The Resurrecting Writers Series: Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol (Repost)
Taking the book solely at face value, Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol are verses concerned with the disintegration of the marriage of Lawino, a rural African (Acoli) woman and Ocol, her western-educated husband. However, peeling back the cover of the words even a tiny bit reveals a woman committed to her indigenous culture versus a man who thinks that her culture needs to be removed from the face of the earth. How could two such people co-exist in the same household? How could two such differing ideologies co-exist on the same planet? According to Ocol, not at all. His song is full of imagery that calls death upon the culture Lawino praises in her song.
We will smash
The taboos
One by one,
Explode the basis
Of every superstition,
We will uproot
Every sacred tree
And demolish every ancestral
shrine.
In Ocol’s song, the thing that is so striking about this book – the use of indigenous Acoli symbols to present a woman solidly rooted in her culture – gets turned on its head. Every thing African becomes associated with death, decay and other imagery meant be extremely negative. However, that is not the case with Lawino. Unlike she does not hate foreign customs. They are simply not hers.
I do not understand
The ways of foreigners
But I do not despise their
Customs.
Of course if things were as simple as that, there would be no need for Lawino to sing her song. For instance, I agree with Ocol’s installing of an electric stove in their house. . Lawino doesn’t know how to use it and is, in fact, scared of it.
I am terribly afraid
Of the electric stove,
And I do not like using it
Because you stand up
When you cook.
Who ever cooked standing up?
And the stove
Has many eyes
I do not know
Which eye to prick
So that the stove
May vomit fire
And I cannot tell
Which eye to prick
So that fire is vomited
In one and not in another plate.
Instead of patiently teaching Lawino the benefits of the stove and how to properly use it, Ocol rails against her. He considers her lack of knowledge one more African deficiency he wants to divorce himself from. His attitude is revealing especially because he later becomes a leader of his country’s independence struggle for Uhuru (freedom). As Lawino tells it, Ocol says
White men must return
To their own homes,
Because they have brought
Slave conditions in the country.
He says
White people tell lies
That they are good
At telling lies
Like men wooing women
Ocol says
They reject the famine relief
Granaries
And the forced-labour system.
After revealing this, Lawino goes on to question an Uhuru where her husband can’t even get along with his brother.
When my husband
Opens a quarrel
With his brother
I am frightened!
You would think
They have not slept
In the same womb,
You would think
They have not shared
The same breasts!
And they say
When the two were boys
Looking after the goats
They were as close to each other
As the eye and the nose,
They were like twins
And they shared everything
Even a single white ant.
Even more astute however, is her statement describing the period of “independence”.
Independence falls like a bull
Buffalo
And the hunters
Rush to it with drawn knives,
Sharp shining knives
For carving the carcass.
And if your chest
Is small, bony and weak
They push you off,
And if your knife is blunt
You get the dung on your
Elbow,
You come home empty-handed
And the dogs bark at you!
In raising questions that center around the concept of post-colonial independence and how such an entity impacts on the consciousness of Africans who have been educated outside of africa as well as rural Africans who have never left the continent, the Song of Lawino & the Song of Ocol ranks up there with Ama Ata Aidoo’s Sister Killjoy. Both Sissie and Lawino were asking the same questions. The current state of the continent provides the answer.