Song of Lawino depicts a heroine who laments the rejection of African tradition for western ways by the educated elite. By using the song style, the poem is not just a lament, but a series of songs meant to celebrate African culture. Cook (231) implies this trend when he says that
Lawino, who also symbolizes African tradition, adopts as the butt of her attacks, her husband Ocol. Ocol is symbolic of the modern educated African, who has adopted wholesale, European cultural and mental attitudes. Ocol is artistically presented as rejecting African tradition, when Lawino says in the opening lines:
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Aside from the role of the traditional healer as a symbol of traditional religion, he also represents the African notion of medicine. Of course, Ocol as an educated man and a Christian would not allow African medicine or juju into his house. But Lawino goes on to give few examples of herbal medicines as illustrated by this traditional cough medicine.
Use of Praise Names: In Song of Lawino, for example, Lawino makes use of praise names in addressing Ocol. This is partly to demonstrate the deep love and respect she still has for her husband. But at a deeper level, it is symptomatic of an African heroic tradition normally present in panegyrics. Some of the praise names she uses are:
Clementine and Lawino are tools of critique for Okot: they exist purely for juxtaposition and he employs them to question cultural progress brought about by empire and capital. Okot, however, fails to deal with one looming concern: the culture he is bolstering through his critique has no room for feminist agency. Clementine is caricatured as loose and without any traditional mores, but she enjoys a freedom Lawino can only dream about. As Lawino tries to recenter her life around a patriarchy that excludes her in all aspects of her life, Clementine in some ways reclaims her agency through the opportunity presented by assimilation as a cultural innovation.
Clementine's song is not heard, and this is the intervention: to revisit the caricature of Clementine and assess how her changing presents an opportunity to innovate feminist agency in the tradition of Song of Lawino and reclaim for both women a place in cultural lore that uncentres them from an entrenched patriarchal construct.
Working with a community based in the region from which this epic originates, Song of Clementine explores these ideas through the concept of critical consciousness as developed by Paul Freire. Critical consciousness focuses on achieving an in-depth understanding of the world, allowing for the perception of and exposure to social and political contradictions. Critical consciousness also includes taking action against the oppressive elements in one's life that are illuminated by that understanding.
As part of the project, Ugandan artist Pamela Enyonu will respond to the epic and create an intervention that will be exhibited in the community. This exhibition continues a series of experiments with temporary exhibition spaces constructed in communities where arts infrastructures are nonexistent, creating new models to increase arts accessibility across Uganda.
Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol are among the most successful African literary works. Song of Lawino is an African woman's lamentation over the cultural death of her western educated husband - Ocol. In Song of Ocol the husband tries to justify his cultural apostasy. These songs were translated from Acholi by the author. They evince a fascinating flavour of the African rhythmical idiom.
Okot p'Bitek was a Ugandan poet, who achieved wide international recognition for Song of Lawino, a long poem dealing with the tribulations of a rural African wife whose husband has taken up urban life and wishes everything to be westernised. Song of Lawino was originally written in Acholi language, and self-translated to English, and published in 1966. It was a breakthrough work, creating an audience amongst anglophone Africans for direct, topical poetry in English; and incorporating traditional attitudes and thinking in an accessible yet faithful literary vehicle. It was followed by the pendant Song of Ocol (1970), the husband's reply.
Carnation flowers pop up every so often as do roses in between short, well-manicured hibiscus bushes arranged neatly beside pinkish amaranths. The gardeners had been thoughtful enough to plant clusters of those juicy red-brown ornamental stripped Hawaiian sugarcane. I almost broke and chewed one, but thought otherwise.
There, at the very center of the garden, sits an artificial wetland full of lilies and waterfowl. Its edges are lined with concrete painted the fiery color of molten lava. On the opposite side majestically stands the pagoda, at the highest point in the park.
It was around 6 and the evening sky had already started playing its game of purple, orange and yellow color-scattering. I climbed up 1, 2, 3, 4 steps, then walked to the center of the pagoda and struck a quarter lotus.
Despite the reducing visibility, it was hard not to notice her. She glided right above the surface of the now blackening waters. She then flapped her green-brown wings, and, hovered for 10, 20, 30 seconds before resuming her glide. A minute later, she started flying backwards, with the setting sun making her yellow breast feathers glimmer with the color of gold.
