Revisiting Kagayi’s Arrest The Poem

On August 25, 2018, a verse drama punctuated by a comedy of manners was staged at the National Theatre by the poetry group Kitara Nation. It was by turns insightful, irreverent, intelligent and incorrigibly naughty. My senses were held in thralldom to it all night. Yes, it was that captivating. In fact, it packed such a powerful performance that The National Theatre banned it from being staged there again!

Although its political message was coated in spun-sugared dialogue and sweet-speak poetry, the authorities were seemingly alerted to a threat of diabetes. This is regrettable. The powers that be had seemed, on that rather cold night in 2018, to forget that it is the unactable that always occurs and that art portrays this so that amity instead of enmity plays out in real life. When we try to stifle such art, all we are left with is eulogy or words of praise for the government and our own dire straits. And, we all know, eulogy is poetry that’s best suited to elegy…poetry about death.

To be sure, the government and the country die when art is prohibited and freedom becomes a love that dare not speak its name. That’s why poetic license is there to liberate artists from chains that are everywhere around us. Love and freedom are not mere upper and lower case abstractions, they are flesh-and-blood notions of how we must live or die. Sure, it is understood by all that Arrest the Poem got between the dog and its bark, as it were. However, if the authorities were not so blinkered in their enthusiasms they would have seen that the play showed how sin is evenly distributed around society.

And such intensely human sin is a disease for in need of a cure and not a crime for punishment. I repeat: Arrest the Poem did not assail government alone, it assailed our whole society. It was American poet Robert Frost who said that poets have a lover’s quarrel with the world, so Arrest the Poem cleaved to this affirmation.

Good art, the world over, lampoons and satirizes the failings of man and man-made institutions like values, culture and, yes, government when it creates inhuman and inhabitable systems for humans. Artistically, Arrest the Poem’s strength lies in its ballad narrative: its words sing home-truths into eternal exhortations for us to do better. Or, at the very least, not repeat the wrongs we continue to repeat. It is the cry of Ignatius Musaazi and not the Song of Lawino.

As it demands for a Uganda that is not a sum of its parts, but a destiny we must embrace as one. Besides, good poetry falls between propaganda and propriety. And Arrest the Poem filled out this description, and then some. Our great Kitara Poets show you how to wear handcuffs like they're manacles that belong to royalty. The pen in one hand and the amandla in the other, as Ngobi Kagayi, the leader of Kitara Nation and author of Arrest The Poem, says.