Kweluma or Why Women Hate Women
A Girl is a Body of Water is a top-five 2021 read. Contains spoilers.
To me, the best books are the ones that tell your story and reveal a bit of your heart to you. I feel beyond lucky to have discovered so many such voices, both personally and in the arts, that have resonated so profoundly they’ve reshaped my value system and elevated my sense of self. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah told the immigration story I didn’t know I had and opened my world. Ingrid Persaud’s Love After Love showed me the rich, tropical beauty in the heritage of indenture. Kama La Mackerel’s ZOM-FAM highlighted the patchwork of identities the Mauritian diaspora constantly navigates and taught me to love me for all I am, not in spite of it.
More recently, I’ve slow-read my way through Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s bildungsroman, A Girl is A Body of Water. Set in Uganda, the novel follows protagonist Kirabo as she navigates her way through love, life and womanhood. Salient themes include identity, patriarchy, colonization and tradition vs. modernity. The language is fertile and the imagery so vivid it leaps off the page. The premise is solid, with enough intrigue and believable, expertly crafted character development to keep you on your toes from end to end. While offering a refreshing portrayal of family within an African patriarchy, Makumbi introduces us to a concept that really stuck out to me: kweluma.
My grandmother's called it kweluma. That is when oppressed people turn on each other or on themselves and bite. It's a form of relief. If you cannot bite your oppressor you bite yourself.
A Girl is a Body of Water, page 80
Throughout the novel we are given multiple examples of kweluma. When Kirabo’s grandfather cheats on her grandmother with his high school sweetheart, the latter is cast away as a home-wrecking witch. Her character is reduced to this one fatal flaw and redemption seems unlikely. Meanwhile, gramps gets away with it scot-free. As the patriarch, his decisions or lapses of judgement are not be questioned but rather, quickly buried. When history repeats itself and Kirabo’s well-to-do feminist boyfriend Sio knocks up her best friend on a careless whim, Kirabo’s Aunt Abi is quick to slut-shame the other woman and make excuses for the boy.
She tells Kirabo:
Listen, I will not let a tiny little thing like a boy having a child in his impetuous youth rob us of a potentially fantastic opportunity with a fine young man from an excellent stalk. You are throwing him right back into the arms of that dung roller—why? Because she is cheap? Let me handle this. One day you might thank me.
A Girl is a Body of Water, page 311
I’ve never called it by this name but kweluma has manifested itself in my life in many ways. When my high school boyfriend would flirt with other women on the internet, I would get mad at them - not him - for being easy, for being so attractive their beauty was mine to compete with. When a boy I liked chose someone else over me, my friends would say ‘she’s not even pretty’. When our men cheat, we get angry at the other women. As if so predisposed to this kind of behavior they cannot possibly bear even a shred of the blame.
This shows up in other areas too. When my friend’s boss won’t let him catch a break at work, he turns to his own subordinates and makes sure they work twice as hard. If he must accept his fate, so must everyone else. When more privileged groups in society mock you for your unrefined ways (your accent, your taste in clothing, your ethnicity, what have you), you can’t fight back because you don’t control the power dynamic. Instead, you turn to those society perceive as ‘inferior’ to you, and find ways to mock them - their unsophisticated palate, their narrow worldview, their outdated fashion - even if that means disparaging your own kind. It’s too hard to think about sticking it to the man, so we stick it to the little guy.
In my world, kweluma explains my lifelong struggles with forming and maintaining strong bonds with other women. I’ve heard - and felt flattered by - lines like ‘you’re not like other girls’ or ‘you’re just one of the boys’ so often I never recognized them as a slapdash way of undermining my entire gender. Other girls can’t take a joke. Other girls are jealous. Other girls don’t know how to have fun. In my eyes, this put me in a favorable position and keeping it meant having to undermine other women.
(Some) women hate women, because we compete for what we see as limited resources. The attention of men, the ability to be desirable and complex beyond our physicalities. We hate other women because we believe their being special makes us less special and thus, less worthy of desire and attention. We hate them because we fear they might take away what we have and cherish.
Perhaps to undo kweluma we must first acknowledge it. I am a woman living in a fundamentally patriarchal, misogynist, imperial society that isn’t designed to cater to my needs and appreciate my multitudes. When picking other women to fight with, I pick the wrong foe, all the time. Fighting with them is fighting over crumbs and never getting our share of the pie. If I inspect myself and recognize that I am, not just an object of desire or a body, but a living, breathing, emoting being, perhaps I can extend this recognition outwards and start believing that other women’s desirability and complexity in no way negate my own. Their worth isn’t, and never was, a measure of mine.
So beautifully written, as always! 'Their worth isn’t, and never was, a measure of mine.' - I really saw myself and my past experiences in this piece. Thank you once again for this!
Fascinating concept, thanks for sharing these thoughts. It seems that for cultures and communities to heal from these hurtful dynamics it will take time to reconstruct a sense of identity that is both proud of one’s heritage and cognizant of our common human experience. And as long as there is gross injustice it seems very difficult to do this because someone will always feel disadvantaged and that frustration won’t just fade away.
Also I just recently learned the word “bildungsroman”... nice.