Harriet Anena

thumb Ber Anena born and previously published as Harriet Anena is a Ugandan writer and performer, whose writing includes poetry, nonfiction and fiction. She is the author of a collection of poems, A Nation In Labour, published in 2015, won the 2018 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa.The Economist described her poetry performance as "an arresting evocation of love and war". Quotes Lay me soft on green grass like an offering. Take off my clothes one at a time like you are opening the Holy Book. Read the verses of my body until you master all chapters. Drink from my river of life. Make me your altar; wine your last supper. A poem on the last supper You are fixable. Hold my hand and let me mend your brokenness. It will hurt less, the falling and crushing. You will get better at sculpturing your bits and pieces. I won’t leave. I’ll wait for daybreak and we’ll figure out what to do with all this sunshine. A poem on fixable The Republic is in labour. Screaming, pacing the political ward, cursing the colonial midwife for telling her to push. Her head is spinning, vision blurred, mind inside out. She drinks a cup of counterfeit morality and blubbers a prayer of hope for the stillborn baby. We love violently Cry and kiss at the same time As our chests heave with want and hesitation We feel extravagantly Run to heaven and hell at the same time As our reconciliation bleeds with desperation and collectedness And we are on heat Like a cow battling a dose of artificial stimulator Then we stop, breathe and conquer these militant things within My writing process is thoroughly random and unstructured. I never see a poem coming, but when it does, there’s no postponement. Which means picking out a phone from my bag to write the lines twirling in my head as I take a taxi home (even with a possibility of my phone getting snatched out of the taxi window); it means getting out of bed at 4 am to scribble words in a notepad or laptop before they scuttle away at sunrise. It’s easy – the unannounced arrival of wordsand confining them to a page. The real work is in the editing, the rewriting, and in ensuring that what’s on the page makes sense. Africa is an annoying sibling, disappointing even, but you can’t get rid of them. So you focus on what’s good about them and beseech the gods to make them better the next day. Africa is home, despite its messyhouse. she spoke on Africa. External links Category:Living people Category:Poets from Uganda