Book Review: Ronald Ssekajja’s Echoes of Tired Men is poetry with ‘swag’

Reviews

Thu 01 Apr, 2021

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Poetry in Uganda is fast becoming a spoken variation on the written word. Its nuanced expressions and phrases amplify an oral element with painterly, descriptive qualities. While its subtle changes in atmosphere, mood and idiolect (peculiar speech patterns) are distinctly Ugandan.

Whether such poetry is performed without text or read aloud dramatically to a roomful of poetry lovers, it never loses this singularity.

For Ugandan poets are more than merely versifiers, they are literary preachers trading in simplifying the complexity of language so it embodies the “Swagnificence” of the artform.

Ronald Ssekajja is such a poet.

His simple yet sophisticated word-painting portrays moral or aesthetic concerns of everyday Ugandans with a rhetorical and rhythmical fluency.

His poetry anthology “Echoes Of Tired Men” is a vehicle for such fluency as his pain, dreams, frustrations and loves are given articulate value on the road to his explaining of self.

There’s a thread of sadness that runs through this narrative garment woven by Ronald Ssekajja.

As you try his words on for size, you are struck by a poignancy at the heart of every syllable and inflection.

He looks back longingly and regretfully to a glorious past which, he writes, immatured into a less exalted present.

And as he gazes into the abyss, the abyss gazes into him.

That’s when the painful self-reflection pulsates with the passion for a paradise lost.

He finds in his past the lofty expectations of parents; loves which were either unrequited or unconsummated due to shortcomings on each side of the sexes involved.

“As a young man with an open heart,” his love and passions were tested by the impersonal march of events.

Events which inspired the poet to lament: “Bless me Father, for once I was an Alter-boy with grand dreams.”

Here, Ssekajja is hurting.

And the pain festers as he writes “Father rumbles silently in the pain of his disappointment. While impoverished by the disillusionments of his first boy…”

There’s a feeling that the poet is about to be lost behind the lines of enemy feelings, for he resents that he fell short in many ways.

This a powerful revelation.

In Ssekajja’s adherence to an ideal artistic temperament marked by suffering and a sense of alienation, he traces the footsteps of Kakalabanda.

This inner torment is precisely the reason for his appeal.

Many can identify with his pain and sadness.

That he writes so passionately is in part due to the fact that . . . under the new world order, the sharing of pain is one of the essential preconditions for a refinding of dignity and hope.

The dignity and hope is partly revealed in his light-fingered telling about the girls in his university days: The girls in his MBA class.

“You too would not understand it when you watched the gait of Nalongo.

When she carries herself like the author of all confidence, she personifies royalty.

The shadowy gaze in Bona’s eye bears a light that can kindle a man’s soul, “he writes.

Here’s when we find the true power of Ssekajja’s words as he seeks refuge in good feeling, and no longer feels lost.

In his mixing of his negative and positive emotions, the opposites of self are united in the singular power of his pen.

Again, Echoes of Tired Men is a work of exquisite poetry echoing the tireless efforts of a man on a mission to improve his craft.

And why not?

For Ronald Ssekajja Esquire has been writing poetry for most of his adult life.

A life which has tested his readiness to battle the odds in order to reap more than the whirlwind.

As a result, his powers of self-rescue have seen him scale the heights only to plunge to the lows.

Such experience has widened his capacity to imaginatively enter into his reader’s feelings in a sort of fellowship of the damned.

For life is a fatal condition made all the more precarious by the human condition.

A condition that has conditioned the works of poets from time out of mind.

Now, Ssekajja holds this flaming baton and runs with it towards the finish line.

His poetry is a mixed bag of ingredients that feed into politics, love, sex, Africanism and a couple of eggs embedded in a double chapatti.

Oh yes.

Although his themes are universal, they’re also as Ugandan as Luwombo.

With a strict diet of metaphors and similes, his figurative language calls forth a richness of narrative wordsmithing which leads the reader along a gilded path of skilled storytelling.

Ssekajja mostly steers clear of the staccato bursts of performance pieces as he tunes out the sing-songy verse in order to tune up a stanzaic steadiness in his eloquence.

His quiet contemplation jibes with the very meaning of the word “stanza”, which means room in Italian.

For he accommodates a roomful of adjectives, verbs and gerunds that hit the reader hardest when Ssekajja “cuts wires” and demands justice.

Justice for the country, for Bobi Wine and justice for tomorrow…a place where his children will find room after he has vacated this life that’s for rent.

He also realizes that justice doesn’t preclude fairness for the oppressor too.

Indeed, in this era when poets want to set the world on fire so they can watch Nero fiddle as Rome burns, Ssekajja is more circumspect.

This speaks to his maturity and keen political acumen.

For while his poetry serves as a call to arms, he will “wordsmith and Wesson” the man in the mirror as prelude to firing up his understanding of the world.

In a sentence, his contemplative poetry leads to self-reflection and this leads to growth. That’s why his poetry is much more refined in ways that even he can’t deny. And yet he still denies it in one of my favorite poems in this excellent anthology:

“And I Will Deny It

I will kiss the kaleidoscope rays from the morning sun

And I will deny it

I will climb the pinnacle of bliss just for fun

And I will deny it

I will wish to kiss ex-lovers

And I will deny it

And as you fumble to find my position among the league of men,

I will kiss the pope’s ring

And I will deny it

I will shake a king’s hand

And I will deny it