Preface to Poems From A Civil WAr

ALMOST EVERYTHING HAS BEEN TRIED in the attempts to stop the war in northern Uganda. The Acholi people, those within the homeland themselves, under their various leaders, have been the main advocates of an end to the Kony insurgency. Non-governmental organisations, churches, and local public leaders also joined the in seeking an end to this troubled region of Uganda.

It is now two decades since the war started, and there seem to be no closure to the tragedy.

This volume of poetry consists of 12 short poems and the longer poem, A Time for Peace, which are a result of my own reflection and response to this disaster affecting my own people the Acholi. Thematically, the poems are complete in themselves: they are reflections from my experiences and understanding of the war.

They are also part of a larger issue – mainly, the idea of pursuing the realisation of liberty and peace in place of the continuing strife and abject human suffering.

Secondly, this collection of poems is also a means of drawing attention to the need for the intellectual re-examination of the plight of the Acholi, by Acholi thinkers and intellectuals themselves, as people who have a practical and immediate interest in the matter themselves. Let them be at the forefront of unearthing the roots of the problem that has so far resisted illumination.

Something is wrong somewhere.Otherwise, twenty years is too long for the Kony phenomenon to have persisted without it being extinguished. My conviction is that Acholi intellectuals have been too random, muted or distant in the manner they have tackled the challenge of examining and systematically publishing their ideas and findings concerning the tragedy. There are no popularised revelations distilled from careful, incisive study done as a service to the people in Acholi facing the displacements, hardships, dilemma, and terror, and to the people of Uganda, who are mystified by the intractability of the war.

Again, from another perspective, certain of us in the nation have been holding certain standpoints, futile positions, and parading them as the solutions for our plight. And our failure to resolve this human tragedy remains. We refuse to look at alternatives, especially through careful investigations and searching, through listening to the earnest appeals and counsel of people in the eye of the storm itself, through admitting the underlying defeat we inhabit because we have all these years been pursuing our pet, precious tried and disastrous approach…

But it is a mark of humility, that great facilitator of success and true victory, if we could admit that there has been fatal errors in the ways we are governed our societies and – especially in rule and authority, that our attitude towards this particular constituency we are ruling over has been one of selective, even cynical accountability.

It is this change of heart and attitude, this admission of partial culpability, that with help us begin to do right by the people of northern Uganda.

Time for Peace 1

CHAPTER ONE
New Nation Rising
Utopia, 1986

Harbingers of peace,
garbed in warrior colours
and blood of gore,
here history rinses out
your gathered struggle
and laboured march.

Vindication
is at your door.

And Fate, wide-eyed,
watchful of your steps
tomorrow-wards,
is unselfish of strong hands
at the helm of large visions,

And checking wayward errands
veering from paths and targets
hope does cherish,

Keeps the stark intent.

So now appease the solemn
gathering of this hour:
of hope rekindled, of expectations
and aspiration myriad and divergent,
enflowered,

Vanquishing hidden suspicions
and defensiveness abroad,
and proffer soothing balms of brotherhood,
embracing every heart.

For now, you are no longer disciples,
but temporary priest of tranquility,
doctors and architects of healing
and newness, started
from this beginning for all to grow on,
as a new nation rising.

Proceed.

Time for Peace 2

CHAPTER TWO
The Falling Out
Acholi ex-UNLF and tribemates, brief refugees,
return from southern Sudan 1986- 87.

Back from the flight, diffident,
accepting of defeat,
they emerged at the edge
of this new threshold, and
willed the return to the land:
subdued compatriots coming
to the feast -

And were met by conquerors,
custodians of this dawn’s promise,
who saw in them, not these
stragglers of humbled citizens,
but the very enemies before,

And singed a multitude of hearts
of all hope in the haughty
flame of their enthronement,
satisfied more to have
adversaries long gone, than
a people needing embraced.

Ah. Perhaps victors’ contempt
are always badly veiled, and
visions cloud when, puffed-up
and star-stuck,
their avocation timbre begins,
too early, to darken,
and they recourse to bouts of
ominous gaffes and vanity’s
intemperate proclamations:

‘Learn secrets of the vanquished,
thou brutes! And the wrath
of unrequited vengeance thereof!’

* * *

So outsiders they became,
perennially unforgiven,
with a new master,

But no friends,
and turning rhetorical, they asked:
‘Whose bloodline and dignity, then,
reigns to heal in a land partisan
and bare of the corporeal intent?’ And
rebelled,

Dropping low,
criss-crossing to the bush,
out of sight; reversing tactics
and hurling indignations,
relinquished accomplishments remembered
of the art of war; belligerence
abroad, itinerant show of force.

