Song Of Lawino Full Poem

[Roselee Kruppa]

Songof Lawino depicts a heroine who laments the rejection of African tradition for western ways by the educated elite. By using the song style, the poem is not just a lament, but a series of songs meant to celebrate African culture. Cook (231) implies this trend when he says that

Lawino, who also symbolizes African tradition, adopts as the butt of her attacks, her husband Ocol. Ocol is symbolic of the modern educated African, who has adopted wholesale, European cultural and mental attitudes. Ocol is artistically presented as rejecting African tradition, when Lawino says in the opening lines:

Aside from the role of the traditional healer as a symbol of traditional religion, he also represents the African notion of medicine. Of course, Ocol as an educated man and a Christian would not allow African medicine or juju into his house. But Lawino goes on to give few examples of herbal medicines as illustrated by this traditional cough medicine.

Use of Praise Names: In Song of Lawino, for example, Lawino makes use of praise names in addressing Ocol. This is partly to demonstrate the deep love and respect she still has for her husband. But at a deeper level, it is symptomatic of an African heroic tradition normally present in panegyrics. Some of the praise names she uses are:

Who are the experts?

Our certified Educators are real professors, teachers, and scholars who use their academic expertise to tackle your toughest questions. Educators go through a rigorous application process, and every answer they submit is reviewed by our in-house editorial team.

Burton, Felicita. "What is the impact of orality on Okot p'Bitek's "Song of Lawino"?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 21 June 2019, -poetry/questions/what-is-the-effect-of-orality-on-song-of-lawino-276682.

"Song of Lawino" shares with most oral epic the large scale form of anextended narrative poem. It is not an example of oral traditional epic, in thatit was composed by an single individual about a subject contemporary to thatwriter rather than looking back to an heroic age. It does, however, borrow someof the stylistic surface feature of oral poetry. It is composed in a simplerhythmic structure appropriate for public performance, uses repeated epithets,invokes stereotypes, and is structured agglutinatively, creating effects not bysubordination and analysis but by piling on layers of detail. Also like mostoral poetry, it is close to the human life world and makes its point viastriking example rather than abstraction.

Wofford, Lynnette. "What is the impact of orality on Okot p'Bitek's "Song of Lawino"?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 14 Sep. 2011, -poetry/questions/what-is-the-effect-of-orality-on-song-of-lawino-276682.

A Song of Lawino is a dramatic monologue which reveals two characters, Lawino and her husband, Ocol who are in disagreement because of their cultural differences. Both Lawino and Ocol belong to Acoli tribe. They represent African husband and wife in early days of African independences. Lawino represents African values while Ocol represents Western values. Therefore, Ocol is educated and westernized while Lawino is not. The poem is a song sung by an illiterate wife who complains about her relationship with her educated husband. Her persistent questioning of why she is abused simply for being African.

The setting of the poem is post-independence Uganda. The poem is set in the African societies plagued by the evils of Western culture to the African people. The setting of this narrative poem is African continent at the time when white men came to Africa. The white men brought Western culture, education and Christianity that were alien to Africa.

This is the arrangement or series of events in a work of art. The plot of this long poem is straightforward and is organized into three parts in which each part has its contents as discussed by the poet. The plot. The plot of the poem is chronological in the sense that the events happen chronologically from the beginning to the end. This is exemplified by the part of the poem called Song Of Ocol which is the continuation of the events raised in the Song of Lawino.

In this poem, Lawino compares the Western ways of telling time. She compares the process by counting seconds, minutes, and hours by clocks with the African traditional ways of observing nature or by needs felt by human beings. She makes fun of Ocol for becoming slave of time to the extent of being unhappy and restless and blames him for treating his children and relatives with great disrespect for the sake of observing time.

The poem shows how Lawino is ignorant of Christianity. She has different attitudes towards Christianity. Lawino expresses her views to those who preach Christianity. She blames the preachers of Christianity for misleading and maltreating their converts. She shows that the missionaries are wrong in their ways of thinking, education, sexual morality and naming individuals. She blames the preachers again for preaching good things but practicing things contrary to Christian ways. She also thinks that it is better to join with her poor people in the area where meaningful and relevant songs and cultural activities are performed.

In this poem, Lawino criticizes the preachers and Christian doctrines. This chapter continues the criticism and attacks on the Christian preachers. Lawino criticizes them for failing to answer the questions concerning the religion. She also questions the Christian doctrines on creation, virgin birth and Eucharist.

In this poem, Lawino tells the irrelevance and effects of Western education. She exposes the irrelevance and effects of Western education in various ways. She asks Ocol of what use for him are the books as a person,if the knowledge in them cannot help to create a better society. According to Lawino, the books have killed Ocol as a man. Western education has brought him to the point where he belongs neither to European culture nor to African culture.

