SOURCE: Ramazani, Jahan. “The Poet as ‘Native Anthropologist’: Ethnography and Antiethnography in Okot p'Bitek's Songs.” In The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English, pp. 141-78. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Ramazani examines the complex relationship between anthropology and postcolonial literatures using p'Bitek's Songs.]

The vexed relation between postcolonial literatures and anthropology has sometimes been condensed in one of two conflicting propositions: that postcolonial literatures are ethnographic or that they are nonethnographic. According to the first formulation, advanced primarily by Western critics, postcolonial literatures are saturated with ethnographic information, conveying for a foreign readership the customs and beliefs of native cultures. Reviewing Achebe's Things Fall Apart and other African novels, Charles Larson finds “anthropological passages,” “anthropological overview,” and “ethnological background” woven into their narrative fabric: “The anthropological is indeed important. Without it there would be no story.”¹ More recently, Christopher Miller has argued that “francophone African literature has always practiced some form of anthropological rhetoric,” using “devices such as footnotes, parentheses, and character-to-character explanations in order to provide the reader with the necessary cultural information.” While conceding the troubled, “imperialist” history of anthropology in Africa, Miller believes that “a fair Western reading of African literatures demands engagement with, and even dependence on, anthropology.”² According to the contrary view, advanced primarily by postcolonial writers themselves, Western critics have, in Kwame Anthony Appiah's words, “been all too eager to attend to the ethnographic dimension of African literature.”³ In specifying their social milieu, postcolonial texts are no more ethnological, argues Appiah, than are Scott's Ivanhoe or Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The popularity at home of postcolonial writers like Soyinka and Achebe indicates that they intend not a foreign but a local audience.⁴ Haunted by anthropology's complicity in the colonial enterprise, many postcolonial writers reject any recolonization of postcolonial literatures under the rubric of Western anthropology.

Each of these arguments illuminates an aspect of the interrelation between postcolonial literatures and anthropology, but neither may be adequate in itself to the complexities of their dynamic engagement. Strangely, postcolonial theory, for all its vigorous and far-ranging explorations, has thus far failed to grapple with the large implications of this relationship. Perhaps one place to start reconceptualizing the tangled skein that binds and divides the two discourses is the postcolonial literary texts produced by professional anthropologists. Having been trained as ethnographers, typically in the diaspora, these writers return home in their imaginative works, but to a “home” defamiliarized by anthropological modes of understanding. Their work crosses the boundaries that constitute “native” literatures on the one hand and “anthropological” discourse on the other. Most important for our purposes, these writers make visible the intense dialogue with ethnography latent in much postcolonial writing in European languages.

When “native anthropologists” write “postcolonial literature,” do they incorporate ethnographic assumptions into their literary work, thereby revealing the compatibility of anthropology and postcolonial literatures? Or are such writers disqualified from the postcolonial and the “native” by virtue of their diasporic investment in anthropology? Despite their anthropological training, do these poets and novelists resist Western ethnographic codes in their imaginative writing, thus confirming the antagonism between the two discourses? What can we learn about the promise and the limitations of anthropology from the responses of the poet-ethnographer?

Recently, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, trained at Oxford in anthropology, has deepened the complexity of the relationship between the two discourses. His story “The Imam and the Indian,” in particular, has influenced the Western anthropological theorizing of James Clifford and David Scott, raising anew the question of how we should position anthropology in relation to the “native” text—above, before, within, or after it? As anterior or posterior discourse? As metadiscourse or intrinsic discourse?⁵ Two decades before Ghosh worked on his thesis in anthropology at Oxford, an East African poet wrote a thesis at Oxford on Acoli and Lango traditional songs, after studying with some of the most famous anthropologists in the English-speaking world.⁶ Okot p'Bitek is also the author of the most celebrated East African poem in English. Often deemed “nativist,” his poetry seems to inhabit the opposite end of the postcolonial literary spectrum from Ghosh's intercultural, decentered work. The broad contrast between these two writer-anthropologists indicates the difficulty of trying to arrive at pat conclusions about the nature of “ethnographic literature” or “literary ethnography.” Because Okot published significant field research and theoretical texts in anthropology, and because his literary work intensely engages ethnographic assumptions and practices, his masterpiece, Song of Lawino (1966), in addition to the briefer companion poem Song of Ocol (1967), may be a most revealing case study in the twisted relationship between anthropology and postcolonial literatures.

A poem astonishingly popular in Africa and abroad, Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino has long been hailed as one of the most authentically native works of the postcolonial world. In their polemical Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike celebrate the “traditionalist” Okot's Song of Lawino as “possibly the best rounded single work of African poetry in English today,” “using authentic African imagery and Acholi dramatic rhetorical devices.” They denounce, by contrast, “Euromodernists” like Soyinka and the early Christopher Okigbo for having “assiduously aped the practices of 20th-century European modernist poetry.”⁷ The words “authentic African” converge repeatedly in discussions of Okot, as when Ngugi wa Thiong'o praises the poet's expression of “an authentic African self.”⁸ The contrast with the Euromodernists is also recurrent. Introducing an important essay on the poem, Bernth Lindfors sets Okot apart from “cultural mulattoes”: “When he sang, no European echoes could be heard in the background. His Song of Lawino was the first long poem in English to achieve a totally African identity.” He adds, “It is a thoroughly indigenous poem in form, content, style, message and aesthetic philosophy.”⁹ Also redeeming the communal, rooted Okot from the company of narcissistic, displaced Euromodernists, Nkem Okoh proclaims Song of Lawino “a thoroughly homebred and autochthonously African literary work.”¹⁰ “There is a grave danger” for English-language African writers, warns G. A. Heron, “that with the tool of language they will borrow other foreign things,” but Okot succeeds in using English “without borrowing foreign elements that distort his message.”¹¹ Deeply rooted, indigenous in form and content, uncompromised by alien influences, Song of Lawino would seem to be the epitome of African cultural authenticity.

Okot's own pronouncements about the dangers of “apemanship” have helped to shape the reception of his poetry as a preeminent indigenous artifact. Numbering himself among Africa's “cultural revolutionists” and “gallant nationalists,” Okot celebrated their dedication “to the total demolition of foreign cultural domination and the restoration and promotion of Africa's proud culture to its rightful place.”¹² But not all of Okot's prose can be assimilated to the nativist paradigm. In the same essay collection, he recalls a 1967 festival at Uganda's National Cultural Centre in Kampala, which featured African pop groups like the Mods and Jets, the Echoes and Slingers, and the Vibrations, their members wearing “tight jeans and large studded belts,” miniskirts and blond wigs. As director of the center, Okot was accused of promoting a cultural “slave mentality”: “Where is your nationalism, man?” asked an enraged revolutionary student.¹³ But while Okot obviously favors the “popular arts of the countryside” and disdains the “aping” of Western song, he also concedes the growing influence of Western music, film, and other forms on Uganda's village youth.¹⁴ The songs of town and village youth, according to Okot, are “equally valid and significant”: thus, the Uganda Cultural Centre “must not be reactionary like some old men who reject all foreign art forms, nor must it reflect the bigoted ideas of some miseducated men who despise all things African.”¹⁵

Okot has too often been taken for the type of the reactionary who rejects all foreign art forms. His first written work was a Mozart-inspired opera. Asked about the influence of African oral tradition on Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, Okot responded with some exaggeration, “I don't think they are very much influenced by the African oral tradition; they cannot be sung, for instance.” He repeatedly cited instead Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha and the biblical Song of Solomon.¹⁶ While he also recalled the influence of his mother, who had often composed new songs and was known, among other names, as Lawino, he humorously recounts his frustration in reading to her the first draft of Song of Lawino:

I took it to her with great pride and said, “I've got a song for you.” And she completely surprised me by asking me to sing it! Of course, I couldn't, and my balloon just collapsed. She went on and asked, “Is it a love song?” I couldn't answer that. “Is it a war song? Is it. … What kind of song is it?” So I said, “You shut up. Let me read it to you.” She shut up and I read it aloud. She was very pleased but kept on saying, “I wish there was some tune to it.” You see, it was not really like an Acholi song.¹⁷

Certainly Okot's Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol are influenced by and even incorporate various Acoli genres. In a piece of intrinsic genre criticism, Lawino enumerates “Provocative songs, / Insulting and abusive songs / Songs of praise / Sad songs of broken loves,” and she might also have mentioned satirical beer-party songs, dance songs, war songs, and funeral dirges (42).¹⁸ Yet Okot's heteroglossic poems are not Acoli oral songs, any more than Langston Hughes's “The Weary Blues” is an “authentic” blues or Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is an oral Indian narrative. Generically hybrid, Okot's poems compound the oral, brief, communal, occasional, proverb-laden songs of the Acoli with the written, single-authored, long dramatic monologues of the West.

Although critics have tended to laugh off Okot's statements that The Song of Hiawatha was a primary inspiration for his “songs,” the seemingly improbable connections between an African nativist and Longfellow might help us to reopen the question of Okot's cultural sources and his relation to the discourse of anthropology.¹⁹ For Longfellow starts his poem much as if he were an ethnographer, who will “repeat” native American “songs,” “legends and traditions” as he “heard them / From the lips” of a native American singer:

          Ye who love a nation's legends,
Love the ballads of a people,
That like voices from afar off
Call to us to pause and listen,
Speak in tones so plain and childlike,
Scarcely can the ear distinguish
Whether they are sung or spoken;—
Listen to this Indian Legend,
To this Song of Hiawatha!(20)

The idea of the long poem as a simple, nearly oral conspectus of a native people's lore—traditional ways that are endangered—undergirds Okot's Song of Lawino. But whereas Longfellow crosses a cultural gulf to transcribe the indigenous “voices from afar off,” Okot presumably listens to the lore and legends of his “own” people. Okot reverses Longfellow's imperial perspective on “childlike” oral culture by singing and writing from “within” it. He performs for the Acoli the roles of both listening ear and scribal hand, voice and text. The postcolonial poet nevertheless absorbs Hiawatha's generic premise that the long poem is the proper form for relating, explaining, and dramatizing songs and traditions of a non-Western culture.

