• It revolves around rural girls and their physical, cultural, emotional, social challenges
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Awadifo Kili, Echoes of Wails. Kampala: African Capricorn Publishers, 2020. 58pp
In East Africa, from the dawn of independence to the present, Ugandan authors have distinguished themselves in poetry as remarkably as have Kenyan authors in prose fiction.
Through memorable books from poets like Okot p’Bitek (Song of Lawino) and Timothy Wangusa (Anthem for Africa), our eastern neighbour is a poetry bastion in this region.
Among the female poets, Kenyans know Susan Kiguli as a major East African poet today. Her pearly poetic offerings include Home Floats in the Distance (2012) and The African Saga (1998) published by Femrite.
Femrite is the Association of Ugandan Women Writers. It has been a central force in the growth and development of Ugandan literature by female authors in recent decades.
Almost all Ugandan women writers of note, such as Goretti Kyomuhendo, Mary Okurut and Kiguli herself, belong to the association. It is in this gynocritical backdrop that readers should receive a new Ugandan poetess whose debut work, Echoes of Wails, appeared late last year.
Awadifo Kili is a young talented bard from Northwestern Uganda, a daughter of the Lugbara, a community known for its rich Sudanic heritage.
Born on March 1, 1998, Kili is the product of the legacy of her paternal grandfather Brigadier Barnabas Kili, who was Uganda’s Minister of Education in the 1970s.
Out of a remote region and community where the girl child faces tough challenges accessing education, she is a beacon for many of her generation and older.
This explains her self-definition as a human rights activist with a keen focus on the plight of African girls and literacy. Her passion for social justice has seen her go beyond poetry to pursue law at Makerere.
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Echoes of Wails is a bilingual collection of 23 pearly poems appearing in English (p. 2-9) and French (p. 33-57). A brief glossary appears on page 58, translating Lugbarati words from her native tongue. Lugbarati and Lugbara folklore offer pillars of aesthetics to her poems.
It is dedicated to the African girl child, who faces unique risks, and is tied in between human rights violations. The poems gathered here are voices meant to capture the spirit of the pastoralist girl child of East Africa and beyond.
The poems cover a sweeping array of thematic concerns revolving around rural African girls and their physical, cultural, emotional and social challenges. Speaking to the Star, Kili said: “Through poetry, I managed to write down to address their human rights concerns, blossoming fresh hopes in them through empowerment, promoting their education and raising a generation of young girls who know who they are.”
The first poem of the book reminds one of the famous classic from Lamu called 'Utendi wa Mwana Kupona', written by the Swahili poetess Binti Msham, who died in 1865. It is about maternal lessons of life to a girl who has come of age in a fast-changing world full of human hyenas.
In the second poem titled “The Marital Yoke”, marriage is praised as a firm institution of society, but caution is given where it becomes a death trap or a cage of pain for many an African girl married young. The poet says: Unsound policies perpetuated by tradition/ Ruined our generation. Many girls are reared for the marital yoke/They suffer the trauma in silence (p. 8).
Other poems tackle issues such as virtue, rape, black woman, human trafficking, war — a motif that has haunted northern Uganda for decades, if one remembers the atrocities of Joseph Kony and the LRA.
In the titular poem, “Loud Wails”, seven stanzas of a narrative poem give us gory details in high imagery of the process of FGM. (p. 13-15). We are told that: Female genital torture is a cousin of death/ An usher at the gates of graves/ Who welcomes women to places of eternal rest?
And in yet another one, blame is apportioned to the conservative among the womenfolk, who are purveyors of retrogressive cultural practices that afflict the girl child in Africa today. Titled, “The Traditional Healer”, abortion is its central idea.
The ones she sent to the house of the dead/ Fill her atmosphere with loud cries. And for this, she will be judged on earth/ And fall under God's umbrella of justice. (p. 16-17).
The social pathologies bred by womenfolk against their ilk appear in the last poem, titled “Sister Hopeless”. It offers a vivid description on how domestically violated women project their hurt on their own offspring. The persona has attained a “chiselled heart box” and as “a millet acre slave”, she is now the tormentor of her own brood.
The desire of this youthful voice of reason is to lay bare afresh, through verse, vignettes from Northern Uganda that offer a grammar for teenage pregnancies during this pandemic, forced marriages, menstrual stigma and female genital mutilation.
Since the launch of Echoes of Wails, Kili has held her campaigns on radio and her social media platforms. Her book was first reviewed on October 11 last year in the Daily Monitor, a prominent Ugandan Newspaper, during the International Day of the Girl Child. In light of the just-ended International Women's Month of March, I recommend this poet and her new book to the public.
A copy of the book can be obtained from the author directly at: [email protected]