In new collection, Minnesota author portrays lives of Zambian women and girls on two continents
Mubanga Kalimamukwento will read from her new story collection, "Obligations to the Wounded," at the Twin Cities Book Festival on Saturday.
Courtesy of Mubanga Kalimamukwento
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On Saturday, Minnesota’s excellent literary scene will be on display at the Twin Cities Book Festival. The day-long event at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds includes readings as well as a chance to meet authors and publishers.
One of those local authors is Mubanga Kalimamukwento. The short stories in her new collection “Obligations to the Wounded” move back and forth between the U.S. and her native Zambia, exploring women pushing against society’s expectations. MPR News host Emily Bright talks with Kalimamukwento, who will read from her collection at the festival Saturday at 10:15 a.m.
Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.
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Audio transcript
CATHY WURZER: On Saturday, Minnesota's excellent literary scene will be on display at the Twin Cities Book Festival at the State Fairgrounds. This is a day-long event and includes readings as well as a chance to meet the authors and publishers, and one of those local authors is Mubanga Kalimamukwento. The short stories in her new collection, Obligations to the Wounded, moved back and forth between the US and her native Zambia, exploring women pushing against society's expectations. MPR's Emily Bright spoke with Mubanga, who began by reading from her collection.
MUBANGA KALIMAMUKWENTO: OK, OK. "Inswa" starts, "When I was 13, my best friend Wongani kissed me. In those delicious seconds while her coal-black lips were pressed on mine, my stomach exploded into an army of golden flying termites, spilling out of their underground castles after a December storm. My skin burned with tingles all over, and I jerked back from her, unable to place the feeling. Joy or shame?"
EMILY BRIGHT: I was so struck by the story. And inswa is the name for those termites spilling out, right? That feeling. Tell me about the writing of this story.
MUBANGA KALIMAMUKWENTO: This was the first short story that I ever wrote. I mean, I had finished writing my novel, and one of my mentors-- her name is Ellen Banda, she's a Zambian writer as well-- she suggested that I write short stories. I wanted the story to start with a kiss, but I was struggling with the description of the feeling of a first kiss.
And I was thinking, how might I have described it if I had never heard the phrase "butterflies in your stomach" to describe the sensation? And I was thinking about inswa, which I saw so frequently in my upbringing, and I thought, they are even more delicate. Their wings, when you feel them against your hand, they really perfectly mirror the feeling that I was trying to convey.
EMILY BRIGHT: Well, the language that you use in writing these stories is very musical. You have this description of Alzheimer's in one story of being like "the mind that's being like a sped-up movie that someone else is hogging the remote and arbitrarily clicking pause." That just stopped me in my tracks. And it's also full of code-switching. Was that important to you, to weave through different languages? And how did you strike that balance? Because it's very understandable for someone who only speaks English.
MUBANGA KALIMAMUKWENTO: Mm. Yeah, I mean, it didn't start out deliberately. At the beginning, when I first started writing, I used to translate myself almost to a fault, overly translate myself. And then when I wasn't translating myself I was always italicizing, which to me, now that I think about it, felt like a form of translating myself, because I was calling attention to the words that I was italicizing and making them different from the words that were English.
And I understand that this is because of my upbringing, Zambia being a former British colony, that my education was primarily in English. Even though I speak multiple languages, the way that I was taught to read and write was in English. But the more comfortable I became as a writer, the less I felt the need to do this. And that's because when I'm going through my story, I'm placing-- also, I place them in places that I know. So when I do that I ask myself, how would this character actually speak?
And Zambia has over 70 different languages. The way that I grew up hearing people speak was that they would weave in and out of languages. Especially in casual settings, which stories are often in casual settings, yeah. So even when I talk to my friends, we'll sometimes speak English, but often we'll be speaking other languages and occasionally going to English. So I wanted the stories to feel the way Zambia sounds to me.
