Jambula Tree

Jambula Tree

Important themes through the story

Gender role in society

“Most of the women don’t work. Like Mama Atim they sit and talk, talk, talk and wait for their husbands to bring home a kilo of offal. Those are the kind of women we did not want to become. They bleached their skins with Mekako skin lightening soap till they became tender and pale like a sun-scorched baby. “

"Their wives are like used bicycles, ridden and exhausted by the entire estate's manhood."

Monica Arac de Nyeko

Homosexuality

Rejection to be a traditional woman:

• Submissive

• Destined to get married

• Dependent

• Promotion of girl's education (1987)

• un-african
• un-Christian
• perverted
• sick

According to Anyanyo's mother

Another aspects

• Soft

• Kind

• Patient

• Romantic love -MYTH-

Rivalry between women

"Oh, and she has a long ringed neck, her eyes are large and sad. The woman has a voice soft, kind and patient. How could the man leave her?"

" I will never leave you, you are mine forever. Stars are for the sky, you are for me."

Possession

Disempowers women

Weakness before men

corrective multiple violation

• Illegal in Uganda

• Homosexuals are seeing as

• Methods of "cure"

Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act

Sanyu's family

Anyanyo's family

"...what lines we crossed. The things we should not have done when the brightness of Mama Atim's torch shone upon us - naked. "

" “You had broken the rules. But that was the lesser of the rules that you broke. That I broke. That we broke.”

"Kill the Gays bill"

"You had new shoes every term. You had two new green uniforms every term. Sanyu, your name was never called out aloud by teachers like the rest of us whose parents had not paid school tuition on time and we had to be sent back home with circulars."

• Middle upper class

• Not economic problems

• Father works and dependent mother

• Working class

• Have to manage to survive

• Mother has to work to bring money and food

• 24 February 2014 signed into law by

• 1 August 2014 the law ruled invalid

Yoweri Musevini

(president of Uganda)

• Differences according to class

• Idealization of promises

• Religion

Land

Future

Anyanyo and Sanyu

Anyanyo's father

Anyanyo's mother perspective

Mama Atim perspective

Illusion

hostile

“I will never leave you. You are mine forever.”

“We made that promise never to mind her or be moved by her”.

“London is a monster which gives no jobs. (...) London is no refuge for the immoral”

"When Mummy talked of London, we listened with our mouths open. She had travelled there not once, not twice, but three times to visit her sister. Each time she came back with her suitcase filled up with stories (…) Queen Elizabeth stories (…)"

Homosexuality = sin

idea introduced by the Church

Characters

Sanyu

Anyango

• Addressee

• Middle upper class

• London

• Narrator

• Working-class

• Stay

Symbols

"(...) you had your legs coiled around Juma. I'don't know how you do it, Sanyu. He could not move."

Anyango's mother

Sanyu's mother

• Single

• Married

• Unemployed

• Working as a "copy typist"

"And you could not tell you mother. She would not believe you. She never did."

"Mummy might have been sad sometimes, but she did not deserve any pity. She lived her life like her own fingernails and temperament: so calm, so sober and level-headed, excet of course when it came to reading those Papa letters."

• Anyango and Sanyu

• The mothers

• The fathers

• Mama Atim

Jambula tree their love

Suitcase traveling and past

Sanyu's father

Anyango's father

• Absent

• Well-known

• Abuser

• Married again with a young woman

"Mummy said if Papa had any sense in his head, he would not have left her with three kids to raise on her own to settle for that slut he called a wife"

"Most of the teachers knew him at school. The kids had hear about him."

"I hate him (...) It was ot what he didn't do, you said. It was what he did. Those touches, his touches (...)"

Mama Atim

• Main representation of traditional gender role

• Gossip neighbour

"Maybe she is the one who should be quieter."

Deep green uniforms

Purple feminism

Index

Final impressions

1. Author

2. Setting

3. Narrator

4. Characters

5. Themes

6. Symbols

7.Final impressions

• Homosexuality
• Gender role
• Other aspects

"The tale is more than a forbidden love beneath the Jambula; it is also about broken hearts, forgotten dreams and the reality of poverty."

- Monica Arac de Nyeko

Monica Arac de Nyeko

• Ugandan writer

• Caine Prize for African Writing (2007)

• Africa39 project

Jambula Tree

Narrator

Anyango

• First person narrator

Ariadna Frías Bajo

Marta Puime Maceira

Paula Cambeiro Villanustre

• Form of a letter addressed to Sanyu

• Tone: sad and melancholic

also hopeful.

Language

Setting

• African words:

not translated

Dool, kwepena, entandikwa...

translated

Soldiers' song

• Not direct reference to lesbianism

Taboo

Lack of knowledge about the issue

• Fruits to refer the body

"your breasts (...) were like two large jambulas on your chest"

"her breasts were firm like green manges"

"your cheeks were bulging like you had hidden oranges inside them."

Nakawa Kampala

• Area city

(capital of Uganda)

Instability

• Uganda - Tanzania war (1978-1979)

after the conflict

Planned houses broken dreams unplanned families

• Nakawa

"most of the women don't work. (...) They sit and talk, talk, talk and wait for their husbands to bring home a kilo of offal."

Optimistic and lively

"Sanyu, you have chosen to come here to children running on the read earth, in the morning shouting and yelling as they play kwepena and dool-familiar and stocked with memory and history. Yo return to dirt roads filled with thick brown mud on a rainy day, pools of water in every pothole and the sweet fresh smell of rain on hard sol."