One People : Two Worlds Apart
by Horace I (Mukwano) Goddard,
Bloomington, Indiana: Balboa Press, 2014
110 pp. US $11.99, Can $13
The poems in Horace Goddard’s One People : Two Worlds Apart are the result of an Afro- Barbadian-Canadian poetic sensibility engaging with the landscapes and social realities of Uganda and Jamaica. This collection is Goddard’s fifth book of poems. He is also the author of two novels, two children’s books and several essays of literary criticism.
One People: Two Worlds Apart is organized into two distinct books. The first, which deals exclusively with Uganda, is titled Song of Uganda and is comprised of forty poems. The second, which contains twenty-eight poems about Jamaica, is called Jamaican Voices from the Forest. Based on the content of the poems, I am unsure about the oneness of these peoples. The closest that the poet comes to showing it is in “Linstead Market,” where the hucksters of trinkets in Jamaica and Uganda employ the same spiel to sell their wares. It could be argued too that at least two similar techniques are present in both books:((1) a contrasting of beautiful, sublime landscape and sordid human practices, and (2) the narration of several of the poems via personas. Perhaps the unity is implicit, is in the fact that the ancestors of more than eighty percent of Jamaica’s present population originated in Africa, though it is highly unlikely that many of them came from East Africa.
That Uganda and Jamaica represent two worlds apart is cogently depicted in the poems. Of course, every artist knows that when reality is put through the alembic of the imagination an altered product emerges, so in that sense there’s a third dimension to this apartness: the poet’s. In “A Writing Attack,” Goddard is forthright about how his imagination works:
And I write these steel lines . . .
bursting forth from a brain
that ceases to shut down
sprinting, routing words
on this page in a
mud flow of word rage until
the brain explodes in rain ( p. 8).
The depiction continues in the poem “Black K (Night)”:
Crash and crush into lines/ cascading into stanzas
Stanzas dance in tune/ with the silence, with
the blackness, with a drawn-out prayer for light (p. 26).
The narrators of the Ugandan poems employ an overall tone that is objective but empathetic. The exception is the poem “Mamie (Report to a Dead Mother),” in which the speaker expresses in triplets his opinions about Uganda. However, even here, it is opinions tied to facts.
The poet wants the reader to understand that these poems (at least in their first drafts) were conceived against a backdrop of the 2012 New-Year Celebrations. The celebrations often intrude like white noise into the scenarios being depicted, and the New Year festival is itself the subject matter of a couple of the poems.
For this reviewer there are three core poems in the Ugandan section: “Kiyera (Nile) River,” “Uganda’s Rain Dance,” and “Kiboga Child”. The first exemplifies the poet’s use of landscape , in this case the Nile, as poignant metaphors that embody the country’s history, traditions and politics. The second brings together the many unpleasant social realities afflicting the Ugandan nation. The third epitomizes the poet’s reaction to the plight of Ugandan women. Roughly one-third of the poems address Ugandan politics; almost as many depict the clash of cultures between traditionalists and modernists. For me, the most engaging of the poems are those that portray the existence of “ women [who] stoop before men / with knees rubbed down/ carrying food to feed them . . ./crawling, bowing, cowering in obedience “(p. 31); women, whose Baganda husbands say:
The Compound and look after the children.
A man cannot do those chores
The villagers will shun him. . .
. . . Sometimes she refuses to cook my
Food and I want to beat her. . .
Here we flog disobedient wives
and children since they belong to us. . .
A wife is a man’s possession. He pays
For her with cattle and goats. . . (p. 62-63)
I asked Mr. Goddard whether he was aware that his depiction of gender inequality might stir up controversy. He said he welcomes any debate they might provoke.
The Ugandan poems are reader-friendly, written for the most part in couplets and triplets, in simple diction and straightforward syntax. They are engaging and highly informative.
The poems comprising Jamaican Voices from the Forest diverge from the Ugandan poems in language and in tone. Here Goddard liberally uses Nation language (the Jamaican vernacular) in several of the poems, in some cases totally, in others occasionally. This has the effect of rooting the poems firmly in their environment. In some cases it’s clear that the poems were written with performance in mind. The Jamaican poems show engaged narrators whose tones range between stifled anger and resignation: fitting tones, inasmuch as many of the poems depict the dire social conditions in which Jamaicans are trapped. Prison as reality and metaphor is omnipresent in the poems.
From a technical standpoint the Ugandan poems are the better poems in the collection. They are more sharply etched and more engaging. This is a collection worth reading and re-reading.
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