Lillian Aujo

Lillian Akampurira Aujo is a Ugandan author.In 2009, she was the winner of the Babishai Niwe (BN) Poetry Foundation's inaugural BN poetry prize.In 2015, she was longlisted for,and won the Inaugural Jalada Prize for Literature for her story "Where pumpkin leaves dwell". Quotes The feel of the poem tends to come to me before the poem itself does. And by this I mean its tone, texture or even structure. Sometimes the poem is so familiar to me that it feels like déjà vu, that is, I know it, but at the same time I don’t have words that will shape it, yet. So writing poems for me is a continuous navigation of the known and unknown. Known in the sense that I may have an idea as to subject matter, and what then remains for me (in my role as poet), is to discover the (unknown) poetics I will employ to achieve that feel, or texture if you will. It occurs to me now that while writing poetry I have not been thinking about saving people; maybe closer to truth is that I have been persuading them to see some aspect of the human condition through my eyes. I don’t know if only/any one poem by me would be enough to save someone Africa is firstly a colonial construct, whether now or in future. Therefore we should be concerned with how to move beyond the post-colonial narrative, which I do not think we have yet. Consider the state of governance in most African states, and how it is our own people doing us in, to the continent’s detriment. Africa is also her Diasporas; it is beautiful and frightening in its complexity. It is what I see and I do not see. It is her constant (needed) reclamation and decolonisation in all spheres of the human condition. Africa needs good governance and technological advancement in order to thrive. There is no space to pack/or unpack my histories or my selves.I am trying to move/without attracting too much attention/to what I don’t have/or what I have lost or what has been stolen from me External links Category: Living people