1 Dibaji: Ustadh Mau’s Moral Concern

Many of Ustadh Mau’s poems are replete with moral concerns: he judges, takes sides with the underprivileged, evaluates the past, criticizes the present, urges change for a better future, and gives advice on what to do best. In the poem Bandari ina mawimbi (“The Port Makes Waves”), he warns his audience to critically ponder the construction of a deep-sea port close to Lamu, since it might have positive, but also destructive effects on Lamuan society. In Mama msimlaumu (“Don’t Blame My Mother”), it is a baby who speaks out against placing blame on the mother for abandoning it rather than considering the involvement of society at large. In Haki za watoto (“Children’s Rights”), he gives advice on child care and defends the rights of children. In Amu (“Lamu”), he pleads with fellow Lamuans, who have lost family members in a shipwreck between Lamu and Pate, to be patient and to accept the catastrophe as part of human life, rather than advance conspiracy theories that are of no avail. Thus, much of his poetry centers around basic ethical questions: what is the right path? What is good or bad? How ought one to live? These add to the more general question, what is the human good?

In this chapter, I would like to reflect on the relationship between morality and poetry in Ustadh Mau’s poetic practice. Drawing on Michael Lambek’s notion of “ordinary ethics” and his emphasis on “doing ethics,” I consider ethics or morality—I use the two terms interchangeably—not as existing in the form of a list of defined and unchangeable virtues, but rather as a continuous practice and a struggle toward the right path. In my reading, for Ustadh Mau, poetry is a major site of “doing ethics”—finding a language for it, weighing arguments, and judging and criticizing in relation to life situations and occurrences.

2 “Doing Ethics”

The intention to do right and to decide what is right and what is wrong is essentially human and part of the human condition. As Lambek underscores, humans are essentially moral beings: they judge, condemn, evaluate, criticize, reason, and are driven by the question: “How ought I to live?” It is this basic human faculty, which does not merely find its expression in constitutions, laws, or philosophical treatise on ethics, but—and this is important for Lambek—is very much part of everyday life and comportment, constantly in the making and thus never complete:

In this sense, ethics is far from the presumptions or moral codes and prescriptions and closer to irony, particularly in the sense of recognizing the limits of self-understanding […] and that one cannot fully know that one means what one says or does.¹

In everyday life, ethics are often not even voiced; they exist rather unnoticed in their “relatively tacit nature, grounded in agreement rather than rule,”² and become explicit only if breached and ethical problems occur. As the examples below and, more generally speaking, throughout this book show, these are also the typical moments when Ustadh Mau composes a poem: for instance, to speak out against the community’s indecision to plan the island’s future (see Bandari ina mawimbi, “The Port Makes Waves”) or to intervene in their political intrigues (see Amu, “Lamu”). Occasionally, prophetic movements also seek to promote agendas, or such agendas are voiced by “priestly figures” whose role it is to offer guidance.³ As an imam, Ustadh certainly belongs to the latter category: qua position, it is not only his choice to take sides, condemn social ills, and pronounce warnings, but also his obligation—which sometimes weighs heavily on him, but also earns him much respect in his community. He gives advice and educates the umma, for instance, in his Friday sermons.⁴

The concern for ethics is not limited to his sermons, but also extends to the advice he gives privately to individuals, like, for instance, quarreling couples who come to him for guidance and support. Furthermore—and this will be the focus here—a concern for ethics permeates his poetry, as Annachiara Raia outlines: “Finally, being a writer entails the formidable mission of guiding (kuwalekeza) and advising (kuwashauri) people on how to go about their lives (jinsi yakwenda maishani).”⁵ His poetry ranges from practical advice (shauri) on what to do, to metaphorical lines that convey a message in a form that invites reflection. Occasionally, it also takes a more personal tone, reflecting upon his own life experience. His poems echo the human difficulty of deciding what is right or wrong in light of the rather fuzzy nature of ordinary life, full of ambivalences, which Lambek highlights as the “ever-present limits of criteria and paradoxes of the human condition.”⁶ Mlango (“The Door”), for instance, speaks of his own moment of crisis, when his bakery went bankrupt, but people would not believe that he was in a financially difficult position. Furthermore, feeling deeply for human weaknesses and inconsistencies in his own community, Ustadh Mau does not promote one set of values in the same way but, depending on the context and event, he argues in different ways, promotes even contradictory and conflicting judgments, and also uses different rhetorical and poetic techniques, which, as I would like to argue, are essential to the ethical argument. For instance, though emphasizing the virtue of chastity and virginity for girls in poems like Ramani ya ndoa (“A Map of Married Life”), he strongly takes sides with the “fallen women” in Mama msimlaumu (“Don’t Blame My Mother”) and Wasiya wa mabanati (“Advice to Young Women”).⁷

My concern is how in his poetry and, importantly, through poetic form, he develops a stance on ethical issues that can more broadly be summarized as “how society ought to live.” Considering ethics as a practice in which values are never fixed but need to be weighed, argued for, and negotiated in relation to specific situations, I look at his poetry as an important site of doing ethics. His poetry varies in the way it involves ethics: sometimes as part of proclamations, other times in less explicit modalities of doubt. More often than not, even in those poems that proclaim values and prescribe what and what not to do—such as, for instance, the Haki za watoto—the moral framework is not just a given, but composing such works is an ethical thought process itself, a consideration of perspectives and a self-interrogation. Accordingly, given the importance of poetry in ethical thought, a consideration of how poetry—its specific means of expression and its ways of relating to the world—shapes the ethical becomes an important consideration as well: the poetic also permeates the ethical. I understand this perspective as a way of entering into and listening to Ustadh Mahmoud Mau’s poetic voice.

3 The Ethical and the Poetic in the Swahili Context and with Respect to African-Language Literatures

A view on ethics and their connection with the poetic can broaden the exploration of Swahili poetics and knowledge production in the Swahili context, where the centrality of questions on how to live has recurrently been noted. Kai Kresse points out the practice-oriented and social dimension of knowledge production on the Swahili coast while focusing on busara (“wisdom”) in his article “Knowledge and Intellectual Practice in a Swahili Context.”⁸ He defines hekima (“wisdom, knowledge, judgment”) and busara (“good sense, wisdom, sagacity”), which are often used together, as “to endorse or commend the wisdom or good common sense of someone’s action.”⁹ Here, he refers to wisdom as being not an abstract quality, but the quality of the one who acts in a good sense. Furthermore, acting also includes speaking: a wise person is someone who speaks with carefully chosen words at the right time for the benefit of his or her community. To be recognized as such, wisdom needs to be socially relevant, answering to pressing demands, and it needs to offer advice on how to act at times when there are either divergent opinions on what to do, or no idea on how to act or even the necessity of acting at all.¹⁰

This brings his elaborations on wisdom close to Lambek’s emphasis on the aspect of doing ethics, which he grounds in his reading of Aristotle, for whom ethics is related to action (and not abstract reason).¹¹ Even if there is a catalogue of virtues, there needs to be a constantly ongoing reinterpretation and negotiation of and for them. They demand application with respect to life and they demand careful reasoning. Kai Kresse describes the negotiations on the human good in the context of the baraza, where young people are inspired to emulate highly respected intellectuals and elders, making an effort to copy their manners of speaking and depth of reflection for their own intellectual and human development and as part of

becoming a better person, of increasing one’s moral status: of following the role model of Prophet Muhammad (and other prophets). An admirable example of good and decent behavior is copied and internalized, so as to make oneself a better person, and in terms of the application of one’s knowledge to the particular setting in which one is situated, more wise.¹²

