Ngwatilo

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Ngwatilo at Stockholm Poetry Festival 2009!!

On November 3rd, Ngwatilo shall be in Stockholm for the 13th Stockholm Poetry Festival 2009. I’ll perform/read   alongside Wambui Mwangi (Dr.) and Shailja Patel, talk about Kenyans being fabulous across the seas! We’ll also be reading among some fabulous Swedish writers, I’ll update this info as we go along… exciting stuff!!

And what’s the theme?

An Evening In Three Love Acts

We, the featured poets, have been asked to:

read something you have written about love; a big word that you are free to interpret as you wish.

Interesting… I’ll let y’all know how it goes…

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Poem for a Census and a Forecast (The Star: 1.09.09)

i
My government wants to know if I live, if I am dead.
My government wants to know what I do for a living,
how many hours I work. It counts my offspring
my livestock my radio my mobile phone. It wants to know
my tribe, the place I was born, if I own a fridge. My fridge
shall help my government plan what to do with bodies and carcasses

ii
when El Niño comes. My government will be in control
it is telling me what to do in good time and meanwhile
I work and pray. For my government is planning
to collect the coming rain so that there shall be food
for the year and enough to store and no one
shall drown. In fact we shall not need a Red Cross or Crescent
to mark our homes for the Angel of Death because we are righteous
at peace with God with each other with nature so no one will die.
My government is steadfast; it does the right thing.

iii
my government is a man,
a giant who speaks every tongue:
he sings to my hair,
it grows long and shiny;

he inspires my hands and feet,
they are calloused with purpose;
he speaks the language of the drum for my hips,
I move like time – if she were a black woman;

he calms the quiver of my breast, even if it
spreads to my bones when there is danger;
he sedates my mind with language
and I am saved for his own hell.

all poems by ngwatilo mawiyoo unless otherwise stated. 

(c) Ngwatilo Mawiyoo 2009

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We Decided To Plant Trees (The Star 24.08.09)

to plant blue gum trees because they would sell to the power
company, because it would help the environment, to plant,
even if we replaced the ones God planted – destroy them -
to make farms for profitable fashionable green things, like maize
and coffee, neglecting and forgetting the plants we grew before,
the trees that just breathed while gnarled and twisted,
which kept us and our rivers. We believe that God doesn’t mind
anything we do, as long as we pray and fast by design
or hunger; as long as we plant trees and work the land, careless
to study it, as if we live on the edge of Eden.

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Eulogy for a Pothole (The Star 17.08.09)

The pothole is gone; the one I hit once
and remembered every other trip home,
knowing it was there when I passed
like a road sign. It’s been      recarpeted–
by the Chinese, mum says, only they
will fix a road in a day.

I drive over the spot to celebrate and mourn,
the same way you scatter soil over a coffin
before they cover it and leave you to collect yourself.
I thought the scar could not fade, even while they recarpeted
and paved and drained and lit the road to the UN.
I wish I had a picture of the hole to show, to remind myself,
because the story will be dull next week. Suddenly

it seems possible that Ngong road will become a dual carriageway,
that the pothole-cum dam opposite St. John’s Church in Pumwani,
on the California side just inside the T-junction will, in my lifetime,
lie under gleaming tarmac – no longer a marker for motorists. If I possess
some clout on that day, I shall like to name the street  “Old Calif Dam Way,”
so it will be possible to tell and retell the story.

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Letting Michael Go

It’s fascinating how Kenyans responded to the news of Michael Jackson’s dramatic final exit, not on stage right or stage left but as if through a hidden trap door just off centre.

We celebrated and mourned him in earnest. In Nairobi a friend and local entertainment writer organized a communal moonwalk downtown; one of the presenters on a local Christian music station was heard reminding listeners that MJ wasn’t in their playlist and wouldn’t be getting on it; music stores and bootleg CD and DVD sellers did some brisk business on Michael Jackson merchandise, in a country where hardly anything musical ever “sells out” or sells at all in any newsworthy sort of way.

The level of activity and awareness is fascinating because the only other people in Kenya’s history to be so actively and universally mourned by Kenyans were politicians and freedom fighters. Certainly, no artist of any kind has ever held the country’s attention so completely in death, even though we have lost a few bright stars. Perhaps it is that we enjoyed his gifts so casually and so deeply for so many years.

We easily forgave his misplacement of African places and languages, we were glad to hear ourselves at all in Liberian Girl, which featured a female Kiswahili speaking voice crooning “nakupenda pia, nakutaka pia.” Never mind that Liberia has nothing to do with Kiswahili. Now we can argue that despite the fact that “Liberian” had the requisite number of syllables to make the hook work, and ‘L’ is admittedly a sexier consonant than “K,” none of Liberia’s languages sound nearly as sexy as Kiswahili. Suddenly we had another reason to love our collective self more.

