What drives you to do what you are avid about? Passion? Inspiration? For 21-year-old Elysee Ibrahim Ngarambe, pain is behind his enthusiasm to write.

Like many children who dream of being something different every day, for Ngarambe, writing wasn’t even among the things he imagined doing someday.

He treasured gadgets and yearned to be an IT expert in the future. But all this changed. The poet says he was introduced to reading by an aunt. She was an author who read him some of her stories during her free time.

Ngarambe had no idea that he would actually fall in love with literature. But then his aunt relocated to Uganda and he was left uncertain about what to do next. Around the time of her departure, his aunt was working on a story about an African boy who grew up in a complex situation. He was eager to find out what happened. Luckily, his aunt sent him written letters, page by page. They were a continuation of the story.

Whenever Ngarambe returned home from school, his mother read him the letters in a poetic way, something that he found intriguing.

Tragically, his aunt passed on suddenly in 2016 before completing the book. Ngarambe felt there was a gap left to fill and so he decided to continue the story from where his aunt had stopped.

Becoming a poet

In 2017, he had the opportunity to participate in a Spoken Word Rwanda event. He enjoyed the performance of other poets. It was astonishing to him, and that’s how he developed the drive to tell more stories.

According to him, the best gift that a poet can be given is pain. He believes that every writer has motivation, run by an engine that compels them to write—pain.

"With pain, a writer puts out their emotions without camouflage. The best artists I have ever known were never created out of joy, but pain, they were broken. If my aunt hadn’t died, I wouldn’t be a poet now. It is through pain that I discovered I could actually write,” he says.

He adds that every time he writes something that isn’t from the pit of pain, it doesn’t come out well.

His first poem was titled "African Kid”. The poem depicted a child from a poor background. This child that was living abroad was judged due to the poor setting. He didn’t have connections, friends, and so forth.

He remembers the first time he stepped on stage, it was intimidating and imagined how the audience would perceive his message. ‘Would it even make sense to them?’ He thought.

To his surprise, the audience loved his performance, as their facial expressions and applause said it all. This pushed him to take part in other competitions.

One would expect a writer to love reading, but this isn’t the case with Ngarambe. He is not an enthusiastic reader, and his friends often ask how he writes yet he isn’t interested in reading.

"I don’t need to read other people’s stories to tell one. I prefer interacting with people to hear their stories. The best stories come from people, not books,” he says.

According to him, books give you the knowledge you want but they don’t give you insight into the life lived at the moment.

He basically tells other people’s stories, putting himself in their shoes, and writes at any time as he gets ideas randomly.

Ngarambe loves listening more than talking, that way, he can observe what people say and capture what to write. He has about 50 written poems and 11 recorded poems.

Some of his poems are "Broken Man”, "Itegeko”, "Depression”, "A Silent War”, and more, and he lives for positive feedback, criticism, and inspiration.

The poet notes that packaging and delivering his work has been a tremendous but ever-changing journey. At the start, he would just tell a story without expressing any emotions, but through practice and interacting with other poets, he keeps getting better.

He says, for one to be good at what they do, they have to be unique. Most poets do their work in the form of rap, but his, he says, is street poetry, as a rhyming beat.

Creating a legacy

The youngster is concerned that Rwandan poets are not yet earning from their art as they should be. This is because they don’t have an audience yet.

He adds that some people view poetry like they do rap music, and many don’t really understand what poetry is.

His poems mostly appeal to the young. He asks questions that he imagines they are afraid or ashamed to ask. That’s how he hopes to capture the youth’s attention.

The way he sees it, the young have questions for everything; religion, gender, their own feelings, to name a few, but they are afraid to open up about some topics.

He has interacted with people that are not certain about which beliefs to follow. The poet recalls a young cousin asking him one time, "If God loves us so much, then why does he allow death?” He was speechless.

Ngarambe says that many people start doubting a lot of things about life-based on their situations.

His wish for such people is to listen to his poems and relate. And, hopefully, find answers. As he writes, Ngarambe wants to leave the memory of his aunt, to know that she didn’t die in vain. He desires to leave a legacy behind so that when he is old, he looks back and sees the youth motivated by his poems.

He enjoys writing untold truths and topics that people tend to ignore. The writer believes that every person has a story to tell.

Ngarambe used to write in Kinyarwanda until his friends said that some messages do not come out well in Kinyarwanda. 

He now combines Kinyarwanda and English because the local language is part of the reason he set out to write in the first place.