Moses Isegawa’s first novel has drawn lavish praise. Soon to visit South Africa, he speaks to Brenda Atkinson
In Abyssinian Chronicles (Picador), debut novelist Moses Isegawa has written an opus to which the usual superlatives apply: it is a rich and perfectly measured tale of contemporary Uganda, a story that grips with the ambiguous allure of a poisonous snake.
Based in part on the author’s life, the novel’s rite-of-passage narrative is cleverly structured through the perceptions – both poetic and droll – of Mugezi, the character whose life and thoughts we live from his rural childhood in the 1960s, via the Kampala of Idi Amin’s reign of terror, to illicit domicile in the Netherlands. The approach works because Mugezi’s voice – initially obscure to us – is never that of a child, but always that of a seer at an intimate distance from his material.
Although Isegawa does not romanticise ”village life” as a bucolic ideal, his novel nonetheless sings an oblique dirge for the destruction of rural structure that followed in Amin’s wake: as the politics and poetics of Mugezi’s life unravel, so does every aspect of Uganda’s social fabric. The child’s suffering at the hands of perverse religiosity – first through his sadistic Catholic mother ”Padlock”, and then in a Catholic seminary – is brilliantly pitched against the equal-opportunity violence that explodes in the country as retaliation follows betrayal.
The venom in this novel is not injected with a sudden unpeeling of fangs: it’s more a slow seeping that lulls and drains away. Rather than sudden devastation, there is cumulative anxiety, congealed in the realisation that by the time of his accidental arrival in Europe, Mugezi the Objective and Omniscient is a mass of scar tissue uncertain of healing.
You left your homeland, Uganda, in 1990. How has that experience and the transition to Europe influenced your writing?
I had always wanted to leave Uganda and go to Europe where books were written and produced and reviewed and exposed to large numbers of people. Publishing had failed in Uganda in the Seventies and Eighties and all along I was looking for a chance to escape to a place where books were readily available.
Finally in 1990 I managed to get a visa for the Netherlands. It marked a break and a new beginning. It was my road-to- Damascus experience. A writer needs the shock of newness to wake him up. The last 10 years have been very important because for the first time I realised how tough it was to write a book.
I was exposed to many writing styles but it took me a lot of time to find my own. For the first time I became African and I felt I had to reflect that in my writing. If I had not come to Europe I would not have had the vision and the power to go for broke. It was also in Europe that I could look back at what I had left behind and also look into the future and examine the present.
Abyssinian Chronicles has been compared to the work of Salman Rushdie. Have you in fact been influenced by Rushdie or any other writers of the post-colonial diaspora?
I have been influenced by many writers, a clan of writers. It is the degree of influence that is always the question. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children broke every rule in the book as far as bildungsromans are concerned. He opened many people’s eyes to the possibilities of creating your own world. Before him many writers’ first books were the same: mother, father, kids … Rushdie introduced politics in a devastating way and added to his wordplay he became the man to emulate.
My book is different from Rushdie’s in many ways. The man is just a wizard. We share the same themes of violence, political upheaval, the world being unpredictable … Rushdie makes me think of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, whose work is full of political urgency and makes it clear that whether you ignore it or not, politics is going to work on you. Wole Soyinka was also important. Rohinton Mistry, Hanif Kureishi …
There also seems to be an engagement with or reflection of Frantz Fanon’s work in Abyssinian Chronicles. Is this so? Is he a writer in whom you are interested?
I heard a lot about Fanon – who hasn’t? But I never read him. I tried several times in secondary school but he proved too complicated, too out of reach. I should read him now. I appreciate his concerns and they are my concerns too. I try to make emancipation in all forms a central part of my work.
There are two incidents of gang-rape in the novel. One is perpetrated against a woman and the other against the narrator, Mugezi, who is a man. The way in which these two events mirror each other suggests that the terror of Idi Amin’s rule in Uganda created monsters of all descriptions, regardless of gender. Is this something you are trying to articulate in your work, and could you say more about the gender aspects specifically?
It is too late now in the game of life to always think in terms of black and white. In my work I try to show that the world is destroyed and rebuilt by both genders. Men are nothing without their women and vice versa. One arm is good, two are better. It would have been too safe to write only about bad men and good, passive women. The world is different and everybody is affected by their environment. Because men have big muscles they are mostly physical in their violence; women use other means, their mouths or psychological warfare, but both genders learn from each other. Writers who write only about saintly women are cheating us. The world has moved on and both genders need to look at themselves critically, evaluate the situation and hammer out a road to the future.
Reading the novel I felt enormous empathy for Mugezi, until the novel’s end, when he finds himself in Amsterdam and seems to have become either a two- dimensional anti-hero or a would-be hero who is himself brutalised. How does this feeling of mine reflect your intentions?
I never set out to write a safe book. I could very easily have written a heroic happily-ever-after novel. I didn’t want to do that. There are far too many of those on the market. I wanted to write a challenging book, a book that would keep many people thinking even after they had read it. I wanted to write a book that would blow a reader through a rollercoaster of emotions from delight, to disgust, to elation to depression ad infinitum.
In order to do that I had to find somebody ready to go all the way, sparing nobody, not even himself. Novels which have all the issues resolved at the end of the book cheat the reader because he or she just puts them away instead of working out what happened to the hero or antihero.