Thus, as this quotation shows, speaking ethically is part of habitus, a form of copied, and hence internalized, behavior. Furthermore, as Kai Kresse highlights, adding further evidence to my concern with the situated reaction of moral discourse, it is not transmission or the simple reiteration of moral knowledge per se that entails “wisdom.” Rather, it is the intellectual’s capacity to make an intervention at the right time, when it is needed. The explicit statement cuts through the implicit continuity of ethical agreement, creates awareness, and makes the cracks and ruptures, conflicting values, or alternative ways of acting visible in the immediate circumstances. It is the sensitivity to act and, as we may add, to speak and to strike the right balance that Aristotle highlights as the virtue of moral action.¹³ And it is a virtue that comes only of action—and of speaking.¹⁴

Furthermore, it is not only the question of when to speak, but also how to speak that matters. The manner of putting the statement forward is not of secondary importance: ethical involvement is essentially tied to a consideration of the appropriate and most effective form to leave an impact “on the thinking of the others.”¹⁵ The wise person is someone who brings forward “convincing arguments from unconventional and expected angles or positions […] even (or perhaps specifically) when this runs against established modes of thinking.”¹⁶ It is the versatility of the rhetor’s thought, his wit and intelligence—his drawing on a huge variety of sources from different, seemingly unrelated domains and flexibly adopting perspectives, as we find in Ustadh Mau’s poetry—that is appreciated.

Considering the literary and the ethical as interwoven also seems to be nothing new for scholarly discourse on Swahili and other African-language literatures.¹⁷ Rather, it has been one of its constant features. Social engagement or intervention, as it has been called, has been a primary criterion by which to measure African literature for many literary critics and authors since the 1960s, the formative period of scholarship and modern writing in African languages. As Simon Gikandi underlines in his article “Theory, Literature and Moral Considerations,” the poets of the independence period and the early days of decolonization “believed that their works and word had an innate and functional capacity to intervene in everyday life and to transform the tenor and vehicle of political discourse.”¹⁸ Thus, the poets, the “self-appointed guardians of the public good,”¹⁹ make up what Lambek has called a “priestly class,” since it was primarily their role to spell out a vision for society in the era of independence. And it is not a coincidence that many state presidents of the independence era, like Léopold Sédar Senghor, Julius Nyerere, and Agostinho Neto, not only promoted poetry, but also wrote poetry themselves.

While the alliances between the political elite and the poet-scholar of the independence period were soon shattered and many poets imprisoned, the vision of poetry as a weapon for fighting for a better future became even stronger. In vocabulary echoing the Marxist approaches to literature of the 1960s and 1970s that have so thoroughly shaped discourse on Swahili literature, the Kenyan poet Abdilatif Abdalla spells out the poet’s “responsibility” (wajibu) to be a “poet of the people” (mshairi wa jamii), a concept that, by his own admission, he borrowed from Jean-Paul Sartre.²⁰ While Sartre enthusiastically celebrated the liberating force of negritude that he found in African poetry,²¹ for Abdilatif Abdalla, “the poet of the people necessarily sides with the masses who have remained in misery, since they have been increasingly exploited and oppressed” (mshairi wa jamii ni lazima aweko upande wa hao wengi wakabakia katika hali duni kwa kuzidi kunyonywa na kukandamizwa).²² According to the Marxist view of society as a dichotomy between the affluent in power and the subjugated masses, the poet is compelled to take sides, to become a mouthpiece of the downtrodden, fighting for their liberation in his or her own writings.²³ Thus, literature is primarily judged by the values it exposes and its call for action—in this case, against the oppressive postcolonial Kenyan government.²⁴ It is the daring author who brings forward an argument in line with his or her own convictions, not shying away from the risk of being imprisoned or killed, who earns the utmost respect in this context.

Until now, not only in East Africa, social engagement has remained the highest value that can be attributed to and analyzed in literature—often held up against a stereotypically evoked Western notion of art-for-art’s sake.²⁵ For instance, Marxist views and African writers’ rhetoric of liberation fell on fertile ground in the form of postcolonial theory, one of the most prominent fields of literary criticism in recent decades and most strongly concerned with the—essentially ethical—ability of literature “to speak back” to power. However, in contrast to postcolonial approaches—which, by imposing preconceived categories of race, class, and gender, have shown a growing insensitivity toward specific social and historical contexts and practices, as well as languages and genres²⁶—there have also been attempts at honing in on situated practices, discourses, and texts; Kai Kresse’s research is one example of this. Moreover, in suggesting productive themes for an agenda for the comparative study of African-language literatures, Karin Barber and Graham Furniss highlight the study of the “purposive dimension” of texts, calling for an approach that involves the careful reading of texts and contexts.²⁷ For them, such a study “concerns the ways in which written texts are used to mobilize their constituencies for moral action”; this is further echoed in “the value placed upon particular writings and kinds of writing in the architecture of culture.”²⁸ To me, this calls for a descriptive project, entailing the cautious observation of how notions of poetry and morality are interrelated; how poems speak to and seek to mobilize constituencies, i.e. by which means; which kind of effect they have; and how they are assessed by the community. It also involves paying attention to culturally specific notions, language-specific poetic strategies, and genres that frame the interpretation and the production of discourse.

It also implies reflecting more closely on the literary: treating poetry primarily as a tool to convey a socially relevant message has often meant downplaying its particular literary nature. It treats the purpose as more important than the literary form, which is merely a container for the message. This is not in line with local Swahili notions of the eminence of poetic form and the specific poetic force that can affect and effect audiences. It also entails not oversimplifying social life as a well-defined structure shaped by clear-cut antagonistic forces—for instance, racism or sexism—but rather looking at it, as mentioned before, as a vague, continuous, and individual experience of conflicting options and ideas, many of which even escape notice. In Forms, Levine argues against focusing on coherent systems and structures as the “truly powerful shapers of life” that literature reacts to and seeks to dismantle, drawing on the Brazilian legal theorist and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger.²⁹ Rather than being shaped by “deep structural forces such as capitalism, nationalism and racism,” as Levine puts it, social life is “composed of ‘loosely and unevenly collected’ arrangements.”³⁰

Accordingly, as I would like to add, echoing Levine, poetry’s engagement is also more complex. Some of Ustadh’s poems show the many perspectives one can assume with regard to the “social.” And many lyrical poems do not provide the conclusive and final argument of a previous debate, but rather offer room for reflection, interrogation, and contemplation—also for the poet himself. Looking at the poetic as practice, the ethical and the poem are not a fait accompli. They are intertwined and come into being in the composition. Considering ethics as part of poetic practice accounts for a dynamic perspective that goes beyond a functional analysis of a literary text.³¹ Thus, my twin focus on the poetic and the ethical represents an approach to investigating Ustadh’s poetic search for “the good” by reading his poetry.

