There are women who have walked alongside men, sometimes, ahead, to claim a hallowed place for present and future – female – pilgrims. The grave of the legendary Somali Queen Arraweelo on the shows of the Red Sea is a pilgrimage shrine:

‘This world we shall bestride
Is full of masculine type
Thou art scribe, ala feminine,
I urge your recollections to engrave’

This trope lifted from my poem, ‘A World so Formulated’, celebrates the achievement of the femina voice, in defying sectarian and gender prejudices, usually associated with male social construct, which rose to the pinnacle of journalistic appraise and creativity.

Muthoni Likimani at 83 years is among the first female Kenyans to work at the BBC. Zerina Patel, Rasna Warah, Maximillia Muninzwa, Lucy Oriang, Betty Caplan, Sarah Elderkin, etc, for many years lit Kenyan newspaper pages with beautiful articles and regular and serious columns at a time when the latter was dominated by males!

Philo Ikonya has straddled more than those two spaces: Teacher, journalist, poet, activist, all at once with the exception maybe, of her days with girls in a class. Philo is the author of three recently published books – ‘Leading the Night’ (novel), ‘This Bread of Peace’ (poetry), and ‘Out of Prison – Love Songs’ (poetry), the latter being the inkwell for which our pen is trailed.

I am presently more disposed to critique Philo’s poetry anthology ‘Out of Prison – Love Songs’ than do a wonderful review. For even Professor Chris Wanjala, Kenya’s foremost literary critic and Philo’s teacher at the University of Nairobi, has said that when one reads a poem and exclaims, ‘I felt sorry for that village,’ that in itself is an appreciation, for the poet has succeeded in appealing to the reader’s emotions.

In an introduction to an anthology of the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, T.S. Eliot wrote that to understand the poetry of Kipling one needed to immerse oneself in his prose. And to understand his prose, a deep knowledge of his poetry was necessary. Therein laid the dilemma of appreciating the poetry of Kipling! He was after all a master of poetry and prose.

How then should we approach the poetry of Philo Ikonya? Does it serve any purpose to read Philo’s poetry as a journalist or a teacher?

This essay seeks to inspire a further study into ‘Out of Prison – Love Songs’. That indeed is a function of any good literary criticism. The other role of the critic is to provide the context within which a text should be deemed. The critic should then offer insights into the relatedness of the text with others. We shall attempt to serve the first two purposes.

Poetry is an art form that thrives in the figure of speech, more so the creator uses a coded language to circumvent censorship, to avoid outright persecution, but also to put poetry on a pedestal. The journalist on the other hand, makes direct statements, to demand an immediacy of response, to constantly prod the reader to act. Philo excels in the latter.

But that does not mean that the poet is indisposed to metaphor. Philo uses nouns like Kalahari and Sahara, both deserts in Africa, as imageries of hardship.

‘Out of Prison – Love Songs’, is Philo’s first complete poetry anthology. The first part of the title, ‘out of prison’ is a proclamation of freedom. Yet writing in exile, in a European city ‘out of Africa,’ the poet must suffer the Negritudist’s admonishment – refrain from calling Africa a prison! But the tone is celebratory, a far cry for the impoverished African populace to revolt, to rise to the occasion and bring down prison edifices propagated by a cabal of non-interesting politicians lacking in character leadership who perpetuate themselves in public offices at all costs with the attendant social malaise:

‘Prison is sometimes distance
Without a word
Pain without a smile
Pain curled in death
A failed state’

Philo writes from the position of a human rights activist. She stands in direct opposition to bad governance and police brutality. Slightly over five months after the promulgation of the post-independence constitution, ordinary Kenyans are not free to hold public rallies and peaceful demonstrations without the interference of the police:

‘They hunt you for
Singing justice on the street’

As a fearless human rights campaigner, Philo was a regular guest in Kenyan prisons:

‘But when you go in
The prison cells are singing’

The poet of ‘Out of Prison – Love Songs’, grapples with the subject of disillusionment, and like many of her Kenyan readers seems to have lost trust with the present political class which continues to disappoint by shamelessly pandering to tribal bigotry – the president and the prime minister meet to negotiate holders of judicial offices and each insists on a member of his tribe. But Kenya has forty-two tribes and 40 million people!

Once speaking on a radio station, the poet had lamented ‘our prison cells do not provide sanitary towels to women inmates.’ Philo had just come out of a police cell and she was speaking on CROSS FIRE a very popular programme on KISS FM radio then hosted by a Ghanaian media supremo Patrick Quaqoo. Whether or not that is the time she encountered the mysterious ‘Akinyi’ shall remain unknown to the reader of this essay but not in her prison chronicles:

‘Baby Akinyi is crying all the time
Her little scalp is scaled with peeling’

The poet also uses words from other languages e.g. ‘ahora,’ Spanish for ‘now’ perhaps to inspire a sense of urgency, but to indict the present, ‘we shall make torture a hideous sin.’

And she relies heavily on the Swahili language ‘pamoja’ ‘together,’ ‘mpenzi’ ‘lover’ and names of African heroes such as Nelson Mandela, the post-Apartheid hero, and sheroes (to echo Maya Angelou) such as the legendary Kenyan freedom fighter Me Katilili wa Menza who was exiled from a coastal village by the British colonialists and defiantly broke out of prison. The non-English words are explained at the end of the book. The evocations of these names, though verily sentimental, seem to be a wakeup call – courageous men and women have struggled and triumphed against iniquitous overlords since time immemorial, even our recent past is replete with examples!

The second part of the title, ‘Love Song’ exonerates the poet from the earlier Afro-pessimism accusation, for ‘song’ is an important exposition of and dalliance with orature. Orature (oral literature), as a coinage or the injection of a new vocabulary into English owes its origin to two Ugandan scholars; Pio Zerimo and Austine Bukenya who first made it public in 1977 at a writers conference in Nigeria, is an important site of knowledge in traditional Africa. Songs and riddles or proverbs, delivered in oral form, were the mediums through which the African was educated.

Philo’s poetry is created to music, and the poet is a master performer:

‘I will walk on the moon
My first own footsteps
The poet’s inspiration
To sight the dimming stars closely’

The melody in the poem, the movement of the poem, and the vision of the poet, makes this trope a most admirable and memorable piece. Yet ‘sighting the dimming stars’ is a pointed finger on young Kenyan professionals whose involvement in politics once inspired hope before they began to copy those they sought to replace. And so the poet returns us to the theme of disillusionment and stagnation for even ‘dimming’ could as well be ‘diminishing’ hope in the future. In her time and space Philo delivers a valedictory, ‘I search for freedom in fair geometry.’

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Philo Ikonya’s ‘This Bread of Peace’ is available from Lapwing Poetry.
* ‘Leading the Night’ (ISBN 9789966151001), published by Twaweza Communications, is available from African Books Collective.
* Khainga O’Okwemba is Kenyan poet, writer and treasurer of International PEN Kenya Chapter.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.