Kintu: From the winner of the Jhalak Prize, 2021

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Suubi wished she could say to Opolot that her memory was a scratched disc, that it jumped and skipped. Sometimes it didn’t play at all.

‘What is a curse to some people is normal to others.’

‘Now this reunion is forcefully grafting and stitching all the pieces back together, which is a good thing, but in some cases, like mine, it does not work. I don’t want the pieces back. I have lived without them for too long that I don’t know how to live with them.’

The mind was a curse: its ability to go back in time to regret and to hop into the future to hope and worry was not a blessing.