4 The Language and Poetry of Morality in the Swahili Context

“Ethics is intrinsically linked to speaking as much as it is to action,” as Lambek contends.³² On a very fundamental level, it is language, with its words and grammatical forms, that provides our categories of uttering or even thinking about what is good and what is bad:

We may find the wellsprings of ethical insights deeply embedded in the categories and functions of language and ways of speaking, in the commonsense ways we distinguish among various kinds of actors or characters, kinds of acts and manners of acting; in specific nouns and adjectives, verbs and adverbs, or adverbial phrases, respectively; thus, in the shared criteria we use to make ourselves intelligible to one another, in ‘When we say when.’³³

In the Swahili context, both Alena Rettová’s and Kai Kresse’s studies on the notion of utu, commonly translated as “humanism,” in the poetry of Swahili poets like Ahmad Nassir can be considered exemplary studies in this regard.³⁴ It is the meaning of the word utu that is constantly reshaped in reflections, discussions, proverbs, and poems. An example of the entanglement of ethical discourse and Swahili grammar is the study of the use of the Swahili ki class by Abel Mreta, Gerlind Scheckenback, and Thilo Schadeberg.³⁵ Though epistemologically and historically unfounded, as the three linguists show, the ki class, in which, for instance, many nouns referring to disabled people are found, has notoriously been considered to impart a derogatory meaning to nouns; it is a noun class that is believed to attribute moral value.³⁶ Apart from the affordances of Swahili words and grammatical items, communicative genres shape the forms of ethical perspectives.³⁷ Forms of giving advice, teaching, and preaching, each of whose dramaturgy follows culturally specific scripts, play a particularly important role in Ustadh’s life.³⁸ Each utterance is voiced within a frame that creates a link to previous utterances and texts and raises expectations about the linguistic means, the topics raised, and the perspective on reality.³⁹

One culturally specific way of judging behavior, as Jasmin Mahazi describes in this volume, is the use of veiled language, particularly common when addressing socially risky topics. It confronts the recipient with a riddle, which can mask harsh criticism. A number of studies have explored the use of mafumbo, literally “knots,” as a face-saving strategy, since the sender can easily retreat behind the literal, “knotted” meaning, denying any other intention.⁴⁰ Mafumbo also find their way into short lyrical mashairi poems. As Nababany explains, Mshairi hutunga shairi kwa lengo la kumfundisha mtu kitu fulani, kumfumba mtu (kama vile mshairi mwengine) au kwa kumwambia mtu jambo ambalo hawezi kumwambia usoni mwake moja kwa moja (“A poet composes a poem to teach something to someone, to make up a riddle for somebody [e.g., another poet], or to tell someone something that he cannot tell him/her directly to his or her face”).⁴¹ The decisive benefit of this strategy, as Beck argues—with reference to metaphorical communication via kanga textiles—is that critical points are addressed rather than neglected, and social cohesion created rather than threatened.⁴² Mafumbo lie between muting an issue and speaking out about it, addressing and not addressing an issue, and thus both interrupt the unnoticed stream of speech and reveal something—since otherwise there would be no riddle—but also blur it, because its indexical reference first needs to be unveiled. Thus, the metaphor, through its very being, has a provocative effect and urges the recipient to ponder on it and answer.⁴³ Mafumbo are engrained in the poetic practice of kujibizana, dialogue poetry, because they demand a reaction.⁴⁴ It is the opponent’s task to react immediately in an equally heightened and veiled speech to safeguard his or her moral integrity. Poetry is part of habitus (see also below): the social person is attacked, formed, and maintained in poetry. Arguments emerge and evolve as part of the ongoing verbal exchange, in line with the processual and dialogic perspective, which Lambek also favors: judgment reacts to, but also anticipates communication with others.⁴⁵

However, mafumbo are not the only way of expressing judgment in the Swahili context. Poetry as such is the key way of voicing essential thoughts, which need to be advanced in “such an extraordinarily beautiful and memorable way that this now becomes a common expression or a new and relevant insight shines out of the creative and innovative use of language within a poem.”⁴⁶ To rephrase it, poetic form is of the utmost relevance, since it “shines out” from the incessant flow of casual everyday speech, less carefully and thoughtfully constructed, and hence has the capacity to call the audience’s attention. Besides practical considerations, there is also the idea that what is essential needs to find an adequate form that does not diminish its importance: there is thus a correlation between the “ethical good” and the “aesthetic good,” i.e. a well-constructed and harmonious poetic form.

The genre most often associated with ethical discourse is the utendi (pl. tendi), because the genre as such has been ascribed a normative, authoritative tone and a “purposive dimension” of providing proper guidance on how to live a virtuous life.⁴⁷ Like the sermon (khutba), which Ustadh regularly delivers at the mosque,⁴⁸ the utendi is essentially a publicly voiced moral guideline often addressing the community at large.⁴⁹ Kresse characterizes the utendi as

[…] usually didactic in nature, providing lengthy elaborations about what to do, how to behave and the like, in different kinds of life situations. In normative terms, Islamic references provide a guideline and the goal is, commonly, to pass on knowledge to the audience which may help them to become better people, with stronger moral character.⁵⁰ (Emphasis mine.)

The utendi plays an important role in Ustadh Mahmoud Mau’s poetic oeuvre. For him, the most valuable aim of poetry is to teach and educate to prevent the community from taking the “wrong path” and to set good examples. Witty mashairi, which play with sounds and meanings, are rather a waste of time to him.⁵¹ For him, the poet is a teacher (mwalimu) whose responsibility it is to educate (kuelimisha) society.⁵² Poetry as a means of education, particularly in utendi form, has the advantage of being appealing to the audience. The utendi’s language has to be rhythmic and rhymed but also clear, so that everybody can understand and memorize it. For instance, both the Haki za watoto (“Children’s Rights”, see below) as well as the Ramani ya maisha ya ndoa (“The Map of Married Life”), a book of advice for a happy married life, provide extensive guidelines on how to act. In the Ukimwi ni zimwi (“AIDS Is a Monster”), he calls on people not to forget about the fatal epidemic and to abstain from promiscuity. According to him, educating through poetry has always been important, but has become even more urgent due to the decline of traditional institutions of learning, the high drop-out rate in local schools, and the manifold media influences negatively affecting young people, who no longer know what is right or wrong (see also his poem Kiswahili).

In contrast to the often fleeting nature of mashairi, tendi are meant to make a lasting statement. There is a tradition of composing didactic tendi for one’s children: in the Utendi wa Mwana Kupona (“The Poem of Mwana Kupona”), composed around 1830, which became the most famous moral catalogue of the genre, a mother who is about to die provides advice to her daughter on how to be a good wife for her future husband.⁵³ In the Siraji (“The Lamp”), to give another prominent example, the poet Muhamadi Kijuma teaches his son how to correctly behave, running through all kinds of possible domestic and public contexts where he fears his son might fail to act properly, losing his dignity.⁵⁴ For generations, both tendi have been memorized, recorded, and copied again and again, becoming “an effective longer-term normative poetic reserve that is still tapped into, reiterated and regularly listened to.”⁵⁵ For Ustadh, too, both of the abovementioned poems serve as models: he refers to them and even quotes whole lines. Moreover, Ustadh also wrote edifying tendi for his own children, as his own father had done for him, intending to show them “the proper path in life” (njia bora kwenye maisha). Furthermore, his own poetry has become part of the cultural “archive,” as Kai Kresse highlights,⁵⁶ for instance, with regard to the “enduring relevance” of Ustadh’s Wasiya wa mabanati (see also Annachiara Raia’s contribution in this volume). Wasiya, a loanword from Arabic meaning “last will, legacy,” and in pre-Islamic times referring particularly to the spiritual testament to the survivors, recurs in the titles of tendi and hints at the intention to compose a poem for future generations.⁵⁷ In this sense, it is also an ethical “investment” in the future, wisely recognizing both “human finitude but also hope.”⁵⁸ The poem is meant to outlast the composer. At the end of the Haki za watoto, he dedicates the poem to his son, while referring to the fact that even his own father had composed a poem for him (see stz. 257).⁵⁹

