Mubanga Kalimamukwento, author of Obligations to the Wounded
Novel & Short Story Category, sponsored by Minnesota Humanities Center
Each week leading up to the 37th annual Minnesota Book Awards, we are featuring exclusive interviews with our finalists. You can also watch the authors in conversation with their fellow category finalists here.
What inspired you to write this book – or inspired you while writing it?
I started writing this collection so long ago that it’s hard to pinpoint an exact source of inspiration. As with all of my stories, though, I probably witnessed something that I found interesting in some way and was interested in exploring in a story. At some point, I decided to put them together. It started out with all the short stories I had written in the last seven years, and then, as I read it more closely, I noticed which stories seemed to be speaking to each other and thinned them so that only those remained.
What is one detail you wanted to include in this book, but couldn’t find a place for?
Two stories almost made this collection. One was “Last-Last Resignation,” which I published on Aster(ix) a few years ago. I really loved the protagonist in that story, but when I tried to place her and the story among those in Obligations to the Wounded, she didn’t quite fit, which makes sense to me now because she sees the world differently than any of these characters do. I think she would work better in a longer piece, maybe a novel entirely in her voice. The other was a story called “The Storyteller,” which I finished just after submitting Obligations to the Wounded to the University of Pittsburgh Press. Still, thematically, it wouldn’t have worked in the collection.
Tell us about someone (whose name isn’t on the cover!) who proved instrumental to the creation of this book.
My mother has had such a strong influence on my writing. She introduced me to stories very young and kept that alive for me through the books she surrounded me with. I was saying recently, and now I realize this is true of all my stories, that many of them start as a question I would have liked to ask her, and the story is an exploration of one of many ways she might have answered it.
Please tell us something about yourself that is not widely known. (It doesn’t have to be about the book in question – or even about your writing at all!)
I can’t think of an exciting non-book thing, so it will have to be a book thing. When I was thirteen, I wrote a novel. I saw a call for submissions from KTV on DStv. I didn’t know how to use a computer well, but my best friend did, so I dictated the novel to her and then asked my cousin to draw illustrations. It never placed, but I think the fact that I submitted at all is still how I approach challenging situations. Even if something is a little scary, or seems a little impossible, if I really want it, I will always try.
Share your thoughts about the role and value of libraries.
I didn’t grow up with public libraries that housed fiction or poetry books. That I love reading and writing beyond the academic is a product of our home library. While I am grateful for that, I am also saddened by it, not just for what I missed out on by not having access to a library where I could read beyond my mother’s budget and literary tastes, but for the children who didn’t even have books in their homes. My children, in contrast, for whom libraries have always been an obvious place to spend Saturday mornings, already write better than I probably did at their age, and I know that is because of libraries. There is a way that they engage with the world that I credit to books. My home library can barely keep up with their interests, but even if we only had a couple of books at home, they would still likely be the same children because of libraries, whereas I probably wouldn’t have been a writer if not for our home library.
Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian attorney and writer. She is the winner of the 2022 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, the 2019 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, and the 2019 Kalemba Short Story Prize. Her first novel, The Mourning Bird, was listed among the top fifteen debut books of 2019 by Brittle Paper.