Obligations to the Wounded

by Mubanga Kalimamukwento

Overview

Winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

Longlist, 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction | Winner, Minnesota Book Awards of 2025 | Winner, 2025 CLMP Firecracker Award | Finalist, 2024 Foreword Indies Award | Co-winner, The Boston Globe's Best 75 Books of 2024 Winner | The Minnesota Star Tribune Best Book of 2024 | Co-winner, Brittle Paper 100 Notable African Books of 2024 | Co-winner, The Continent's Top 5 African Books of 2024

In formally adventurous stories rooted in Zambian literary tradition, Obligations to the Wounded explores the expectations and burdens of womanhood in Zambia and for Zambian women living abroad. The collection converses with global social problems through the depiction of games, social media feuds, letters, and folklore to illustrate how girls and women manage religious expectation, migration, loss of language, death, intimate partner violence, and racial discrimination. Although the women and girls inhabiting these pages are separated geographically and by life stage, their shared burdens, culture, and homeland inextricably link them together in struggle and triumph.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822948360
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/08/2024
Series:	Drue Heinz Literature Prize , #44
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 7.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian attorney and writer. She is the winner of the 2022 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, the ’ Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, and the ’ Kalemba Short Story Prize. Her first novel, The Mourning Bird, was listed among the top fifteen debut books of ’ by Brittle Paper. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in adda, Aster(ix), Overland, the Red Rock Review, Menelique, on Netflix, and elsewhere.
When she’s not writing, Mubanga serves as fiction editor for Doek! and as mentor at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

Editorial Reviews

Rendered in rich, rolling, and riveting prose, Obligations to the Wounded is written with great care, pacing, and hard-won wisdom by one of Africa’s most talented writers. This collection of short stories, which uses Zambian womanhood as its contextual exploration point, offers the reader something approaching a universal understanding of the challenges women face in contemporary African and world societies. With these perspicacious stories, Kalimamukwento has compiled a collection of tales that will shock, awe, and delight readers and lovers of stories wherever they are found. Obligations to the Wounded is the work of a writer in the full flow of her storytelling prowess.

Rémy Ngamije

Kalimamukwento's syntax is as selective as a poet’s, allowing the reader to sit in the spaces so often filled with unnecessary words. Obligations to the Wounded is a sensitive work of compelling juxtapositions: neat and raw, soft and tough, victimized and empowered.

Booklist

Kalimamukwento writes with empathic knowing, deftly treading between resignation and hope. Her enigmatic storytelling underscores that silence is not an option, that bearing witness is obligatory.

Shelf Awareness

These thematically linked stories deliver an intricate study of Zambian women living both in Zambia and abroad who are weighing their options for whom to love, where to live, where to work. The author, with a poet’s restraint, has written stories that deftly negotiate the challenges and tribulations women face when they feel the pressure and duty to yield to the will of family, community, customs, country, and spiritual beliefs. Obligations to the Wounded is a graceful, touching, and generous collection.

Angie Cruz

Timely and at times wrenching stories about contemporary Zambian women fighting to establish their identities.

Kirkus

Obligations to the Wounded is extraordinary—a powerhouse collection of stories that give voice to a dozen Zambian girls and women. Mubanga Kalimamukwento’s prose crackles with sharp observations and searing images. Her characters sing their truths, listing the horrors of misogyny—yet she empowers rather than victimizes them via her loving lens and protective fury. A stunning book that should not be missed!

Mona Susan Power

a searing and hilarious collection

Minnesota Star-Tribune

In this innovative collection, Mubanga Kalimamukwento finds mesmerizing new ways to tell the stories of women navigating a world that is pitched against them. Each story is a deftly realized portrait of a woman insisting on her individual humanity while contending with the expectations of her family, community, religion, and history. Moving elegantly across decades and continents, Obligations to the Wounded showcases a rare talent and rich sensibility.

