Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe (Awp Award Series in Short Fiction) - Hardcover

Baingana, Doreen

3.71

560 ratings by Goodreads

9781558494770: Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe (Awp Award Series in Short Fiction)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1558494774 ISBN 13: 9781558494770

Publisher: University Massachusetts Press, 2005

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Tropical Fish is a collection of linked short stories that explore the coming of age of three African sisters. Introspective and personal, the stories reveal the unexpected ambiguities of the young women's lives. The setting is the lush beauty of Uganda and the background is the aftermath of Idi Amin's dictatorship. But even in such trying circumstances, the stories show that people everywhere face the same basic human struggle to understand themselves, their world, and their place in it. Each story develops the theme of exploration and discovery as the sisters mature and their interior and exterior lives expand. The youngest sister, Christine, becomes aware at an early age of the bittersweet dynamics of family love and later grapples with romantic and erotic, if problematic, love. Her explorations lead her across racial lines, when she has an affair with a British expatriate in the title story. What is initially an act of curiosity brings forth questions of racial and gender identity. Eager to stitch together a new pattern for her life, Christina ventures to another continent, North America, where she attempts to create a new home and a new self. In another story, Christina's sister Patti writes in her diary about the vicissitudes of daily experience at a typical Ugandan girls' boarding school and the impact of class and religion on her relationships with fellow students. Other stories are written in the voice of the oldest sister, Rosa, who as a precocious teenager tries to decipher the mysteries of sex. Unfortunately, her promising future is harshly disrupted. In the final story, Christine returns to Uganda and finds her perspective irrevocably altered. She is more acutely aware of her home's natural beauty, but its physical vibrancy is in stark contrast to the social and political conditions she encounters. Her journey of self-discovery comes full circle, but without any tidy resolutions. Ambiguities and uncertainties remain. What is clear, however, is that this book marks the arrival of a remarkably gifted writer.

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Review:

Baingana deftly describes both the physical landscape and her characters' emotional terrain. Her narrative voice is strong, endowing the smallest situations with remarkable power.

--The Virginia Quarterly Review

Ugandan-born Baingana chronicles in her debut collection of linked stories the lives of three sisters growing up in Entebbe after the fall of Idi Amin. Though most of the stories take place in Africa, "Lost in Los Angeles" follows the principal character, Christine Mugisha, as she travels to California, where she grapples with a different breed of racism than she faces in her own country. The title story, "Tropical Fish," follows Christine's apathetic affair with an older, affluent white man who woos her with the many perks of his money. "A Thank-You Note" is a letter from Christine's older sister, Rosa, to an ex-lover that angrily and poignantly recounts her battle with AIDS. Baingana's characters are confined by a passivity and powerlessness (Christine likens herself to a plastic doll) rarely broken, though the collection ends on a hopeful note, as Christine rejoins her mother and sister Patti -- Rosa has already died -- thinking about how she "would have to learn all over again how to live in this new old place called home." Baingana's richly detailed stories are lush with cultural commentary.

--Publishers Weekly

About the Author:

Doreen Baingana is from Uganda and lives in the United States. She has a law degree from Makerere University, Kampala, and an MFA from the University of Maryland. Her poems are included in the anthology Beyond the Frontier. She works for Voice of America radio.

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