What’s slightly awkward about the timing of all of this was the heightened awareness of child abuse, molestation and sodomy in Kenya. It may be argued that parents in Kenya are a bit careless with their kids, perhaps an aftereffect from a moment when children belonged to the community rather than solely to their parents and guardians. But now we contend with a barrage of reports detailing the assault and exploitation of our children as if a child-molesting demon has just been released in Kenya. We are suddenly awake to the idea that we need to guard our children, need to be concerned about their caregivers, friends and movements.

It’s also followed that anyone accused of such crimes is presumed guilty.

Although Kenyans know Jackson was acquitted of the charges brought against him in 2003, we never quite gave him the benefit of the doubt and at the same time, refused to ponder over his case in any depth with our very religious consciences. It was easier and more interesting to live with his issues unresolved including the fact of his vitiligo and lupus, which were public knowledge but have never prevented anyone from speculating further about his appearance.

That is, until now, when it doesn’t matter any more and all the world has of Michael Jackson is a handful of public statements and interviews, what Wikipedia says, his records, music videos and concert footage, and our memories of how his music marked the moments and events of our lives.

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As You Say (Not Without Sadness), Poets Don’t See, They Feel

By Karl Shapiro

As you say, (not without sadness), poets don’t see, they feel. And that’s why people who have turned to feelers seem like poets. Why Children seem poetic. Why when the sap rises in the adolescent heart the young write poetry. Why great catastrophes are stated in verse. Why lunatics are named for the moon. Yet poetry isn’t feeling with the hands. A poem is not a kiss. Poems are what ideas feel like. Ideas on Sunday, thoughts on vacation.

Poets don’t see, they feel. They are conductors of the senses of men, as teachers and preachers are the insulators. The poets go up and feel the insulators. Now and again they feel the wrong thing and are thrown through a wall by a million-volt shock. All insulation makes the poet anxious. Clothes, strait jackets, iambic five. He pulls at the seams like a boy whose trousers are cutting him in half. Poets think along the electric currents. The words are constantly not making sense when he reads. He flunks economics, logic, history. Then he describes what it feels like to flunk economics, logic, history. After that he feels better.

People say: it is sad to see a grown man feeling his way, sad to see a man so naked, desireless of any defenses. The people walk back into their boxes and triple-lock the doors. When their children begin to read poetry the parents watch them from the corner of their eye. It’s only a phase, they aver. Parents like the word “aver” though they don’t use it.

——

This is a re-publish I stole from somewhere I shall not say, but can if you must know. I hope you don’t mind, Karl Shapiro, one day we may workshop together.

I don’t think I need to say anything beyond the piece, unless I were to write a new piece. I wish it was on a great big poster of every poetry event in this city, this poem, then maybe- but that is too much information. Read it and read it again.

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Try To Praise The Mutilated World

by Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Stumbled upon this piece today when i was reading up on Mr Zagajewski. The piece was published on the back page of the NYTimes on the 20th of September 2001 or thereabouts, just 2 seconds after 9/11. Quite a beautiful poem i think, gentle like, clear, as sad as the real world is but sort of not sad at the same time. hopeful, joyful, Life-ful. It made people feel better, even as it allowed them to feel what they were feeling. well, i don’t know all that, but if that’s not what happened for Adam’s poem, well, then, that’s what I want to happen for Ngwatilo’s poems. there I said it, i have an ego.

It is what I want for my pieces, the ones that people will still want to read and talk about when my voice is croaky, when my eyes have a bunch of wrinkles around them; when I am not there. gentle-like

More about the author: http://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/poem-try-to-praise-the-mutilated-world/

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Get well

When you are well we can walk in the rain
pretend we are young again, that we are willful
enough to splash in puddles. We don’t have to do it really.
We can just smell the rain and the trees and skulk in the black cotton soil-

Come home with me.

(June 18 edit)

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Seeing you

I will try not to look at you funny
I am not perfect either. But when I do
it’s really a question I want to ask
God or Fate. But it’s good to see you.

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Dream house

i saw the house today,
a quaint two bedroomed,
with enough space
for a dinning and lounge.

The bathroom loo had a wonderful flush,
a properly old school bowl and tank
and the tub, in its own room,
imagine a bath without the knock
of a belly full of pee cutting in

Outside was a garden of fully grown trees,
no matter they give nothing to eat.
Oh the peace that rests in these five homes,
in a neighbourhood where men build fifty
to tower high. Bliss is knowing that whatever
they dream, peace is intact here.