Exposed at an early age to this proto-anthropology as part of a colonially imposed Western canon, Okot was later immersed in the prescriptions and assumptions of modern British anthropology. Yet the relation between Okot's anthropological and literary work remains largely unexplored. It shouldn't escape our notice that Okot was awarded the degree of B.Litt. in anthropology only a few years before he published Song of Lawino. How did an Acoli writer wind up reading anthropology at Oxford in the early 1960s? Britain's African empire may have been breaking up at this time, but imperial patterns of cultural and educational dissemination persisted in the relations between metropole and decolonizing outpost. Thus, having found his way to Britain as a member of the Ugandan national soccer team that played barefoot at the summer Olympics of 1956, Okot first studied education at the University of Bristol and then received a law degree at Aberystwyth in 1960. From 1960 to 1963 he read at Oxford's Institute of Social Anthropology, headed by the social anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, author of the pathbreaking trilogy on Nuer religion and social practices (1940, 1951, 1956). Godfrey Lienhardt, whose renowned Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka was published in 1961, supervised Okot's research, which included fieldwork in Uganda in 1962. Plunged into British anthropology during some of its headiest days, Okot wrote a thesis entitled “Oral Literature and Its Social Background among the Acoli and Lang'o” (1964), which provided the basis for his books Religion of the Central Luo (1971) and The Horn of My Love (1974), a collection of Acoli oral poetry with extensive commentary. In 1970 he published his most searching book on anthropology, African Religions in Western Scholarship.²¹

Although Chinweizu, Ngugi, and others portray Okot's poetry as a pure, rooted, authentically indigenous touchstone of African literature, Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol are poems of split vision, part of yet parted from the culture they describe. “Many an African leader is split,” Okot remarks, “between his African background, of which he is secretly proud but publicly ashamed, and the so-called ‘modern way of life,’ of which he is publicly proud but secretly unsure.”²² Okot's inner division may be much the same, although the values are reversed. Insofar as Okot's poems record and explain the village culture of Acoliland, anthropology inflects their apprehension of a native culture threatened by change. Okot admits that Acoli war songs and dance songs “are now socially irrelevant”: “If all that can be done is to record them on tape, to be preserved like specimens in the laboratory, then that at least we must do.”²³ Are Okot's literary songs in effect laboratory vials, preserving specimens from a vanishing East African village heritage? In what specific ways is Okot's literary work shaped by his training in Western anthropological techniques for selecting and conserving cultural samples? To what extent is Song of Lawino in harmony with the disciplinary assumptions of anthropology?

The poem's anthropological affiliations run deep. Social anthropology, writes Okot in African Religions in Western Scholarship, has been based on “the study of the so called ‘tribal’ peoples,” and thus, as he quotes Joseph H. Greenberg, “The basic technique [is] field study, by observation and participation and verbal interviews of relatively small groups typically organized on a tribal basis.”²⁴ Okot offers in Song of Lawino an “intensive, in-depth study of a small community ‘from the inside,’” in accordance with this anthropological norm after Malinowski, as described by Sally Falk Moore.²⁵ In Song of Lawino, the unit of description and exploration is a single “tribal” village. The communities studied by the anthropologist, Moore states, needed to be “small enough to be treated as closed systems.”²⁶ Villages, as James Clifford observes of anthropology, “have long served as habitable, mappable centers for the community and, by extension, the culture. … The village was a manageable unit. It offered a way to centralize a research practice, and at the same time it served as synecdoche, as point of focus, or part, through which one could represent the cultural whole.”²⁷ By limiting the “field” of Song of Lawino to an Acoli village, Okot can represent intensively and comprehensively the social and religious practices of Lawino and her clan. A concrete and bounded cultural space, her village serves as vivid synecdoche for the cultural whole of Acoliland, and sometimes even for sub-Saharan Africa. This circumscription of the field is as useful to the imaginative writer as it is to the anthropologist, helping to make the living social world both comprehensible and representable.

Lawino's vehement defense of her native culture and rejection of Western ways also resemble the culturally conservative stance of much social anthropology. Although her perspective has been assumed to be “autochthonous,” it could also be seen as strongly allied with the anthropologist's tendency, until recently, to valorize and study what Moore calls seemingly “ancient and fixed ‘traditions’ and ‘customs.’”²⁸ Lawino's proverb for this traditionalist position, repeated often, is “Let no one / Uproot the Pumpkin” (56). Lawino addresses her Westernized husband:

Listen, Ocol, my old friend,
The ways of your ancestors
Are good,
Their customs are solid
And not hollow
They are not thin, not easily breakable
They cannot be blown away
By the winds
Because their roots reach deep into the soil.
I do not understand
The ways of foreigners
But I do not despise their customs.
Why should you despise yours?
Listen, my husband,
You are the son of a Chief.
The pumpkin in the old homestead
Must not be uprooted!

(41)

Almost as an anthropologist to the estranged Ocol, Lawino would reintroduce her husband to Acoli customs, as Okot would his readers, both Acoli and foreign. Lawino's “live and let live” or “to each his own” philosophy conforms to a bedrock assumption of anthropology. Defending her right to practice her people's ways, Lawino naturalizes cultural difference by referring to the vivid biological diversity around her. Even this anthropomorphic comparison of differences between animal species to differences between peoples is not alien in the history of ethnography:

No leopard
Would change into a hyena,
And the crested crane
Would hate to be changed
Into the bold-headed,
Dung-eating vulture,
The long-necked and graceful giraffe
Cannot become a monkey.

(56)

But the assumptions shared in Okot's poetry and in anthropology—tolerating difference, preserving traditional culture, and focusing on the village—are insufficient to prove that Okot's imaginative eye was disciplined and directed by his anthropological training. After all, imaginative works by Achebe, Soyinka, and other nonanthropologists share some of these general features. Indeed, before he left for Britain, Okot had already drafted, in 1956, a small portion in Acoli of what would later grow to be his English Song of Lawino (1966) and his Acoli Wer pa Lawino (1969). Even so, Song of Lawino as a whole reflects the strong influence of anthropology in more specific ways. The latter sections of the poem, mostly added or amplified in the wake of Okot's ethnographic research, not surprisingly resemble anthropological discourse more than the earlier sections. Whereas Lawino had focused, in sections 1-5, on her feelings of betrayal by her wanna-be-white husband, who is intoxicated with a new Westernized wife humorously named Clementine, her emphasis shifts in these latter sections to an ethnographic outline of Acoli culture. In a long passage new in the 1966 English version and partly excerpted below, she describes in detail her mother's house:

Look,
Straight before you
Is the central pole.
That shiny stool
At the foot of the pole
Is my father's revered stool.
Further on
The rows of pots
Placed one on top of the other
Are the stores
And cupboards.
Millet flour, dried carcasses
Of various animals,
Beans, peas,
Fish, dried cucumber …
Look up at the roof,
You see the hangings?
The string nets
Are called cel.
The beautiful long-necked jar
On your left
Is full of honey.
That earthen dish
Contains simsim paste;
And that grass pocket
Just above the fireplace
Contains dried white ants.

(59)

Even the shift in voice in these sections indicates a greater degree of objectification, the poet relying less on urgent and directed second-person address, more on depersonalized second- and third-person description.²⁹ Here Lawino invokes an abstract “brother” and almost seems to be talking beyond him to a non-Acoli audience. Whereas agitated apostrophe to her husband and clansmen verbally encoded Lawino's full participation in her village community, the diminishment and attenuation of this rhetorical device implicitly open a space between Acoli village culture and the poet, even as the poem paradoxically becomes most “indigenous” in content. Swollen with pain and pride in the early sections, Lawino's voice is tinged in these later sections with a detachment that, coupled with ethnographic inventory, resembles the tone of anthropology's “participant observer.”

Among the most important footprints left by anthropology in Song of Lawino are the categories of knowledge that structure Lawino's representation of Acoli ways. In the later versions of Song of Lawino, Okot gathers together Lawino's views on cooking and eating from seven previously scattered short sections and concentrates them all in the sixth section, adding passages like the one quoted above, which almost reads like culinary anthropology. Here as elsewhere in Song of Lawino, the mode of apprehension and narration is governed by a recognizably anthropological topos. Lawino's poetic ethnography of Acoli customs for preparing and consuming food also informs us that her people use “grinding stones” to pound “millet / Mixed with cassava / And sorghum” (59). Lawino details the different kinds of wood and whether they serve for cooking or for making axes or canes. She explains that the Acoli stove is “dug into the earth” and that half-gourds and earthen dishes are used for food and drink (61). At mealtime among the Acoli, except for the father seated on his stool, everyone sits on papyrus mats on the earth. But first,

We wash our hands clean
And attack the loaf
From all sides.
You mould a spoon
And dip it in the gravy
And eat it up.

(62)

Each of the ensuing sections addresses one or more anthropological concepts. Some critics have complained that the later sections of Song of Lawino fail to sustain the narrative of conflict among Lawino, her husband, and her rival wife. In view of Okot's revisions and additions after his ethnographic schooling, the shift in narrative mode can be explained. As the structuring logic of these sections, anthropological tableaux supplant dramatic tension and plot. One of Evans-Pritchard's principal strategies in his famous ethnography of the Nuer, as Sally Falk Moore surmises, was “to take a Western concept, such as the concept of time, and to address the variety of ways in which Nuer thought of it.”³⁰ This technique is only slightly veiled in “There Is No Fixed Time for Breast Feeding,” where Lawino expounds the “customs of our people” in relation to time, referring to the agricultural patterns of the daily routine and the seasonal round of wet and dry (68). Similarly, in the next section she parses the different classes of names among the Acoli, responding to the apparent meaninglessness of Christian names: Bull names are passed to the children of the chief, Jok or divinity names are given to “deeply respected” twins, titles like her father's are acquired through battle, and there are also sorrow names, praise names, and mourning names (82-83). In the sections on religious beliefs and medicine, Lawino describes some of the healing and apotropaic practices of diviner-priests like her father and Acoli herbalists. To ward off maladies, the Acoli pray to the ancestors for intervention and wear charms like elephant tails, rat toes, cowry shells, and colobus-monkey hair. She even recounts the different roots, greens, and juices that she applies to stomachaches, sore throats, wounds, difficult childbirth, impotence, and the evil eye. If a child falls ill with fever, a jealous woman or relative is most likely to blame for having “hidden / The child's excreta in a tree fork,” or buried the boy's hair in a riverbed, or trapped the girl's shadow or head (97).

