Tayari's Blog: TROPICAL FISH by Doreen Baingana

Posted by TayariJones on January 4, 2009 10:23 AM
Filed under Bookshelf

This time next week, I'll be in Kampala, Uganda giving a five-day workshop to the amazing women of an organization called FEMRITE. I am so stoked about the opportunity. (Sadly, I had to cut my visit a couple of days short so I could attend the Dreams From My Father American Scholars Inaugural Ball.) Right now, I am preparing a packet of short stories to use as texts. Obviously, I went right to Doreen Baingana's Tropical Fish. The stories in this collection are set in the part of Uganda where the workshop will be held.

I'd read Tropical Fish before, but I had forgotten just how brilliant Doreen is! I am forcing myself to choose only two stories for my packet, but I can't begin to choose. I love me some coming of age stories and her young narrators are aces. I know I'll end up using one of the epistolary stories because writing a letter that seems like a letter, but still tells a story is a complicated maneuver-- which Doreen pulls off not once, but twice in the collection.

So, here are the stories I am thinking of using and a little bit of summary.

  • A Thank You Note This story is a letter from Rosa who is in the final stages of HIV to her lover, David. The letter is both personal and real, but at the same time really gives a reader a close look at the physical ravages of the disease and also the way that you can trace the spread of HIV to the complicated networks of culture.
  • Hunger A formerly well-off girl in boarding school must beg for sugar from the "posh" girls. This is a dynamite look at class and entitlement. The ending put me in the mind of James Baldwin. So good I wanted to eat it.
  • Tropical Fish The title story is a knock out. Christine, whom we meet as a girl in earlier stories, is grown up now and has fallen into a relationship with a British exporter of fish. It's about sex, power, race, and voice.


    I know I said I can only use two, but there are just so many tempting stories. I wish, I wish, I could afford to buy books for all thirty women in the class!

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