UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Tropical Fish
Stories out of Entebbe
Book Jacket: 'Tropical Fish' by Baingana

Doreen Baingana

A memorable collection of stories set in Uganda
and the United States

Winner of the AWP Award for Short Fiction

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.

"Tropical Fish is extraordinary for a number of reasons. It follows the separate fates of sisters who begin their lives together in the town of Entebbe in Uganda. The prose is rich in specifics unknown to most of us, but what is truly dazzling is the way this brilliance of detail mounts into rare, subtle, surprising drama. These are memorable stories, fiercely fair, the work of a large talent."

Joan Silber, author of Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories
"Tropical Fish is an incandescence; it is a dream; it is a letter from a lover; it is a book of enormous beauty.”
Junot Díaz, author of Drown
"I urge you to read this book straight through from ‘Green Stones’ to ‘Questions of Home,’ for in doing so you will discover a powerful novel that happens to be rendered in short stories rather than chapters, something I call the ‘novita.’ Tropical Fish is one of the finest novitas I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. . . . Doreen Baingana shows mastery of language, a painter’s eye for detail, and a compassion so deep, I imagine her heart has no bottom."
Reginald McKnight, author of He Sleeps: A Novel
"Doreen Baingana's stories movingly communicate the complicated social and emotional process of re-rooting. Open-eyed and unsentimental, her faith in self—in life—is evident and affecting."
Linda Swanson-Davies, coeditor of Glimmer Train Stories
"Baingana looks at contemporary Uganda in a way comparable to Edwidge Danticat’s approach to Haiti’s recent history. Tropical Fish marks the debut of a similarly unflinching, graceful new voice.”
David Anthony Durham, author of Gabriel’s Story
and Walk Through Darkness
"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

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. She has won the Washington Independent Writers Fiction prize, was nominated for the Caine Prize in African Writing, and received an Artist Grant from the District of Columbia Commission of the Arts and Humanities.

Fiction
152 pp.
$27.95t cloth, ISBN 978-1-55849-477-0
February 2005

Listen to Doreen Baingana's interview in National Public Radio.

Published in cooperation with the Association of Writers & Writing Programs.

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