“We didn’t ask you for stories. We have heard the stories from Anena, Aya, Bongomin, Nyeko, Ayat, Lalam, Auma, Ocheng, Otim, Olam, Uma, Ateng, Akwero, Laker, Odong, Lanyero, Ladu, Timi, Kati.” Beatrice Lamwaka, Butterfly Dreams.
When the media reports on tragedies, both words and numbers are used. However, it is often that when it comes to human life, the numbers tend to take precedence. A mother, a friend, or a teacher, turns into percentages and statistics. In her story Butterfly Dreams, Beatrice Lamwaka moves away from this style of storytelling and decides to remember the identity of the victims, calling them by their names. Even in a work of fiction, that decision was significant.
Butterfly Dreams set in Alokolum, Gulu district tells the story of a family dealing with the return of Lamunu, a 15-year-old girl rescued by the Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF) nearly five years after being abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The story conveys the plethora of emotions that her family and society deal with as they try to find some sort of footing in the wake of her return. Their happiness at her return overshadowed by the realities of the new life for them, its terror, and displacements. Lamunu on returning home does not speak. The family doesn’t ask questions either. Beatrice shares keeping her protagonist silent was deliberate. While she is silent, through the narrator Beatrice reinforces the sad truth, Lamunu’s experience was shared by many others. The ones named, those who had returned before had told her story, their shared story. The families were acquainted with the gruesome tales. Because of her silence, the reader is compelled to feel her pain as she sets on her journey of rehabilitation and re-integration.
Butterfly Dreams is the opening story in her first anthology Butterfly Dreams and other stories published in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2011. The emotional story took her over two years to complete. Though it was not an easy story for Beatrice to tell she continues to query the plight of the children who were abducted and remain unaccounted for in her follow-up works.
I have always believed that getting lost in the world of stories is an experience that no child or even adult should be denied. Stories take you to places and time-lines way before your feet ever do. Ask any lover of books, and they will have a story or two to share about how engrossed they would get into a book that it almost got them in trouble. As a young girl, Beatrice Lamwaka fell in love with stories, and as soon as she learned to read, she did whatever she could to find a story to read. It was this very love for stories and reading that led her to start telling her own stories through writing.
She joined FEMRITE, an organization aimed at developing and promoting female writers during her third year at Makerere University. It was here that she got her first taste in being published. Her first short story, Vengeance of the Gods was published in the FEMRITE anthology Words from a Granary in 2001. Beatrice believes that she might have given up on her writing had she not found the writing community FEMRITE provides where she currently serves as a board member.
In 2011, she was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing, a prestigious award that carries a £10,000 cash prize. To a lot of writers, winning an award like this is not just desirable because of its monetary value but also because of the peer approval communicated not just with a win but making the shortlist as well. To Beatrice, this recognition of the kind of stories she was telling was a welcome outcome. The experience also led her to think more deeply about her stories and what she could do better each time she was telling a story. This was not Beatrice’s first experience being recognized on a large scale for her writing. She was also a finalist for the PEN/Studzinski Literary Award in 2009.
Her short stories have been published in various anthologies, including the Caine Prize anthologies, To See the Mountain and other stories, and African Violet and Other Stories. Her short story The Star in my camp was published in PEN/Studzinski Literary Award Anthology New Writing from Africa (2009). She is also a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby. Other publications in which her work has appeared are Words from A Granary (2001), World of Our Own (2011), Farming Ashes (2009), Summoning the Rains (2012), and Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction (2013). She is working on her first novel, Sunflowers.
What is the artist’s responsibility to society if any I have often questioned in the company of artists. For Beatrice, with the acclaim came the realization that people had expectations of her. She would go on to learn that she carried the responsibility to be as truthful as possible even with fiction because the stories she told contributed to how her society is seen or defined. However, she does not let that box her in and strives to write about things that keep her up at night, as truthfully as she can. She believes every writer should write the stories they want to write because there’s enough room and enough readers for all the stories.
In addition to using her writing voice to shine the light on topics she deems important, Beatrice started The Arts Therapy Foundation a non-profit organisation that provides psychological and emotional support through creative arts therapies. From the realization of how important art is in her own life, she knew that using art you have created can help bring peace to your heart.
Her reads at the time of the interview included House of Stone by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma and Praise Song for the Butterflies by Bernice L. McFadden. She was preparing to get to The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell. Her go-to is Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi’s writing which makes her appreciate writing more.