Death as natural presence and as a monster: The elegy in African textual traditions with a focus on Swahili verbal art

According to Ruth Finnegan (2012), Africanists have always paid little attention to elegiac poetry. This paper is a contribution to the exploration of modern African elegy in African verbal art. Comparing various texts from different contexts and periods, it will argue, in line with Charamba’s work (2014), that two different conceptions of death are traceable in the continent—one sees death as a fulfillment of the existence and as something that gives meaning to life; and the dead are seen as reconnecting themselves with the ancestors, who are not far from life. On the other hand, the other conception sees death as an unnatural element, even as something monstrous. These apparently antithetical ideas have influenced the production of elegiac verbal arts in Africa, even the modern one, and coexist not only in the multiplicity of textual praxis and relationship with death, but sometimes also within the same poetic corpus, like in the work of the late Swahili poet and philosopher Euphrase Kezilahabi. This paper will analyse a body of poems which may be categorised as part of the first conception. It will do so by comparing one of the most famous poems of Negritude, Souffles (Breaths, 1948) by Birago Diop, to its Swahili-language rewriting, Mpenzi wangu hakufa (My love is not dead, 1974) by M.M. Mulokozi, and to Kezilahabi’s elegiac poems (1974) and his last collection Dhifa (Banquet, 2008). The lyrical I of the latter engages a poetic travel through death, not only in the underworld where a dialogue with Death occurs, but also around the very concept of death, which in some poems is accepted as an essential part of life, while in others is refuted. Thus, in Dhifa death emerges also as something unnatural— which reflects the second conception. Also belonging to the second conception are the lyrics of songwriter Remmy Ongala, analysed in this essay. This paper will make a case for the need to study contemporary forms of orality in order to further investigate modern elegiac African poetry.