Mubanga Kalimamukwento is the multi-award-winning author of The Mourning Bird, Obligations to the Wounded, Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies, and The Shipikisha Club. Her work appears in The Hopkins Review, adda, Isele, Contemporary Verse 2, Kweli, Overland, on Netflix, and elsewhere. She is a PhD student in the department of Gender, Women, and Sexualities Studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and teaches in the MFA program at Hamline University.

In this interview with our editor-in-chief, Ukamaka Olisakwe, who is also a close friend, they discuss the intergenerational and mosaic nature of this novel, the work Mubanga has done as a lawyer and a scholar, the thematic choices she made while writing this novel that spotlights gender violence, and why it is important to write complex women.

Ukamaka: It’s such an honor to have you here, Mubanga. Congratulations again on publishing this classic. What some of our readers may not know is that you wear many hats – you are a lawyer, a scholar, a writer, and an editor and publisher. Having followed your work closely, it indeed is heartwarming to see how passionately you continue to explore the lives of women. And in The Shipikisha Club, especially on the last page, you include a sobering note about the number of women who are victims of gender violence. One can guess that this statistic possibly sparked the idea for this novel. I would like to ask then: at what point did you realize that you needed Sali’s story to become the driving force behind this novel?

Mubanga: This honor is definitely mine, Uka. Thank you for that generous reading of The Shipikisha Club. I haven’t thought about the beginning of the story in a long time, but, let me try and answer your question by starting with the ending as you have. That note on the last page is a concern I’ve held tightly since childhood. When violence between partners erupts, as in, during the fights themselves, I think the people embroiled in it aren’t thinking about how the children, often their own children, are experiencing what they are observing – even if the fists are not landing on the child’s body. It stays with you, no matter how far from the moment you go; it stays. So perhaps this story was always going to emerge from me. It was just a matter of when and how. The writing itself began in 2019, I think, just after I finished writing my first novel, The Mourning Bird, and while wearing the lawyer hat one day, the haunting that is this story returned. In every draft, and there have been many, Sali’s voice has carried the narrative forward. I can’t explain why, but that’s just how it came. One thing I was thinking about is how litigation, which I’d been doing for about six years at the time, is a kind of storytelling. The witnesses come to tell a story, the lawyer helps translate them into the language of the courtroom, and the judge reads it, so to speak. But that language is very restrained, and often what emerges is a very truncated account. Without going into the questions of guilt and innocence, the pressure during litigation was to guide a witness who did not speak the language of the courtroom to pare down their words to the bare essentials. That’s a huge challenge because of course, nothing happens in a vacuum, and people want to explain themselves; they want to give context. Fiction, the novel especially, is very roomy, so it started there with that hunger for expansion.

Uka: This brings me to the question of the intergenerational nature of this novel, which I think is mosaic. You brilliantly demonstrated how distinct these women are, whether we are looking at Sali herself, or her daughter Ntashé, or even her own mother. You illustrated each person’s dreams and longings and joys and sorrows, and how differently each reacts to a peculiar incident. Could you talk a bit about how you approached crafting their complex interior lives with such care? 

Mubanga: Again, thank you. What a kind reading. During revisions, each time someone read a draft, they had questions about either Sali’s daughter, or Sali’s mother. Ntashé and Peggy’s voices emerged in response to those questions. At face value, Shipikisha, as a cultural concept, and is enacted and performed during marriage rites and marriage. I think though, that like other socialization mechanisms, it is a very protracted process, so that marriage, rather than the place where it is initiated, is a kind of climax. Ntashé is looking forward, learning the expectations her society demands of her because of the body she inhabits and the positions she lives in. Peggy is looking backward with a kind of resignation. Sali is in the thick of it. In the end though, they are all negotiating their existence under the same instruction. The concept of “the shipikisha club” culturally, is not only about the endurance interpreted at the beginning of the book and throughout the narrative, but also, the expectation that the one enduring does so graciously, never acting in a manner that would give people a reason to justify her suffering with, “Well, she did, this, so she deserved it,” which can happen when the person shipikisharing isn’t the “good woman” she is supposed to be. To write about that kind of woman without judging her, I needed to be curious about this woman. I needed to care about what she cared about, to believe in what she thought mattered, so that I could follow through with her actions and decisions all the way to the end. Because I spent so much time in her mind working through what sometimes felt like kinks in her, moulding her mother and daughter was a less daunting task. 

