Queering the Post-Apocalypse in Three Selected Short Stories by Dilman Dila

Abstract

The Ugandan literary canon is comparable to other regional postcolonial fiction in its obsession with verisimilitude in the representation of nationalist themes, as prominently reflected in the works of eminent Ugandan writers such as Okot p’Bitek, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Moses Isegawa. These authors’ seemingly neat and stable critique of Ugandan society through realistic modes of representation has recently been disrupted by works of contemporary writers who experiment with new forms and themes in their writing. While gender and sexuality have been foregrounded in contemporary Ugandan writing, some authors, such as Innocent Immaculate Achan, Lillian Aujo Akampurira, and Dilman Dila, have tried out sci-fi motifs in their works. In this article, I explore how three of Dila’s short stories—“A Wife and a Slave”, “Two Weddings for Amoit”, and “The Taking of Oleng”—use sci-fi tropes with implicit queer tangents to provide insights into post-Armageddon Ugandan fictional futures. I argue that Ugandan sci-fi texts that feature post-Armageddon settings deploy queerness to interrogate how marginal subjects, who are often depicted as metaphors for the redemptive futurity of their societies, use queerness to articulate the trauma of their exclusion from the social collective.