Recital of current affairs

When it began, I was afraid I had entered the wrong auditorium. I was supposed to be at a recital not a play. The stage was set up to have two grass-thatched houses with people in the “compound,” sweeping and doing all manner of house chores.

It was like a scene in a play, and the two girls who were MCing were definitely not reciting poetry. But I was wrong. The stage was filled with props that were used such that the poems were not just recited but that they were performed as well. It was brilliant.

Collaboration
The students were a mix of Nabisunsa Girls’ School and Kings’ College Budo, from a range of classes and the poetry performed was written mostly by the students themselves.

There were some poems by Lantern Meet poets and others by Maya Angelou. I forgave them for using these poems because they not only gave credit to the poets, but I could never resist a well-performed Maya Angelou poem.

The performance on stage in this two-in-one-day recital was great but that is something that gets better with practice and the students had evidently practiced enough to be heard across clearly. What cannot be practiced that much is the verse.

Yes, writing takes some practice but it also takes an amount of talent and maybe genius to be as creative as the students were when they wrote these poems. Take the example of my favourite poem that night that started “I see them pass by every day, as I sweep the yard…”

The girl that recited it took on the persona of an older woman, who has probably had a couple of children and is a servant. She dressed the part and as she spoke, she swept the stage that did look like a yard. The poem tackles education and the gap it creates between the uneducated and the educated while still giving credibility to the people that have not gone to school.

The poet says, “I know that most of these children do not know some of the things that I do/Maybe some of them do not even know the right taste of goat stew.” I was amazed by the clarity it presented because usually, we will say education is good and to be educated is to know things.

However in this poem, it says education offers something to this servant woman and while she would like to know what the word “respiration” means and would jump at the opportunity, she is also very aware that there are things she knows that the other people despite their education, don’t.

A student thing
There were a lot of love poems because, well, these are high school students. It was mostly with this theme that I was comforted that the students were still young girls and boys, since their verse was alarmingly grown-up and making me think critically on a lot of themes.

This recital was an integration of two schools, several poets, and themes but it was also a wonderful melting pot of styles. Some poems were sang while one was recited in Arabic (it was juxtaposed with a translation).

We left sure of one thing: there was a whole lot of talent in these high schools and for those of us that didn’t write while at this stage, we wondered if we wasted an opportunity.

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