If the ethical is so closely linked with the poetic, the poet is also the ethical person par excellence. He or she is the one who speaks wisely—i.e., advising on what to do and how to do it—and well, i.e. with a careful choice of words and arguments. The impeccable external form, the rhyme and rhythm, and the careful choice of meaningful words need to corroborate the content. A “good” poem is one that is both “meaningful” (lenye maana) and well composed in “rhyme and verse” (lenye vina na mizani). A “good” poet is of good reputation (mwenye heshima) and intellect, showing refined manners, including first and foremost his or her poetic skill. The poet is a mungwana, often translated as “person of manners,” concerned with keeping his or her heshima “dignity, respect,” a central category of the social as well as moral persona (see also Jasmin Mahazi’s contribution in this volume). Pouwels characterizes the mungwana not only in terms of his patterns of consumption, but also in terms of his distinguished manners in public, diligence in religious worship—and distinguished way of speaking. He refers to him as a person, who “dressed in a certain way, ate certain food, earned his livelihood in certain ways, attended to his prayers assiduously, lived in certain types of houses, behaves in certain ways in public, and above all, spoke the vernacular Swahili well.” (my emphasis)⁶⁰

Many of the practices he mentions are unconscious and embodied, like the consumption of certain foodstuffs, which make them fall into Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus, a notion linking individual practice and social values, referring to “systems of durable, transposable dispositions”⁶¹ acquired through imitation that become manifest in habitual behavior.⁶² Speech patterns are also part of the habitus, and so is the esteem and practice of poetic composition in the Swahili context. The composition of tendi characterizes the poet as a mungwana, since it is elevated speech and above all the composition of poetry, a quasi-embodied practice acquired gradually in the form of imitation, that differentiates him or her from lower social classes. The mungwana is a poet and the poet is a mungwana. Furthermore, by their didactic nature, tendi are also concerned with guiding the mungwana to keep his or her heshima.

The link between “speaking in a refined way” (kusema kwa ufasaha), on the one hand, which finds its most virtuous expression in poetry, and moral dignity, on the other, as well as reputation and leadership, has a long history on the coast. From the ancient and mythical master poet Fumo Liyongo, fighting for his right to inherit the throne of Pate, to Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassany, the nineteenth-century court poet of the Mazrui, and Bwana Zahidi Mngumi, the wordsmith who defeated the powerful city state of Pate on the battlefield, respect and authority are not merely reflected, but earned by swift poetic interventions. In the nineteenth century, when didactic tendi, like the ones described above, became the most important genre in a period of Islamic renewal, they also turned the composer into an essentially morally acting subject, who earned a heavenly reward through his or her compositions and turned the listener into a pious person.⁶³

This might urge us also to reconsider the notion of poetry. Poetry is not a written text, even if written down later, but a practice carried out by a mungwana responding at the appropriate time and in the adequate form. I do not merely mean to question the centrality of the written text by highlighting practices of oral composition and recitation, including improvisation.⁶⁴ Rather, I would like to highlight the connection between poetry and the person of the poet. Poetry indeed refers less to the product, the result of speaking, than to the act of speaking and, accordingly, to the acting speaker, i.e. the poet. The change in meaning of the term fasihi in the twentieth century, from “one speaking well” to “literature” (increasingly valued in its printed book form), is telling in this respect. Traditionally, like in many other cultural and historical contexts, there is no overarching term for poetry or literature in Swahili that would group together the various genres, like the tendi, the shairi or, later, also the novel. While the term fasihi has generally been used since the 1970s to refer to what we call “literature” in English,⁶⁵ in his dictionary, Sacleux still reports the meaning of fasihi as referring to an “eloquent person who speaks well and expresses him- or herself abundantly and in a lucid way” (“éloquent, qui parle bien, qui s’exprime avec abundance et lucidité”).⁶⁶ Thus, fasihi did not refer to the literary product, but to the “lucid” rhetor, who did not fall short of words.⁶⁷ Poetry is thus not the sum of a poet’s words, handed down and memorized, but primarily the poet’s persona, his way of composing and speaking, as well as the knowledge he has acquired. This is similar to the German context of the sixteenth century where, mostly by analogy with French, literature was used with reference to the literatus, the well-read erudite, the homme de lettre, having a mastery of Latin.⁶⁸ It is thus the author’s erudition and charisma that is in focus.⁶⁹

As I have been trying to show, Ustadh is certainly a homme de lettre, conversant with the large cultural archive that he draws on. The poet is a mediator who—given his broad knowledge and overview of important debates that often comes from books that people do not have access to or cannot read (since the books are, for instance, written in Arabic)—has to make the effort to “translate” (kutafsiri) the most important moral guidelines into a language that is understandable and speaks to the people.⁷⁰ He is a fasihi in the old sense of hodari ya kuzungumza, “skillful in speaking” Swahili, which likewise confirms his role as a mungwana. The ethical, the social persona, and the poetic, coming together in the poet’s habitus, are intertwined.—In the following, I will turn to the reading of a specific poetry.

5 Caring for and about the Children: Haki za watoto

Mwana umleavyo, ndivyo akuavyo

As you nurse your child, so it grows up.⁷¹

For Ustadh Mau, the Haki za watoto (“Children’s Rights”), which he composed in 2000, is one of the most important poems he has ever composed. The haki “rights” in the title refers to the poem’s far-reaching agenda. It is the same word as that found in the Swahili translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: haki za binadamu. While there is a commonly shared body of knowledge on what a child needs as well as practical knowledge on how to raise a child on Lamu, which is usually not explicitly addressed and falls to the responsibility of women, Ustadh Mau deemed it necessary to write the poem after experiencing his own and other people’s ignorance about children’s needs. As he explained to us, he only gradually became aware of children’s needs after he became a father. He saw many parents either abusing or neglecting children, which made him embark on the reflection that ultimately led to the composition of the poem.⁷² Further, his discontent with his wives—who did not care enough, in his view—prompted him to read more and more about developmental psychology and child care in both English and Arabic.⁷³ His poem draws on a number of different sources. At the beginning of the poem (stanzas 7 and 8), he refers to the Qurʾān and hadith as major inspirations for his poem, but he also makes use of his own observations; he draws not only from the UN conventions, but also from literature on baby care.

In the poem, he underlines the importance of minding the children’s age (stz. 237) and treating and guiding them accordingly. He starts by considering infants, then schoolchildren, and finally adolescents—in line with the utendi’s tendency to approach a topic systematically and coherently. As he explains at the end of the poem, his aim is to point out how to adequately handle and bring up children, so that they grow up to become responsible human beings. The poem thus moves chronologically from infants to adolescents, reflecting the utendi’s aim of an exhaustive treatment of the topic. Furthermore, its stanzas are structured thematically and topically, systematically addressing the different points that must be considered in child care, as well as the violations he has witnessed, like the severe corporal punishment of children.

Rather than providing a rigid list, he seeks to argue carefully to convince his audience of the particular needs of children as well as the value of a conscientious upbringing. In the poem, he makes himself an advocate of children in a society that, according to him, increasingly tends to disrespect, neglect, or abuse them and where, as a result, the children ever more frequently turn into uncontrollable tyrants. The poem includes practical advice as well, for instance in favor of breastfeeding and official registration after birth, but frequently also reads as a broader ethical consideration. In enumerating both what is good for a child and what makes a child a good person, his poem turns into a philosophical and anthropological consideration of the human good, a reflection on the human condition and strategies of making it better: what is, and what makes, a good person?

Above all, Ustadh Mau makes love and care central concerns, on which hinge not only the child’s but also society’s well-being. At the end of the poem, he describes himself as mwenye kite na dhuriya “someone who feels deeply for children” (stz. 255). Kite is one of the crucial concepts here, which firstly implies a deep, heartfelt affection and fondness for children that touch the narrator’s heart.⁷⁴ Kite thus overlaps with mapendi “love,” which he stresses over several stanzas: the right and need of the children “to be loved and to be brought up with love” (ni haki yake kupendwa na kwa mapendi kuundwa, stz. 36).⁷⁵ Love for the child is not a given; he critically adds wazazi wengi hushindwa “many parents fail” (stz. 35) to have or show it. But he highlights love as the most existential need of the child—more existential than even food (stz. 37)⁷⁶—and hence the most important human good to be passed on, so that the child too becomes a “good person.” Ruhuma “compassion, sympathy” is another relevant key word in relating to children with a loving heart and in a gentle manner (stz. 39). It evokes a sense of empathy, i.e. the capacity to put oneself in the position of the child to be able to understand its wishes and needs, but also to forgive its failures. Ruhuma is the same concept often evoked in referring to the Prophet’s loving relationship toward mankind, for whom he is the intercessor, praying for God’s mercy and forgiveness on the day of judgment despite all human failures and sins, which is the subject of many narrative tendi.⁷⁷ It is this “unconditional love” (stz. 45) that Ustadh demands from parents and that is, on the other hand, also the basis of all good relations.

