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BOOKS: Stella Nyanzi tells of prison life in collection of poems

Sunday June 07 2020
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Stella Nyanzi was released from prison in February 2020 after her sentence was overturned by the High Court on the grounds of lack of jurisdiction and fair hearing. PHOTO | ABUBAKER LUBOWA

By BAMUTURAKI MUSINGUZI

Ugandan Stella Nyanzi is a renowned medical anthropologist, feminist, queer rights activist, and scholar of sexuality, family planning and public health. She is also a leading authority in African queer studies and rights.

She is a practitioner of “radical rudeness”, a traditional Ugandan strategy for unsettling the powerful through the tactical use of public insult.

In 2016, she staged a naked protest against the director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research who had dismissed her from her job as a research fellow.

In September 2018, she wrote a poem on Facebook criticising Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. On November 9, 2018, she was charged in court with cyber harassment and offensive communication under the Computer Misuse Act, and was later handed an 18-month sentence. She said, “I don’t want to waste the court’s time. I deny the charges. I want Museveni to come to court, face me into my eyes and tell me how my posts on Facebook have offended him.”

While incarcerated in Luzira Maximum Security Prison in Kampala, she wrote the collection No Roses from My Mouth: Poems from Prison. Forty-five of them were shared on her Facebook and Twitter accounts to celebrate her 45th birthday on June 16. She dedicated the poems to all women locked up in prisons in Uganda and the world over.

In the "Introduction" of the collection, Esther Mirembe and Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire write: “Nyanzi located herself within a tradition of radical African protest that utilises the body and custom to condemn injustice and oppression”.

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Some of the poems that were confiscated by prison warders did not make it to the collection. She wrote on exercise books that she received as gifts in prison, and the poems were smuggled out.

Published in February by Ubuntu Reading Group in Kampala, the 191-page poetry collection contains 157 poems divided into three volumes.

Nyanzi tackles the subjects of love, loneliness, congestion and poor hygiene and sanitary conditions in prisons in Uganda. She also writes about the challenges of epileptic and disabled people in prison, corruption, nepotism, injustice, feminism, press freedom, dictatorship, elections, and the poor who are imprisoned for failure to pay court fines, among other issues.

INSIDE LUZIRA PRISON

In the poems, she gives insights into her own personal tragedies — she had a miscarriage while in prison — trauma, and how she became a skilful weaver of mats and baskets inside the dark walls of Luzira.

In the title poem No Roses from My Mouth, Nyanzi cautions her readers to expect words that knock out oppressors, blow up tyrants and destroy our hearts.

"There will be no roses

Falling out of my mouth

Who brings fleeting beauty to war?

Instead there are razor blades and axes

Chainsaws, knives and machetes

Daggers, swords and bayonets

My words cut up our enemies..."

Nyanzi talks about systemic violence in the poem Redeeming the Uganda Flag.

"Thread me a needle

And I will mend the Uganda flag

The bullet wounds in the fabric

For too many to go unsewn

Armed violence tears the heart of our flag

Don’t the tyrants see the holes in our flag?"

Two of Dr. Nyanzi’s poems in the collection— Ode To Truth and After Supperwon the Oxfam Novib/PEN International Award 2020.

In her acceptance speech dated January 16, 2020, read by Danson Kahyana, President of PEN Uganda at The Hague, Nyanzi, said: “Can one believe that I am locked up in prison for writing a poem? Is this 2020 or the Stone Age period? I am shocked at how low my motherland has sunk!”

In February 2020, Nyanzi was released after her sentence was overturned by the High Court on the grounds of lack of jurisdiction and fair hearing.

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