Thus, in the latter sections of Song of Lawino, the poet's practice has much in common with the anthropologist's: carefully describing specific village customs, gathering them together under one conceptual rubric, and relating them to the broader nexus of a people's beliefs. So ethnographically rich and wide ranging is Okot's survey of the Acoli in Song of Lawino that it makes his professional monograph Religion of the Central Luo seem narrow by comparison. At least for Okot, poetry ironically seems a more efficient medium for ethnography than professional ethnography itself. As one indication of the vast anthropological ground Okot covers in Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, most of the crucial concepts that he lists in a table of Religion of the Central Luo, along with their corresponding indigenous words, are recognizable from the poetry: “Dominant Deities, Chiefdom Deities, Ancestral Ghosts, Ghostly Vengeance, Curse, Blessing, Totems/Emblems, Pestilences, Certain Diseases, Rain, Lightning, Ritual Observances (Respect), Fault/Sin, Sacrifice, Witch, Evil Eye, Fetish, Medicine/Poison, Diviner, Priest, Prophet.”³¹

Lawino's commentary on death also condenses considerable ethnographic knowledge. Although Lawino vaunts the efficacy of herbs, charms, and sacrifices, when it comes to last things, she is a fatalist, as she explains in a long passage new in the English version of the poem:³²

          when the day has dawned
For the journey to Pagak [the place of no return]
No one can stop you,
White man's medicines
Acoli medicines,
Crucifixes, rosaries,
Toes of edible rats,
The horn of the rhinoceros
None of them can block the path
That goes to Pagak!
When Death comes
To fetch you
She comes unannounced,
She comes suddenly
Like the vomit of dogs. …
You may be the fastest runner,
A long distance runner,
But when Death comes
To fetch you
You do not resist,
You must not resist.
You cannot resist!

(102)

Here as elsewhere, Lawino deprivileges Western “crucifixes, rosaries” by juxtaposing them with similarly apotropaic devices used by the Acoli, such as rat toes and rhinoceros horns. Her figuration of death as the sudden vomiting of dogs is characteristically vivid and tactile. The fatalism of the Central Luo, once all devices and rites have failed, was also the final subject of Okot's Religion of the Central Luo, providing a useful point of comparison:

When danger threatened, the Central Luo did all they could to avert it, and to rid the homestead of it. The beliefs and practices I have described and certain knowledge of medicines were used to diagnose, explain, interpret the individual causes of misfortune and ill-health, and they also provided means and ways of coping with the individual situations of anxiety and stress. But when all these failed, when the game of ritually acting out their deeply felt needs and desires and hopes had produced no satisfactory results, at this level, the Central Luo became sceptical and irreligious, and preferred to face the facts of life cooly and realistically. When your son died you wept, but amid tears, you declared, “Wi-lobo”; “This is the way of the world”!³³

Do we learn more about Luo fatalism from Okot's anthropological or his poetic account? At an analytic remove, his professional narrative relies on objectifying abstractions like “the Central Luo,” “fatalism,” “situations,” “ritually acting out,” “satisfactory results,” “sceptical and irreligious,” until he adds the last flourish of a poetic apostrophe with a specific example, the poet's voice finally overtaking the ethnographer's. Ironically, the poem may afford a more immediate apprehension of Acoli fatalism, because of its more intrinsic perspective (Lawino's dismissal of the indigenous medicines she has been promoting) and lively metaphors (the victim as doomed runner, death's suddenness as dog vomit). These rough distinctions between ethnographic and literary discourse should not serve to harden boundaries that are unstable and permeable; on the contrary, they indicate once again that Okot the poet may paradoxically “out-ethnograph” Okot the ethnographer.

In addition to the broad influence of anthropological strategies, does the discipline leave more specific discursive traces in Song of Lawino? Perhaps. Sometimes Lawino objectifies her cultural environment as “our People” and “the Acoli.” She constructs her culture as an ethnological unit, related to yet distinct from others both nearby and far away. She compares, for example, the Acoli stove dug in the ground with the three mounds of clay used by the Lango—a type of stove she has learned to use from the “wife of my mother's brother” (61). Admittedly, the extent of ethnographic influence is difficult to measure here, since this self-understanding can also be viewed as intrinsic. Another example of the undecidability of the ethnographic or the oral in Lawino's rhetoric is her description of her culture's habitual rites of time:

When the sun has grown up
And the poisoned tips
Of its arrows painfully bite
The backs of the men hoeing
And of the women weeding or harvesting[,]
This is when
You take drinking water
To the workers.

(64-66)

When the baby cries
Let him suck milk
From the breast.

(68)

Among our People
When a girl has
Accepted a man's proposal
She gives a token,
And then she visits him
In his bachelor's hut
To try his manhood.

(90)

These passages can be seen as the didactic instructions that an oral culture uses to transmit its customs—prescriptions for acts to be repeated whenever certain conditions are present. Without reiterating when and how certain actions should be performed, an oral culture cannot sustain itself. But in such passages Lawino may also sound as if she were explaining herself to a foreign audience. Her specific rhetorical strategy—the use of subordinate adverb clauses in the habitual present—is also key in anthropological writing, freezing actions in time as perpetual events. In works like Godfrey Lienhardt's Divinity and Experience and Evans-Pritchard's Nuer Religion, many pivotal sentences take the form, “When boys reach manhood they take the colour-names of oxen …” and “When a spirit gets a cow, … the cow ought to be disposed of.”³⁴

Granted the uncertain provenance of some of the poem's rhetorical forms, we can summarize by saying that Okot's Song of Lawino abounds not only in “Acoli ways” but also in anthropological ways, from general assumptions to detailed observations. If Song of Lawino is often cited as a preeminent example of authentic African culture, then its participation in anthropological techniques, attitudes, and categories of knowledge suggests that “nativist” literatures may be deeply and pervasively intertwined with Western ethnographic discourse. Paradoxically, the poem's “nativism,” like the “nativism” of negritude and other recuperative postcolonial movements, betrays the force of Western influence.³⁵

But to gauge the full measure of the complex relationship between Song of Lawino and anthropology, we need to probe the ways in which the poem, though steeped in ethnographic practices and ideas, may also be actively antiethnographic. “To the gallows / With all the Professors / Of Anthropology,” demands Ocol in one of his bombastic tirades against the preservers and defenders of African culture (129). As a professor of anthropology himself, Okot was undoubtedly more sympathetic to the discipline than Ocol. But Okot's own relationship with the discipline of anthropology was vexed, perhaps offering clues to understanding the ambivalences in his poetry. This sentence concludes the preface to Okot's African Religions in Western Scholarship: “Lastly, I would like to thank my Oxford teachers, especially Professor Evans-Pritchard, Dr. Godfrey Lienhardt and Dr. John B[e]attie for their personal friendship, and for the challenge they threw at me.”³⁶ Gracious as this acknowledgment is, it comes after Okot has indicated how troubled his relationship was with his teachers, whose disciplinary rhetoric and assumptions he found offensive:

I first met a number of Western scholars at Oxford University in 1960. During the very first lecture in the Institute of Social Anthropology, the teacher kept referring to Africans or non-Western peoples as barbarians, savages, primitives, tribes, etc. I protested; but to no avail. All the professors and lecturers in the Institute, and those who came from outside to read papers, spoke the same insulting language.

In the Institute Library, I detested to see such titles of books and articles in the learned journals as Primitive Culture, Primitive Religion, The Savage Mind, Primitive Government, The Position of Women in Savage Societies, Institutions of Primitive Societies, Primitive Song, Sex and Repression in Savage Societies, Primitive Mentality, and so on.

Later in the same work, Okot ridicules the anthropological defenses by Lucy Mair and Evans-Pritchard of words like “primitive” as “value-free.”³⁷ Okot's quarrel with his teachers went deep. Their “insulting language” and assumptions, he recalls, “caused me so much suffering” and “often led to bitter exchange in lecture rooms and during seminars.”³⁸ As indicated by Lawino's strategic use of the word “primitive,” this “bitter exchange” spills over into Song of Lawino. “He says Black People are primitive,” laments Lawino of her self-despising husband, and she goes on to discredit this view by her intelligence, her perspicuity, and her brilliant use of metaphor (36). For all its ethnographic inflections in form and content, Song of Lawino mounts a powerful rebuttal of several key tenets of social anthropology.

Okot anticipates by decades the postcolonial critique of anthropology and the intensified self-scrutiny within the discipline. In his scholarly writing, Okot attacks Western anthropology because of its colonial complicity, its religious investments, and its assumptions about the anthropological observer. Regarding the first of these he writes: “Social anthropology has not only been the handmaiden of colonialism in that it analysed and provided important information about the social institutions of colonised peoples to ensure efficient and effective control and exploitation, it has also furnished and elaborated the myth of the ‘primitive’ which justified the colonial enterprise” (1-2). In a bracing historicist critique, Okot traces the nineteenth-century foundation of the discipline to the requirements of French, German, British, and other European colonial administrators. In a more widely read book of anthropology published two years later, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, Talal Asad alludes to “wild remarks about anthropology being merely the handmaiden of colonialism,” yet he concedes that anthropologists have contributed “towards maintaining the structure of power represented by the colonial system,” as reflected in their “mode” of “objectifying alien societies.”³⁹

Elaborating this line of argument from the decolonizing era, Edward Said has more recently claimed that anthropology, like other specialized disciplines about the cultural “Other,” continues to be “an often direct agent of political dominance.”⁴⁰ Said doubts that anthropology can shed its colonial inheritance: “Perhaps anthropology as we have known it can only continue on one side of the imperial divide, there to remain as a partner in domination and hegemony.”⁴¹ Thus Okot answers the question, “Is there a place for social anthropology in an African university?” with a definitive “no,” even though he was himself a member of such a department (6). In an epilogue to Okot p'Bitek's African Religions in Western Scholarship, Ali Mazrui, former dean of the faculty of social sciences at the University of Makerere, quarrels with Okot's harsh view: the sympathies of anthropologists, according to Mazrui, were partly responsible for the “cultural toleration” of British colonial rule (131). But even Mazrui has to admit that anthropology's “respect” for African ways “was essentially parental” (132). Okot's historicist and anticolonial critique of anthropology should alert us that his ethnographically informed poetry nevertheless seeks to disentangle itself from disciplinary norms conducive to perpetuating colonial domination.

