In 1999 Mary Okurut was voted as Uganda’s woman writer of the millennium – the country’s best woman writer of the past 1000 years is quite an achievement – which probably has a lot to do with her popular appeal, her writing that is hilarious, caustic, melancholic and proudly uplift ing all within a few pages. But lest you feel intimidated by the title awarded to Okurut and expect a book of impenetrable depth or literary pretensions, don’t be. Th e Offi cial Wife, Okurut’s third novel (and ninth book) is more akin to Kathy Lette than Doris Lessing. But such a comparison is unfair because Th e Offi cial Wife is fi rmly, unequivocally a story of Africa, albeit a story of one woman’s quest to fi nd peace, sleep and affi rmation of her worth aft er her husband moves in with his lover – his other wife. It is a personal, first-person story that begs to be read because it does not lecture, it is not selfpitying. It is unashamedly forthright, unembarrassed and entertaining. It is about a woman scorned. The story is nothing new. Woman is married, has two children and the husband moves on to another, younger woman. The new woman gets what she demands and more. Yet The Official Wife is so much more than chick-lit aspires to. It is about women’s issues, but not those petty issues that much popular literature deals with, like men not picking up their dirty socks. The merciless fashion in which the author pokes fun at the hypocrisy of life, everywhere, makes the reader want to be an instant soulmate. Even the title unconfusingly, if esoterically, situates the novel in Africa. Unofficial wives are not uncommon in many societies but they are usually covered with a veneer of denial and money. Okurut, through Elizabeth, strips that veneer away. In her insomniac ramblings Elizabeth, the official wife of a government minister in Uganda, only refers to herself as the official wife deep into the book. The title is not one of those long rambling English affairs, so loved by creators of what is know as chick-lit – the title is direct, to the point, as a reflection of Okurut’s style of writing, and the personality of the narrator who welcomes us into her broken home and bruised ego. The entire book is essentially a soliloquy by Elizabeth, who tells her story with candour and unashamed directness that is hilarious. It is about her, her thoughts on Africa’s troubles, its diseases, the uselessness of double beds in unloving marriages, the myriad ways of seducing men, the role of woman as lover versus mother, the importance of education, and the all-too-frequent inefficiency of house girls and house boys (or HG and HB to be more politically correct). She manages to mock the West, as well as the hypocrites of her own country. So in Africa, death has been liberalised rather too liberally; we have endless opportunities to meet our Creator. That is why you hardly hear of suicides the way it is in the developed world. You don’t have to kill yourself in Africa, there are more than abundant opportunities to die, just waiting for you around the corner. If you are in the Western world, that means you have a bit of money on you or around you. What this really means is that you don’t die like Africans who die like dogs, in ignominy par excellence. No sir. You will die of those rich men’s diseases or if you like, the more developed diseases born out of obesity because of overfeeding on good food, the preserve of the developed world. The author also pokes fun at the use of the English language and those who think they know best how to use it. When Liz decides her house is on fire, she calls the fire brigade.‘Hello. This is the fire brigade. Is there a problem?’ ‘Of course there is a fire, you dim wit. Why else would I be calling you?’ I raise my voice. ‘My house is on fire. Do you hear? FIRE!’ ‘Ok, Madam, let’s take it slow and easy,’’ the fireman says. Don’t scream as thought there is a Rion in the house…’ ‘What do you mean Rion?’ It’s now my turn to be surprised. ‘Rion. The animal that eats people. King of the jungle.’ ‘Ah! You mean Lion?’ Such a dim wit! Like many of us, this slow-thinking cop is a victim of first language interference where we don’t have the letter L.. It can be quite embarrassing, this thing of first language interference. There is this man from the central region. The people from this region pronounce the letter R as L. Our man goes to Europe for the first time. His host receives him warmly and soon they are at a table having a warm conversation. His host asks him: ‘So what is the main meal in your country?’ ‘Oh, we eat a lot of beans and of course plenty of lice.’ ‘Oh my goodness! Lice? Exclaims the shocked host.” “Then there is this ex-guerilla chap, from the western region now a major or something in the army, who was explaining on a radio talk show why he joined a certain guerilla movement, after a rigged election. ‘Erections were held and the erections were rigid, so we went to the bush.’ The talk show host asked him to mind his language, adding that his listeners did not really care about his sex habits and whether the bush is a better sex venue than the bed.” It would be easy to describe the central theme of this work as being that of the clash of cultures between African and European ways of life, between monogamy and polygamy, rural and urban, woman as pounders of grain not university graduates, christianity versus animism, tradition versus modernity. But there is no clash of cultures. This is not some uneducated peasant trying too make a home in cold, damp, unwelcoming atmosphere of London or Washington. This is an African woman who knows exactly what her culture is. Even the couple central to this story, Elizabeth and Ishaka, tempt one to label it as clash of cultures, with her name being that of English royalty and his that of African. But this story is not about us vs them. Big cities and a western way of life are not new to Africa. To assume there is a clash of cultures merely because a woman with a Masters degree stretches her vaginal lips to be more acceptable to men, uses traditional medicine to help have a baby girl instead of a boy, and understands polygamy (even if she rejects it as a feasible way of life) does not mean two cultures are clashing. It is often easier for cultures to cohabit than it is for spouses. The clash is between men and women. Men who think they can ride roughshod over the aspirations of their partners once they begin to put on a bit of weight and become accustomed to looking after children. Men who take another wife, one thin and young and elegant and accustomed to wearing g strings, and present her at all but the most auspicious occasions, when (of course) the official wife must do her duty. Men who forget about their children once the cute factor has worn off, who tell the wife to calm down after she has found him groaning in ecstasy on top of the housegirl in the next room. Men who come limping home when the other wife realises that being a kept woman does not last for very long. Men, their desires and idiosyncracies, are discussed with such sharpness and wit. “Ishaka has no problem telling his friends what I look like down south and how pleasant or how deep my well is compared to his other exploits, when he gathers with ‘the boys’ for an evening sip around the malwa pot. But when I say anything to make him feel not-too-manly, he opens his granary of proverbs and promptly issues three or four just to put me where he says is where women belong.” Liz tries to seduce her husband after he has moved in with his other wife. She thinks something is wrong with her “engine”. As soon as I make up my mind, I go take a long bath. I scrub every part of my body more than ten times to make sure every cavity is clinically clean. I had already bought the sexiest perfume on the market – Temptress. The perfume smells exactly that. Then I put on this tiny piece of thread that is supposed to pass for pants. I had actually felt terribly embarrassed while purchasing it and the shop assistant had given me this very queer look. But I ignored it and mumbled something incoherent about teenagers of these days who put on mere strings and call them panties. Then they embellish it and call it a G-string.” Yet there is much more to this book than a mere clash of the sexes. Okurut has received acclaim in Uganda because she writes with such aplomb. Nothing is sacred, there is no embarrassment, there is constant mirth lingering in her cynically direct and uncluttered appreciation of family strife, modern life and Western arrogance. She doesn’t have easy answers or penetrating solutions. It is about the drudgery of relations that require great effort for often disappointing and unexpected returns. Okurut’s brilliance, and her popularity, lie in making such subject matter a pleasure to read |