Uka: Considering that you come to fiction as both a lawyer and a scholar, could you talk about the ways you think diverse perspectives and voices, as we have in The Shipikisha Club, shape the ways we think about power and justice and gender?

Mubanga: When writing The Shipikisha Club, I wasn’t conscious of how my training or research was or would influence it, though, of course it did. In both the academic and creative planes, I am asking “What price do women pay when they rebel?” “How are women differently framed from men in contexts of guilt and innocence?” “How much of the gendered treatment of adult expectations have I internalized?” “How can I interrupt those internalizations?” and “What changes when my understanding changes?” Like law, though, academic writing, as you know, is stubbornly formulaic, so I have to answer these questions within existing frameworks and theories. I find this rewarding because I can see the lacuna my work is slowly contributing to filling, adding the Zambian context to larger conversations within African feminisms. But after the research, I’m left with the stories, a bit like the marrow after a stew. I can’t cast it away; that’s where the flavour is. It’s a compulsion to tell the stories that help me answer those questions. 

Uka: Sali, my favorite among the women, is such a morally complex character. The first time we meet her, she is in the courtroom and she appears dejected. It was disquieting watching her daughter almost, really, testify in a way that doesn’t favor the mother. And one would expect Sali to become bitter, but she isn’t. As a young woman herself, she had made morally questionable decisions that led to her marriage to Kasunga. And even as that marriage deteriorated, she never at any point lacked agency. Could you talk a bit about why it was so important to write her in such a way that resists a flattened victim narrative? 

Mubanga: She is my favorite too, so I was nervous about sharing her, about whether I had done her justice, whether people would understand. During one revision, I remember saying to my agent that she was morally grey, and my agent pushed back at that. She found her honest, all of her flaws representative of flaws we could easily locate in women out here in our world. Her feedback was very reassuring, in that I felt steadier in my rendering of Sali. 

In a way, I think my writing of her was similar to Ntashé’s experience of testifying “against” Sali. There is a feeling that I am saying what needs to be said, and another, that no matter how I say it, someone, maybe a Sali somewhere, will be betrayed, and that is a complex feeling for me.

Mothers are complex characters, whether we know this of our own mothers or motherhood or not. As a child, I understood my mother through a single dimension––she was love epitomized, and because of that, the way I’d later give, accept and reject love was informed by how I understood her. However, because she died so young, my understanding of her and mothers was very scant. As a teenager, watching my friends’ relationships with their mothers evolve was quite disconcerting. I couldn’t understand their gripes, and they found my reactions incredibly frustrating. When I eventually became a mother, I didn’t realise how much pressure I was holding onto, about the kind of mother I thought I was supposed to be. Keeping my mother on a pedestal, which had been, until that point, comfort, suddenly soured into an oppressive experience wherein I felt, at every turn, inadequate. A few years ago, I heard one of my children describe me. It was so eye-opening, how I was, and am, a completely different person to them than I am to my friends. They know a very specific Mubanga who lives in the box called “mom”. That realization made me reconsider who my mother was, the ways I would never know who she was, or who she could have been. The understanding that a child’s knowledge, and therefore, my own knowledge of my mother would always be limited to my point of view, as her child was devastating for me, more so because even that point of view had been severed so early in our relationship. I felt like I was losing my mother again, and because my own mothering continues, my children’s needs and our relationship are expanding––I don’t know that there is an ending to that loss. I am aware, too, that the same is true of a mother’s knowledge of her children, although I am sure many of us would dispute it and claim to know our children better than anyone. They too, I will know mostly through that lens, even when they are older and we are, I hope, friends. Their peers will get a different version, their partners, their colleagues. 

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. 

Uka: One wrenching thread in the novel is that of deferred dreams. Sali had big dreams, not minding that the messiness of her longings as a young woman. But then she ends up with Kasunga and really never quite recovered from that twist of fate. Could you talk a bit about why it was important to examine that fragile chasm between life hoped for and the life one eventually is left with, and how that discrepancy impacts one’s choices and their relationship with the people in their orbit?