Kite and ruhuma are hence more than individual feelings, but are ethical in that they call for, demand, and incite a whole spectrum of good actions, which I relate to the notion of care. This notion has increasingly received attention in the social sciences and philosophy in the past decades. “The central focus of care,” as Held underlines in her book The Ethics of Care, “is on the compelling moral salience of attending to and meetings the needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility.”⁷⁸ Accordingly, it challenges the injustices entrenched in political thought, as well as political and social institutions that do not adequately value the care work that is typically part of the household and thus is excluded from any public recognition, yet most essential in recreating society—and thus also became an important concern of feminist theories.⁷⁹ Lambek defines care as an essentially moral action by referring to Hannah Arendt’s notion of “labor,” essentially a “labor of love and reproduction” (as opposed to “work” in the sense of industrial production) that relates to “looking after and looking out for the well-being of others.”⁸⁰ It is particularly care for human beings who are dependent, like children, that has been in focus.⁸¹ Care involves work, as also evident in Ustadh Mau’s recommendations on child care, but it is more than merely utilitarian, since it involves and is based on emotions, like kite and ruhuma. They resemble Held’s description of the basis and essence of care as “close attention to the feelings, needs, desires and thoughts of those cared for, and a skill in understanding a situation from that person’s point of view.”⁸²

In Ustadh Mau’s poem, one finds several layers of care that he prescribes. At a minimal level, this firstly implies not hurting or abusing the child; he argues against verbal and psychological violence, such as ridiculing the child, for instance, by giving him or her a “bad name” (ina ovu), “which will remain like a scar” (kwake itakuwa kovu, stz. 28).⁸³ He is also against corporal punishment beyond “one lash of a whip” (ngongo, stz. 134), as well as against child labor: Wana tusilazimishe wala tuskalifishe, “Let us not force our children nor overburden them” (stz. 121). While it is good to send them on little errands, make them help in the household (stz. 124, 126), or sell some food in the street (stz. 125), hard work “destroys their character” (huwavuruga tabia, stz. 122). He recommends being indulgent, mild, and forgiving—all characteristics implied by ruhuma—toward the child. With regard to the question of how to make a good child, his poems argue for the right balance between rectifying mistakes, not leaving them unremarked, but also giving the child a second chance (see also stz. 246): “If a child misbehaves, it is necessary to discipline him, but in a careful way, and show him the right way” (stz. 245). He urges parents to carefully guide their children by talking to them (stz. 190 ff.). Parents should build a relationship of trust with the child, so that the child feels free to talk about his or her concerns. Trust is the seed of a good person later on. And, as he argues a few stanzas later, it is not only for the benefit of its parents, but it also makes the child a good and responsible member of society.⁸⁴

Secondly, care also demands very practical measures: he underlines the child’s right to have a proper name, under which the child will also be registered (stz. 31). Moreover, registering the child right after birth will save it from difficult bureaucratic steps later on (35). These two points seem to echo article 7.1 of the UNICEF Convention on the Rights of the Child: “The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name […].”⁸⁵ Echoing advice on baby care, he reminds the audience that the child has the right to be properly nourished with a balanced diet—breastfed rather than bottle-fed in the early days (stz. 63–68)—given clean water (92–95), to be dressed, given a bed to sleep in (stz. 81), and have medical check-ups (stz. 78), vaccinations, and medical treatment if the child falls sick (stz. 96–100). He also includes the right to schooling as well as religious education.

Care in Ustadh’s poem emphasizes the concrete and constant nature of ethical engagement: care, referring to sustained attention, is first of all part of ordinary life, carried out in the realm of the family.⁸⁶ And it is the habitual, which is part of everyday life, in which love needs to be enacted and parents have to show love and goodness, as he also highlights with the concept of mazoweya. Literally, this term means “habit,” “practice,” and in this context it refers to a constant, unflagging relation with children built by listening to them (wana wakizungumza yataka kuwasikiza, “when children address us, we should listen to them,” stz. 41) or by playing with them (na wana wetu tuteze, “let us play with our children,” stz. 44). This also implies showing one’s love: recalling bonding theory, he stresses that expressing affection with kisses is equally important (stz. 48). As he underlines, these expressions have a lasting effect on the child’s personality: “they do not go away, but remain” (hayondoki hubakiya, stz. 24). He underlines the relationship between the love and affection shown toward the child and “bright minds” and mental stability (stz. 51).⁸⁷ It is a lack of care and protection that turns children into a troublemakers, little “devils” (iblisi, stz. 58) “who will go astray” (hunenda mapopo, stz. 52).

The poem makes the parent a moral subject.⁸⁸ It is a guide on how to act as a good, caring parent and hence also a responsible, benevolent member of society, who is morally compelled to help the dependent infant (as failing to do so would make the parent an immoral person). Moreover, the parent also has to ensure that the child turns into a good, responsible person: it is the adult’s responsibility to teach the child “to do only good”: yalo mema ayatende (stz. 140). The two aspects, the caring adult and the morally good child, are interrelated in the poem. Ustadh starts his poem by stressing the importance of the “good mother”—and in this sense, he also directly addresses his adult target audience. Care for children starts before conception, in thoughtfully choosing the right mother, “who is excellent not in appearance, but in character” (aliyo mzuri mno / si kwa sura kwa tabiya, stz. 10). As in other poetry, like in the Wasiya wa mabanati (“Advice to Young Women”), he warns the reader or listener, whom he addresses directly, not to be seduced by outward appearances, but to choose mama bora (“the best mother,” stz. 16), who is religious and has a good conduct (stz. 16), who is mtulivu (“calm,” stz. 19), muyuzi alo mwerevu (“knowledgeable and smart,” stz. 19), and “who is not too busy but will truly look after the children” (aso mengi mashughuli / tawatunga kwelikweli, stz. 20). It is the good mother, just described, who is “a child’s first most important teacher” (mwalimu wa kwanda mno muhimu, stz. 23). Shaping the child’s behavior, the mother must first of all be a good role model (see stz. 141). The parent teaches the child good conduct and how to behave toward others through his or her own behavior. This also demands that the adult and teacher be sincere and act according to his or her words, which Ustadh Mau stresses as an important ethical tenet for humans as such: “And you also have to stick to your rules” (stz. 196; see also stz. 145, 209).

