Review of Doreen Baingana's Short Story Collection Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe

In Doreen Baingana's prize-winning book of short stories with linked characters and events, the stories are indeed like tropical fish: vibrant, rare, variegated, and exotic. Baingana's stories offer a more intimate perspective on the Ugandan experience than Giles Foden's Last King of Scotland, which is told through the eyes of a white foreigner and focuses more on the history and political scene than the emotional lives of individual Ugandans. Moviegoers captivated by the Oscar-winning film version of the Last King of Scotland will find much to interest them here.

Set in the years following dictator Idi Amin's regime, the book follows the lives of three sisters from the city of Entebbe in Uganda: Christine, the youngest, who emigrates to the United States as a young adult and returns eight years later; a religious middle sister, Patti; and an older sister who dies of AIDS. The stories are linked not only by references to shared characters and events, but by shared themes. The themes center around vision, dreams versus reality, and separate worlds whose borders intersect or are superimposed upon each other --- the world of adults versus that of children, the black and white worlds, Africa and the West.

We first meet Christine as a small child. In the story "Green Stones," she loves to play in the forbidden territory of her parents' empty bedroom. She reverently and ritually uses her mother's necklaces to evoke the mysterious world of adulthood with its seemingly infinite possibilities: Decked out in her mother's jewels, she is "a princess from under the sea," a church cardinal wafting incense, a Paris fashion model in front of the cameras. At a distance, she sees her parents' marriage slowly disintegrate as her father succumbs to alcoholism, and her games become a childish echo of her parents' passion, which both repels and fascinates her. Years later, she returns to find her vision changed. The colorful necklaces she played with are now dull and tawdry, her father has long since passed away, and the passion her imagination fed off of has evaporated as though it never existed.

In "Hunger," high school-aged Patti narrates her boarding school tribulations through journal entries. Her physical hunger is due to the school custom of letting older girls distribute the food at mealtimes, keeping most of it for themselves. Her emotional hunger stems from the fact that her family's troubles and lack of means make her an outsider among the other girls. She constantly both appeals to and questions God's grace, believing it to be God's will that she bear the other girls' unkindness in suffering submissiveness. Then one night a religious experience alters her perceptions, and she finds herself in a new world of peace and acceptance, a world that is superimposed upon the old drab world of her hunger --- the same world, yet transformed.

"First Kiss" finds Christine just exiting childhood and taking her first teetering steps into teen angst. She looks forward to the glamour of high-heeled shoes, parties, lipstick, and dates. The high-heeled shoes are difficult to walk in, however, and she can't decide if her first drunken kiss is "yucky or nice." Asked out on a date for the first time, she waits to meet a boy at her old primary school, and sees the school's dilapidated state as if for the first time. This changed view of her old childhood playground mirrors the disillusionment she feels when the afternoon ends differently than she planned. Baingana skillfully conveys with gentle humor that it will soon be too late for Christine to return to the romance-novel world of her preadolescent imaginings, even if the adult world falls far short
of expectations.

For those who want their fiction subtle, the story "A Thank-You Note" will defy expectations. Cast in the form of a letter from Rosa, who is dying of AIDS, to the ex-boyfriend who may have infected her, subtle it is not. Rosa shouts, is unashamedly dramatic, even moralizing in places. Despite the story's urgent and emotional tone, we still find passages here that are moving on an intellectual level, too, such as when Rosa compares the telltale rash around the waist, kisipi, to the disease's progress across "the waist" of central Africa and concludes that "God, or the devil, has a bitter sense of humor, loves cruel connections." The story "Passion," on the other hand, is perhaps overly subtle. Rosa (still young, healthy and ignorant-albeit-curious about sex at this point) plots with her school friends to perform a putatively aphrodisiac juju (voodoo) experiment on her male literature teacher, with a somewhat mysterious outcome that is hard to make sense of.

