Mubanga Kalimamukwento

Mubanga Kalimamukwento (born 1988) is a Zambian writer, known for her novel The Mourning Bird,which focuses on Zambia's AIDS crisis, and Obligations to the Wounded, her thematically linked collection of short stories centring the lives of Zambian women and girls. Quotes I carry an empty metal bowl, knock on our neighbour’s kitchen door where Please sits with may we borrow & my wrinkled shame as i curtsey a Thank you maybe God is still busy. maybe Mayo is still on hold. maybe us singing, Jehovah Jireh, mwimbileni! is the on-hold music maybe her payphone tokens ran out before we said In Jesus’ mighty name, Amen. People who have experienced their mothers at different life stages probably get to that point sooner than I did, and we do with that knowledge, different things. What that realization did for the writing of this book, though, was give me the omniscience I needed to write about three different experiences, yet see and convey all the ways they are interconnected in their limited understanding of one another. It did not come easily. It happened over many, many revisions, a lot of crying to my best friend, to my mentor, and one time, I think, to you. I appreciate you saying that the structure gave you an understanding of all the characters, because that was always the goal. Rather than the structure itself being challenging, I think it was that, in order for the structure to make sense, I needed the characters themselves to be very clear to me. Once they were, it became easier to plug holes as I found them and revised. Shipikisha, as a word, is a bit like the proverb, but it’s also indexical and gendered. As a concept, it’s universally recognizable because it is sustained by patriarchy. It needed to be a refrain to depict these contradictions and similarities unapologetically. When I started writing the story, I didn’t know what the title or even their names would be. What you read in the final version of ‘Thandiwe’ surprised me too. In fact, those lines where the daughter addresses her mother by her first name weren’t always like that, but once it fell into place in the story, I found that it reflected their relationship best. There is an intimacy between them, but they are also strangers. As for what inspired it—the story told me; the characters spoke, and I listened. Stories are a great place to explore because you don’t have to have them figured out from the start. You can make them up as you go, and if you don’t get it right the first time, you can reshape it until it becomes something you like.“ External links Category: living people