As for the religious bias of anthropology, Okot doesn't hesitate to label his teachers “Christian apologists”: Evans-Pritchard and Lienhardt “use African deities to prove that the Christian God does exist, and is known also among African peoples” (41). Conceding that African intellectuals had also hellenized and christianized African deities, he hammers Western anthropologists like Lienhardt, Evans-Pritchard, and Placide Tempels for having forced the independent, multiple, and distinct African deities into the mold of the Christian God: “There is no evidence to show that [the Nilotes] regard the named jogi as refractions, or manifestations, or hypostases of a so-called High God” (71). In contrast to the metaphysic that anthropologists have imposed, Okot argues that traditional Africans have “no thought of another world” and could even be described as “atheistic” (99-100). Lawino is, as we shall see, Okot's most forceful corrective to this wrongheaded anthropology, exemplifying the this-worldliness of many African religions.

Okot traces the source of such misconceptions about African culture to a key disciplinary assumption of Western anthropologists—namely,

that a student should carry out research among a people other than his own. This, they say, provides a certain distance between him and those people, so that, although he tries to get as close as possible to their way of life, there is what they call “detachment,” which is supposed to ensure objectivity. …

In my view the student of African religions needs to soak himself thoroughly in the day-to-day life of the people whose thought-systems and beliefs he wishes to study. He must have a deep knowledge of their language. When attending ceremonies, he must not stand apart as a spectator, but join in fully, singing the songs, chanting the chants and dancing the dances. Let our students experience the real thing, for only then will the full meaning and significance of the songs and chants and invocations come through. It is obvious that if he is going in for studies in “depth,” then in studying his own people he starts off with a great advantage, in that he knows the language and much of the customs and the attitudes of his people; and they may know him as well. This helps a great deal, because often there exists a barrier between the people and a foreign researcher, who mumbles half-understood sentences; for this barrier disappears when a researcher returns to his home among his own people.

As late as 1989, Edward Said could complain that “the problematic of the observer” was still “remarkably underanalyzed” even in revisionist anthropology, which typically evaded the questions, “Who speaks? For what and to whom?”⁴² Whereas Okot calls for the anthropologist's full participation in the community under study, James Clifford, who has helped to foreground the “problematic of the observer,” describes the approach of the Malinowskian generation in terms of “the controlled empathy of participant-observation”: “An understanding rapport and measured affection were favored. Expressions of overt enthusiasm and love were circumscribed.” The normative fieldworker was Western and white, “a homebody abroad.”⁴³ As Kirin Narayan writes, “Those who are anthropologists in the usual sense of the word are thought to study Others whose alien cultural worlds they must painstakingly come to know.”⁴⁴ In the period of decolonization, Okot and other “native anthropologists” put new pressure on the binary distinctions that had been constitutive of the discipline—native and researcher, home and abroad, insider and outsider. In Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, Okot practices a kind of counteranthropology, blurring the cultural boundaries between observer and observed, eroding the tonal detachment prescribed by his elders at Oxford.

Even so, the dichotomies that structure anthropology also infect the oppositional discourse used to attack it. Curiously enough, Okot's rhetoric, as well as that of other postcolonial critics, is often consistent with these binary assumptions while it inverts their values, celebrating the authentic voice of the native insider as opposed to the outsider perspective of the Western researcher. But the anthropologist who returns from Oxford to conduct fieldwork, or what has been termed “homework,” is distinct from either a “pure” indigenous insider or an outside observer.⁴⁵ “How ‘native’ is a native anthropologist?” asks Kirin Narayan, deconstructing the received disciplinary dichotomy: those who are “‘native,’ ‘indigenous,’ or ‘insider’ anthropologists are believed to write about their own cultures from a position of intimate affinity.” But amid the multiple currents moving information, capital, language, and education across North/South and East/West borders, the “native” anthropologist should be seen as having complex and multiple identifications and origins.⁴⁶ Although Okot writes nostalgically that “this barrier disappears when a researcher returns to his home among his own people,” he knows that the reunion is seldom so simple. This anthropologically trained poet is self-critical enough to recognize himself in the Westernized, self-alienated Ocol, whose name echoes Okot's, as does his affiliation with Makerere University (87): “Ocol is more like me and my age-mates who have been through the school system. The great debate in the poem is one which takes place inside us.”⁴⁷

Still, Okot's sympathies clearly lie with the more “native” Lawino, who is the indigenous anthropologist's best solution to his disciplinary and cultural predicament. If, as Okot believes, anthropology has been led astray by its preference for “detachment,” if the better practice is immersion in the culture being studied, and if the person speaking for and about that culture should belong to it, then the answering form may be the imaginative literary work in which an African village woman speaks in her own voice about her society and customs. On the one hand, she represents a native authenticity that the Westernized Acoli anthropologist can no longer lay claim to. On the other, she rebuts the Western anthropologist's effort to impose an alien voice and vision on Acoli culture. Gender difference is in part a figure for cultural difference: like many nationalist and negritude writers who reimagine the African homeland as mother, Okot genders as female the authentic Acoli voice, as opposed to his and Ocol's masculine detachment, thereby marking the author's distance from the ideal of African cultural integrity.⁴⁸

As deployed in Song of Lawino, dramatic monologue as a genre has an antiethnographic function. Okot's critique of Placide Tempels's famous Bantu Philosophy spotlights the problem of voice in anthropology. Okot quotes Tempels's patronizing assertion that the Bantu lack “an adequate vocabulary” for their own ethnophilosophy: “It is we who will be able to tell them, in precise terms, what their innermost concept of being is.”⁴⁹ An offended Okot responds:

A crucial question arises as to the attitude and role of the student of African thought. It is, to say the least, an unhelpful conceit to start off by holding that a people do not know what they believe, or cannot express it; and that it is the student—who, after all, is the ignorant person—who will tell the people what they believe. It seems to me that the role of the student of traditional religion and philosophy is, as it were, to photograph, in as much detail as possible, the way of life of the people; and then to make comments, pointing out the connexions and relevances of the different parts, and their ultimate relation to the whole of life. In this way the beliefs of a people, whether in one god or in a number of gods, in witchcraft and magic, will emerge.⁵⁰

Song of Lawino is a more radical solution to this problem of voice than is Okot's own anthropological work: it endows a village woman with her own vibrant and compelling voice, seemingly abolishing the role of intermediary. Insofar as Song of Lawino wrests voice from the anthropological observer and bestows it on a native insider, his “autoethnography” powerfully resists the ethnographic norm of speaking for another culture.⁵¹ Against the anthropological standard of “controlled empathy,” it seems to provide access to direct speech. Gone is the ethnographic metadiscourse of “tribalism” and “the primitive mind,” along with any metaphysical filter for African religion. But dramatic monologue affords this victory over the Western ethnographer's voice precisely because it allows the poet to disguise his own more complex, more anthropologically informed relation to Acoli culture. Critics often say Lawino is the poet's mouthpiece, but her difference from Okot is almost as important as her similarity in waging the poem's antiethnographic battle.

Dramatic monologue characteristically emphasizes the subjectivity of the speaker. Because it dramatizes utterance, it calls attention to the emergence of the subject through vocalization. In the first few lines of Song of Lawino, the speaker vigorously asserts herself as voice:

Husband, now you despise me
Now you treat me with spite
And say I have inherited the stupidity of my aunt;
Son of the Chief,
Now you compare me
With the rubbish in the rubbish pit,
You say you no longer want me
Because I am like the things left behind
In the deserted homestead.
You insult me
You laugh at me
You say I do not know the letter A
Because I have not been to school
And I have not been baptized
You compare me with a little dog,
A puppy.
My friend, age-mate of my brother,
Take care,
Take care of your tongue,
Be careful what your lips say.

(34)

Apostrophe, a primary rhetorical tool of both dramatic monologue and Acoli songs, establishes Lawino's voice by putting her into a performative relation to an absent addressee.⁵² The abundant use of anaphora (“Now,” “You,” “Take care”) and other figures of repetition further heightens the impression of living speech, the pained and agitated spouse unleashing a torrential response to her absent husband. By calling attention to her illiteracy (“You say I do not know the letter A”) and to Ocol's tongue and lips, Lawino highlights the act of utterance from the poem's start. She incorporates Ocol's abusive words within her own, thus increasing our sense of overhearing an agitated response to her interlocutor's taunts. Lawino's specific familial points of reference—aunt, son, brother—situate her within a concrete social space that lends credibility to her speech-acts. By all these means, Okot creates a character whom we listen to as vocalizing subject, not as ethnographic specimen. If the “native informant” is typically reduced to a supporting role in the anthropologist's work of scholarly inscription, here the native informant takes center stage, her robust speaking voice almost seeming to eclipse any scribal or interpretive function.

Even so, we cannot forget for long that Lawino's voice is a fiction, created by the poet's written language. At the same time that Okot creates the illusion of unmediated talk, he also calls ironic attention to the inscription of this antitextual “voice” in his text. To Lawino, books look so strange that they seem like old smelly trees with their bark peeling, some with frightful pictures on them, “Dead faces of witch-looking men and women” (114). Of course, we have access to Lawino's antibibliographic viewpoint only from just such a book, plastered with the picture of the author on its back. Lawino attacks book learning at length as both Westernizing and feminizing. Of young Acoli men, she says,

Their manhood was finished
In the class-rooms,
Their testicles
Were smashed
With large books!

