The monthly Guest Writer Session organized by the Abuja Writers’ Forum (AWF) took place at the popular Pen and Pages Bookstore, Abuja, on July 30, 2011. In this report, TUNJI AJIBADE highlights the intrigues that weave through Cecilia Kato’s journey around her poetic canvass.

IT was obvious she wrote what she knew intimately. It is the foremost rule in writing. Write what you know. No wonder, Cecilia Kato, as soon as she took the hot seat, listed the sources of inspiration for her poems, and tagged them “my stupid thoughts.”

And she had been longer on that on any occasion she had to talk about her works: “Poetry is my passion. It is a natural consequence of my rural upbringing. Kagoro (her Local Government council in Kaduna State) exudes poetry by its topography.

The streams, the foliage, the wild game and birds sing through memories that have survived every (aspect) of western education that one has received. Other experiences stem from early marriage and the survival techniques life made available to provide an enabling environment for the prisoner of the world’s worst war, The turbulence caused by riots in my State has left a mark on each of us. This too, is reflected in what I call ‘my stupid thoughts’, that is, the poetry I write.”

However one of the participants at the July, 2011 edition of the Forum, Mr Jim Pressman, contradicted Kato. “You made an understatement when you called your poems stupidity poems,” Mr Pressman had pointed out during the Question and Answer period.

Cecilia Kato reading to the audience

“I wonder how you managed to express your anger so well in your poems, because there is so much angst in them.” Perhaps, the reason Kato described her poems the way she did, as well as the considerable time she devoted to describing the circumstances that spurred them, proved to be an eye opener for many of the participants at this largely interactive session.

It was obvious from her the experiences she related, how the most intimate thing that many do not pay attention could just be materials for beautiful, rhythmic poetry such as Kato read to her audience.

The event that had Mr Kamal Balogun as the Master of Ceremony, kicked off with the reading of the winning entry of this year’s Caine Prize story, Hitting Budapest. This story was read by Ms Chinelo Onwualu, an editor with Cassava Republic.

Life music was provided by Tokuboh Edward and Chukwuka Fortune. A young motivational speaker and poet based in Oweri, Benjamin Anabaraonye, also read poems tilted “Pen and Pages” as well as “A Humble Man.” There was also a raffle draw in which participants won books.

In her collections Desire; Victims of Love, (both published) as well as A woman’s Song (unpublished), Kato drew on her growing up years, and her day-today experiences.

Each collection has a major background that informs it though, just as the fact of  her being a lecturer and a published writer have a background. “The reason I have publications today is because of my husband,” she said to a question on what her husband’s role has been in her writing.

“I have had a rough marriage, yes. But no matter how rough it has been, I owe my being educated and being a lecturer to my husband.”

 Established female writers

In contrast to known and established female writers whose husbands burnt their scripts and maltreated them such that their marriages ended in divorce, Kato noted that at the age of seventeen, “I left boarding  school, and three months after, I was bundled into marriage.I left one burden for another.

“She never had her youth, and she was not interested in attending any higher institution after she left secondary school. But her final year results came, her “husband saw how beautiful the results were,” and he insisted she had to further her education.

She did not like the idea, she made trouble in every way she could to stop her husband who was a Grade Two teacher at the time. But the man was unperturbed.

One day, he came home with some pieces of paper. He had them folded in his hand, and told her to sign in the space for signature at the bottom. She did. Unknown to her, it was the application form to a higher institution.

When the application sailed through, her husband packed her, her load, a month old pregnancy, and drove her to school. And now, years down the line, she is both a lecturer at the University of Abuja and doctoral candidate.

Her husband also played the same role in her writing: “Don’t ever throw any piece of paper away in this house,” was a rule he set for their children long ago. That was because their mother would write poems on a piece of paper, and throw it somewhere.

The man of the house however kept picking the pieces up wherever he found them, and one day, he had them typed, and brought them to his wife. They are the stuff of Kato’s published poetry collections.

Kato is strong on poetry that treats issues of women, and issues in her immediate environment. Victims of Love, for instance, is her ‘stupid thoughts” on women. “A man can only slap a woman after she has surrendered herself when she said “I love you.”

It cannot be otherwise, Kato reasoned. So about occurrences in a home where a woman goes through what many African women are acknowledged to go through, Kato wrote Victims of Love. And she believes in the traditional role of a woman in the home.

“If a man tells me my place is in the kitchen, he has not said anything new.” And with that in view, she wrote poems such as Victim of love (which is also the title of the collection); My Battle Day, in which she asks: What is the day of a woman? And she follows up with “My battle day begins at 4 am.” This collection also has Amina (that treats girl-child marriage), as well as Unoma.