I had never seen such strange behavior in a bird before and had by then stood up to watch the spectacle more closely. As she approached me, she broke into song. But it was not one of those joyous sounds members of her species usually make.
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performed. This included a narrative expressed in poetic form, in rhyming couplets. Other elements linked to Acholi traditions, which the author often points to as borrowings, include proverbs and songs, as well as references to the festivals at which they would have been sung. The author did the first translation into English, which appeared earlier than the Acholi original, retained the original rhyming couplets, but he was not fully satisfied with it.
Burton, Felicita. "What is the impact of orality on Okot p'Bitek's "Song of Lawino"?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 21 June 2019, -poetry/questions/what-is-the-effect-of-orality-on-song-of-lawino-276682.
"Song of Lawino" shares with most oral epic the large scale form of anextended narrative poem. It is not an example of oral traditional epic, in thatit was composed by an single individual about a subject contemporary to thatwriter rather than looking back to an heroic age. It does, however, borrow someof the stylistic surface feature of oral poetry. It is composed in a simplerhythmic structure appropriate for public performance, uses repeated epithets,invokes stereotypes, and is structured agglutinatively, creating effects not bysubordination and analysis but by piling on layers of detail. Also like mostoral poetry, it is close to the human life world and makes its point viastriking example rather than abstraction.
Wofford, Lynnette. "What is the impact of orality on Okot p'Bitek's "Song of Lawino"?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 14 Sep. 2011, -poetry/questions/what-is-the-effect-of-orality-on-song-of-lawino-276682.
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As G.A.Heron notes in his Introduction, Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol:are not songs in any literal sense. You cannot sing them. They are not simply a written version of Acoli songs. Acoli songs do not grow to book length. They are one or two verses repeated with musical accompaniment. [...] They do ot use rhyme or the regular rhythm used in Wer pa Lawino. The lengthy poem Song of Lawino, in particular, is a lament and denunciation one can imagine being declaimed, if not sung. For all the (local) universality of its arguments, it is not a communal work but an individual and personal one, the poet giving voice to a strong leading figure, Lawino. It is a litany of specifics, bitter complaints about her husband, Ocol -- even as their individual differences are representative for two camps, one espousing the entirely traditional (Lawino), the other looking only towards a European-culture-guided future (Ocol).
Even if not of the traditional oral-poetic (or song) form, the approach is appropriate, given that Lawino is illiterate, and given her complaint about Western book-learning: "Ocol has lost his head / In the forest of books" she laments, denouncing the written texts that have displaced traditional values and customs (including, presumably, oral culture):And the reading
Has killed my man,
In the ways of his people
He has become
A stump. The form of the 'song' is adapted in translation (Okot p'Bitek's own), Heron also explaining: In Song of Lawino Okot replaces the regular rhythm and rhyme of the Acoli version with irregular free verse in the English version. Clearly, this gives a different feel to the work, but it seems reasonably successful. Lawino's expression hammers home her complaints in stark, quick succession -- though one wonders whether the regularity of rhythm and rhyme in the original suggest a much more tempered argument: as is, the clipped, rapid-fire English gives a very heated feel to Lawino's expressions of frustration.
Lawino is Ocol's first wife, and the mother of his first children. Now educated -- in the Western sense: he "Has read at Makerere University / He has read deeply and widely" -- and religious -- again in the Western sense, having become Christian --, Ocol sees everything about his origins as backward, and something to distance himself from. He has tried, and apparently managed quite well, to reinvent himself in the Western mold, complete with a European name -- Milchizedek Gregory ("It sounds something like / Medikijediki Giriligoloyo", Lawino thinks) -- and a new wife who understands these new ways. Among the reasons he rejects Lawino is: "Because, he says / I have no Christian name. / He says / Lawino is not enough.
