Using poetry to clean hearts

At just 23 years of age, Bahati Innocent is one of the youngest poets in the country. And you would think that this tender age is his biggest challenge in a field largely associated with age and wisdom. Well, not at all. “The challenge I get is that of language –whereby the older generation feel that language has generally been degraded by the young generation, while the young generation do not understand the language of the old generation,” he starts. In essence, Bahati’s biggest challenge as a poet is that he can’t communicate effectively to both segments of his audience, which is divided between the young and the old generations. “Communication to the younger generation is a great challenge. I can’t communicate to both generations at the same time. Sometimes I use words that as a poet I consider as normal words in modern language but others feel that it is complicated and some can’t get what you wanted to mean because most people are used to speaking by mixing languages. And some traditional words are lost. If I start to speak according to the very modern language which is newer the older generation will dismiss me as not worthy of the title of poet. They will complain that he is joking because he is using poor language. But if I use standard language my generation will lose track because their language has been mixed with others.” His poetic journey started in 2004, while still a student at Bushara Primary School, in the Eastern Province. It was a national schools poetry competition about HIV and although it was his first attempt at poetry he performed well and was encouraged by his teachers to pursue it seriously. He continued writing more poems and entering more competitions. A decade later, he has more than 120 poems to his name, the bulk of them in Kinyarwanda. One of them, Rubebe, will be performed at the upcoming Ubumuntu Arts Festival that opens at the Kigali Genocide Memorial amphitheater on July 14. “Rubebe is a satire about the church,” he begins to explain: “I put myself in the shoes of a believer who is vulnerable and who is not living a good life. The man called Rubebe was born into a Christian family, but at the end of the day the family perished from HIV and Rubebe stayed alone and believing in God.” “Every time he prayed to God for a miracle so that he could also live happily as others, but God did not respond. He again goes to church to present his plea to God, explaining how he prays a lot but God has forfeited him. So he tells God that really, you don’t work well. Even when I come back to the evolution of Christianity or the Christian belief I can see there’s something wrong. I can see that the history of the Christian faith is rooted in killings and other bad things.” Bahati performed this poem at the Kigali Vibrates with Poetry forum on April 30, where he emerged best in the Kinyarwanda poems category hence his selection to perform at Ubumuntu. Rubebe is also an expression of anger/disappointment toward GOD. But the moment of reconciliation comes through nature - as an inspiration to see the world in a new - transcending perspective, a reminder to us that nature is a powerful reconciliatory force. The performance at the festival brings together young talents who share the passion for poetry and experience - individually and as a creative group, people who appreciate the medium’s transformative power. Also to be performed by Transpoesis is ‘To be or not to be’, which basically questions the human capacity to forgive. Inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, it features Rwandan poets performing on the themes of forgiveness and the possibility of recovering one’s humanity after crimes within families and struggles for power. The performance is an encounter with fear, jealousy, anger, pain, and a taste of joy. The Tempest tackles the question; do I need to forgive in order to be joyful again? Collectively, the poems bring to light the truth that victims and perpetrators are not only linked by a shared history, connected emotionally by horrible crimes, but also freed by the human being’s tremendous capacities to forgive. The creation around the sentence “I forgive you, though you are a monster” speaks about living in the aftermath of crime, where both victim and perpetrator decide to move along on the road to forgiveness. According to Andrea Grieder, the founder of Transpoesis, which organises Kigali Vibrates with Poetry; “Transpoesis encourages young poets to express themselves – so that poets are heard in the society. Poetry is also a way of understanding who we are, and where we are moving to. It aims at giving voice to poets in Rwanda and Beyond. It’s a powerful contribution to the creation of Humanity, not as an abstract concept, but as a way for being in the world - seeing beauty in everyday life. Therefore, performing at Ubumuntu arts festival aims at speaking about jealousy, justice and forgiveness through a language which touches the heart – poetry.” In fact, Rubebe will be among the few purely Rwandan stage productions at the four-day festival. The others are mostly collaborative works between Rwandan performers and foreign theater troupes: “We’re going to present pieces that we wrote and that were inspired by the legendary British poet and author William Shakespeare. We’ve created different things –a Sonnet (14 short verse poem) and I’ve wrote a poem called Monster, among others,” Bahati quipped. Bahati was born in Kabale district, South-Western Uganda where his parents had fled from Rwanda as refugees. He recalls, from tales by older people, that although refugees, the family did not live inside the camp. “According to what I was told the life of a refugee wasn’t easy because sometimes you would not be allowed to even own land,” he says. His family eventually returned to Rwanda towards the end of 1993. “I was just months old so I can’t really remember anything. I’m quoting others,” he clarifies. He attended Bushara Primary School in the Eastern Province and moved to the Western province for his secondary education at Groupe Scolaire St. Joseph in Nyamasheke and Groupe Scolaire Mater de Nyanza in Southern Province. He is now in Level II, at the University of Rwanda College of Education, studying Biology and Chemistry education. He is currently putting together a video clip for Rubebe, which he wrote in 2012. It should be out in a week or two. “Some people like to sing, me too I like to sing, although when I sing I find that the song is too short to fully capture all my emotions,” he justifies his preference for poetry. “Through poetry you clean your heart. I do not do it to get money but to clean by heart. People who are intellectual like poetry. They don’t rely on melody but message.” Bahati performs his poems at a variety of events –nights shows in hotels and bars, commemoration events, school events, and private events like weddings … He contends that one of the biggest challenge is the fact that poetry in Rwanda is not yet commercially viable: “Poetry in Rwanda is not something you can do professionally because there is little financial rewards. So when you have a choice between making a video for a poem and paying school fees, for instance, one may not be wise to invest in poetry.” Even with this, he is still cognizant of the most pressing challenge: “The audience does not have the same attitudes when listening to the language that I use in my Kinyarwanda poems. Some terms and words are lost through generations. Kinyarwanda language is getting degraded by intermarriage with other languages, so some words that we use as poets can’t be understood by the young generations, so to communicate to them through poems is a big problem and yet that’s the audience we have to win.”

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Using poetry to clean hearts