nor control. Though tragedy is suffered in solitude and silence, comedy opens up the possibility of transfiguring the original event by replaying it in such dramatically altered and exaggerated form that it is experienced as “other.” It is often said of tragedy that healing takes time. With distance comes release. The comedic is the ultimate expression of this kind of distancing and release, and it entails three critical transformations in our experience. First, the comedic restores a sense of agency. Second, it fosters emotional detachment. Third, it entails shared laughter, thus returning us to a community of others. In taking us out of ourselves and eclipsing our emotions, comedy returns us to the world, allowing us to see that we are a part of la comédie humaine rather than a victim of it. In this sense we are able to review the human condition from a general rather than exclusively personal standpoint. This is why comic characters are always stereotypes—“the mother,” “the daughter,” “the senior cowife,” “the wicked stepmother”—rather than particular individuals, why they are often depicted as animals rather than persons, why they have one-track minds rather than complex sensibilities, why their personalities are one-dimensional, and why what they have in common is given more weight than their idiosyncratic features. Moreover, insofar as they transcend private and particular identifications, funny stories can be more widely shared than tragic ones.
But there must be events that defy such imaginative reworking, that cannot be escaped, disguised, or bought off. And so I asked Emmanuel if we could go back to the time when his aunt tried to force him into an incestuous relationship with his sister.
“Actually,” Emmanuel said, “I think you are, if I’m not mistaken, only the fourth or the fifth person I’ve told about that. The reason is that one of the main taboos where I come from is against seeing the private parts of your auntie. It is a very big taboo, because aunties have a very serious and strong role in your upbringing, in your mannerisms, in your life, in your future marriage, and so on. So having seen what I should not have seen became something I had to put aside, something I could never tell anybody, because if I told it to someone, especially in Uganda, I would be the person, not the auntie, who would be in trouble. Now, having seen my auntie in that condition and having been made to do what I did became a no-go zone in my life. I never even told my mother. The only people who know of it are Nanna, my sister, and my brother-in-law, because he had to know where his wife was coming from.”
“So there are things a person simply does not joke about, that are too serious to—”
“Precisely. You couldn’t make any fun out of it. You cannot make fun out of your aunt telling you to have intimate relations with your sister. It is beyond belief.”
“It would have been breaking an absolute taboo.”
“The worst taboo. Nothing rivals it. Even seeing your sister naked is a taboo, or thinking sexual thoughts about your sister. Until I grew up and started dating or having girlfriends, I could never speak of it.”
“It seems unforgivable.”
“Yes. If a person was a serial killer, that would be a different issue altogether. You could explain that in many ways. Even though killing is wrong, you could understand why that person might be driven to kill. But if a person tells you to have intimacy with your sister, or with your brother, and they do that—well, until recently, I couldn’t put words on that. It’s what sent me out of the village, it’s what made me dislike or hate everybody related to my auntie, apart from my mum. I excused my mum, but I don’t know whether it is a biological reason or if I had justification for it because she was busy or something like that, but I never really told her.”
“Did your mother ever find out from others or ever have any idea?”
“I think she did, or maybe my grandmother told her, because I think my uncle, my young uncle who was also in the same village, must have told my grandmother, yeah. She could have been told. Because I realized later that whenever my mum talked about going to the village, she would make sure my aunt was not there before we went. And whenever my aunt came to visit, my mum was very prickly, you know. But being sisters, that close relationship, I think she had no choice but to avoid the whole topic. But I don’t think she knew about this issue of us being naked in the room. She knew about the punishment my aunt was subjecting us to, but I don’t think—”
“It would have been devastating if she knew the full story.”
“Yes, it would, for her. Until recently we didn’t talk about it, but then I had a talk with my sister when I was back in Uganda this January. It was the first time we ever talked openly together about what happened. I call her Mama Ali, because her firstborn is called Ali. I said to her, ‘Mama Ali, do you remember our auntie Namibia?’ She said, ‘Yeah, our witch auntie?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Do you remember what she did to us?’ She said, ‘Yeah, I do. I wanted to tell Dada Ali [her husband], but I haven’t.’ I said, ‘Okay, no problem, you tell him.’ You see, she was thinking of my position if she told him the whole story. I told her, ‘No, tell him what you think.’ Because there were times when my sister would get angry over some small thing, and my brotherin-law would call me and say, ‘Your sister is angry, and I don’t know why; I don’t know what has happened.’ So I told Mama Ali, ‘You’d better tell your husband about the way you feel sometimes and about what is affecting you.’ There were two things affecting her: that experience with our auntie was one, and the other was not knowing where our father came from, not knowing any of his family. So first we solved the issue of our experiences. We talked about everything—we had a very long day that day talking about everything, and I can tell you I’ve never seen my sister so happy. After that day, she was really a very excited woman. A weight had been lifted from her head. I think she had been carrying it—maybe she thought she had imagined it, maybe she was not really sure it had happened at all. So then, the next thing was to solve the issue of where our father came from. Luckily, we did that as well. We dealt with the two things that had been weighing so much on her. In my case, I dealt with these things by learning to hold them in and thinking of only one small bit at a time, never wanting them to affect me. My biggest fear was that those experiences would make me have a negative reaction or relationship to other people. But luckily, I think that by and large I turned that experience into something positive. But I never told anybody the story about my auntie and the issue of cleaning her and so on, and that picture has remained in me up until now. It is a very bad picture, and I didn’t want anybody else to experience it.”
Once again, I was struck by the ethical emphasis that Emmanuel placed on relationships. He appeared to be less mindful of how the infringement of a moral law affected him—a trauma suffered or a shame endured—than on how it had damaged relations among the six individuals closest to him. In having recourse to silence and forgetting, Emmanuel might be accused of avoiding an issue that required a talking cure, a confession, an expiation. But, as a Ugandan, the ethical priority was not revisiting the past but looking toward the future. Moving on, as we say. Finding a way around an obstacle rather than confronting it head on.21
And so, after reminding Emmanuel of how he dealt with bullying by becoming an entertainer, a comedian, I asked, “How did you deal with this other issue, concerning your aunt?”
“By not thinking about it. By trying to forget it. I literally closed it down. I mean I never spoke of it before the day I talked about it with my sister. I could never bring it up in any situation, never. I totally killed it off. I continued to have a very good relationship with my sisters, my brothers, and so on, but I closed that memory totally and never told anyone about it. It was simple, really. I pretended it never happened. The bullying was a daily thing, a daily activity, so I had to find ways of dealing with that. There is only so much you can take. I could take any verbal abuse—anyone could start abusing me from morning to evening, from now to next year, and I wouldn’t care. But physical abuse—there is a limit to what I can take. Especially, I hate being punished for something I have not done. If you saw me being punished
