By Yemi Adebisi
Ugandan writer, Doreen Baingana, is known for writing fiction and poetry.
Baingana
She has been a celebrity in the literary world, as her story, Tropical Fish, won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, best first book, Africa, and an Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) short fiction award. She has always been reported as a fan of Tony Morrison and Nadine Gordimer, the authors that have influenced her writing the most, because of her strong interest in women survivors negotiating their way through what she often refers to as a man’s world.
“I love Toni Morrison, because of her lyrical and intelligent writing. How she uses her own people’s stories and way of speaking and living in the (usually cruel) world to creative first-class fiction. She makes art out of history. I admire Nadine Gordimer for the way she, like Morrison, entwines the personal and the political. By telling stories about individuals trying to live through apartheid, she showed how the system corrupted them all, white, black or colored.
“Both these authors write a lot about women without making it seem less important to do so. I am especially interested in how women survive and negotiate their way through what still is a man’s world,” she said.
Admitting that she has read many wonderful books, her favourites include Morrison’s Beloved; Gordimer’s Burgher’s Daughter; Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude; Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet, Gloria Steinem’s Revolution from Within; and Chinua Achebe’s books among others.
Beloved is about a mother who murders her child because she doesn’t want her to become a slave, and the child later comes back to haunt her. Burgher’s Daughter is about a child of famous human rights activists, who feels trapped by her parents’ heroism, and this compels her to forge an identity separate from their legacy.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel that traces a family’s fate during an era of political oppression and rebellion in a Latin American country.
Revolution from Within by Steinem: “This book is my feminist Bible. It argues that women and men need to excavate their own psyches to unlearn inherited ways of thinking and behaving,” she said.
Baingana, who declared that reading has brought her to her greener pastures, recalled that she has loved reading all her life: “I wished I could change, because my parents said it was very hard to get a job, so I left the country and went to Italy for a greener pasture and I kept on writing, describing everything that I saw and heard and I enjoyed that process.”
She, however, implored youths to always read books that will improve their psyche.
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