And the people remaining behind,
out in the open, saw the grievance
in their action, and the logic of it,
and aligned themselves with their own blood,
together keeping count and reckoning

Against alien retribution.

Time for Peace 4

CHAPTER FOUR
Ogre
The Kony phenomenon

What were they
but a rabble of simple minds
now left in the lurch
by their betters?

But armed with a recourse
to familiar spirits, and a
skewed, encrusted, crucifix
religion, they stormed
the helm of the uprising
left open by peace-seekers
departing:

Stragglers, they become
honed weapons;
often merely sensational -
bemusing but dangerous witchdoctors
and sorceress frighteningly abroad -
yet betraying robust exploits
and game feats in skirmishes
galore, astounding enemies
across gun-sights and muzzle-fire.

But they were a freak
infestation gathering terror
and frenzy around the people,

Blasphemous, a three-pronged
metamorphosis unfolding:
beyond the magic water,
shea-butter oil bullet-proofing
and slander of the Trinity,

They conjured, around
their personas, apparitions of
grim reapers emerging from the
smoke of war....

Still from the debacle
of Kona Kilak and the
sizzling campaign that fizzled out
in an Iganga cane plantation,
two went down ; but there is
the one to go -
still going strong,
flouting the pattern,
incestuous and cannibal in his
belligerence, inexorable in
demon intent.

He laid waste upon
his own people, his own land,
having neither pause nor vision;
veering an uprising from
reason’s gate to the realm
of unhope, insurfeit.

Murderer! Who calls his
priesthood a salvation, this
slaver who maims and
abducts of his own
far from the enemies front?
Let him go!

Again: there is still
the one to go - Let him go!

Time for Peace 3

CHAPTER THREE
Of Predators and Victims
The hidden challenge of nationhood.

For theirs was not visions
and grand designs
to sway ordinary yearnings,
but an embodiment of a need
collective, spawned in manifold
grieving corners of the
greater neighbourhood, waiting
to be heard, equally unrequited,

Proven when, heartfelt,
they admitted to the truce
and the pact of diplomacy
and the dotted line,
abandoning the momentum of
the crunch of war in mid-pique,
willing again.

And so, in pockets and groups
they quickly came back, but
graduating via the theatrics
of peace talks, tall demands
and the lavish five-star highlife
and effervescent government-paid
privileges, to a horse-traded peace.

In a year or so
the rout was complete:
absorbed, disbanded, fled
they, the core original
came back home.

But the new comradeship,
Oblivious in its shallow settlement,
Left a freak infestation
Gathering terror and frenzy
Around the people.

* * * *

The need collective:
Searching for some outlet,
For respite, some relief
- vindication even - in sea of
Apprehension and bottled anguished…

Instead, in some dark year
on their way out, a people
are plucked for their unwanted
turn downward, keeping
tradition, as another finds
their way up, at the helm.

But truly,
the need, for each people,
is to live
without secret proscriptions
by any rulership,
and become one among equals,
each brandishing individual aspirations
in broad daylight,
and all satisfied together.

But they are victims both,
the victor and the defeated,
of a larger conspiracy, deeper
than their jostling partisan insights,
and the father of their unhappiness:

Chameleon enemy

* * * *
Bickering is now
the main battle, and
parochial visions proliferate,
borne on the back
of a truce of ignorance
each new season:

Through some baleful roulettes,
jockeying, small victories
and heavy-handed triumphs,
and the influence of power, too,

Each train is engaged in partial diagnosis and
anaemic answers - waylaid
by unanalyzed limitations,
hobbled by hidden contradictions,
and (unsuspecting),
tailgated by smuggled-in subjectivity:

Not merely out of malice,
that pervasive motivator,
but as blind guardians aware
only of their own progress and safety,
blithe and blameless.

Time for Peace 5

CHAPTER FIVE
Crossfire
....as the elephants fight.

Were they enemies, then,
these hapless children and
trapped youth cowering in the bosom
of enfeebled elders?

What collaborations and
conspiracies abroad
are they guilty of, these innocents,
faint clued to the gravity
of patriotics, treason-prone?

Are they doubly damned, merely,
with their blared identities of
patriots and traitors interchangeable,
fit only for refuge in those innumerable
camps’ congestion, seeming protected
and soon enough parched
from a dearth of grains, a
shortage of healing hands,
and life in common unraveled?
Where brief showing by conscript
acolytes of death, sudden like
earthquakes, prowl?

Conscripts! -
Perplexed contributors
to the futile reckoning!

A litany of unbeing;
in pain, bowed:
Dazed enactment of the day’s
effaced routines.

Time for Peace 6 & 7

CHAPTER SIX
A Time for Peace
Today

Enough. Uphold the day’s
baton resolve - and let us marshal
a kindred peace as perennial
as this present overcast.