Stressing the importance of influence, he underlines the negative impact that friends and the media can have, which spreads like an infectious disease (stz. 153–168). He defines zifaya za anasa (“media of entertainment,” stz. 169) as the source of much harm. TV programs destroy mazuri mambo “all morality,” according to him. Being easily accessible, they are like ulimbo (“a bird trap,” stz. 171) and mostly offer bad programs. The trope of “deceit,” so common in Swahili Sufi poetry but also the reformist Islamic literature so important to him, is essential to reflecting upon the morally good which it endangers and seems to have found a new form in his poetry.⁸⁹ Here it is the TV and its colorful programs, full of all “types of perversions” (nyendo za ulanisi, stz. 177), that does “away with our sense of decency” (na kuondosha ya haya, stz. 178). The senses threaten to lead the human being astray—a recurring point in poetry. In earlier classical poems, such as the nineteenth-century Inkishafi, sensual pleasures, like food and the promise of erotic encounters lying in looks, gestures, scents, and textiles, take the senses hostage and prevent the soul from its spiritual fulfillment.⁹⁰ In the Inkishafi, the individual not able to refrain himself or herself cannot develop his or her fullest potential as a “good person” rewarded by paradise, but debases himself or herself and is punished in hell. In Ustadh Mau’s poem, it is the consumption of TV as well as pornographic magazines (stz. 186) that make the individual lose all dignity, which also finds direct expression in dressing shamelessly, which he condemns (stz. 181–183). According to him, TV programs have a deliberate main agenda of destruction, set by the West (stz. 180), “to promote immorality and to spread it according to well-made plans worldwide” (kuu ni tabiya jongo / kuzeneza kwa mipango / zitapakaze duniya, stz. 176).

The topic of education occupies a large part of the poem. For Ustadh Mau, education is essential not only to the child’s future, but also to society’s, since the benefits of an educated child spread “so that we can also profit from them” (Na kwetu husikili, stz. 112). The poem reflects Ustadh Mau’s constant worry—also expressed in other poems, such as Kiswahili⁹¹ and Bandari ina mawimbi (“The Port Makes Waves”)⁹²—about the low level of education on Lamu, which has ranked high in the Kenyan statistics on school dropouts for decades. In this climate, where education has lost its value, he tries to urge the community—by the use of an inclusive “we”—to make sure that children go to school and make an effort to learn: “We will not see any good results, unless they work hard” (faida hatutoona / illa wakisoma sana, stz. 114). It is only ilimu “knowledge, education” that can lead to progress and development, as he argues by referring to the example of Japan and Western countries, where education has been the key to success (stz. 117–119). Thus, education essentially builds the foundation of a “good life,” in the sense of both financial benefit as well as a broader understanding of things, which is a precondition for any judgment or decision-making.

It is independence in thought and action that Ustadh Mau highlights as important values toward the end of the poem, alongside generosity in giving, volunteering to take responsibility in the community, and the courage to confidently speak out on one’s own behalf or to defend the rights of those who are weaker (stz. 222, 223). It is the relational aspect of caring about and for others, as well as independence in making decisions not “depending on others” (mwenyewe asiajizi wangine kutegemeya, stz. 228), that he stresses.⁹³

What about the poet as a moral subject? In the poem, Ustadh Mau as the lyrical I takes on the role of the morally responsible and caring person. He formulates directives and imperatives for his audience and speaks up for their dependents, just as he wants parents to teach their children to do. The narrator is not only an ethical person in voicing imperatives and listing values, but rather in the sense that he intercedes by judging the unquestioned, habitual practices he has witnessed and by suggesting alternative ways of acting. The starting point is not values, but observations: he imposes judgment on observed practices, singling them out from the continuous, unquestioned flow of everyday action with the intention to change them. This echoes Lambek’s understanding:

It is precisely because practice is not mechanical, automatic, or fully determined that we have ethics. We must continuously exercise our judgment with respect to what we do or say. The criteria by which we do so are made relevant, brought into play, by means of performative acts, such acts themselves being conducted in consequence of practical judgment.⁹⁴

The initial impulse to intervene is first of all not founded on unchangeable criteria, but on the emotional virtues of ruhuma and kite, on which his notion of care hinges.⁹⁵ They allow him to feel for the child and to put himself in the child’s position, to be benevolent and forgiving, and they urge him to further his intention to “repair the ‘world’ ” he lives in, to rephrase Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher’s notion of “to take care of.”⁹⁶ In his arguments, Ustadh reflects upon criteria. However, while the values expounded in the poem are meant to be of enduring quality, they are also relative, as Ustadh is also aware. In stanza 253, he acknowledges his own fallibility and invites his fellow poets to correct him:

As this stanza underlines, ethics means a communal, dialogic search for values and criteria to decide on a “better path,” since the latter is anything but fixed: there are always alternative possibilities, and the decision requires a careful weighing of criteria. As described above, Ustadh makes use of various sources, from existing poetry to books on child development. He sketches scenes of everyday life and dialogues to make the practices he refers to palpable and concrete. In his poem, he stages dialogues between children and parents to show rather than tell about good and bad examples and to make everyday scenes come to life. In this sense, the ethical is not a claim of a fixed truth, but rather a constant search, which for Ustadh Mau takes place largely in his poetry. How much the ethical emerges in reference to lived experience becomes even clearer in some other poems, like the next one.

6 Demanding Social Responsibility: Mama msimlaumu (“Don’t Blame My Mother”)

Imenibidi kunena, kabla wangu wakati

Sababu nimewaona, mamangu humlaiti

Mamangu makosa hana, sipweke amezohiti

Kosa hili nda ummati

I have been compelled to talk prior to my time,

because I have seen you condemning my mother.

My mother is not the one to blame; it is not her fault alone.

It is society’s fault.

Mama msimlaumu (“Don’t Blame My Mother”, stz. 1)

In the poem Mama msimlaumu, which takes the shorter shairi form, Ustadh Mau talks about an abandoned baby that a dog found in the woods and saved. A newspaper article reporting the incident prompted him to write about it. While many around him condemned the mother for leaving the child to die, he defends the mother and rather places the blame on a society in which a mother is so desperate that she sees no other option but to abandon her own child. In seeking to challenge society’s stereotypical blame of women, he takes the perspective of the abandoned baby in the poem, who outwardly defends its mother (see the lines given above).⁹⁷ The narrative perspective comes with important effects linked to the moral intent of the poem, as I shall argue. First of all, however, I would like to take a look at the argument put forward by the child.

The child empathetically underlines the fallibility or weakness (dhaifu) of all human beings (not only the mother) who, despite a general consensus on what is right or wrong, fail to stick to it (which is exactly the reason why, for Lambert, “doing ethics,” like judging, is a constant concern): “As all of you know, there are times of weakness, in which we fail to control ourselves” (stz. 3). Thus, the mother is not portrayed as the monster who callously abandoned the child, but as a fallible and thus normal human being. The “we” that Ustadh Mau uses in this stanza includes himself as well as the audience, and asks for their understanding, drawing attention to everyone’s fallibility. Counter to society’s tendency to socially marginalize pregnant single women, exempting men from any responsibility, the baby urges the audience to equally distribute the blame (stz. 5). The baby highlights the “share” of the man, who did not only “contribute,” but might have even taken the mother against her will (stz. 4). In the following stanza, the poem rises in emotionality; the child defends the mother even more emphatically, putting the blame solely on the father, who “pushed her” to such an act, leaving her without a choice although she loved the child. The expression “putting shame on my mother” (kumuaziri mamangu; stz. 4) reflects the passive role of the woman, who might have seen no alternative and who also could not deny the illegitimate intercourse, as it was immediately revealed by the pregnancy. Moreover, this has a lasting effect: children born outside of marriage become marginalized and are called names. With the line “I feel so much bitterness if I hear people talking” (stz. 8), the baby narrator is referring to the humiliating practice of gossip, against which the poem seeks to speak out. It is the performative act of the poem that questions and redefines existing criteria and practices of shaming.

