Language, fiction, and heteropatriarchal critique in selected recent Ugandan short fiction

Abstract

There is an emerging Ugandan queer writing tradition that adopts an activist stance to imagine an alternative Ugandan queer subjecthood beyond popular and polarising perspectives of this subjectivity that were instantiated by the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014. This emerging archive of Ugandan writing, often deploying the short fiction genre, weaves intricate tales of queer Uganda that sidestep the censorship of an ostracised sexuality deemed sinful, dangerous, and unUgandan to claim the agency and humanity of Ugandan homosexuals. While this archive of Ugandan queer short fiction has attracted significant critical attention from scholars such as Edgar Fred Nabutanyi (2017, 2018), Ken Junior Lipenga (2014) and Ben de Souza (2020), who focus on the political activism of these texts in Ugandan sexuality debates, little critical attention has been paid to how writers deploy sociolinguistic tools to empower their characters to author their agency and life experiences as same-sex loving Ugandans. Using sociolinguistic discursive tools, I refer to a textuality that includes illocutionary techniques such as letter writing, dialogue, and stream of consciousness that subversively empower excluded and muted subjects to articulate their essence and humanity. Deploying textual analysis of selected short stories, their analyses, and Ugandan queer theoretical treatises, I read Monica Arac de Nyeko’s ‘Jambula tree’ (2006) Beatrice Lamwaka’s ‘Pillar of love’ (2016) and Anthea Paleo’s ‘Picture frame’ (2013) using a sociolinguistic lens to unveil how the selected writers’ subversion of patriarchal tropes of an amorous letter, an ideal heterosexual family, and a romantic date critique the ostracisation of a sexual orientation.