Aliker Pa Ocitti, the founder of the Aliker Foundation and curator of Gulu’s first slam poetry event. PHOTO | COURTESY | PHILIP MATOGO
Poetry Slam, better known in Uganda as Slam Poetry, was born in Chicago, USA, in November 1984, with the first slam competition being organised by an American poet called Marc Smith.
To lift this genre into the literary stratosphere, Smith repackaged poetry recitals best suited to academia to appeal to a popular audience. Smith brought poetry down from the heights of the Ivory Tower because he felt it was "too structured and stuffy". By doing so, he turned open-microphone poetry readings into slams by introducing the element of competition.
A poetry slam is a competitive art event featuring spoken word artists, who brandish oral bazookas, as it were, before a live audience and a panel of judges. Although this is not carved in stone, slams are characterised by vocabular poets, whose energy feeds off audience participation, which in turn is characterised by cheering as it laps up the poets’ dramatic delivery.
Uganda enjoyed its first poetry slam in 2018, curated by slam poet Mark Gordon and was won by Ivan Agaba, who went by the stage name Zombie at the time.
On December 18 last year, Slam Poetry was launched in Gulu City. It was the first slam poetry for secondary school children. Aliker p’Ocitti, the founder of the Author Aliker Foundation, launched this initiative. At the same time, he launched Gemo Korona; a collection of poems written by students in Gulu City and published by Author Aliker Publishers (AAP).
“The reason why we did this is that there are so many complaints about unscrupulous children in Gulu. When you talk about children in urban centres in Gulu, you are talking about the street children. However [beyond such complaints] you are not providing a platform for good children to do good things. All the children of our generation are hooked to music but I am saying ‘look, if they can love music they can love poetry. They can love creative writing.’ So by providing a holiday makers programme for slam poetry, we are not going to entertain ourselves with music, we are going to entertain ourselves with spoken word,” Aliker says.
He further explains that every activity during that launch was run by children between the ages of 13 and 19. Aliker says he wants the children of the north to compete with children from Kampala. He adds that his foundation is building this indicator around the life and works of Okot p'Bitek, the Ugandan poet who achieved wide international recognition for the Song of Lawino.
Lira versus Gulu
“In 2023, I organised the Author Aliker Prize and I included Lira City. I wanted to have some level of competition between Gulu City and Lira City. I identified 10 schools in Lira and one thing I realised is that we received double the number of poems from schools in Lira yet both Lira had and Gulu had 10 schools each. And when you look at the quality of the poems, Lira is deeper,” he says.
“Historically, Lira has more structures of poetry; they appreciate poetry more. There is something more literary in Lira…something that we do not have in Gulu. In Gulu, we have Bitek and that gives us an identity but the real grassroots structure of poetry is better found in Lira. So if you are to sell a book [in northern Uganda] it is easier for it to be appreciated in Lira than Gulu,” he adds.
Mr Aliker says this reality is largely, thanks to a generation of young teachers who have ensured literature is more pronounced in secondary schools in Lira, with more schools teaching the subject.
“The teachers are also teaching their students to recite poems. This is why their poetry is deeper and their use of poetic tools is much more comprehensive. The best poems recited from northern Uganda come from Lira. Now we are grounded in Gulu, we want to re-engage Lira City and then we re-engage Arua City,” says Aliker.
Kampala-phobia
Aliker further notes that in the north, there is a certain phobia for all things Kampala that must be demystified.
“There is a feeling that you are just going to get cheated. There is a feeling that you are going to lose your work. My foundation is trying to be the bridge between those who want to get published in Gulu and Kampala. We hope in three years, we shall have Lugbara poetry,” he discloses.
He adds: “We are working strictly in schools, working with teachers. This year, we will build the teachers’ profiles in the literary world, training them to become editors, proofreading and to become literary agents because they stay with these children and so they can tell us publishers which children are outstanding, with the support of the children's parents. We want to connect the writer and the reader in a chain of distribution that will nourish the reading culture in Uganda.”