(117)

From this perspective, the young Acoli author of Song of Lawino must have immolated himself before literary and ethnographic books to give life to Lawino's voice. Insofar as the poem as dramatic monologue is antiethnographic, fashioning an authentic and illiterate Acoli spokeswoman, it can only renounce ethnographic scholarship and other forms of Western discourse through its own written language. The poem as book, as written object, is at least as much kin to the ethnographic textuality it repudiates as it is to the unmediated vocalization to which it aspires. Similarly, we cannot help but notice the irony that Lawino rails against English in English. Through dramatic monologue, Okot may seem to remove the linguistic “barrier” he disapproves between the anthropologist and the people, creating the illusion of an Acoli woman who speaks in her own language for her own culture. But it is in English that we read her complaint about Ocol: “He abuses me in English, / And he is so arrogant” (35). For Lawino, the English language is a sign of colonial subordination: “The dogs of white men / Are well trained / And they understand English!” (115). Is Song of Lawino—rendered in English by a Western-trained poet-ethnographer—symptomatic of the very condition Lawino decries? By mediating between speech and writing, illiteracy and literacy, Acoli and English, is Okot's dramatic monologue complicitous in Western anthropology? As Gayatri Spivak provocatively asks, “Can the subaltern speak?”⁵³

In short, to see Okot's use of dramatic monologue as unambiguously antiethnographic would be a distortion. Indeed, dramatic monologue is arguably the most ethnographic of poetic genres. Much has been said of the deeply historical nature of dramatic monologue as a genre: it situates the speaking subject within a particular moment and a particular set of social relations. “Historical contextualization,” Herbert Tucker astutely points out, is “the generic privilege of dramatic monologue” and indispensable in the “construction of character.” What is overheard in Western dramatic monologue is history.⁵⁴ In postcolonial dramatic monologue, by extension, what is overheard is culture. Cultural contextualization is the generic privilege of postcolonial monologue, since the genre is particularly suited to conveying the cultural imbeddedness of character. The rise of dramatic monologue in nineteenth-century Europe has been attributed to increasing relativism, since the genre enables the performance of a variety of perspectives and values. Similarly, its recent resurgence in and beyond the West can be ascribed in part to a multipolar, multicultural age. Indeed, the ethnographic potentiality of the genre was evident long before the rise of postcolonial literatures. Intended to widen the Western reader's sympathies, exotic monologues such as Joseph Warton's “The Dying Indian,” Felicia Hemans's “The Indian Woman's Death Song,” Robert Browning's “Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr,” and Maria Jewsbury's “Song of the Hindoo Women” are exercises in the ethnographic imagination.⁵⁵ Far from exoticizing her own culture, Lawino speaks for it as norm, but even she, as we have seen, sometimes sounds as if she were explaining Acoli values to outsiders:

Ask me what beauty is
To the Acoli
And I will tell you;
I will show it to you
If you give me a chance!

(51)

Lawino speaks for her culture, however, as one among many, and dramatic monologue formally embodies her awareness of being culturally located. The genre enables the poet to vaunt a specific outlook and to acknowledge its cultural relativity.

Although Okot resists ethnographic norms in ceding expressive authority to an Acoli woman, dramatic monologue not only offers a wellspring of personal utterance but also, paradoxically, objectifies the speaking subject, locating her in a culture, a society, a history. Loy Martin writes of the “divided subject” in dramatic monologue: the “person-as-process” who enacts subjective being through speech and the “person-as-object” who is absorbed into a totality larger than herself.⁵⁶ As speaker, Lawino is less objectified than Ocol, whose dramatic monologue exemplifies the use of the genre to articulate and analyze a “case” of psychopolitical disturbance: he is, like the colonial subject in Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, excessively identified with white culture and thus aggressively turned against himself as a black man.⁵⁷ But even without the ironic leverage wielded in Song of Ocol, Song of Lawino is the utterance of a woman whom we experience both as vital, subjective being and as discursive nexus of habits, beliefs, and values of the Acoli. Indeed, this division helps to pinpoint one aspect of the poem's simultaneous embrace of ethnography and rebuff to it.

Another key area of ethnographic ambivalence in Song of Lawino is religion. The religious anthropology that Okot attacked in prose is a significant intertextual presence through much of his poem. Okot's Oxford teachers, as we have seen, represented Africa's multiple deities as emanations of a single God. But Lawino forcefully rebuts this Westernization by her distinctions:

And when it is Jok Omara
That has caused madness,
Or Odude or Ayweya
That has brought troubles,
When Jok Rubanga
Has broken someone's back
Or Jok Odude
Has tied up a woman's womb,
And the husband
Cries over his lost bridewealth,
Saying,
What is marriage without childbirth?

(94)

For Lawino, there is no single, overarching Being who connects these jogi. In enumerating the types and functions of Jok, Okot could be seen as practicing a kind of poetic ethnography, but it is an ethnography that sharply corrects the views of his teachers. “How did Jok come to be called God?” asks Okot; his answer traces the misunderstanding from Evans-Pritchard and Max Müller back to early Christian missionaries baffled by the necessity of finding African equivalents for their supreme deity.⁵⁸ Further, these beings are not metaphysical but local, causing specific ailments and difficulties. Metaphysical speculations about who created the earth strike Lawino as nonsensical (89). Her religion is entirely this-worldly:

All misfortunes have a root,
The snake bite, the spear of the enemy,
Lightning and the blunt buffalo horn,
These are the bitter fruits
Grown on the tree of Fate.
They do not fall anyhow,
They do not fall at random,
They do not come our way by accident,
We do not just run into them.
When your uncle curses you
You piss in your bed!
And you go on pissing in your bed
Until you have taken him
A white cock!

(98)

That Lawino's religion is a matter of cause and effect in the everyday world is rhetorically emphasized by such graphic images as “pissing in your bed”; it tells her what occasions specific misfortunes and how to redress them.

In matters of religion, Okot often wields translation, mistranslation, and nontranslation as antiethnographic devices in Song of Lawino. Admittedly, in translating his own Acoli poetry for initial publication in English, Okot may be seen as participating in the ethnographic quest to decode non-Western “tribal” languages. Moreover, in sprinkling his English text with transliterated Acoli words that are key to understanding Acoli religion and culture, Okot recalls the modest diglossia of classic anthropological studies. One of Evans-Pritchard's primary strategies was “to take a word from the Nuer vocabulary that had no direct translation into English, and to elucidate its various referents.”⁵⁹ Less accommodating to the Western reader than his teachers, Okot mockingly mistranslates some key religious terms. Counteracting the distorting effects of imposed anthropological and missionary words, he bizarrely names, for example, the Christian God the Hunchback throughout Song of Lawino. Baffled by missionary metaphysics, Lawino asks,

Where did the Hunchback
Dig the clay for moulding things,
The clay for moulding Skyland
The clay for moulding Earth
The clay for moulding Moon
The clay for moulding the Stars?
Where is the spot
Where it was dug,
On the mouth of which River?
And when the Hunchback
Was digging the clay
Where did he stand?

(87)

Elsewhere Okot recounts the riveting story of how the Christian God came to be called Rubanga in Acoli (or Luo):

In 1911, Italian Catholic priests put before a group of Acoli elders the question “Who created you?”; and because the Luo language does not have an independent concept of create or creation, the question was rendered to mean, “Who moulded you?” But this was still meaningless, because human beings are born of their mothers. The elders told the visitors that they did not know. But, we are told that this reply was unsatisfactory, and the missionaries insisted that a satisfactory answer must be given. One of the elders remembered that, although a person may be born normally, when he is afflicted with tuberculosis of the spine, then he loses his normal figure, he gets “moulded.” So he said, “Rubanga is the one who moulds people.” This is the name of the hostile spirit which the Acoli believe causes the hunch or hump on the back. And, instead of exorcising these hostile spirits and sending them among pigs, the representatives of Jesus Christ began to preach that Rubanga was the Holy Father who created the Acoli.⁶⁰

In Song of Lawino the deliberately strange translation of God as Hunchback wittily recalls a mangled history of cultural imposition and misunderstanding. Behind Okot's “retranslation of missionaries' mistranslations of the vocabulary of Christian belief,” Heron observes, “lies the history of the blunders of the missionaries in their first dealings with the Acoli at the beginning of this century.”⁶¹ The word “hunchback” captures the weirdness of the concept of God within Acoli culture, both for the people who first encountered it and for an individual like Lawino who still cannot easily make sense of it within her cultural framework. For Okot to have written “God” for Rubanga might have been to reiterate an act of cultural imperialism and to have papered over the gap between antithetical cultural perspectives.

Okot defamiliarizes other key terms of Christianity by rendering them in humorously skewed translations. Lawino recounts her alienating experience of both Protestant and Catholic indoctrination, starting with the Catholic missionaries:

When I was in the Evening Speakers' Class
We recited the Faith of the Messengers
And Our Father who is in Skyland,
We sang Greetings to Maria
We learnt:
Glory shine on the body of the Father
And on the body of the Son
And on the body of the Clean Ghost
We recited the Prayer for saying Yes
And the Prayer for Love,
The Prayer for Trust,
The Greetings of the beautiful men
With birds' wings,
And the Dekalogu,
The Ten Instructions of the Hunchback.

(84)

The English-language reader has to decipher each term, momentarily experiencing a fraction of the hermeneutic bafflement of the Acoli: the “Faith of the Messengers,” we infer, is the Gospel, “Skyland” is heaven, the “Clean Ghost” is the Holy Ghost, the beautiful men with birds' wings must be the angels, and the Ten Instructions, the Ten Commandments. Returned to English through the detour of Acoli, these revised English terms are bidirectional, recalling both the stock English original and its literal rendering in another language. Their linguistic strangeness for the English reader echoes some of their cultural peculiarity for the Acoli. Okot's partial retranslations into English represent a kind of discursive anticolonialism. They embed and mock a linguistic history of missionary efforts to identify local equivalents for religious concepts, often literal translations of Western abstractions. Like their missionary forebears, anthropologists are, according to Okot, “intellectual smugglers”: mistranslating African concepts like the Acoli Jok or the Akan Borebore as God, “strong” as “omnipotent,” or “wise” as “omniscient,” they introduce “Greek metaphysical conceptions into African religious thought.”⁶² At least Lienhardt and Evans-Pritchard acknowledge that they can only see African religions through the prism of their own beliefs; “it is wise to bear in mind,” Okot says of many Western anthropologists, “that they are active members of their own churches and other institutions, and their first allegiance is to their God, whom they believe to be supreme.”⁶³

Perhaps the most powerful antiethnographic device in Song of Lawino is Okot's inversion of the ethnographic gaze. At a time when the norm of anthropology was the study of “primitive” societies in the non-Western world, Okot “anthropologizes” the West. “Although social anthropology has been described as the study of man and his works,” he writes, “in Western scholarship it has been, until very recently, the study of the so called ‘tribal’ peoples, and has shown very little interest in western industrialised societies.”⁶⁴ Where Western anthropologists assimilate Luo religion to their preconceptions, Lawino aggressively redescribes their religion from her perspective. She recounts her first experience of communion, led by a large robed Protestant:

He held a little shiny saucer:
It had small pieces of something.
The name of the man
Was Eliya
And he was calling people
To come and eat
Human flesh!
He put little bits
In their hands
And they ate it up!
Then he took a cup,
He said
There was human blood
In the cup
And he gave it
To the people
To drink!
I ran out of the Church,
I was very sick!
O! Protestants eat people!
They are all wizards,
They exhume corpses
For dinner!