EMILY BRIGHT: Yeah. And when it comes to the endings of these short stories, they're not wrapped up with a bow. They're very satisfying, but they're usually not-- they're certainly not happy ever after. Sometimes we don't quite know what the character is going to decide. She makes a decision-- like in "Inswa," she makes a decision. And we have to decide for ourselves what that decision is. And it feels like you're drawing the reader in and saying, OK, reader, here you go. You finish it. Do you feel like that's the case, or you're in a partnership with the reader?
MUBANGA KALIMAMUKWENTO: Yeah, I feel like I'm in partnership with the reader, but I'm also in partnership with my characters. I feel like my characters are real to me, and there's a sense of wanting to give them agency in what happens towards the end, and me not manipulating it to fit into an ideal where I think the character should go.
But also, the beginning of every story in the collection starts with a proverb. And one of the story traditions that I was raised heavily involves proverbs. Proverbs across languages-- I only speak three fluently, I only speak three Zambian languages fluently-- but in all those languages, proverbs are there as lessons, and sometimes a story will be contained in just the proverb.
One of my favorite proverbs translates to, guard your neck, you can always buy a new necklace. It has so many layers to it. The moments that it's been spoken to me, it's been moments when I was on the verge of a dangerous situation or something very important was about to happen, and I was being cautioned to be careful, to think very carefully about what my next steps were going to be, to weigh what was replaceable and what was irreplaceable. That the neck is irreplaceable, but the necklace is replaceable.
So this is the way that proverbs operate within a lot of African cultures, within Zambian languages specifically. And so what I'm trying to drive at here is that because of the way the proverb operates, the way that you understand it as the person who is listening to the proverb, will be very heavily dependent on who you are as a person, where you're situated, what specific circumstances you're living through while you're listening to that proverb.
And this is the kind of experience that I want my readers to have when they're ending my stories, which is-- I know you were referring to "Inswa," which at the end, she's kind of at a crossroads and she's trying to decide, where am I going to go? And she says, I know what I'm going to do. And that is an invitation for the reader to consider, what do they think she would do based on the person that they have gotten to over the previous pages? I considered-- especially in revision, I considered saying, this is what she did. But then that would be me saying, and that's not the experience that I wanted for anybody who is interacting with my story.
EMILY BRIGHT: Yeah, and we know the characters well enough that we just get to live out the endings in our own minds.
MUBANGA KALIMAMUKWENTO: Thank you. Yeah, I like that.
EMILY BRIGHT: Mubanga, this has been a delight. Thank you for talking with me.
MUBANGA KALIMAMUKWENTO: Thanks.
CATHY WURZER: That was MPR's Emily Bright speaking with Twin Cities author Mubanga Kalimamukwento. She'll read from her short story collection Obligations for the Wounded at the Twin Cities Book Festival this coming Saturday, 10:15 in the morning, at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds.
MUBANGA KALIMAMUKWENTO: OK, OK. "Inswa" starts, "When I was 13, my best friend Wongani kissed me. In those delicious seconds while her coal-black lips were pressed on mine, my stomach exploded into an army of golden flying termites, spilling out of their underground castles after a December storm. My skin burned with tingles all over, and I jerked back from her, unable to place the feeling. Joy or shame?"
EMILY BRIGHT: I was so struck by the story. And inswa is the name for those termites spilling out, right? That feeling. Tell me about the writing of this story.
MUBANGA KALIMAMUKWENTO: This was the first short story that I ever wrote. I mean, I had finished writing my novel, and one of my mentors-- her name is Ellen Banda, she's a Zambian writer as well-- she suggested that I write short stories. I wanted the story to start with a kiss, but I was struggling with the description of the feeling of a first kiss.
And I was thinking, how might I have described it if I had never heard the phrase "butterflies in your stomach" to describe the sensation? And I was thinking about inswa, which I saw so frequently in my upbringing, and I thought, they are even more delicate. Their wings, when you feel them against your hand, they really perfectly mirror the feeling that I was trying to convey.
EMILY BRIGHT: Well, the language that you use in writing these stories is very musical. You have this description of Alzheimer's in one story of being like "the mind that's being like a sped-up movie that someone else is hogging the remote and arbitrarily clicking pause." That just stopped me in my tracks. And it's also full of code-switching. Was that important to you, to weave through different languages? And how did you strike that balance? Because it's very understandable for someone who only speaks English.
