Author of ‘(Purse) Strings Attached’, Paula Akugizibwe, used to resist ambiguity. More recently, however, ‘I’ve grown more comfortable with uncertainty if that’s what is most honest—both in my writing and in my lived experiences—and it’s liberating.’
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
Anything I could get my hands on: reading was the mainstay of my childhood. My mother is a statistician by profession but a phenomenal teacher by nature, and teaching babies to read is one of her superpowers—my older sister tells me that I started reading before I could hold a proper conversation. And as we moved between several different countries, books were one of the few constant presences in my life, a traveling home of sorts.
Fiction was my favorite, and my mother also packed our shelves at home with biographies, encyclopedias, Chicken Soup for the Soul, textbooks, and Christian literature. This was before we had the internet at our fingertips, so books were how we explored the world. As I got older I would read a book from somewhere unfamiliar, for example, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward which is still one of my favorite books, and it would trigger a curiosity about that place, leading me down a rabbit hole of Russian literature for weeks.
My relationship with books deepened in my teens when I read Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. That was my first experience of a contemporary African novel and made literature feel more personal, like something I didn’t just consume but was part of.
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