(75)

Slyly inverting the Western stereotype of African cannibalism, Okot irreverently literalizes a Christian ritual, stripping away its metaphysical meaning. The humor of the scene lies in defamiliarization, in the dissonance between the habitual Western rite and the impression it first makes on an Acoli village woman. As Lindfors writes, “Lawino focuses attention on some of the arbitrary and seemingly irrational aspects of western behaviour which would very likely baffle any non-westerner encountering them for the first time. She forces us to recognize the illogicality of our ways. Her incomprehension is both a warning and a protest against cultural arrogance.”⁶⁵

Similarly, Lawino's puzzlement over the Christian calendar denaturalizes a Western custom:

My husband says
Before this man was born
White men counted years backwards.
Starting with the biggest number
Then it became
One thousand
Then one hundred
Then ten,
And when it became one
Then Jesus was born.
I cannot understand all this
I do not understand it at all!

(73)

Lawino's complaint comes at the end of a long rebuke to her husband for trying to impose an industrialized society's concept of time on an African village, where time is a function of agricultural life and seasonal return. She tells time by sunrise and sunset, harvest and hunger. This section's reflection on time may well be, as we saw earlier, indebted to an ethnographic category of knowledge. But instead of merely submitting to a Western anthropological norm, Lawino casts a defamiliarizing, ethnographic glance in the reverse direction. “Time has become / My husband's master / It is my husband's husband,” she laments (68); Ocol monitors every moment according to a fixed sequence of minutes, hours, days, and years:

If my husband insists
What exact time
He should have morning tea
And breakfast,
When exactly to have coffee
And the exact time
For taking the family photograph—
Lunch-time, tea time,
And supper time—
I must first look at the sun,
The cock must crow
To remind me.

(64)

Listen
My husband,
In the wisdom of the Acoli
Time is not stupidly split up
Into seconds and minutes,
It does not flow
Like beer in a pot
That is sucked
Until it is finished.

(69)

Lawino astutely juxtaposes Acoli and Western practices for observing and regulating time. In her stereoscopic vision, she resembles yet reverses the anthropologist, whose underlying source of insight is the sometimes unannounced splicing together of divergent cultural perspectives. Perhaps Lawino isn't quite disinterested here, but neither is the anthropologist, whose “ethnocentrism,” according to the postcolonial novelist and anthropologist V. Y. Mudimbe, is neither “an unfortunate mishap, nor a stupid accident, but one of the major signs of the possibility of anthropology.”⁶⁶

If we were ignorant of Western codes of cooking and eating, we might learn a lot from Lawino's mock-ethnographic account. From Ocol's “apemanship,” we glean that Westerners eat with spoon and fork though Lawino does not (56), sit at meals not on the earth like her but “on trees / Like monkeys” (61), cook standing up (58), preserve meat in ice (58), keep foods in tins (58), use dangerous coal and electric stoves (57-58), and cook with flat-bottomed pots and pans “Because the stoves are flat / Like the face of the drum” (59). Lawino is repulsed by the texture of Western foods: a fried egg “Is slimy like mucus,” cooked chicken makes “You think you are chewing paper,” and the standard mushy fare seems like “Foods for the toothless, / For infants and invalids” (58). In a strategy explored earlier in my discussion of Ramanujan, Okot's metaphors vividly enact at the level of the word and the image the uncanniness of postcolonial perception.

Perhaps Lawino's most aggressive counterethnographic ethnography is a propos of Western love, beauty, and dance. Lawino proudly declares Acoli ways of adorning the female body, against which Western makeup seems frightful. Of Ocol's new, Westernized wife, Lawino observes:

Her lips are red-hot
Like glowing charcoal,
She resembles the wild cat
That has dipped its mouth in blood,
Her mouth is like raw yaws
It looks like an open ulcer,
Like the mouth of a field!
Tina dusts powder on her face
And it looks so pale;
She resembles the wizard
Getting ready for the midnight dance.

(37)

Lawino delights in the abundant and astonishing use of simile. By figuratively reconceiving lipstick and face powder, she associates habits meant to soften and beautify the face with violence, death, and destruction. Her similes mimic the to-and-fro flight of the mind from an unfamiliar sight to daily experiences and back again, attempting through trope to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical habits of the West. In the poem's third section, “I Do Not Know the Dances of White People,” Okot extends this cluster of figurative associations, fiercely defamiliarizing Western practices of love and dance:

You kiss her on the cheek
As white people do,
You kiss her open-sore lips
As white people do,
You suck slimy saliva
From each other's mouths
As white people do.
And the lips of the men become bloody
With blood dripping from the red-hot lips;
Their teeth look
As if they have been boxed in the mouth.
Women throw their arms
Around the necks of their partners
And put their cheeks
On the cheeks of their men.
Men hold the waists of the women
Tightly, tightly …

(44)

Lawino's horror and astonishment have ethnographic content, but not of the sort that a pre-1960s textbook would have emphasized: Westerners kiss on the lips, unlike peoples in some other parts of the world; they dance holding each other, a strangling violation of dance codes for the Acoli. Further, they dance inside:

It is hot inside the house
It is hot like inside a cave
Like inside a hyena's den!

(45)

Throughout this section, such repetitions effectively reproduce Lawino's sense of claustrophobia and confinement within Western rites.

If these passages amount to a kind of reverse ethnography, Lawino comes closer to an outright parody of the discipline in graphically describing the latrine in a Western-style dance hall, her figurative abundance rivaling the most resourceful scatological literature in English:

The entire floor
Is covered with human dung
All the tribes of human dung!
Dry dungs and dysentery
Old dungs and fresh dungs
Young ones that are still steaming,
Short thick dungs
Sitting like hills,
Snake-like dungs
Coiled up like pythons.
Little ones just squatting there,
Big ones lying on their sides
Like tree trunks.
Some dungs are red like ochre
Others are yellow
Like the ripe mango,
Like inside a ripe pawpaw.
Others are black like soil,
Like the soil we use
For smearing the floor.
Some dungs are of mixed colours!

(46)

Even before Lawino has categorized the varieties of excrement, the phrase “tribes of human dung” is our first clue that anthropology is being mocked. In African Religions in Western Scholarship, Okot scornfully surveys anthropological definitions of “tribe,” including Evans-Pritchard's, and concludes that the term, though a cornerstone of the discipline, is analytically meaningless and an “insult” that “ought to be dropped.”⁶⁷ With his descriptive rainbow of excremental tribes, Okot excoriates anthropological practices for demarcating one group of human peoples over against another according to key characteristics. To anthropologize non-Western societies as “tribes,” he suggests, is to risk treating them as objectified “others,” things to be eliminated from the world's body.

In Song of Ocol Okot still more forcefully connects anthropological classification with imperialist destruction. The self-alienated Ocol aggressively surveys East African peoples, employing catalogs that bizarrely cross anthropological textbook with Walt Whitman:

You Maasai warrior
Honing your spear
And polishing it with ghee,
You naked Jie
Studying the sick cow,
You Turkana scout
Perched on the termite mound
Ijakait from Toposa,
You Dodos General
Presiding over the war council;
You Suk youth
I hear you singing
Praises to your black ox,
Your hands raised
In imitation of its horns;
You men on Nandi hills
Tending cattle in the rocky pastures
Always suspecting an impending raid,
You Pokot hordes
Driving home the stolen cattle;
Kipsigis men
I see colourful shields
Surrounding a thick bush
In which I see
A lion's tufted tail …
You proud Kalenjin
Chiefless, free,
Each man the chief
Of his hut.

(135)

Ocol's ethnographic overview of “tribes” might seem value neutral. But in each case, he parodically reduces a people to a single characteristic: an African people comes to seem little more than a favorite weapon, headdress, animal, or method of political organization.

Most tellingly, his ethnographic reductionism soon turns into rancorous calls for the extermination of the customs and peoples he has classified:

Listen,
We will not simply
Put the Maasai in trousers
To end twenty five thousand years
Of human nakedness,
Dynamiting the ochre quarries
Is only the starting gun,
We will arrest
All the elders
The tutors of the young
During circumcisions,
The gathering of youths
In the wilderness for initiations
Will be banned,
The council of elders
Will be abolished;
The war dance …
The blowing of war horns
Will be punished
With twelve strokes
Of the cane
For each blast;
All the men with moi names
And those with “killer” marks
On their backs
And on their arms
Will be hanged for murder.

(136-37)

The violence of Ocol's verbs intensifies as he calls for traditional African peoples to be “jailed” and “shaved,” their customs to be “destroyed” and “stamped out,” until he is so carried away he promises to “blow up / Mount Kilimanjaro,” to “uproot” the trees and “fill the Valleys” (146). What happened to Ocol's seemingly careful and particularist surveys of different tribes? By interweaving them with hyperbolically imperialist calls for the blanket destruction of traditional African cultures, Okot unforgivingly highlights the most negative potential of anthropology—a discipline of ethnographic cleansing.

This extreme indictment might seem to rule out any accommodation of anthropology within Song of Lawino or Song of Ocol, but these texts are, as we have seen, often ethnographic in their antiethnography. Lawino, after all, indulges in her own rough form of ethnographic classification in defending Acoli hairstyles as naturally suited to Acoli hair:

Listen,
Ostrich plumes differ
From chicken feathers,
A monkey's tail
Is different from that of the giraffe,
The crocodile's skin
Is not like the guinea fowl's,
And the hippo is naked, and hairless.
The hair of the Acoli
Is different from that of the Arabs;
The Indians' hair
Resembles the tail of the horse;
It is like sisal strings
And needs to be cut
With scissors.
It is black,
And is different from that of white women.

(51)

Lawino's defense of her kind of “vigorous and healthy hair / Curly, springy and thick / That glistens in the sunshine” relies in part on the logic of distinction and classification, even though it might seem uncomplicated self-affirmation (54). To each people, its own style of existence and self-representation.

