Patience Atuhaire
21 October 2007
book review
TITLE: Jesse's Jewel
AUTHOR: Nick Twinamatsiko
At the age of six, Jesse remembers the day his baby cousin was hit by 'Sabasabas' as war wrecked havoc on his childhood home in Kisana village. For the elders in his village, Jesse was, at the time, too young to remember such a thing. His family brands him 'eccentric', and the village gossip predicts the little boy will become insane if he is not checked at a witchdoctor's.
At about the same time, Jesse develops a strong attachment to his little sister's nurse (maid), Helen, in a way that is beyond even his own understanding. A further 'justification' for his eccentric personality.
Through Jesse's young eyes and mind, we see the extent of the damage of the 1985 Liberation War on rural western Uganda, especially when Mbarara town goes up in
flames. The raging battle leaves hospitals and patients abandoned and Jesse treks six miles seeking to rescue his beloved Helen from the pangs of a pregnancy conceived through rape and the fangs of the war.
From Helen's traumatic past comes an admirable personality that is keen to peculiarities and a jewel on which is engraved, "Peculiar, parts, paths and purpose", a message that Jesse is not even able to read at the time Helen bequeaths the jewel onto him.
Yet, the lessons about peculiarities that Jesse takes at Helen's feet (before she dies in childbirth), plus the message on the jewel seem to enhance Jesse's own zeal
towards everything peculiar that they become his theory and explanations to life.
It is written in the first person with every event in Jesse's life pointing to the author's own that, by the last chapter, the reader can't help but be biased that it is actually the latter's biography. The fact that the author invents a character to tell a story that sounds every bit like his own is one thing to admire about the book.
However, the 156-paged text is one that lacks in editing and a story that lacks in depth. The former because of countless grammatical errors and the latter because the reader would expect more to one's life story than the character's attachments to peculiarities and a heart that leaps at the first sight of every beautiful girl that crosses his path.
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