PLATEFORME

This week, the afriCOLOGNE festival hosted the book launch of SPUREN, which was recently published by Theater der Zeit. This anthology brings together nine plays by authors from Benin, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, the Republic of Congo, Senegal, Uganda and the African diaspora. The selected texts tell stories of social change, resistance, identity and memory – sometimes in a poetic and condensed form and sometimes in a direct and confrontational manner. The selection also includes the piece «For My Negativity» by Ugandan poet and performer Kagayi Ngobi (translated by Annette Bühler-Dietrich, Beat Dietrich, and George Seremba). In an email exchange with Frank Weigand, the author speaks about the text’s origins, literary traditions, and why translation means freedom to him.

Frank Weigand: You originally wrote «For My Negativity» as a poem and published it as such. How did the text change for you when it became a performance with you on stage?

Kagayi Ngobi: When I wrote this poem, I had the intention of it being read aloud. I wished it to be vocally visible to the public. Afterall, it was a reaction to another spoken word poem entitled «Negativity» written and performed by a colleague Wake The Poet. In my mind this poem already belonged to the stage before I even placed it on the page. Besides, the ideas it was challenging had been expressed in a similar domain by Wake The Poet. The first time I read it aloud in public the Wake was in the audience.

However, when I decided to perform it in theatre, the theatricalization process changed the ‹performance nature› of the poem. I had to develop a stage script for its life on stage; I collaborated with other artists to develop new elements that would enrich the poetic experience for the viewer and listener of the poem.

For example, we had to develop costumes, props and to make its language and message more tangible. We also developed a soundscape to accompany the recitation. We had to turn the persona of the poem into an actor in essence, we de-poemized the text of the poem to make its poetics more accessible and relatable in the theatre space.

The text deals heavily with the reality of contemporary Uganda and what can and cannot be said there. Do you think its themes can appeal to an audience beyond this context?

Its message is personal but of course its themes are universal. What literature is not? Everywhere I have performed it, it speaks differently to the audiences I meet. The themes of corruption, Identity, coloniality, language, power, democracy among others that the poem tackles find home in many hearts of the various audiences it has been staged before. If there is anything this poem has proved to me, it is that literature is a universal language.

«For My Negativity» deals with the protagonist’s ambivalent attitude towards the English language, the language of the colonisers. You yourself are multilingual. How does the text change when you write it in another language, and are there feelings or concepts that you can express better in one language than in another?

Honestly I do not know. When I wrote the poem, I intended it to directly speak to the problematic ambivalence of the English language as a colonial language in a post colonial reality. So English is not just a vehicle for the message, but also the defendant in this poetic case the persona makes. Also the poem is multilingual… a translation of it to one language would affect its general character.

However, I believe that the experience of the poem can be aptly translated and transliterated to any performance context without the burden of Ugandanizing its lived experience. The fluidity in and flexibility of its performable qualities makes it a possibility to be adaptable to any language of any setting.

Your play quotes literary models such as «The Song of Lawino» by Okot p’Bitek. How important is it for you to situate yourself in an artistic and literary tradition?

Literature is always in conversation with itself, whether we know it or not. Yet it is possible for generations to make the faces of artists hollow and their literature invisible. For me it is important to acknowledge that I am planting the pillars of my poetic language on a poetic foundation that was already laid by other writers who wrote and performed before me, thereby leaving a blueprint for poets of my generation to continue doing the work that they had already begun. The work of using literature as a tool to speak truth to power.

As a poet for whom every word is important, how do you feel about the experience of being translated? Do you see it as something positive or as an unpleasant loss of control?

Translation is a positive and pleasant experience I enjoy. For in it my work gets to have a life of its own, living true in the freedom of expression that I crave. If I write to liberate myself from the chains of oppression that I feel around me, imagine the joy in my heart when my words are freed from my context to live with others and in the experience of a different expression.

I do not need the control of my words when translation is freedom they need to live beyond me.

Kagayi Ngobi is a Ugandan poet, playwright, performer and publisher with Kitara Nation. A former lawyer, he gave up his legal career to concentrate on writing, performing and publishing poetry which are his passions. The author of four poetry collections and 6 stage plays, a vast number of his works have been performed in various theater festivals in Uganda, Africa, America and Europe. Kagayi has been featured at the africologneFESTIVAL in 2017 (The Audience Must Say Amen), 2021 (Romeo & Juliet in Kampala) and 2023 (For My Negativity). His plays ‹Arrest The Poem!› (2018) and ‹For My Negativity› (2022) are currently banned from being staged at the Uganda National Theatre for being «too political». Kagayi lives in Seguku-Katale, Uganda.