Bodies of Water and Women: Rain and Gendered Trauma in the Ugandan Matriarchive

This article focuses on the metaphorical significance of rainfall in Ugandan women’s literature, arguing that stories about rain reflect the gendered aspects of colonial and state violence. Building on Sarah Nuttall’s recent call to “read for rain” (2022), the article focuses on how rain registers East African water-related ontologies, but also hydrocolonial violence, in two Ugandan realist novels, Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting and Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s A Girl is a Body of Water. The article traces how rain in the novels evokes histories of war and Indian Ocean slavery, thereby capturing how trauma builds up intergenerationally, but also the seminal role that storytelling plays in overcoming these traumas. It shows how contemporary women writers create a matriarchive by embedding oral stories about rain into the novels, juxtaposing bodies of women, bodies of water, and bodies of texts to offer narrative as a remedy for relentlessly “raining” past traumas.