How writing helps Iryn Tushabe recover what she's left behind

It's been almost 20 years since Iryn Tushabe left Uganda to live in Regina, and she says that she writes to recover things she's left behind. 

Tushabe was a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2021. In 2023, she won the Writers' Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. Tushabe was longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize in 2016.

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The traditional stories of spiteful gods and triumphant heroes were one of the ways she and her family connected with each other.

"I grew up next to a forest. When I was born, my neighbours were baboons and monkeys and just all kinds of wild animals," she said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "On any given day, I might see more chimpanzees and baboons than human beings. So after supper, all we ever had for company were each other. And I had a big family. So we told each other these stories."

Her latest book, Everything is Fine Here is inspired by one of those Ugandan folk tales and tells the story of two sisters. 

Aine is the younger sister and her world is turned upside down when she begins to suspect that her beloved older sister is gay. This is Uganda, where homosexuality is illegal. 

And as happy as Aine is to see her sister Mbabazi find love, she's caught between disapproving parents, a hostile culture and a desire to see her sister blossom and incorporate some kind of new and fresh ideas into Aine's world.

Tushabe joined Mattea Roach on Bookends to discuss why for her, writing is an act of reclamation and recovery. 

Mattea Roach: Why did you choose to tell a queer love story through the perspective of an observer?

Iryn Tushabe: The first draft that I wrote was actually first person. It turned into this long rambling diatribe of a thing that was unreadable at the end of it. It was full of anger because a lot of it was my own experience of growing up bisexual in Uganda.

What that draft did is it helped me purge all of that frustration and anger, and now I could tell it from the perspective of someone else and still include those experiences- Iryn Tushabe

I think what that draft did is it helped me purge all of that frustration and anger; now I could tell it from the perspective of someone else and still include those experiences, but not make it so personal to myself.

Once I stepped out of the way and let the younger sister be the one to tell the story, then it became more real. It became more of a story that includes everything — not just the idea of just being gay and queer in Uganda.

What is it like for Aine to grow up with a sister who is kind of that gold star sibling, someone that you want to emulate in a lot of ways?

I think that sibling dynamic where the older sister is really much older; they kind of take on the role of a mother too. So she has nurtured Aine since she was very small. So they are quite close

Family can be a site for a lot of hurt, a lot of heartbreak and disappointments. It can be a site for healing too.- Iryn Tushabe

Aine, I think, has a pedestal in her heart for her sister. Just really adores her. It just seemed to me that it would be a good story to tell from the family level because family can be a site for a lot of hurt, a lot of heartbreak and disappointments.

It can be a site for healing too. 

Can you describe what the relationship between religion and queerness was like for you growing up in Uganda and how that has affected your journey as a queer person and as a writer?

There's an influx of evangelists from the United States. They come and they hold these massive crusades, and they convert people from whatever religions they're in and they turn them into born again Christians. These are the sorts of people who actually have influenced the Anti-Homosexuality Act in Uganda before it was ever tabled in parliament.

I didn't want to inflict any further violences on the queer characters in the book.- Iryn Tushabe

So religion plays a massive role. But it seems to me that, when you know what you know about Uganda through the news, you don't get the whole picture. You just think that perhaps Ugandan queers are just sitting there waiting to be saved by outsiders. But the way they live their lives is actually — they're resisting.

They're moving forward in the world with turmoil for sure. It's hard, but they're happy. I think that's part of the reason why I made the book that way. I didn't want to have to repeat what everyone in the news-reading world already knows about the Anti-Homosexuality Act.

I didn't want to inflict any further violence on the queer characters in the book.

What is your relationship to spirituality these days?

I think for a lot of people who grew up religious and who are queer, it's a complicated thing to navigate. I'm envious of people who are queer who still are able to hold onto their faiths. But for me, I cannot. I cannot reconcile the two because I just feel like growing up a Christian it's, to use a tired word, traumatizing. 

It's traumatizing on a psychological level to sort of be told that the only way to be in the world is to pray this thing away.

But now I find it in meditation. I find it in sitting in silence. And it's very hard, so infinitely harder than prayer. Because in prayer you can just say all these things and unburden yourself in whatever way. But it's hard to sit in silence for 30 minutes because it feels like an eternity.

There's some incorporation of Ugandan folk tales in a really beautiful way and the characters in your novel find great meaning in some of these stories that they were told as children. There's this one story in particular about two loyal sisters. Can you tell that story?

I feel that this story truly encapsulates what the novel is about. It was the first thing that came to my mind. So basically the story is that these two siblings are tested, their family is tested by this goddess Nabinji, the goddess of plenty.

And she comes to the home of the two sisters, and their mother is unkind to her, so she puts this curse on her, so that she's suspended between life and death.

And the girls pursue the goddess to the forest so that she will give them their mother back. She subjects them to all these difficult phantasmagoric illusions to break their spirits.

But every day they sing to each other and they persist and persevere through all these trials. At the end of it, she just grows bored because she can't break their spirits and she sends them back with this candle that they can burn next to their mother.

And hopefully when the candle burns out, then their mother will arrive.

Is there a name for a mother whose children have outgrown her?- Iryn Tushabe

But when they get back, their mom is still young. That's just the most beautiful thing I like about that story is that she's still suspended at the age where the curse was put on her.

And they've grown older than her and part of it is just, 'Ok so is she still our mom if we're older than her? And is there a name for a mother whose children have outgrown her?'

I think that's kind of what Mbabazi and Aine are doing. Their mom is stuck in these old colonial Christian ways and they just want to get her unstuck. And they're burning this candle, but who knows how long this candle is going to burn and does it burn out? Does she wake up?

I think that's the tragedy of it. They're not knowing if mama gets unstuck.

I'm wondering what your hopes are for queer people in Uganda looking ahead?

We have a phrase that I have in my acknowledgements and it's in my language, but translated I guess with context would be, "May love always prevail." 

I think that is my hope — that many people will walk this path towards embracing everybody.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Talia Kliot and edited by Ailey Yamamoto.