Kampala — Book: Mammon Tree

Author: Josepha Jabo

Publisher: New Life Publishers

Available at: Fresh Vine Bookshop, Aristoc Booklex

Reviewed by: Emmanuel Ssejjengo

FOR many, the Advent season is a time to turn to God. This book gives you the opportunity to turn to God in a more interesting way, poetry. True there are sections of the Bible that are poetic masterpieces. In this collection, Jabo has paid less attention to those and given the biblical prose a poetic cutting edge. The reason has been like creating music out of the scriptures. And with that she is not preaching to a church choir, but reaching out to anyone who has a taste for poetry.

You do not have to approach the collection with a Bible in one hand. The title poem, The Mammon Tree, does not even have a very direct reference from the Bible. But it is an attack on society's greed for money and its hardheadedness. Many are also tagged around other Christian values like repentance. The allusions, especially to the creation stories and the fall of man, give the collection epic propensities. But what Jabo avoids is debate. She prefers to state the facts and relate them to other happenings.

On poems like Road to Namugongo, she pricks at Ugandan Christian sentiments when she invokes the words of a Ugandan martyr on his way to Namugongo, the place where Kabaka Mwanga's henchman ended the lives of 22 men. Structurally, the poem has 22 lines.

Disturbingly, she has not divided the book into sections to direct a reader, especially the kind who wants to read a poem a day. That is tiresome when you have to choose from a collection of 70 poems of varying lengths. So, it is the simple titles that may guide you on a topic. And like most recent poetry, Jabo has not avoided the pitfall of displaying prose in verse form. But that is limited and Jabo can rightly be regarded as a poet. Unlike her earlier biography of Roger Mugisha "The Shadow", Jabo has taken this work more seriously and it deserves your serious attention during this Christmas period. These are good reflections from a member of the laity.