The poem continues by further elaborating on the mother’s love (as opposed to the man’s cold-heartedness), referring to ruhuma “mercy,” the concept that was so central to the Haki za watoto, as the emotion that dominated her feelings (stz. 10). According to the baby’s argument, the fact that the mother abandoned the child was not an act of cruelty or despair (as depicted in the newspaper article), but an act of wema wake, i.e. her “goodness” or “kindness,” since firstly she did not abort the child before giving birth (stz. 11 and 12), and she even put a cloth around it when leaving it in the forest (stz. 13). The child highlights the uniqueness of the mother with the rhetorical question, Walimwengu nauliza, tazawa mara ya pili? (“I ask you human beings: Can I possibly be born a second time?”, stz. 14). At the end, the baby thanks the dog and the people who saved it, who have become role models of altruism: “There are still people in the world who are altruistic” (Wangaliko duniyani, waja wapendao kheri,⁹⁸ stz. 15).

Again, judgment takes place here in relation to a specific incident that Ustadh felt compelled to comment on. While warning against and castigating pregnancies outside of marriage in other poems or stressing the utmost moral responsibility to love an infant in Haki za watoto, he does not merely impose the previously established criteria on the mother abandoning her baby, but adopts a different position through the lyrical I, who completely reverses the perspective. It is the baby who, again out of ruhuma, is able to forgive, to feel pity for the mother. It is even able to understand the mother’s choice, or rather, it calls into question the mother’s freedom to act according to her own will.

The narrative perspective and the lyric presence of the baby’s voice here is not a byproduct of the poem, a kind of trickery to rivet the audience’s attention, but necessary to the ethical statement. It is a role reversal: the fact that it is the baby itself—the victim, who cares for the mother—is what lends its voice so much weight and constructs the poem in antagonism to the hostile social environment. The newborn baby in its state of nature—it is even found in the woods by a dog—is not (yet) a member of society, and thus can speak outside of it and raise its voice against the practices of gossip and exclusion. Against society’s fixed judgment, the baby shouts out its questions, which make the poem particularly touching and emotional.⁹⁹

The poem shows the power of Ustadh’s poetry in “performing ethics,” since in contrast to a catalogue of values, it gives the audience the possibility to plunge into the baby’s and mother’s experience of pain and pity. It fleshes out real characters, makes them act and talk, so that the audience does not merely understand Ustadh Mau’s argument in favor of the mother, but rather feels for the mother’s plight and fear, sees her fallibility in a larger context, and wonders at the surviving baby, siding with her. The poem has a cathartic or purifying effect: the poem stages human fallibility and vulnerability, such that it is not only the baby feeling ruhuma for the mother; ruhuma is also what the audience feels—a precondition, as the Haki za watoto had already shown, to care in a morally responsible way. Kite and ruhuma are staged to produce an effect on the audience and urge it to change its attitude—a phenomenon that recalls Aristotle’s concept of the cathartic effect of tragedy. For Aristotle, pity and fear are the essential ingredients of tragedy, which, “employing the mode of enactment” throughout a unifying plot, accomplishes the “catharsis of such emotions”:¹⁰⁰ “For the plot should be so structured that, even without seeing it performed, the person who hears the events that occur experiences horror and pity at what comes about.”¹⁰¹ The enactment of a tragic fate makes the audience fear for the protagonist as well as feel pity, while at the same time, it gives them the chance to live through these emotions communally as the story unfolds. For Aristotle, it is catharsis that changes the audience’s attitude and thus lays the groundwork for future good deeds. In a similar way, in thinking about philosophical discourses of morality, the contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum also highlights the capacity of literature to sensitize others to human pain, vulnerability, experiences of loss, and fragility as a precondition for acting ethically.¹⁰² Taking the example of Greek tragedy, she highlights its particular way of developing morality through an emotionally compelling staged drama, which involves the audience differently than a philosophical treatise on morality, which relies on abstract arguments. In Mama msimlauma, the narrative technique of telling the story through the eyes of the baby—by piercing the reality with questions—is linked to the ethical concern of the poet.

7 Poetry as a Site of Self-Interrogation: Mlango

While there are many other poems through which Ustadh seeks to make a public intervention, questioning existing practices, in what follows, I will turn to a more personal, reflective, and intimate poem—namely Mlango (“The Door”)—to show the variability of his poetic and ethical voice. He composed the poem in 2003 or 2004 at a time when his bakery, with which he had always earned his living, was no longer making enough money to cover his family’s needs, including his children’s university fees, and his debts were increasing to the point that he was forced to think about closing the bakery.

It is a poem about loss, disappointment, and despair, and it struck me because of its deeply melancholic tone; the narrator here does not side with someone else, but cries out about his own fate, yet at the same time looks for ways to comfort himself. Differently from the other poems discussed here, this poem is a lyrical, interior self-exploration. It is a form of “self-care,” if one wants to stick to the notion of “care” introduced above, but, more importantly to me, self-care is not merely the aim of the poem, but rather emerges through its lyrical voice. In line with Earl Miner’s comparative exploration of the “lyrical” in the world’s literatures, I understand the lyrical as a “radical presence” that suspends the flow of the narrative, enhances the palpability of the depicted scene, and plunges into emotional intensity in a well-conceived and pithy form.¹⁰³ In a similar way, Ustadh also acknowledges a lyrical quality in some of his poetry, where he explores his emotions (hisia) with regard to his own experience: “a poet also composes to talk about feelings that are his or her own, concerning things that happened to him or her personally.”¹⁰⁴ In other words, the lyrical voice and intention—whose ethical core is “to do good to oneself” or “to care about oneself” and implies a strong element of self-reflection—are intertwined.

Self-interrogative poems, in turn, are an important part of Swahili poetic tradition.¹⁰⁵ In Moyo iwe na subira (“Be Patient My Heart”), the Kenyan poet Abdilatif Abdalla—who had been sentenced to solitary confinement by Kenya’s first president, Kenyatta, because of his political activism against the government—argues with his own heart: usijitie matungu, siliye ‘tajiumiza “don’t hurt yourself by crying.”¹⁰⁶ Addressing his heart, he explains to it, the fate of imprisonment is “a lesson for you—learn from it, heart, learn” (haya ni mafunzo kwako, funzika moyo funzika).¹⁰⁷ As in Ustadh Mau’s poem, the lyrical voice in Moyo iwe na subira struggles with the discrepancy between his strong feelings of loss and sadness and his previous confidence—“it wasn’t meant to be” (stz. 14)—and the situation as it is, which he cannot change.¹⁰⁸ While the narrator urges the heart to be patient, since na yale ambayo huwa, huwa ni ya kuwa nayo “whatever happens is usually what is meant to be,”¹⁰⁹ the self-interrogative form of the poem acknowledges the essential ambivalence of the human condition: despite knowing about the fickle nature of life, one still hopes for the contrary, struggling with feelings of loss, deprivation, and limitation. Above all, it is in poetry where the discrepancy between the hope for a better life, on the one hand, and coercive reality, on the other, is staged.¹¹⁰

Mlango also starts from the point of loss as a fait accompli, as the narrator struggles to make himself realize that there is nothing else to do but close the bakery. No matter how hard he tries to find a solution, the situation is getting worse and worse: nimemaliza mipango, siyoni kurakibika, “I have tried everything; I do not see any improvement” (stz. 1). In focusing on the moment when the narrator is struggling for final certainty about a major loss that represents a turning point in his life, the poem is similar to Jahazi (“The Dhow”), which stages a major economic crisis that struck Lamu as if it were the sinking of a ship, into which water keeps pouring despite the sailors’ efforts to save it:¹¹¹

Ngurudi imeshopoka, mai ngamani hujiri

Haitaki kuzibika, na hata kwa misumari

Kuyafua tumechoka, mikono hutuhairi

The stopper is out, and water is pouring into the bilge

It doesn’t want to be plugged, not even using nails

We are tired of scooping out water; our hands hurt.

