African Woman Prosaic Poem
(by Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo)
(From My Mother’s Poem and Other Songs, Nairobi: East Africa Educational Publishers, 1994, pp.83-85)
In commemoration of those moments when we make prosaic statements that end up sounding poetic and then we are reminded that ordinary human dialogue is often punctuated with poetry.
Refrain: One day!
One day, we shall rescue our lives from precarious peripheral hanging on and assume the center of historical action. We shall explore every avenue that runs through our lives and create live-roads that know no dead ends, extending them to the limits of human destination. We shall put an angry fullstop to the negation of our human rights.
One day!
One day, we shall undertake a second journey along the bushy path of denied human development, chasing away the wild beasts that prowl the route of our narrow survival lest they make a complete jungle of our already beastialized lives. We shall then cultivate a huge global garden and plant it with the seed of true humanity.
One day!
One day, we shall emerge from the wings and occupy the center stage in full visibility, refusing to be observers and understudies who wait behind the curtain of living drama. We shall liberate the word and become its utterers, no longer cheer crowds or ululators who spur on and applaud the molestors of our affirmative speech.
One day!
One day, we shall explode the negative silences and paralyzing terror imposed upon us by the tyranny of dominating cultures and their languages of conquest. We shall discover the authentic voices of our self-naming and re-naming, reclaiming our role as composers, speaking for ourselves, because we too have tongues, you know!
One day!
One day, we shall make a bonfire of currently dismantling and maladjusting economic structural adjustment programmes, then engage in the restructuring process, producing coherence around our scattered daily existence till it is full of bursting. We shall stop at nothing short of holding the sun to a standstill until the job is complete.
One day!