In separate chapters, Lawino addresses the variety of differences between the traditional that Ocol now rejects (but which she still clings to) and the new, which he has embraced entirely. He is dismissive of Lawino for not being able to cook European-style food, or being able to: "dance white men's dances". He is disrespectful of his parents and of family in general, and not welcoming in the way expected of him, barring visitors because, among other reasons:They ruin his nicely polished floor
With the mud in their feet. Among the many areas of disagreement is about time, Ocol angry at Lawino because: "I cannot keep time / And I do not know / How to count the years". For Lawino, things happen when the need and circumstance arise: the child is fed when it's hungry (as opposed to fixed, regular mealtimes), or goes to sleep when it is tired. Ocol's life, meanwhile, is ruled by precise schedules -- and by the baffling grandfather clock whose: "large single testicle / Dangles below" (in one of Okot p'Bitek's most inspired images).
Lawino is baffled by Ocol's attitude:I do not understand
The ways of foreigners
But I do not despise their customs.
Why should you despise yours ? Yet ultimately she too seems to judge reflexively: for Ocol all things Western are unquestionably superior; in reaction, she finds only flaws (and no potential positives) while wholeheartedly endorsing the entirely traditional. There is no middle ground here -- as, indeed there is no discussion: these are the songs of two individuals presenting their positions.
Lawino complains:My husband refuses
To listen to me,
He refuses to give me a chance.
My husband has blocked up my path completely. Ocol's treatment of Lawino does seem outrageous. He is in no way supportive, and seems to make no effort to convince Lawino of the superiority of his newly-found ideas and ways. He lives (and lords) by fiat, the traditional so hidebound and silly that it can be dismissed without explanation; he is not in the least responsive to Lawino's plaints: "I cannot understand all this / I do not understand it at all !" Lawino makes some efforts to learn about and try to take up some of Ocol's ways, but finds a darker side lurking there too that Ocol seems completely blind to.
Meanwhile, Lawino thinks Ocol and those who have pursued European-style education have lost an essential part of themselves, in distancing themselves from the traditional. As she ultimately bluntly puts it:For all our young men
Were finished in the forest
Their manhood was finished
In the class rooms,
Their testicles
Were smashed
With large books ! Ocol is also politically active, presented as the leader of the Catholic 'Democratic Party'; his main, despised political opponent is his brother, leader of the Marxist 'Congress Party'. Lawino does not understand the political (and personal) differences at work here: both sides seem to want the same thing, so:Then why do they not join hands,
Why do they split up the army
Into two hostile groups ? Song of Ocol -- shorter, and even more spare and stark and direct in its presentation -- gives Ocol a chance to respond, and to explain his own reasoning and feelings. Ocol sees Africa as only something to be fixed, a place:Diseased with a chronic illness,
Choking with black ignorance,
Chained to the rock
Of poverty. Africa has failed, and he wants to move forward -- by leaving everything African behind. This is also reflected in his personal philosophy: his loathing runs so deep that he wants to:Smash all the mirrors
That I may not see
The blackness of the past
From which I came
Reflected in them. The Ocol of Song of Ocol seems even more radical and absolute than that of Lawino's complaints. His argument is taken to such extremes here that it becomes almost comical, as in his raving call to:erect monuments
To the founders
Of modern Africa;
Lopold II of Belgium,
Bismarck ... His position as presented here is even less nuanced than in Song of Lawino. With religion playing less of a role, the divide is presented even more starkly as simply between the old and forgettable (Africa) and the new (European and Western ways).
Ocol's position is so extreme as to be indefensible; Lawino's, while less so, also leaves little room for compromise. Yet, as Heron observes in his Introduction: "These two poems are not the thesis and antithesis of the argument, from which the reader can deduce a synthesis". Nevertheless, in their frustrated, extreme opposition the two do suggest possible middle ground: Okot p'Bitek leaves it as a vacuum here, but there is much room for positive advancement that does not neglect the traditional.
The world-views of Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol are so polarized that neither can be embraced. Lawino's position is the more sympathetic, because she at least expresses some openness to trying to understand, while Ocol has simply cut himself off from both his (and his continent's) past and from any constructive dialogue. The more carefully composed Song of Lawino is by far the stronger of the works, but even if Song of Ocol is almost crude in its simplicity, there is still considerable power to it.
In clinging so firmly to specific (and extreme) positions, Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol might seem facile, but there is considerable art and, on some levels even subtlety, to them. They remain powerful works that are well worth revisiting.
- M.A.Orthofer, 7 March 2015 152ee80cbc
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