Jahazi (“The Dhow”, stz. 2)

It is the moment of fatigue that is in focus in both poems, as neither situation changes for the better. Mlango speaks of the same weariness toward waiting as Jahazi, where, rather than a storm or the water rushing in, it is inertia that dries up all courage. In Jahazi, the narrator reaches the point where he would prefer the ship to “hit a coral reef than [confront] this nuisance” (ni heri mwamba kupanda, kama hunu utiriri, stz. 4). In Mlango, the narrator has just made the unavoidable, “hard decision” (uwamuzi thakili, stz. 2) to close the bakery against his will, and is seeking to come to terms with it. The latter is not an easy task, since he has spent his whole life working in the bakery, which he inherited from his uncle, and the future is uncertain.

In contrast to Jahazi, where the lyrical I is a plural “we”—it is the whole community of Lamu that is suffering—the narrator of Mlango is alone. Over the course of the poem, it becomes clear that there is a bigger personal threat than the sheer economic one: the lyric narrator does not only fear losing his means of livelihood, but it is his very persona, defined through moral engagement—his heshima—that is at stake. The narrator also feels compelled to close the shop’s door as a way of making the bankruptcy visible to everybody, since the people who used to beg or borrow from him and have relied on his generosity do not believe him to be in a difficult situation. They take his confessions about his miserable situation for a “joke” (dhihaka, stz. 4) or a sign of “arrogance” (ujauri, stz. 5), a lame excuse to “avoid all responsibility” (jukumu kuepuka, stz. 8)—and start slandering him behind his back. He is considered a liar and a miser who no longer lives up to his moral code and has become as unreliable and moody as the proverbial “mkizi fish” (stz. 7), which is hard to catch and whose behavior is difficult to predict. The sad voice of his poem contradicts the slanderous speech of the others, whom he quotes: “It has become his habit: when someone begs him, he says, ‘Nowadays, things have gone wrong’ ” (Imekuwa ndake kazi, mtu kitu akitaka / Humwambiya siku hizi, mambo yameharibika, stz. 7). Not unlike in the other poems, the lyrical voice expresses great disapproval toward how they speak and act. However, this poem is not a public proclamation castigating wrongdoers, explaining his situation to everyone beyond doubt and reminding the audience of kite and ruhuma.¹¹² This would run counter to dignity (heshima) linked to the concept of sitara,¹¹³ since it would mean publicly shaming himself. Rather, this poem is the outcry of the abandoned and mistrusted narrator against all the slander and cruelty around him. As he cannot rectify his mistakes through speaking publicly, he resorts to a monologue in which the lyrical I can lament his humiliation and find a place to console himself and consider what to do. The narrator starts wondering if closing the shop would be a possibility to prove the truth and veracity of his claims. Here too the conclusion about what to do has not yet been drawn, but the poem as such becomes a site of reflection, comparable to a diary, as is best reflected by the modality of possibility in stanza 9, which starts with “perhaps” (huenda) and turns into a conditional clause: he wonders if the “reproaches and provocations of those surrounding me will stop if I close the shop’s door” (zikapungua lawama, za wenye kunizunguka na utune ukakoma, mlango kiushindika).

At the end of the poem, the narrator finally urges himself to be patient despite all the impatience that has taken hold of him, and not to be led astray by emotion, but to rather resort to God, the ultimate good above all human beings, who is able to “repair” the world even when it seems to be lost forever. In a similar way, he pleads for patience in Jahazi and Amu: in the latter poem, the catastrophe of an actual sunken ship brings the community of Lamu to the verge of emotional and social breakdown. On the one hand, patience (subira) means accepting misery as a challenge sent by God, but on the other hand, also believing that God will bring relief: Ni yeye pweke Khallaki, atuwao na kutweka, “It is only the Creator who can lift the burden or put it on our shoulders” (stz. 10). To appease his troubled heart, he—similarly to Abdilatif Abdalla—heeds the enlightening aspect of misery, since, as he argues in Mlango, it will tell him who his true friends are. Furthermore, he also reminds himself that Mola amenisitiri tangu nalipoinuka, “God has always safeguarded me since my childhood” (stz. 12).¹¹⁴ In the end, he encourages himself with the phrase afuwa haiko mbali, “relief is not far” (stz. 13). As these last stanzas underscore, through their growing intensity in imploring God to change his fate, on the one hand, and their seeking to accept the situation tel quel, on the other, the poem is a site of struggle for hope—and not an expression of a previously gained certainty about what best to do.

The poem Mlango reminds us that not only in poems like the Haki za watoto or Mama mslimlaumu, which seek to intervene in public affairs, are the poetic and the ethical intertwined, but also in more introspective, lyrical forms, which can express dissent with the status quo and particularly common practices that hurt and objectify others. The lyrical form is not supplementary to, but a precondition for its moral force: its questions, staged dialogues, and reflections pierce through the unquestioned and imposed practices and speech of society. However, more than Haki za watoto and Mama msimlaumu, where the poet intends to and believes in changing existing social conditions and advises on what to do, Mlango—like Amu and Jahazi, which essentially speak from a position where no longer can anything be done to avert misery—also struggles with the limitation of the human condition as such. There is nothing that can be done to avoid all suffering, which is a difficult conclusion for the suffering lyrical voice. In this context, the only and ultimate resolution is “to be patient” (kuwa na subira). This does not mean merely waiting and hoping for the better, but rather implies a form of “doing” as well, since it demands that the individual make a constant and painstaking effort to trust in God and His mercy (ruhuma). In this sense, subira is also a form of doing “good”—as the poems suggest, the ultimate one.

8 Conclusion: The Poetry of Care and the Care for Poetry

Boya hili la maisha, kattu halitozamisha / Ashikao tamvusha, bandari tasikiliya

This life buoy never sinks; it will rescue the one who holds onto it, so that s/he reaches the port.

Ramani ya maisha ya ndoa (“The Map of Married Life”, stz. 9)¹¹⁵

In seeking to explore Ustadh Mahmoud Mau’s poetry, I have sought to explore the close connection between his care for poetry and his poetry of care. My major concern has been highlighting that the poetic is not secondary to the ethical, but rather an essential part of his ethical explorations. It is poetry that has the built-in authority and effective voice to cut through the unconscious continuation of life, to express dissent from the status quo, and to suggest or rather to carefully explore ways of doing things better. Furthermore, in his poetry, Ustadh Mau does not merely resort to rules or received codes of conduct; his process is not that of making general statements without taking into account the details of specific, recurring challenges that society confronts. It is through abstraction that ethical guidelines and rules lose their palpability and their capacity to involve people emotionally and to make them imagine concrete scenes and applications. In staging dialogues and incorporating scenes of, for instance, parent-child interaction before their eyes or a baby speaking out in defense of its mother, his poetry becomes compelling in that it urges the audience to put themselves in the place of the characters and hence to care for and about them. It is the kite that, for him, is the basic incentive of all morally good action and is ultimately grounded in God’s own unconditional care for his creation, which Ustadh Mau does not preach but rather seeks to evoke through his poetry, turning the audience into a caring community. Thus, Ustadh Mau’s poetry has a cathartic effect in that it has the power to transform the audience or even the self—as the last poem, Mlango, seeks to do, where patience as trust in the ultimate good is reached not before but through the poem.

In this sense, “educating people” (kuwaelimisha watu), which he considers a major goal of his poetry, does not mean merely to form their “intellect” (akili) or to increase their “knowledge” (ujuzi), but also to turn them into morally acting thinkers, or rather “carers,” who intervene whenever they deem it to be necessary; not to impose strict rules, but rather to act on behalf of “dependents” who cannot speak for themselves or do not even recognize the wrong inflicted on them. Intellectual practice, closely intertwined with poetry, is primarily of ethical concern.