Nyamuteza
What does it mean for one to begin from the point of view of a Black thought? Nyamuteza, named for the planet Pluto in the East African Native language of Runyankore, opens with a Black dictionary definition of four of the brightest objects of the Kuiper Belt. The sonorous book-length poem is a love song that unravels the affective from the perspective of a village in rural Uganda devastated by the climate catastrophe of a hailstorm. The same population is tasked with producing food for the community. Jedidiah Mugarura uses incantation as a mode of expression with a novelistic attention to story. In Nyamuteza the hail is likened to stars and African Nkore ideology is infused with Black thought in seeking a language toward survivance.
“Spellbinding and assured, Jedidiah Mugarura’s poetic narrative reaches past land and sky, toward a universe of greater love and wonder. The breadth of this poem, grounded in historical and ancestral tellings, is distilled through metaphor as gracious to the soil as it is to the stardust. Nyamuteza gifts its people a wider canvas for dreaming.”—Elizabeth Mudenyo, author of With Both Hands