Written by Everything Is Fine Here author Iryn Tushabe. 

My brother Herbert tells me this omugane, a folktale:

Obwakarenakare—a very long time ago— there lived two brothers. One a potter, the other a musician. One day, the potter’s wife brought him the softest clay she’d dug from the bottom of a well she discovered on the edge of the forest. The potter kneaded the clay to a perfect consistency and shaped from it enyungu. He etched three lines around the neck of the pot and set it to bake in his bonfire kiln. When the right amount of time had passed, he took his handiwork out and beheld it. It was, without a doubt, the single most remarkable object he’d ever created. Too beautiful to ruin with cooking or beer storage. He set it on his mantle and invited the village folk to look. One after another, they told him he had outdone himself.

His brother, the musician, was inspired by the rare beauty of his brother’s pottery. He went into the forest looking for the perfect tree from which to craft a new musical instrument. After many hours of searching, he settled on the mpingo, a blackwood so old there was a hole where its heart used to be. He dragged the log home and used an adze to carve his instrument. It looked, from a certain angle, like a shallow dugout canoe in miniature. He bored holes along its mouth and looped leather strings through, pulling them just taut enough. Resting it in his lap, he plucked a melody. It was both joyous and melancholy, for the blackwood, so old, contained both the beginning of time and the end of it. He named his instrument enanga. A trough zither. There was no doubt in his mind that his instrument was the most magical thing in existence, superior, even, to his brother’s precious pottery.

“No, no, no,” the potter protested when his musician brother advanced this ludicrous suggestion. “Have you not heard? Everyone is saying my pot is fit for a king!”

“They’re saying the same about my enanga,” the younger brother said. “I saw you weep when you heard me play!”

Now the brothers were bickering, irritating the monkey who made her home in the nearby trees. She couldn’t stand their overinflated egos. She hopped over and offered to settle their disagreement once and for all. 

“But first, you must promise you’ll abide by my methods,” Monkey said.

“Fine,” the brothers said.

Monkey instructed them to fire up the kiln and put the trough zither in it, and to beat the pot with drumsticks. “Then we shall know whose craftsmanship is truly enduring,” said the monkey.

The pot immediately broke into shards and the zither burnt to ash. Furious, the brothers ran to fetch their spears, but Monkey had disappeared into her stand of trees. They could hear her cackling high up in the cathedral canopy. But every effort to spear her was futile.                   

“The end,” my brother said.

“What?” I was furious at him for not knowing how to end a story properly. He was twice my age and was in his first year at the fancy all-boys boarding school beyond the forest. These stories he told me and the conversations they inspired comprised my English lessons at the time. But how was I to remain interested if his storytelling was unremarkable? “What’s the moral of the story?” I asked.

“There has to be one?” 

I was seven, not stupid. “Of course.”

My brother tilted his chin at a thinking angle. “Maybe the moral of this story is that monkeys are cantankerous,” he said.

“Cantankerous!” A new word. It rolled so smooth from my tongue. I loved its hard syllables and that s that elongated it. Later when I saw a colobus, teeth bared, stretching to pluck a ripe pawpaw from a tree in our yard, I shouted, “Cantankerous!” while chucking stones at the thieving creature. I was born under that pawpaw tree and had decided that its fruits belonged only to me. This logic baffled my parents, who’d nicknamed me kapapali or “little pawpaw.”

Anyway, I said “cantankerous” every chance I got until my father snapped. “That word does not mean what you think it means,” he shouted and handed me his red Webster’s Advanced Learner’s dictionary.

More than three decades have passed. Now, words are my preoccupation and stories my trade. I think about my brother’s story often, though I haven’t seen him in years. I’m glad he offered me an adjective instead of a moral. Sometimes that’s all one story can do. Give us new vocabularies to enliven our experience of the world.

The news has extensively covered Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act since parliamentarian David Bahati first proposed the bill in 2009. That coverage, however, has created a single narrative where the cameras and microphones are always trained at politicians spewing their dehumanizing falsehoods, and at police officers brutalizing queer people. The news cycle with its sensationalizing zeal casts an objectifying gaze, requiring queer people to justify their existence, to defend their very humanity. But what new vocabularies might emerge if we paid more of that attention to queer lives? If we zoomed in on the ways—both subtle and overt—in which queer people resist this unrelenting tyranny? Might we see new dimensions that broaden our understanding?

In Everything is Fine Here, Aine observes her big sister’s relationship with her partner Achen and learns, among other things, that they don’t pass their days wallowing in sorrow. They have dreams and ambitions. In their downtime, they get together with their friends to watch televised soccer matches, and dance raucously when the Uganda Cranes win. The dynamic of Mbabazi’s and Achen’s partnership—so sensual, nurturing, and deeply honest—becomes the template upon which Aine and her boyfriend, Elia, wish to model their budding relationship.

“Could we be like that, do you think?” Elia asks Aine.

“What, care about each other so much it’s almost nauseating?” says Aine.

“Yeah, totally gross.”  

“I think I can manage that.”