So long as we perceive Song of Lawino as a “homebred” manifesto, we obscure the dialectical impact of the objectifying gaze of the ethnographer on the poem's self-affirmations. A defense, Lawino's representation of her own culture cannot be conceived as pure or unmediated. When Lawino describes Acoli ways, she presents them to us always in relation to Western culture. Her “native” culture is anthropologized by its placement side by side with the West's. I return once more to an example of Lawino's proud assertions of her culture:

I do not know
How to keep the white man's time.
My mother taught me
The way of the Acoli
And nobody should
Shout at me
Because I know
The customs of our people!
When the baby cries
Let him suck milk
From the breast.
There is no fixed time
For breast feeding.

(68)

Lawino may not know exactly how to keep time in Western fashion, but she knows enough to realize that Western time differs from her own customary practices. Her vision of her own culture is mediated through the knowledge of the white man's “fixed time.” She cannot conceive of her culture except through the detour of another. She continually presents her culture to us in terms of what it is not—whether in food or religion, dance or dress. Witness such section titles as “I Do Not Know the Dances of White People,” “There Is No Fixed Time for Breast Feeding,” and “I Am Ignorant of the Good Word in the Clean Book.” In Song of Lawino traditional Acoli culture is not simply “there” but “under erasure,” threatened by Western influences, constantly having to justify itself in relation to them. Thus, even in its nativist defenses, Song of Lawino is a poem of split vision, facing at once inward and outward, resisting and incorporating ethnographic norms.

Close attention to Okot's conflicted dialogue with anthropology in Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol demonstrates that the poem is profoundly intercultural, despite the well-meaning claims on behalf of its “African authenticity,” “autochthony,” and “nativism.” In an intelligent reading of Song of Lawino, K. L. Goodwin claims that cultural “syncretism” is beyond Lawino's “conceptualization, and is perhaps alien to Okot p'Bitek's own beliefs.”⁶⁸ Like other Western and postcolonial critics, Goodwin believes that the power of the poem lies in its fidelity to Acoli culture. In another fine introduction to Song of Lawino, Gerald Moore similarly sees “total participation by the poet in the still flourishing culture of his people.”⁶⁹ While the poet's participation in traditional Acoli culture is indeed vigorous, it is not total but, as we have seen, highly mediated. Okot's poem is ineluctably hybrid in genre, cultural perspective, and language. If even this touchstone of the “authentically African” is deeply syncretic, then the distinction between the “culturally native” poem and the “culturally mulatto” poem in English is unlikely to continue to be useful.

Perhaps the most immediate evidence of the poetry's hybridity is its language, to which I recur by way of conclusion. A bilingual poet, Okot is brilliant in his linguistic interleaving of English and only partially translated Acoli idioms, as we saw in his antiethnographic non-/mis-/semi-translations of Acoli religious terms. Like other postcolonial writers and like Western anthropologists, Okot sprinkles his text with apparently untranslatable native words. Sometimes explaining them in a brief note, he more often leaves them to be puzzled from context.⁷⁰ But Okot also makes use of a more risky strategy for hybridizing English—namely, he renders Acoli words and phrases with insistent literalism. Discussing Nigerian writers, Michael C. Onwuemene terms this strategy “transliteration” or, perhaps more helpfully, “translexification” and sees this implanting in English of idioms and tropes from African ethnic languages as comparable to what is called in translation theory semantic translation, which emphasizes the source text, as opposed to communicative translation, where the target culture is primary: “Semantic translation … is a Janus-faced interstitial operation between the word level and the idiom or trope level of language use; the words are translated, but the idiom is only transferred.”⁷¹ Okot wields this strategy with remarkable effectiveness, as we can see by looking at one last passage from Song of Lawino:

My husband's tongue
Is bitter like the roots of the lyonno lily,
It is hot like the penis of the bee,
Like the sting of the kalang!
Ocol's tongue is fierce like the arrow of the scorpion,
Deadly like the spear of the buffalo-hornet.
It is ferocious
Like the poison of a barren woman
And corrosive like the juice of the gourd.

(35)

In English it is nonidiomatic to talk of bees with penises, scorpions with arrows, or hornets with spears. But these literal translations vividly recover the metaphorical content of Acoli expressions and at the same time bring striking metaphors into English. Taban lo Liyong, Okot's Acoli rival and near-contemporary, attacked his “Acholi-English” for losing the meaning of native proverbs and idioms by rendering them into English “word for word, rather than sense for sense, or proverb for proverb.”⁷² In a largely sympathetic account of Song of Lawino, Heron also bemoans the “curious obscurities” and “lost meaning” in Okot's “unnaturally literal translation.”⁷³ Examples include the repeated proverb about not destroying traditions—“The pumpkin in the old homestead / Must not be uprooted” (41); idioms such as “to eat” instead of simply “to win” a praise name or title (82-83); and words such as “moons” for “months” (69-70). But instead of losing meaning, these renderings afford a literary gain that no mere one-to-one substitution could afford. Okot serves the languages of both colonizer and colonized, reinvigorating the language of English poetry by infusing it with Acoli metaphors, while vivifying the metaphoricity of Acoli—a metaphoricity obscured by everyday use. The double “poetry” of Song of Lawino thus enacts and exemplifies the intercultural energies of postcolonial poetry. Through its Acoli-English, the bilingual poet africanizes the master's language by persistent reference to the partially absented native tongue. In the creolized language of Okot's poetry, English no longer exists without its African shadow.

As with language, so with the disciplinary assumptions of anthropology, we've seen that Okot simultaneously embraces a Western colonial inheritance and vigorously repudiates it. Indeed, the power of Song of Lawino can be traced in part to its robust dialogue with anthropology, helping to reveal the limitations of the controversy over whether postcolonial literatures are ethnographic. Without Okot's ethnographic attentiveness to specific Acoli customs, his grouping of them in ethnographic clusters, his relating of them to general assumptions, his continual counterpointing of them with Western ways, Song of Lawino would be a less compelling work than it is. Nor would it be as vital and intense without its dramatization of the indigenous voice, its pointed repudiation of Christian ethnography, its humorously skewed translations, its inversion of the ethnographic gaze, and its mock-ethnographic catalogs. The poem's often brilliant response to anthropology sharpens our awareness of the discipline's capacity to distort, reduce, contain, and oversimplify the non-Western world; yet it also heightens our appreciation for anthropology's ability, like that of the postcolonial poetry it enriches, to convey the lived density and cultural distinctness of Third World societies. Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol are not ethnographies of the Acoli but neither are they merely antiethnographies, just as they are neither Acoli oral songs nor Western literary artifacts. They are “both/and,” not in a merely formulaic and predictable balancing of opposites, but in actively engaging these intertexts, whether to repudiate, revise, or remake them.

Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol are perhaps atypical in addressing anthropology as a disciplinary discourse in such a sustained manner. But this “special case” may help us to consider how a host of other prominent postcolonial writers, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Chinua Achebe, V. Y. Mudimbe, Kamau Brathwaite, and Amitav Ghosh, also draw directly on anthropology's findings and practices, while chafing at some of its disciplinary norms. In the ambivalent relation between postcolonial writers and anthropology, the story of Wole Soyinka's experience at Cambridge is illustrative: in 1973-74 he delivered a series of lectures entirely in the department of anthropology, having been declined by an English department apparently unable to “believe in any such mythical beast as ‘African Literature.’”⁷⁴ Soyinka was more readily welcomed by English anthropologists than by literary scholars. But even his most “ethnographic” poetry published before this disagreeable episode both incorporates and contests disciplinary assumptions of anthropology. Like a religious anthropologist, he centers his long poem Idanre (1967) on such key orishás (or Yoruba deities) as Ogun and Shango; but far from presenting these figures as members of an “ancient and fixed” pantheon from an immutable past, Soyinka emphasizes their hybridization with modern technologies, such as electric wires. Similarly, in a gripping poem ironically entitled “Pleasure,” Ramanujan offers an ethnological portrait of a Jaina monk, who masochistically immolates himself by standing on an anthill, having

smeared his own private
untouchable Jaina
body with honey
thick and slow as pitch. …(75)

No doubt Ramanujan's sketch of the monk is indebted to anthropological codes of representation. But his emphasis on the psychology of pain as pleasure also complicates the poem's objectification of the monk as ethnological specimen, just as the wider range of Ramanujan's poetry both answers and deconstructs the question, “Is There a Hindu Way of Thinking?” Sharing the recuperative ethnographic zeal of many earlier postcolonial writers, Yeats and Bennett are among those at the forefront of efforts to collect, promote, and revalorize the folklore of their peoples. Even so, Yeats digests Irish myth within an idiosyncratically personal vision, and Bennett feminizes performance genres described as male by professional anthropologists. All told, the tribes of the literary and the ethnographic are no more isolated from one another than are today's national literatures. The ethnographic and counterethnographic crosscurrents that flood Okot's Songs—and perhaps other postcolonial poems of Africa, India, and the Caribbean—deepen and complicate their intellectual and literary substance, helping to make them rich and enduring contributions to world literature in English.

Notes

1. Charles R. Larson, The Emergence of African Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 44.

2. Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 6, 4.

3. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 68. Appiah directly criticizes Miller's views (62-64) and briefly discusses Song of Lawino (66-67).

4. Ibid., 62-72.

5. Amitav Ghosh, “The Imam and the Indian,” Granta 20 (1986): 136-46; David Scott, “Locating the Anthropological Subject: Postcolonial Anthropologists in Other Places,” Inscriptions 5 (1989): 75-85; James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1-2, 4-6.

6. “Acoli” is pronounced and sometimes spelled “Acholi.” The Acoli language was also known by the broader designation “Luo” or “Lwo,” and Song of Lawino itself uses “Luo.”

7. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1983), 163, 259. On the pivotal influence of Song of Lawino on East African writing, see Michael R. Ward, “Okot p'Bitek and the Rise of East African Writing,” in A Celebration of Black and African Writing, ed. Bruce King and Kolawole Ogungbesan (Ibadan, Nigeria: Oxford University Press Nigeria, 1975), 217-31.

8. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, introduction to Africa's Cultural Revolution, by Okot p'Bitek (Nairobi: Macmillan, 1973), xi.

9. Bernth Lindfors, “The Songs of Okot p'Bitek,” in The Writing of East and Central Africa, ed. G. D. Killam (London: Heinemann, 1984), 144, 146.

10. Nkem Okoh, “Writing African Oral Literature: A Reading of Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino,” Bridges (Dakar, Senegal) 5, no. 2 (1993): 51.

