A woman wears wooden sandals

If I sing you a song whose words
You have heard in the west
You will forget that I come from the East
You will tell me that I am a confused Afrikan woman
Who has learned from the west to sting with venom
deriding cultures and speaking in borrowed tongues
Failing to stem Lawino’s tide for all that sharpness
Relying on papers instead of oral wit.

If I sing you a song in this language
which many in the world share
you will tell me to think again
of placing my mother tongue
In its place of pride.

Should I beg you to let me sing?
Our mother’s tongues are versatile
Catching hope in glimpses of light
And with it making power for a night feast
Going where languages are no barriers.

Shatter this mold,
I do not in a language think
They do so who have time for analysis
We went digital before the way was discovered.

I tell you let me place my case
You can rest it in both the east and west
It is my soul that sings this song
Of freedom unbound by cultures
Refusing to sit in the place they choose
Feeling the pain of a dying language
Of mind and body and soul and power.

Translate me, transcribe me if you care
Languages never sit side by side.
Like white and black angels the fly everywhere.
Today I must look not only after millions of siblings
in a clan to assess a culture, and speak sense in no sense.

Wambui Otieno bears me witness
Many others are hidden in silence
I must from and to
My family
bring them bread,
Of grain and of hope.

I take, without any permission
Metaphysical Aristotle to be my mentor
The principle of non contradiction
How can I be and not be
In different places at different times
In the different ways and in the same way?

Philo Ikonya © 2007

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* Philo Ikonya is a Kenyan poet.
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