The last few stories in the collection focus on cultural criticism and self-criticism in addition to the collection's other themes. In the title story, Christine is a college student who becomes the lover of a rich older white man. In her boyfriend's house, Christine escapes into the "white world" of comforts and easy pleasures. The boyfriend makes his living by exporting exotic and rare tropical fish from Uganda's lakes to the West at very low cost. Christine is aware, however, that he is "lower class, Cockney, and doing much better here, practically stealing our fish, than he ever would in Britain." Their relationship and his business seem to become broad metaphors for Western exploitation of the developing world. A moment of clarity is reached when Christine visits a doctor whose gynecological procedure reminds her of the boyfriend's lovemaking, and asks herself, "Why did I always seem to have my legs spread open before kind men poking things into me?" Her answer to herself is bravely self-critical: "I let them."

In "Lost in Los Angeles," Christine has emigrated to the U.S. and views both U.S. and Ugandan culture with a critical eye. In the elevator of the corporation where she temps, "We have no choice but to go up or down." Economically, too, one either goes up or down in America. The "lush mansions of Beverly Hills, the endless, flashy Wilshire Boulevard" are contrasted with "the cardboard tents, the scattered misery" of the homeless in downtown LA. Christine finds American city life dream-like, mechanical, and isolating. American food is "fake," the fruits and meat "smell of nothing, taste of nothing." Further, "because everything works and is automatic, there is less and less need to talk." Christine longs for "the dirty smells of Kitoro, the dark swirling mud after an hour of rain like vengeance ... the rotting fruit and swarming flies of Nakasero market." Disgorged sterilely from elevator to car to automatically opening garage door to underground parking lot to another elevator into her apartment, she is "alone and trapped in metal ... lost."

She finds no solace in the other Ugandan �migr�s she meets. They have embraced the prosperous "Southern California suburban life," and the eligible expatriate bachelors are small-minded, conventional social snobs. She leaves them behind and begins to build her own bridge between worlds through a brief amorous encounter and through a small circle of offbeat would-be poets. Gradually she finds that through giving up her past life and identity she has gained the freedom to be whatever she wants. "Being lost," she decides, "is freeing."

The last story of the collection, "Questions of Home," ties many of the book's themes together. On returning to Entebbe, Christine's vision of her home and family has been altered by the years away. Small details of daily interactions are by turns exasperating, puzzling, alarming, and fascinating to her. In what she calls "this new old place called home," everything is simultaneously familiar and foreign. One evening, looking out over rows of "disorganized gardens where life unleashed itself every which way," so different from "the tiny rectangular patches of immaculate green lawns back in the States that had to be watered, fertilized, fenced off, teased, and begged to grow," she understands she will face a long slow process of bringing her past and present worlds together and regaining her sense of normalcy. But the worlds of the West and of Africa, of her past and present, are not really separate worlds at all, for at the same time that night falls over the chaotic gardens of Entebbe, "somewhere far away," in the West, the same sun is rising at dawn.

In Baingana's writing, sobering imagery often goes hand in hand with genuinely funny caricature. Her writing succeeds on several levels. Some writers craft astonishing sentences at the micro level, but fail on the macro level of deciding which fictional events to write about (I put Willa Cather, for example, in this category). Others excel at the plot-architectural level, but then use unimaginative verbal building blocks (say, Dan Brown). Baingana's plots seem more organically grown than orchestrated --- much like the chaotic gardens her character Christine loves. Still, she generally succeeds on both levels. Add to this the book's wealth of intercultural insights, and it's not hard to see why it received the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Award for Short Fiction. If there is one overall criticism one could make, it's the minor one that American readers may find the occasional sprinkling of phrases from African languages throughout the text a little baffling. There is no deft glossing of Lugandan terms such as readers find in Giles Foden's Last King of Scotland.

In naming the collection "Tropical Fish," does Baingana possibly see herself, ironically, in a role analogous to that of the exploitative tropical fish exporter in the story of the same name? She likewise is culling an exotic collection of living things --- characters, sights, sounds --- from her home country and "selling" them abroad. Whether or not that was the title's intention, Baingana's stories negate and triumph over such exploitation. In collecting her memories and experiences and transforming them into fiction, Baingana by turns celebrates and excoriates her origins, but always affirms them as uniquely hers. The collection is an anthem of self-reflection and growth that not only could teach the international development community a thing or two about how development happens, but can also teach the reader a little bit more about what it means to be human.