Mike Alberti

In this innovative collection, Mubanga Kalimamukwento finds mesmerizing new ways to tell the stories of women navigating a world that is pitched against them. Each story is a deftly realized portrait of a woman insisting on her individual humanity while contending with the expectations of her family, community, religion, and history. Moving elegantly across decades and continents, Obligations to the Wounded showcases a rare talent and rich sensibility.”
 
—Mike Alberti, author of Some People Let You Down
 

“Rendered in rich, rolling, and riveting prose, Obligations to the Wounded is written with great care, pacing, and hard-won wisdom by one of Africa’s most talented writers. This collection of short stories, which uses Zambian womanhood as its contextual exploration point, offers the reader something approaching a universal understanding of the challenges women face in contemporary African and world societies. With these perspicacious stories, Kalimamukwento has compiled a collection of tales that will shock, awe, and delight readers and lovers of stories wherever they are found. Obligations to the Wounded is the work of a writer in the full flow of her storytelling prowess.”
 
—Rémy Ngamije, author of The Eternal Audience of One
 

“Obligations to the Wounded is extraordinary—a powerhouse collection of stories that give voice to a dozen Zambian girls and women. Mubanga Kalimamukwento’s prose crackles with sharp observations and searing images. Her characters sing their truths, listing the horrors of misogyny—yet she empowers rather than victimizes them via her loving lens and protective fury. A stunning book that should not be missed!”
 
—Mona Susan Power, author of A Council of Dolls
 

“These thematically linked stories deliver an intricate study of Zambian women living both in Zambia and abroad who are weighing their options for whom to love, where to live, where to work. The author, with a poet’s restraint, has written stories that deftly negotiate the challenges and tribulations women face when they feel the pressure and duty to yield to the will of family, community, customs, country, and spiritual beliefs. Obligations to the Wounded is a graceful, touching, and generous collection.”
 
—Angie Cruz, Drue Heinz Literature Prize judge and author of How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water
 

From the Publisher

2024-07-04
A debut collection about women living in Zambia and abroad.

Winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Kalimamukwento’s stirring stories explore the lives of women weighing their debts to tradition and family against their desire to break free and express their true selves. In “Azubah,” Funso has to return home to Zambia to care for the mother who never seemed to love her. The past still has a grip on her, even though she believes she has bought her freedom by moving to America and remitting her “Black Tax” with every paycheck to ensure her mother is cared for. In “Inswa,” the young female narrator discovers her sexuality with her best friend, another girl, and would rather endure her mother’s abuse than give up the pleasure she’s found. Kalimamukwento has an eye for the poetic possibility of the natural world. After her first kiss, the narrator says her “stomach exploded into an army of golden flying termites, spilling out of their underground castles after a December storm,” and her ears “filled with bees fighting to escape.” In “Mastitis,” another standout, the narrator loses her mother the same day she gives birth to a daughter, though her mother reappears—an apparition—with sage advice and common sense when the narrator needs her most. This collection covers a lot of ground—from the price of privileging English over one’s native language to the dehumanizing U.S. immigration system, from the AIDS epidemic in Zambia to illegal adoption rings. These are complicated and important issues, but at times it feels like Kalimamukwento is cataloging all the social ills that Zambian women face and the steep cost of global imperialism rather than slowing down and deepening our understanding of the particular women and girls who are emmeshed in these heartbreaking circumstances.

Timely and at times wrenching stories about contemporary Zambian women fighting to establish their identities.

Kirkus Reviews

Obligations to the Wounded deserves immediate attention.

Pittsburgh Quarterly

Obligations to the Wounded is a marvel of a collection. Kalimamukwento joins the likes of Deesha Philyaw, Edwidge Danticat and others whose short stories signaled breaking boundaries of the form and creation of space for a wide range of Black women’s experiences committed to making noises louder, sights sharper, and feelings linger with us.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

These stories! They are opulent, clever, and ingenious.

Debutiful

The stories in Obligations to the Wounded have a universal appeal. Kalimamukwento’s characters face daunting odds while trying to do the right thing, in a way that feels so familiar, so compelling. Everyone can use a little help, human or divine. We feel that obligation, reading these stories.

The Hopkins Review