Philip Matogo
The publisher has agreed on a tentative release date for my forthcoming book, Nocturnes at dawn. It’s a different kind of book from my last one, A Licence To Phil.
The difference between the books is that A Licence To Phil reflects, in its playful prosody, that person I always wanted to be. While Nocturnes at dawn reminds me of the person I was born to be.
This next book is me coming into my own, poeticizing the politics I have had a ringiside seat to since I was two years old. That’s when my Mum and Dad took their then three children across the border with Kenya into exile.
There were close scrapes with death in Zambia and London, as the family moved from place to place and country to avoid the scythe of Idi Amin’s rule. Consequently, we became rootless and disinherted in a very real way.
1986 was supposed to be our familial nirvana. Sadly, after my father was appointed ambassador-at-large to about 10 countries, give or take, he realized that comfort kills a revolutionary faster than conflict.
The war that beset Rwanda in the mid 90s was partly planned in the ambassador’s residence in Tanzania. I saw the late Fred Rwigema weeks before he died and Mr. Paul Kagame slept at the embassy. Then my father died, a month after the pogroms in Rwanda picked up from 1959.
In St. Charles Lwanga Kasasa secondary school, I felt the sadness and rage within me about all this recast my mental state.
My subsequent forays into student politics helped me understand where my head was, and the many years I lived in Nakasongola barracks taught me where my heart lies.
I once advised some younger poets not to risk the trauma that comes with the poetic path. I take that back.
The struggles and triumphs we face as poets distinguish the dreamer from the daydreamer. Accordingly, Nocturnes at dawn reveals the dream as an oasis in a Sahara of growing self-doubt.
Young poets, by all means, go through hell and collect some of its Promethean fire by trailblazing towards Heaven.
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I am a writer and a humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain, Aziz Ansari, Tina Fey, George Carlin and Ogden Nash. I believe in social justice and I am passionate about a global literary Renaissance.
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