NEW YORK, NY.- The Center for Art, Research and Alliances announced the publication of Judith Namala: A Novella. Its release marks writer and curator Serubiri Moses’s fiction debut and the launch of a new CARA publication series, Practice.

Judith Namala is an experiment in adaptation, storytelling, and translation as fictocriticism. Set in Ntinda-Kiwatule, a neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, between the late 1970s and early 2000s, the book follows the domestic dramas of Judith Namala, a Black maid, and Esther Nambi, her Black madam. “Some say that the coming of a maid is a ritual. That the family waits patiently in the living room to inspect the maid. Others say that the maid arrives unannounced and without pretext. The house produces maids. As in a factory, the home easily finds its division of labor, its factory workers and supervisors. In the factory, she will become part of the family album,” observes the narrator.

Unfolding across short vignettes, the author’s innovative prose attends to the silences and opacities that mark the distances—and forced proximities—between two characters whose tense relationship is defined by class and social hierarchy. “The story reveals the depth of injustice at the household level, where one woman’s child is abandoned, whilst the children of an elite Kampala household are over-mothered,” remarks poet, playwright, and performer Sitawa Namwalie.

Hovering at the surface of these quiet scenes of servitude, the narrator offers an enigmatic model of interiority—grasped only in passing, where psychic geographies confront and sometimes, surprisingly, mirror one another. “The tension between rural and urban elite women played out like a soap opera in their household,” says the narrator.

Inspired by the late author and journalist Binyavanga Wainaina, who encouraged Moses to write a novel in Luganda and translate it to English, the author spins a story of housework and labor that reaches across forty years of Ugandan history. Drawing on cultural artifacts, art, film, and Moses’s translation of lyrics from a Luganda popular music songbook, Judith Namala threads together references from filmmaker Ousmane Sembène; writers Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid; and musicians Fred Sebatta, Dan Mugula, and Christopher Ssebadduka, among many others.

Poet and filmmaker Ladan Osman calls Judith Namala “a cinematic dressing-down of airs and manners: a collision of tradition, ritual, and other social parameters revealed through imperatives or hauntings.” Written in a unique style informed by oral tradition, folklore, criticism, and reportage, the novella offers an intimate domestic portrait that embraces the poetics of metaphor.

Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Designer: Stoodio Santiago da Silva, Bárbara Acevedo Strange, and Moritz Appich
Copy Editor: Re’al Christian
Printer: KOPA, Lithuania
ISBN 978-1-954939-09-7 / $18 / Edition of 2,000
Softcover, 6.8 x 4.3 inches, 88 pages