In this poem, Lawino advises Ocol on how to regain and retain his last manhood. According to Lawino herself, Ocol can do that by throwing away all the symbols of hypocrisy, by begging for forgiveness of the elders, offering traditional sacrifices and by using traditional doctors and medicines.

Characterization. The poet has created the realistic characters who appeal to the experiences of the modern societies. In this dramatic poem, the three main characters have been created; they are Lawino, Ocol, and Clementine. Lawino is the central character of this anthology.

Lak Tar tells the story of an Acoli boy whose father dies while he is still very young. A few years later he falls in love with a girl and she agrees to marry him but he is unable to pay the very high bride price. His stepfather and his uncles refuse to help him. The rest of the novel relates the series of misfortunes that befall him when he goes to Kampala to try to earn the money he needs. Despite nearly two years away, he earns only a fraction of the bride price, and during his return journey he is robbed. The novel ends with his arrival home, miserable and penniless.

Okot took this opportunity to extend his education. He stayed in England to study. He did a one-year course for a diploma in Education at Bristol University. He then did a degree course in law at Aberystwyth. It was during this period that Okot lost his Christian commitment. It was also at this time that the direction of his interests changed from the European traditions he had been studying to the traditions of his own people. While studying the Medieval European tradition of trial by ordeal he recognised a parallel to the traditions of the Acoli. He wanted to investigate this.

When he finished his Law degree in 1962 he had an opportunity to pursue his interest in African traditions. He moved to Oxford University to study for a B. Litt. in social anthropology. It was in this period that he developed many of the attitudes he expresses strongly in his poems and academic works. In his Preface to his book, African Religions in Western Scholarship, he tells us of his conflicts with his teachers:

First he worked in Gulu again, for the extra-mural department of Makerere College. He continued his research in traditional songs, especially investigating the religious ideas expressed through them. He was also involved with a large group of friends in the creation of the Gulu Festival. He was a performer as well as an organiser, singing and dancing with a group and devising ways of adapting traditional songs to the different performance conditions of the Festival. It was in this period that he wrote Wer pa Lawino, the Acoli version of Song of Lawino. It is easy to see how songs that Okot was working on could influence the composition of his own poem.

Okot wrote the Acoli version of Song of Lawino in a period in his life when he was daily concerned with Acoli traditional songs, both in his research and in his activities in connection with the Gulu Festival. In his work for the Festival, he co-operated very closely with a large group of friends. These are some of the people whose help he acknowledged on the title pages of Song of Lawino. Naturally when Okot was writing his poem he also worked together with these friends. He read new versions of each chapter of the poem to these people as soon as they were completed and

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

As G.A.Heron notes in his Introduction, Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol:are not songs in any literal sense. You cannot sing them. They are not simply a written version of Acoli songs. Acoli songs do not grow to book length. They are one or two verses repeated with musical accompaniment. [...] They do ot use rhyme or the regular rhythm used in Wer pa Lawino. The lengthy poem Song of Lawino, in particular, is a lament and denunciation one can imagine being declaimed, if not sung. For all the (local) universality of its arguments, it is not a communal work but an individual and personal one, the poet giving voice to a strong leading figure, Lawino. It is a litany of specifics, bitter complaints about her husband, Ocol -- even as their individual differences are representative for two camps, one espousing the entirely traditional (Lawino), the other looking only towards a European-culture-guided future (Ocol).

Even if not of the traditional oral-poetic (or song) form, the approach is appropriate, given that Lawino is illiterate, and given her complaint about Western book-learning: "Ocol has lost his head / In the forest of books" she laments, denouncing the written texts that have displaced traditional values and customs (including, presumably, oral culture):And the reading

Has killed my man,

In the ways of his people

He has become

A stump. The form of the 'song' is adapted in translation (Okot p'Bitek's own), Heron also explaining: In Song of Lawino Okot replaces the regular rhythm and rhyme of the Acoli version with irregular free verse in the English version. Clearly, this gives a different feel to the work, but it seems reasonably successful. Lawino's expression hammers home her complaints in stark, quick succession -- though one wonders whether the regularity of rhythm and rhyme in the original suggest a much more tempered argument: as is, the clipped, rapid-fire English gives a very heated feel to Lawino's expressions of frustration.

Lawino is Ocol's first wife, and the mother of his first children. Now educated -- in the Western sense: he "Has read at Makerere University / He has read deeply and widely" -- and religious -- again in the Western sense, having become Christian --, Ocol sees everything about his origins as backward, and something to distance himself from. He has tried, and apparently managed quite well, to reinvent himself in the Western mold, complete with a European name -- Milchizedek Gregory ("It sounds something like / Medikijediki Giriligoloyo", Lawino thinks) -- and a new wife who understands these new ways. Among the reasons he rejects Lawino is: "Because, he says / I have no Christian name. / He says / Lawino is not enough.

In separate chapters, Lawino addresses the variety of differences between the traditional that Ocol now rejects (but which she still clings to) and the new, which he has embraced entirely. He is dismissive of Lawino for not being able to cook European-style food, or being able to: "dance white men's dances". He is disrespectful of his parents and of family in general, and not welcoming in the way expected of him, barring visitors because, among other reasons:They ruin his nicely polished floor

With the mud in their feet. Among the many areas of disagreement is about time, Ocol angry at Lawino because: "I cannot keep time / And I do not know / How to count the years". For Lawino, things happen when the need and circumstance arise: the child is fed when it's hungry (as opposed to fixed, regular mealtimes), or goes to sleep when it is tired. Ocol's life, meanwhile, is ruled by precise schedules -- and by the baffling grandfather clock whose: "large single testicle / Dangles below" (in one of Okot p'Bitek's most inspired images).

Lawino is baffled by Ocol's attitude:I do not understand

The ways of foreigners

But I do not despise their customs.

Why should you despise yours ? Yet ultimately she too seems to judge reflexively: for Ocol all things Western are unquestionably superior; in reaction, she finds only flaws (and no potential positives) while wholeheartedly endorsing the entirely traditional. There is no middle ground here -- as, indeed there is no discussion: these are the songs of two individuals presenting their positions.

Lawino complains:My husband refuses

To listen to me,

He refuses to give me a chance.

My husband has blocked up my path completely. Ocol's treatment of Lawino does seem outrageous. He is in no way supportive, and seems to make no effort to convince Lawino of the superiority of his newly-found ideas and ways. He lives (and lords) by fiat, the traditional so hidebound and silly that it can be dismissed without explanation; he is not in the least responsive to Lawino's plaints: "I cannot understand all this / I do not understand it at all !" Lawino makes some efforts to learn about and try to take up some of Ocol's ways, but finds a darker side lurking there too that Ocol seems completely blind to.

Meanwhile, Lawino thinks Ocol and those who have pursued European-style education have lost an essential part of themselves, in distancing themselves from the traditional. As she ultimately bluntly puts it:For all our young men

Were finished in the forest

Their manhood was finished

In the class rooms,

Their testicles

Were smashed

With large books ! Ocol is also politically active, presented as the leader of the Catholic 'Democratic Party'; his main, despised political opponent is his brother, leader of the Marxist 'Congress Party'. Lawino does not understand the political (and personal) differences at work here: both sides seem to want the same thing, so:Then why do they not join hands,

Why do they split up the army

Into two hostile groups ? Song of Ocol -- shorter, and even more spare and stark and direct in its presentation -- gives Ocol a chance to respond, and to explain his own reasoning and feelings. Ocol sees Africa as only something to be fixed, a place:Diseased with a chronic illness,

Choking with black ignorance,

Chained to the rock

Of poverty. Africa has failed, and he wants to move forward -- by leaving everything African behind. This is also reflected in his personal philosophy: his loathing runs so deep that he wants to:Smash all the mirrors

That I may not see

The blackness of the past

From which I came

Reflected in them. The Ocol of Song of Ocol seems even more radical and absolute than that of Lawino's complaints. His argument is taken to such extremes here that it becomes almost comical, as in his raving call to:erect monuments

To the founders

Of modern Africa;

Lopold II of Belgium,

Bismarck ... His position as presented here is even less nuanced than in Song of Lawino. With religion playing less of a role, the divide is presented even more starkly as simply between the old and forgettable (Africa) and the new (European and Western ways).

Ocol's position is so extreme as to be indefensible; Lawino's, while less so, also leaves little room for compromise. Yet, as Heron observes in his Introduction: "These two poems are not the thesis and antithesis of the argument, from which the reader can deduce a synthesis". Nevertheless, in their frustrated, extreme opposition the two do suggest possible middle ground: Okot p'Bitek leaves it as a vacuum here, but there is much room for positive advancement that does not neglect the traditional.

The world-views of Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol are so polarized that neither can be embraced. Lawino's position is the more sympathetic, because she at least expresses some openness to trying to understand, while Ocol has simply cut himself off from both his (and his continent's) past and from any constructive dialogue. The more carefully composed Song of Lawino is by far the stronger of the works, but even if Song of Ocol is almost crude in its simplicity, there is still considerable power to it.

In clinging so firmly to specific (and extreme) positions, Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol might seem facile, but there is considerable art and, on some levels even subtlety, to them. They remain powerful works that are well worth revisiting.

- M.A.Orthofer, 7 March 2015

3a8082e126