Sweep under the ignominy;
monument the carnage, if you must,
until shame whisks it away.
And in its wake, revealed,
new secrets and patient
formulas discovered, distilled from
blood-gore.

A time for peace a-brewing...



CHAPTER SEVEN
Nation Rising
Yesterday, today, tomorrow.

Heritage is a spread
of initial ballast.

What if, workman-like,
we add to it the vagaries
of modern wisdom and
this new family-hood thrust upon
our peoples by foreign hands?
Phoenix- winged,
eclectic fusion of soils:
propitious, restrained…

Why, it is a nation rising.

C&C 1

The Father’s Son

A child’s growth
On the upward pole
Sun-reaching, a vine
Entwined

Bud-tender still

Soon daring the teaching strains
Of wind-blasts, swamped in flood rains
Later to root in baked earth, blistered
Groping tendrils toughening; now

Half-grasping,

Of discerning allegiance to legacies
Long-rooted. Of lineage, of blood and water
A child needs awaken to, established;

All-grasping. Only then

The Child’s urgent honouring: unfurling
Psalms of petals sun-ward, fragrance in the wind;
Leaf-cups for rain in supplication;
Fruitlings for dark soil
And the fertile giving of teeming peat.

Tendril-coils around the pole, gently

Always.
And posterity in seed-pods
Awaiting turn...

C&C 2

The Bride and Groom

My borders, then
Are a flexible brief, permeable
Tuned to love’s demands,
Heeds what cavernous wants
Need filling.

I welcome you
Within the buoyant shields
Of my joyous abandon,
And make your innermost
My ministration.

So come when you will
And give wings to your needs.
I will wait on you devoted,
Always...

C&C 3

Loyalty

Faithfully we treasure what gifts
Of loving attention
Are showered upon our bosom:

This greatness of sheer pain,
This wanting to repair,
These tears and entreaty, to
Converge and heal - they all protest cessation.
So we look to one another, mutual
Demands never draining to a drought.

Yes, we are strong together;
Family enough to seek gentler sympathies
Together, in quieter places, less
Flighty times…

C&C 4&5

Paradise

Goodness flows down
from clouds of largesse;
it rains down to soil,
down to the bed of seeds
for germination. And so
this love is a tender plant
in our embrace.

If I wrap my arms
around you, I watch the leaves
of our love unfold, spreading
to hold dew-drops of goodness.
and in days passing, and
many months, as the years
seals us stronger together,

our love entwined becomes
a shade for our kindred hearts,
bearing flowers and fruits of
the union. We shall trim
the hedge of our garden of delight,
growing ancient together,

under the shadow
of the Almighty.




Life

Harmony is here already, complete,
in the primitive’s careful ear
of the heart,

engaging in life’s smooth variation
of seasons - of Spirit,
tribe and earth.

Upheaval 1

A Rational Mess


Imperial Rome’s decadence,
In line towing the precedence of Greece:
Finessed figures in marble; strong heights;
The grandeur of patient brick-and-mortar...

Do you see the barren heritage we keep,
This fermenting civilisation?

Continuity, this burden,
Bleeds witness to cell dichotomy:
Conflicts in disaster-stances spawned
Endlessly, unbidden…

Upheaval 2

Independence


Independence, I remember
Was midnight, and a royalty swaying
The regal dirge, her union jack spent.

Midnight, I remember
Was a virgin flag fluttering, awash
In peals of ojili, hoarse joy, too
Well-wisher in tow, paraded that same night.

Opportunists and late abortionists
Bearing forceps and scarpnels -but were not
These gifts to deform the child’s future?

Independence? Why, it s midnight!
What other depths do you require?
It is the begging owl - and
The begging bowl is black!

Cash- crops and no dollar yields
Move to the left, flee to the right
And still manured dead - center

It is so hard, so damning easy
To sleep at midnight.

Independence is slavery still
And slaves are planting fields:
Time’s room for funereal jokes,
Abrupt endings.

I keep my flag at half-mast,
Keep the wake through my midnight,
Steeling myself for the coming dawn.

Upheaval 3

Civil War

Reality is lead-sown silences
Silent screams prostrated.

Highways and dust-blown by-ways
Hide submerged roadblocks - details
Of sharpnels to frisk bones and bodies -
And lives heave on tarmac, half-burnt,
Scattered meat for birds of prey and
Soldier ants...

Farmlands keep,
Not merely life-giving harvests, but
Utopian brigands, too, obstructing life.
Death sulks in camouflage and
Bush habits - Part the leaves, brother
And dive to mildew cover!

Later, gaping
A swollen stillness, abandoned.

