Author: Bash Fahad Mutumba
Title: Why we sing
Published: 2022
Price: Shs40,000
Availability: Aristoc Bookshop
Philip Matogo
Bash Fahad Mutumba is known for his unmatched photography skills. They betray his unique eye for capturing the essence of a moment, and immortalising it.
Beyond his abilities as a visual storyteller, Mutumba is also a poet whose poetry book Why We Sing gives us every reason to sing. Not because its title recalls the book of British singing therapist, teacher and performer Julia Hollander, whose 2024 book is also called Why We Sing.
Nor because it recalls the legendary soul singer Marvin Gaye’s 1971 classic jam, What’s Going On.
How, you ask? Well, Mutumba does not require an exclamation mark in his book title; even though one would not be misplaced.
Similarly, Gaye does not require a question mark in his song and album title even as it would be at home there.
Rather, Mutumba and Gaye are both telling us about their respective worlds.
Gaye tells about the troubling world of 1970s America, while Mutumba tells us another story.
“Since I was a child, I have always had the dream to be an author. ‘Why We Sing’ is a collection of poems I’ve written throughout my life; about growth, love, politics, physical intimacy, romance and the Ugandan experience,” Mutumba says.
His poetry collection is about life, in the round.
To be sure, these poems are essentially a coming-of-age collection, which pulls together the various strands of his story. A story fashioned from an adamantine sense of self.
Dr Stella Nyanzi, who writes the book’s forward, is on the mark in the way she pegs “the poet [Mutumba’s] displays mastery over figurative language that combines, metaphors, humour, allusion, juxtaposition, shock and deceptive simplicity.” “Why We Sing” is divided into four sections: On the wrong side of the bed; Why bite my tongue; I cried, you lied and The Ten African Commandments.
The first section is sexed-up, as it were, by the poem “Bed Mates”, which has nothing to do with what you are thinking. That is if you are looking for a verb where only a noun exists in its title.
This is a poem about the bed bugs, which fill their innards “with your romance”.
But, wait a minute; let us look a little closer: “Till between your thumbs you squeeze them/Till they bleed your love because it is you they bleed.”
The “toxic smell” they leave behind after you have killed them reimagines a love gone sour.
The dead bed bug thereby becomes a metaphor for memories filled with the divine stench of a love in need of an autopsy.
In section two, the poem “Kati What?” is a sestet or a six-line poem. It is simply put together and plays to the strengths of a whimsical yet deep love. Adorned with spell, the poem and the persona are elegantly brought into single focus by the charm with which the poem is rendered.
Section Three is packed with some well-written poems like, “Don’t You want such a woman?”
In a study of contrasts, the woman is calm and crazy; as graceful as a gazelle on the streets, but also quite the opposite, too.
The poem starts with a question and ends with an exclamation mark in the form of the question posed. Because after you have heard the description of this woman, you would be crazy to say no.
In the last section of this 53-page book, the poet explains why we sing in the poem Why We Sing.
It is a political poem and reminds us that, even in our darkest moments, we must sing. Not merely for singing’s sake, but to overcome:
