Review of Mubiri Bubiri

By the time I went for this poetry event, I had no clue who Mubiri Bubiri were. I thought it was going to be like many of the other poetry events I had been at, where there’s this line-up of talented young poets who come up, one after the other to do their thing.

I had arrived a little late, the room was dark when I got in, with voices already rhythmically rising and falling – the story telling had begun. I was impressed they started right on time, as many of our events usually look at the time stamp as a rough estimate.

I quickly realised this was not like my regular poetry events when the dark room, lit with a few ambient floor lights, was suddenly brought up to full glare at some point in the poem. This happened for every poem that was performed that night. The intimacy of the dim lights made me lean in to listen more even if their tone of voice was as clear and articulate as when the lights were on. As the stories unfolded, my attention was briefly drawn away by what seemed to be a wardrobe malfunction in the making. One of the actor/poets’ fly was down, and I was worried that we might get more than we bargained for. Luckily we didn’t, but it was one of the only distracting points for me.

The other thing was languages used. I should’ve guessed from the name of the show (Mubiri Buburi) this was going to include a heavy dose of local dialect, but as we can see any prior expectations I had were long thrown out the window. A very small portion of the show was done in English, while most of the action went down with Luganda and for a very brief moment, Runyankole/Rukiga. As a Mukiga myself I felt alight when the girl started to speak in the poem “We are not gods”, but overall the experience felt very alienating. I noticed there were a number of white people among the audience, many of whom had turned to paying attention to the action to get any context of what was going on. I have only mild conversational knowledge of Luganda, enough to keep me a comfortable Kampalan. These guys brought the deep stuff. I didn’t understand the half of it and when I did understand, like when they spoke Rukiga, I felt bad for those who didn’t because they only got half of the story. I feel like the point of poetry is to communicate something and if half of the audience would prefer if there was a translator right there on stage as the communication was being made, then how effective was it?

The way the poets moved and spoke on stage heavily covered up any language issues I might have had. They used body language, symbolism and tone so well in acting that I knew when one of the poets was a tree being cut down. I almost cried during that poem because seeing the earth die is something that is killing me inside, and the helpless feeling I had as I watched the “tree” go down on the stage mirrored the helplessness I have about this beautiful earth. But I digress. The way the actors spoke and leaned into one another let us know what was being said was a secret, but it was humorous that it was a secret even to some of us.