11. G. A. Heron, introduction to “Song of Lawino” and “Song of Ocol,” by Okot p'Bitek (Oxford: Heinemann, 1984), 1, 8. All quotations from these poems will be cited parenthetically in the text.

12. Okot, Africa's Cultural Revolution, vii.

13. Ibid., 1-2.

14. Ibid., 2-3.

15. Ibid., 3.

16. Kirsten Petersen, “Okot p'Bitek: Interview,” Kunapipi 1, no. 1 (1979): 89; Bernth Lindfors, “An Interview with Okot p'Bitek,” World Literature Written in English 16 (1977): 282-83.

17. Lindfors, “Interview with Okot,” 283.

18. Okot remarked to an interviewer, “The tradition I grew up in had love songs, funeral songs and so on and so forth to be danced, to celebrate particular important occasions, birth and circumcision and so on and so forth,” in contrast to his “long, long, long songs,” which are generically “a new thing altogether” (Lee Nichols, “Okot p'Bitek” [1978], in Conversations with African Writers, ed. Lee Nichols [Washington, D.C.: Voice of America, 1981], 250). Studies of the influence of Acoli oral traditions on Okot's poetry include Charles Okumu, “The Form of Okot p'Bitek's Poetry: Literary Borrowing from Acoli Oral Traditions,” Research in African Literatures 23, no. 3 (1992): 53-66; Okoh, “Writing African Oral Literature,” 35-53; and Gerald Moore, “The Horn of the Grasslands,” in Twelve African Writers (London: Hutchinson University Library for Africa, 1980), 174-76. But Okumu observes that “Okot's songs can neither be sung nor fitted into the thematic classification of Acoli oral songs. Oral songs are composed in response to an immediate event or as a means of reflecting a localized issue within the village or clan” (“Form of Okot's Poetry,” 55).

19. Lindfors, “Interview with Okot,” 282; Petersen, “Okot: Interview,” 89; Nichols, “Okot p'Bitek,” 245.

20. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha (1855; reprint, New York: Federal Book Co., 1902), 10-11.

21. To fill in further the biographical details, Okot p'Bitek was born in 1931 in Gulu, Uganda. His father was a Protestant schoolteacher but also an accomplished dancer and storyteller from the Patiko chiefdom, his mother a famous composer of songs and a dancer. He attended Gulu High School, King's College, Budo, and the Mbara Teachers Training College. In 1953 he published his first book, a novel in Acoli entitled Lak tar, later translated as White Teeth, and in 1956 an early Acoli version of Wer pa Lawino was rejected by a publisher's agent. As a schoolteacher, he played for several years on the Ugandan national soccer team, which eventually led to his studies in Britain. In the wake of Ugandan independence in 1962, Okot returned to teach and work in the extramural department at Makerere University in Kampala in 1963, also serving as the director of the Uganda National Cultural Centre (1966-68), before being forced out of this post for political reasons. During eleven years of enforced exile from Uganda, Okot taught in African studies, sociology, and literature at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, with brief visiting appointments at the University of Texas and the University of Iowa's writing program. Under the tyrannical and murderous rule of Idi Amin (1971-79), many of Okot's relatives in Uganda were killed. In the last few years of his life, Okot taught at the University of Ife, Nigeria, and at Makerere University, where he died in 1982. Along with Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, Okot published the poetic monologues Song of Prisoner (1971) and Song of Malaya (1971). Author of several books of anthropology, Okot also collected and translated folk songs in The Horn of My Love (1974), folktales in Hare and Hornbill (1978), and Acholi Proverbs (1985). For more on Okot's life, see G. A. Heron, The Poetry of Okot p'Bitek (London: Heinemann, 1976), 1-5; Lubwa p'Chong, “A Biographical Sketch,” in Artist, the Ruler, by Okot p'Bitek (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1986), 1-12; Monica Nalyaka Wanambisi, Thought and Technique in the Poetry of Okot p'Bitek (New York: Vantage Press, 1984), 1-2.

22. Okot, Africa's Cultural Revolution, 98.

23. Ibid., 33.

24. Okot p'Bitek, African Religions in Western Scholarship (Kampala: East African Literature Bureau, 1971), 9-10.

25. Sally Falk Moore, “Changing Perspectives on a Changing Africa: The Work of Anthropology,” in Africa and the Disciplines, ed. Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O'Barr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 10.

26. Ibid., 3.

27. Clifford, Routes, 21.

28. Moore, “Changing Perspectives,” 3.

29. My references to different versions of the poem are indebted to Heron's account; Heron also discusses this shift in voice (Poetry of Okot p'Bitek, 33-45).

30. Moore, “Changing Perspectives,” 12.

31. Okot p'Bitek, “Table of Nilotic Religious Concepts,” in Religion of the Central Luo (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1971), unpaginated.

32. Heron, Poetry of Okot p'Bitek, 37.

33. Okot, Religion of the Central Luo, 160.

34. Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 13; E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 39.

35. For a searching critique of nativism, see Appiah, “Topologies of Nativism,” chap. 3 of In My Father's House, 47-72.

36. Okot, African Religions, viii-ix.

37. Ibid., vii-viii, 44-45. Ensuing references to this work appear parenthetically in the text.

38. Cited by Lubwa p'Chong, “A Biographical Sketch,” 7.

39. Talal Asad, introduction to Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Talal Asad (London: Ithaca Press, 1973), 16, 17. Asad makes no direct reference to Okot; in his comment about “wild remarks,” he is paraphrasing a view dismissed by Victor Turner.

40. Edward Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 220.

41. Ibid., 225.

42. Ibid., 212. The long quotation above is from Okot's Africa's Cultural Revolution, 90-91.

43. Clifford, Routes, 69.

44. Kirin Narayan, “How Native Is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?” American Anthropologist 95 (1993): 671.

45. Clifford, citing Kamela Visweswaran, Routes, 85.

46. Narayan, “How Native Is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?” 671; Clifford, Routes, 77. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's comparable skepticism about the “native informant” in “How to Read a ‘Culturally Different’ Book” in Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iverson (New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 126-50, and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

47. Lindfors, “Interview with Okot,” 284. Angela Smith notes the authorial “self-mockery” implicit in Lawino's complaint that books have smashed the testicles of Acoli men (East African Writing in English [London: Macmillan, 1989], 89).

48. Florence Stratton has “denounced” Okot for “following the model provided by Senghor,” which “analogizes woman to the heritage of African values, an unchanging African essence” (Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender [New York: Routledge, 1994], 50, 41, 43).

49. Okot, Africa's Cultural Revolution, 61. For an interesting recent attempt to defend Tempels, see V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 50-54, 136-42.

50. Okot, Africa's Cultural Revolution, 62.

51. Mary Louise Pratt states, “If ethnographic texts are those in which European metropolitan subjects represent to themselves their others (usually their subjugated others), autoethnographic texts are representations that the so-defined others construct in response to or in dialogue with those texts.” It should be noted, however, that by “ethnography” (or the counterdiscursive “autoethnography”) Pratt means not the historically specific discipline of ethnography per se but any metropolitan representation of “others.” See her “Transculturation and Autoethnography: Peru, 1615/1980,” in Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, ed. Barker, Hulme, and Iverson, 28, and Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7.

52. As Michael R. Ward observes, “Okot p'Bitek avoids the tone of anthropological description … by speaking directly to the audience (using the second person)” (“Okot p'Bitek and the Rise of East African Writing,” 224). On Okot's use of dramatic monologue and apostrophe, see Heron, Poetry of Okot p'Bitek, 12-25, 60-61; Moore, “Horn of the Grasslands,” 176; Ogo A. Ofuani, “Digression as Discourse Strategy in Okot p'Bitek's Dramatic Monologue Texts,” Research in African Literatures 19 (1988): 312-340; and Okoh, “Writing African Oral Literature,” 48-50. On anaphora and apostrophe in Okot's “Songs,” see Wanambisi, Thought and Technique, 103-11. On apostrophe more generally, see Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 67-81; and Jonathan Culler, “Changes in the Study of the Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 40.

53. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313, subsequently revised in chap. 3 of her Critique of Postcolonial Reason.

54. Herbert Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry, ed. Hošek and Parker, 228.

55. On exotic monologues, see Alan Sinfield, Dramatic Monologue (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977), 44-45.

56. Loy D. Martin, Browning's Dramatic Monologues and the Post-Romantic Subject (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 106.

57. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Wiedenfeld, 1967), 141-54, 190-203. Referring to African history and culture, Ocol says:

    Smash all these mirrors
    That I may not see
    The blackness of the past
    From which I came
    Reflected in them.

    (129)

    On “self-hatred” and the “inferiority complex” in Okot's poetry, see J. O. J. Nwachukwu-Agbada, “Okot p'Bitek and the Story of a Paradox,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 12 (Autumn 1989): 95-107.

58. Okot, African Religions, 59.

59. Moore, “Changing Perspectives,” 12.

60. Okot, African Religion, 62; see also Petersen, “Okot: Interview,” 91.

61. Heron adds that these “deliberately odd translations giv[e] a totally new effect in the translation from that given in the original, where the Christian meanings of the words would be accepted without any strangeness by now” (Poetry of Okot p'Bitek, 56-57).

62. Okot, African Religions, 87-88.

63. Ibid., 67.

64. Ibid., 9.

65. Lindfors, “Songs of Okot,” 150.

66. Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 19.

67. Okot, African Religions, 14.

68. K. L. Goodwin, Understanding African Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1982), 161.

69. Moore, “Horn of the Grasslands,” 175.

70. For reflections on glossed and untranslated words in postcolonial texts, see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 1989), 61-66; and Maria Tymoczko, “Post-colonial Writing and Literary Translation,” in Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (New York: Routledge, 1999), 25.

71. Michael C. Onwuemene, “Limits of Transliteration: Nigerian Writers' Endeavors toward a National Literary Language,” PMLA 114 (1999): 1057, 1058. See also the discussion of “relexification” in Chantal Zabus, “Language, Orality, and Literature,” in New National and Post-colonial Literatures: An Introduction, ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 35-36; and of nonstandard lexemes due to literal translation in Tymoczko, “Post-colonial Writing and Literary Translation,” 26.

72. Taban lo Liyong, The Last Word: Cultural Synthesism (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969), 140, 141.

73. Heron, Poetry of Okot p'Bitek, 55-58.

74. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (1976; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), vii.

75. A. K. Ramanujan, The Collected Poems (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 139-40.