MUBANGA KALIMAMUKWENTO: Mm. Yeah, I mean, it didn't start out deliberately. At the beginning, when I first started writing, I used to translate myself almost to a fault, overly translate myself. And then when I wasn't translating myself I was always italicizing, which to me, now that I think about it, felt like a form of translating myself, because I was calling attention to the words that I was italicizing and making them different from the words that were English.
And I understand that this is because of my upbringing, Zambia being a former British colony, that my education was primarily in English. Even though I speak multiple languages, the way that I was taught to read and write was in English. But the more comfortable I became as a writer, the less I felt the need to do this. And that's because when I'm going through my story, I'm placing-- also, I place them in places that I know. So when I do that I ask myself, how would this character actually speak?
And Zambia has over 70 different languages. The way that I grew up hearing people speak was that they would weave in and out of languages. Especially in casual settings, which stories are often in casual settings, yeah. So even when I talk to my friends, we'll sometimes speak English, but often we'll be speaking other languages and occasionally going to English. So I wanted the stories to feel the way Zambia sounds to me.
EMILY BRIGHT: Yeah. And when it comes to the endings of these short stories, they're not wrapped up with a bow. They're very satisfying, but they're usually not-- they're certainly not happy ever after. Sometimes we don't quite know what the character is going to decide. She makes a decision-- like in "Inswa," she makes a decision. And we have to decide for ourselves what that decision is. And it feels like you're drawing the reader in and saying, OK, reader, here you go. You finish it. Do you feel like that's the case, or you're in a partnership with the reader?
MUBANGA KALIMAMUKWENTO: Yeah, I feel like I'm in partnership with the reader, but I'm also in partnership with my characters. I feel like my characters are real to me, and there's a sense of wanting to give them agency in what happens towards the end, and me not manipulating it to fit into an ideal where I think the character should go.
But also, the beginning of every story in the collection starts with a proverb. And one of the story traditions that I was raised heavily involves proverbs. Proverbs across languages-- I only speak three fluently, I only speak three Zambian languages fluently-- but in all those languages, proverbs are there as lessons, and sometimes a story will be contained in just the proverb.
One of my favorite proverbs translates to, guard your neck, you can always buy a new necklace. It has so many layers to it. The moments that it's been spoken to me, it's been moments when I was on the verge of a dangerous situation or something very important was about to happen, and I was being cautioned to be careful, to think very carefully about what my next steps were going to be, to weigh what was replaceable and what was irreplaceable. That the neck is irreplaceable, but the necklace is replaceable.
So this is the way that proverbs operate within a lot of African cultures, within Zambian languages specifically. And so what I'm trying to drive at here is that because of the way the proverb operates, the way that you understand it as the person who is listening to the proverb, will be very heavily dependent on who you are as a person, where you're situated, what specific circumstances you're living through while you're listening to that proverb.
And this is the kind of experience that I want my readers to have when they're ending my stories, which is-- I know you were referring to "Inswa," which at the end, she's kind of at a crossroads and she's trying to decide, where am I going to go? And she says, I know what I'm going to do. And that is an invitation for the reader to consider, what do they think she would do based on the person that they have gotten to over the previous pages? I considered-- especially in revision, I considered saying, this is what she did. But then that would be me saying, and that's not the experience that I wanted for anybody who is interacting with my story.
EMILY BRIGHT: Yeah, and we know the characters well enough that we just get to live out the endings in our own minds.
MUBANGA KALIMAMUKWENTO: Thank you. Yeah, I like that.
EMILY BRIGHT: Mubanga, this has been a delight. Thank you for talking with me.
MUBANGA KALIMAMUKWENTO: Thanks.
CATHY WURZER: That was MPR's Emily Bright speaking with Twin Cities author Mubanga Kalimamukwento. She'll read from her short story collection Obligations for the Wounded at the Twin Cities Book Festival this coming Saturday, 10:15 in the morning, at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds.
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