A Season of mirth.

Reviewed by: Joshua Masinde
Published July 30, 2009

Book: A Season of Mirth
Author: Regina Amollo
Price: Ushs10,000 ($5)
Available: All leading bookshops
Reviewed by: Joshua Masinde

Regina Amollo’s A Season of Mirth is set in a village in Teso region of Eastern Uganda. The setting revolves around Okanya’s chauvinism and domineering disposition permeates the plot of the novel.

Occasionally, Okanya beats Abeso, his wife, even when her two daughters, Anaro and Ikiso, are the ones at fault. Abeso thus often worries about Anaro in particular, because of her father’s yearning to make a marriageable woman of her. “Whenever her husband returned home before Anaro, he would beat both mother and daughter. In fact, every mistake by the girls was blamed on the mother. He [Okanya] was there to supervise, guide and correct what he thought big mistakes and with the stick.”

Owing to Okanya’s inevitable beatings, Abeso has been constrained to enhance love and care through a concoction from Lakeri, her future in – law, especially after one particularly thorough beating when Okanya almost killed her when drunk. But for Lakeri, Abeso would have eloped forever. “If you had not advised me to return, with the help of this leaf, I would not have gone back to him.”

Anaro foresees a similar fate when she gets married to Ewiu, the son of Lakeri. She wonders where she would run to whenever her husband-to-be, a police constable, batters her after they relocate to Kampala. Her mother insists there is nowhere to run to, and advises Anaro to always keep quiet whenever Ewiu spoiled for a quarrel.

“If you show him respect, he will feel good and will not beat you unless he is a natural woman beater.” Abeso supplements her advice by offering Anaro the leaf Ewiu’s mother had given her, to tame Okanya’s anger and avoid battering.

Okanya derives his bitterness from his wife’s failure to give birth to a son, making him feel out of place whenever his peers discussed their sons.
“He had no son and did not find the subject of sons amusing. His wife was 33 years old, but since the birth of Ikiso, who was 13 years old, he had stopped hoping for another child.”

In a society riddled with superstitions and retrogressive cultural beliefs, Abeso wonders why she cannot give birth to a son. She does not know where she went wrong. Could some woman with an evil eye have ‘hidden her uterus!’ she wondered.

Okanya’s mother would have been the first suspect, but she was dead.
Abeso yearned for a son to look after her daughters in case the parents died. “A brother was most important. When a girl married, her brother was guaranteed to get married because he needed the dowry to marry as well.”

Amollo, in A Season of Mirth, visits such societal vices as domestic violence, male chauvinism and retrogressive superstitions. She also emphasizes the importance of girl child education.

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