Mujuni chronicles change in latest poetry collection

They say women are from Venus

And men are from Mars, 

And so it was, on her funniest birthday...

Jim and Bob, were all in sync,

On two different missions, 

So they completed their annotations,

Beyond this Ugandan horizon!

Bernard M. Mujuni writes in the poem ‘Inviting Their Friends For Birthday’.

The poem is an extract from his sophomore poetry book: The Monologue Dairy of a Covid-19 Walker.

His starter book: The Rabbit on the Pulpit, was one of 2023’s most talked about books, in the categories of poetry and fiction. 

In The Monologue Dairy of a Covid-19 Walker, Mujuni does not rest on his laurels as he continues along the proverbial yellow brick road towards the poetry of a similarly winning vintage.

This time, however, Mujuni turns to socio-political commentary as he reflects on the COVID-19 pandemic and how it turned our society upside down. Through poetry, he captures and chronicles the changes in our lifestyles, politics and social interactions brought on by the pandemic.

As policies like social distancing kept us at arm’s length with the normalcy of our pre-Covid lives, we learnt to walk for miles alongside persons of the opposite sex who engaged with us in something that was not exactly the opposite of sex. That was the fun part.

The darker side of the pandemic-enforced regulations that led to an increase in domestic violence, including child abuse, spousal abuse, elder abuse and disability abuse. We were cooped up with family for so long, with nowhere to go, that familiarity bred contempt.

The closure of schools and universities deprived millions of learners of social educational activities and bred social anxiety, and panic due to financial insecurity, economic recession and severe psychological stress. 

Mujuni captures all this to validate the saying by Greek philosopher Aristotle, “Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.”

The pandemic was universal, it equalised life across the globe in ways that only death and taxes can do. During the pandemic, in its universality, however, there was a particular reality about living your own private hell. It reminded us that life is not only fragile, it is fleeting; like wind. This is why most of our efforts to get by, as it were, are really futile. Mujuni highlights this in the poem, Chasing the Wind. 

Everyone in some way, chases the wind, 

That great deal, often blown by the wind, 

Like Musa, the mechanic, lost into weed, 

Weeding, day and night till the end of the week, 

Later becoming weak, 

A dead weakling...

Gone with the wind,” 

It did not matter whether we worked hard, loved harder or met our hard-won responsibilities; life was reduced to its ruins. So it did not matter whether we worked hard like the richest man on earth or got high like Musa, the mechanic. Many chose the latter.

This is especially so when the medicinal properties of weed were touted as a curative for Covid-19. That’s when the heights of self were scaled by those gripping their weed as a drowning man would clutch at a straw.

Mujuni does not only talk about the downsides of the pandemic. He playfully registers, with contrasting tones of expression, the fun we had meeting persons we would never have met if there was no pandemic. It was a blast.

 But is this joy against the tide of the times a sign of madness? 

Mujuni touches on this too in the poem, Slaying the Dragon in the Valley:

“Fourteen million Ugandans mad,

It is not enough to say,

That when the madness of this nation,

Disturbs a solitary mind,

It is not enough to say,

The man or woman is mad…”