The streets grow silent at dusk
And soon the night’s darkness shields
Marauders at your door - and a bursting
Overhang to light up your solace, and
Smother you deeper to sleep...

Observe,
We hide our shades of knowledge
Within deeds of a dark rashness,
This generation’s quest for longevity,
Ever mocking all,
Of a precipitous dare to survive…

Upheaval 4

Butcher’s Rendezvous

By noontide’s stark heat
They razed through villages, single file.

In places, events proved diverting:
They laved their hands in
Pools from blood-pours, juggling
Intervals on the gun.

They tripped matchsticks on thatches
Leaving homesteads a-fire - and
Pebbles of lead stole the still silence
With crippling rings in the air.

But later,
It proved a lifetime for them
-A summary life span
When Patiko bared her secrets
In dense colours:

Moving shades of green
Stitched to stretching grays;
Brief reds, flashes of orange.
Erupting fields and dropped bodies
Flapping on blackened air,
Lost to acid breaths and souls
Beyond retrieving



-While
Palm-branches, blasted, dart haywire
On savannah stretches;
Referees to the feast of feuds...

O Patiko was choice place
For maddened skirmishes this day -

Gunsights and bleeding bayonets,
Shattered bellows from failing men
And unfailing mortar loads.
Brothers gave all that day...

And there was no room for
Mothers there, or fetching daughters;
No harnessed recluses, whether the dreamer’s
Monologue, whether of greenness of age.
The moment reeked of entrapment,
Lived, action clear - Beyond vague wants
And unweaned fulfillment:

They fitted death immediately,
Dying quickly....

Upheaval 5

Distress

Maniacs mob me when still
I itch to live. I run scared, for
Couriers of drowning, these
Recurrent brigands, dispense not
Mere dunking, but the rituals of
Weighed winding-sheets at waterbed.

There is no quenching of need here
For the fear smashed, when
All around is marshland;
No salvaging of vision
For the thought-dispossessed:

Only gathered sprays of red
To abate monsters of the over-board...

Upheaval 6

Disaffection

Indian shop architecture age,
while mango trees continue evergreen
in the dust and heat;

the small town,
almost-desert in dry season,
squirm from the dark, forced-fed
panacea of imported systems, past and present.

And sealed to balk the bullying
and entrapment of alien greed,
the district seat yielded to the mantra
of the vote, conspiratorial,
mediating survival.

Instant in the ballot’s guise,
Enslavement’s variation execute
king’s and subjects’ diffusion,

milking the land’s reaping, its real intent,
in buyers’ sleight-of-price purchasing,

while the Bank recycles
deft subterfuge for premium profits,

and publishes writs of fresh servitude
in goal to a mass of faceless debtors.

Upheaval 7

Slum

Their ambition lived,
less of sadness and self-pity,
than to quench the pain,
soothe the bruises of neglect,
of each days’ offering

earning the day’s bread.

And I joined in their reprieve
of self-sufficiency in desolation,
gleaning life from simple
continuance:

And later at night,
we settled to noise-some
rejuvenation

before repose.

Misc. 2

Fallen Generations

Fresh from the womb and into
The rush, weaving with the tide,
Mainstream,

A stubborn claw dripping forth,
Insatiate on yesterday’s preyed inferiors.

The cesspool overflow,
Smeared today a clinging membrane,
Choking injuries’ steadfast pervasion
On daylight pedestals.

A stranglehold on corporate butter,
Nimble, spraying haughty opulence
In trade-room rececces,
Casting spells of insurfeit greed in
Tiny pockets all round.

The loanshark’s knee in your groin, and a
Switchblade’s leer over your navel:
Conan’s grin to eternal beggers.

The die-cast power-caste, above all.
The spider’s waiting crouch; the morgue;
The shackles; the tit-bit for your gut;
The septic fabrics for your nakedness.

A secretive seed
Racing womb-paths to consummation,
Predatory.

Misc. 1

The Sheperd

If we have no-one to turn to

If we wallow in the wayside
Of the spring
With no-one to lead us
To the center

To the very heart of this brook
Where few are
And all should belong

Someone from amongst us
Shall rise up
To lead us to the refreshing

And keep us there

Misc. 3

Warlord

− The mad aspirant kneels murder-scouts
To new grasps of carnage,
Baptised to blood-letting,
Turned hunters of blameless targets
Amidst the mob motley.

Who dares the mad listing
Of sweeping carnage, then?

Misc. 4

Empire

Vaults of affluent glee:
Hoards of gold to snare
Sumptuous mounds…

Behold, suddenly
The pyramid careens in time’s
Unfolding, top-heavy with the booty,
Predatory.

− And there are bled prostrations
To speak of − Millions of wrecked
Bondsmen in sacrificial routines…