Orature as decolonial epistemology: (Re)writing the postcolonial African female body in Jennifer Makumbi’s A Girl Is a Body of Water (2020)

This article examines Jennifer Makumbi’s A Girl Is a Body of Water (2020) as a literary example of a decolonial feminist work, mobilising African epistemic traditions to expose the discursive footprints of postcolonial gender binary norms and foreground African women’s counter-body politics. I analyse how orature functions as a decolonial epistemic tool to critique the colonial legacy of gender essentialism and its continued influence on cosmological narratives, social norms and gender identities and relations in postcolonial Uganda. Decolonial scholarship, operating at the intersection of resistance and reclamation, entails using Indigenous knowledge systems and artistic forms to challenge the universalism of Western body politics and to reclaim Indigenous ways of knowing, being and relating. Centring decolonial scholarship in my analysis of Makumbi’s novel, I examine a range of oral aesthetics – folklore, creation stories, idioms and riddles – all of which operate collectively as decolonial epistemic resources. These elements are intentionally deployed within the overarching plot to challenge the postcolonial, patriarchal moralisation and pathologisation of the African female body, reconstruct African women’s heterogeneous histories and subjectivities and write new postcolonial female body politics.