Mubanga: You and I, being mothers, know this tension intimately, right? How impossible it feels to love our children with all our lives, and also love ourselves with the same intensity. The latter especially, is criminalized in all societies. A mother must love her children even, and sometimes, especially, at the expense of self. Society judges mothers harshly, yes, but society is only the jury, the gavel is held by her children. The problem is, there is no template for what is right. Most situations require calculated guesses, and the consequences often show up decades later, when the decision cannot be undone. When Sali met Kasunga, she was guessing, “Which will be better––for my parents to find out, or for me to enter a new lie?” She made what some would say was a bad guess. But who is to say how things would have gone the other way? Some of us recover from our bad guesses, but many don’t. When a mother’s guess is bad, the sentence will be doubly so. As mothers, this knowledge is a constant thrumming in our ears. That’s why you hear so many mothers in abusive situations say, “I stay for my children,” while we, on the outside, make judgments about what they should do instead. Those mothers are guessing “Which will be better––to try and raise them alone and subject them to the trauma of a divorce or challenging finances, or give them financial stability?” But go through social media comments of an adult child wishing their mother had left their father, and you’ll quickly find pockets of people whose mothers had left, wishing their own parents had stayed together. Both feelings are valid, of course. We all grieve those “what if’s.” What troubles me is how when the blame falls, it is always at the feet of the mother. So, in Sali’s case, who would be blamed for her deferred dreams? Who would be blamed for her messy choices? Who would pay for the twisted fate? Whose choices would be scrutinized when it all crumbled?

Uka: Something else I found fascinating is the novel’s structure. We begin with Ntashé and the courtroom. That courtroom thread then stretches for most of the novel. But within that thread are pendulous moments when we travel back and forth in time, stitching up past choices and decisions made so that when we return to the courtroom, we understand the accused better. We understand Ntashé’s anger and guilt. We understand why Sali’s mother froze and grew detached after Sali confessed to her. That threading of the past is carefully done so that we understand the ways circumstance shape a character and impact the choices they eventually make. This is a great craft lesson. Did this structure come easily? Or did you complete the courtroom thread first and then returned to layer the story with the past?

Mubanga: 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. 

Uka: And then there’s the term itself, “Shipikisha,” which you briefly touched on above and which Sali’s colleague at work first mentions when Sali revealed her pregnancy. This term rings throughout the novel and, at a point, becomes a refrain. Could you talk a little more why it was necessary to sustain that refrain, especially considering the sobering note at the end of the novel about gender violence?

Mubanga: 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. 

Uka: For educators like me who will teach this work, what do you hope that your readers, including college students, take away from The Shipikisha Club? And is there a particular question you hope that the novel leaves them with?

Mubanga: Hopefully, people look beyond the ethnographic. Yes, I am making observations about Zambia. Yes, the setting and language are Zambia-specific. What it means to shipikisha just differs from place to place. We all endure something, and have all been witness to another’s endurance. This is just one story about the shape that endurance can take.

Uka: Who are some of the writers whose work have deeply inspired you, and who do you think we should be reading right now? 

Mubanga: Definitely you. By the first time we spoke, I had read almost all your work, and till now, I often re-read The Mothers, Postpartum Interiorities, and my favorite, I’m Done Listening to My Family About How to Be a “Good” Mother. I have so much admiration for the way you write, think about, and ask questions about motherhood. When I approached you with advice on how to go about doing work like you are doing in Isele, what I remember most is your generosity of spirit. You spoke to me for hours over several days. You took every call, responded to every question, and assuaged my anxieties. Like me, you wear many hats. In addition to Isele, you were also a PhD student at the time, facing the daunting question of what would come next, and yet you still carved out time for me. That act taught me a lot about the kind of writer I want to be. The writing itself will always happen, it is the language I speak in. The stories will find homes and readers, but I care a lot about community, and you embodied how to be in community with other writers. Thank you for that. I read everything Theresa Sylvester and Frances Ogamba write for sure, and hope to keep re-reading What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Arimah and my brilliant mentor, Sheila O’Connor’s work. Read more Zambian writers, please, there are many of us, but here are some good places to start: in the novel, Natasha Omokhodion, Ellen Banda Aaku, Namwali Serpell, and Jacob M’hango. Good places to start for shorter prose are, Fiske Nyirongo, Mali Kambandu, Perpetual Murray, Mwanabibi Sikamo, Mukandi Siame and Mwenya Chikwa. In poetry, Cheswayo Mphanza and Kayo Chingoyi have beautiful books out in the world and Vuma Phiri , Isaac Kanyinji and Anna Zgambo for shorter poetry.

Learn more about The Shipikisha Club here.