood to womanhood told in the voice of three Ugandan sisters. The beautiful “incompleteness” of the stories that hold the heart of the reader is fascinating. The stories do not offer a neatly figured out conclusion. They take us into and through the depth of the experiences where Christine- the main character, born-again Patti and Rosa allow the reader to make a verdict of their own. Questions emerge:

“What if …What next?”

“Why?”

“Why didn’t …”

And moments of inward screaming, “Yes, go for it sister!”

Then,

“No! stop, don’t, don’t …” 

The characters keep us in the present moment and leave us to a future we can only imagine; trusting the reader.

Christine takes us into her family home in Entebbe, Uganda, post Idi Amin’s dictatorship. As a child, she observed her parents behaviour, emotion and desire. She notices what they shared with each other contrasting the passivity they demonstrated to her. “We children knew we were an afterthought, outside this world of their own. A heavy door banged shut, sometimes with a sweet word, a gift, but more often a harsh question, an answering mocking laugh.”

Meanwhile, Rosa takes us into her world at a girls boarding school. Friendship, gossip and the discovery of passion is probed, “This girl, Namata, remember her? … We both did housework in the classroom together; that’s when she told me. She said men have this problem of wanting women too much, and they can’t control it, so we have this power over them.” Rosa’s inquiry into passion leads her on a complex contemplation of love and consequences, subtly highlighting the HIV/AIDS pandemic that afflicted Uganda in the late 80s and early 90s. “They were punished for spreading love around,” she writes in a somewhat sarcastic but heartbreaking letter to David, her former lover.

In the story of the title, Tropical Fish, Christine’s own exploration of her womanhood with a foreign man, while studying at the ‘Harvard of Africa’, Makerere University, blurred what relationships and sex should be or feel like, “In the same practical way he lay down and stroked me for a few appropriate minutes, put on a condom, opened my legs, and stuck his penis in,” which left Christine wondering why she didn’t go into a wild rage “like white people in movies.”

Leaving that behind her, she travels to Los Angeles to study, which takes us to a lighter and humorously meaningful part of the stories – an African woman’s encounter with America! “I buy things which is fun. I buy and buy and buy. A car to be paid for over six years (that’s painless); a new bed with shiny gold bedstead … office clothes, party clothes, barbecue clothes, disco clothes, workout clothes, nice church clothes (I don’t go to church anymore but you never know) …” In figuring out the space she occupies there, Christine immerses herself into the American social experiences.

In the final story, Christine’s return to Uganda, after 8 years, was not to be as smooth as she assumed. She realises she would need to relearn being home and make peace with what was familiar yet distant from the new life she had been living. Now it was at home that she felt different. 

A refreshing read on womanhood and identity that challenges stereotypes and questions where home is for diasporic African women of the new world.

Baingana was the winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel, Africa Region, 2006 among other awards for her short fiction stories. In as much as the stories share some resemblance to her experiences as an African, Ugandan woman, she is clear in saying that it is not an autobiography and that “This work, therefore, should not be read as representations of African womanhood but as possibilities, instances and imaginings.”