Judith Namala: A Novella

The Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) is thrilled to announce the publication of Judith Namala: A Novella. Its release marks writer and curator Serubiri Moses’s fiction debut and the launch of a new CARA publication series, Practice.

Judith Namala is an experiment in adaptation, storytelling, and translation as fictocriticism. Set in Ntinda-Kiwatule, a neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, between the late 1970s and early 2000s, the book follows the domestic dramas of Judith Namala, a Black maid, and Esther Nambi, her Black madam. “Some say that the coming of a maid is a ritual. That the family waits patiently in the living room to inspect the maid. Others say that the maid arrives unannounced and without pretext. The house produces maids. As in a factory, the home easily finds its division of labor, its factory workers and supervisors. In the factory, she will become part of the family album,” observes the narrator.

Unfolding across short vignettes, the author’s innovative prose attends to the silences and opacities that mark the distances—and forced proximities—between two characters whose tense relationship is defined by class and social hierarchy. “The story reveals the depth of injustice at the household level, where one woman’s child is abandoned, whilst the children of an elite Kampala household are over-mothered,” remarks poet, playwright, and performer Sitawa Namwalie.

Hovering at the surface of these quiet scenes of servitude, the narrator offers an enigmatic model of interiority—grasped only in passing, where psychic geographies confront and sometimes, surprisingly, mirror one another. “The tension between rural and urban elite women played out like a soap opera in their household,” says the narrator.

Inspired by the late author and journalist Binyavanga Wainaina, who encouraged Moses to write a novel in Luganda and translate it to English, the author spins a story of housework and labor that reaches across forty years of Ugandan history. Drawing on cultural artifacts, art, film, and Moses’s translation of lyrics from a Luganda popular music songbook, Judith Namala threads together references from filmmaker Ousmane Sembène; writers Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid; and musicians Fred Sebatta, Dan Mugula, and Christopher Ssebadduka, among many others.

Poet and filmmaker Ladan Osman calls Judith Namala “a cinematic dressing-down of airs and manners: a collision of tradition, ritual, and other social parameters revealed through imperatives or hauntings.” Written in a unique style informed by oral tradition, folklore, criticism, and reportage, the novella offers an intimate domestic portrait that embraces the poetics of metaphor.

Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Designer: Stoodio Santiago da Silva, Bárbara Acevedo Strange, and Moritz Appich
Copy Editor: Re’al Christian
Printer: KOPA, Lithuania

Specs
ISBN 978-1-954939-09-7 / $18 / Edition of 2,000
Softcover, 6.8 x 4.3 inches, 88 pages

Distribution
Available on CARA’s website and distributed internationally by Artbook | D.A.P.

About Serubiri Moses
Serubiri Moses is a Ugandan curator and author living in New York City. He is the author of two poetry books, THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK and You Who Suffer, Because You Love, Love Still More (pântano books, 2023 and 2025). His poetry and short fiction have appeared in Jalada Africa, Badilisha Poetry Exchange, Kwani?, READ: A Journal of Inter-Translation, Lolwe, and Ursula. Moses is a contributing editor at e-flux journal, and teaches at Hunter College and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. This is his first novel.

About Practice
Judith Namala: A Novella is the first title in CARA’s publication series, Practice. Each season features newly commissioned texts, writing in translation, critical conversations, and rigorous and experimental approaches to research and inquiry that model new ways of thinking and making beyond disciplinary frameworks and genres. The series supports practices that challenge dominant narratives, expand historical records, and foreground process, care, and embodied forms of knowing. In its inaugural year Practice invites writers to engage with histories of material and visual culture to animate their potential for addressing the urgencies and cultural shifts of the present. Forthcoming titles include The Intimate Cinemas of Arlette Pacquit: Conversations between Arlette Pacquit and Nathanaël, translated from the French/Kreyol by Nathanaël, and Subject to Justice by Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz.

Press inquiries: Sam Riehl, Head of Communications, sam@cara-nyc.org