Ausable Press: Dark Under Kiganda Stars

ABOUT THE AUTHOR | SELECTED POEMS | VIEW CART

This book is a startling lyrical account of a young Catholic American student's time in Uganda, where she taught English to adults and assisted at a medical clinic in a remote country village. Written while the author was still in college, it is an astonishing debut, richly musical and descriptive, confident, unpretentious, and bursting with new experience: love, identity, religious faith, and the complex collisions of culture and language.

REVIEWS & COMMENTS

"Lilah Hegnauer's poems are spare and just to language, ofering strength of word and phrase turned in just the right way for an audience who wants story, image, song in poetry. She reveals her vision and experience of Africa in a starkly visceral way, using language the way you might pray. . . . The poems she then offers us, tempered through experience and knowledge, will be come classics, lasting symbols, a testament that lives on through the generations." —Jessica Powers, NewPages

"My sons are linguists, connoisseurs of culture as well as language. One of them endured months of depression on his first return to the US from a year abroad, for he had found himself as an adult, at age 21, in year of life in a Japanese city, and the transition back to Vermont—wintry, lonely, having left beind both his first adopted neighborhood and his someday bride—nearly froze him.
     "So as I nibbled my way through this new volume of poetry, written by 21-year-old Portland resident Lilah Hegenauer during and upon her return from a summer of teaching in Uganda, I recognized some of the patterns: passionate embrace of another world, inquiry into new scents and tastes, playful and sometimes desperate exploration of language and communication. And of course, the ecstasy of falling in love, touching and renaming the beloved and one's own heart in the process.
     "Struggling to talk with each other across a language barrier often deepens the sense of connection, I've found. Hegenauer savors the meshing of languages, whether in the classroom where she is thrust into English teaching and cane-based discipline expectations, or in the arms of a man who embraces her. "About Gerald's low voice: Ngwagala omwana, honey; / where did he learn English terms of endearment?" She laughs gently at her own initial confusion of pupils' names, and later at her misperception of cultural significance around actions like kneeling in front of another person.
     "What can we expect of a poet who is 21? Here are quietly varied line and stanza forms, a kindness in storytelling, a nice balance of inner and outer vision: more than many an older poet can rely on. In writing from her time in a region stricken with both poverty and AIDS, Hegnauer reveals a willingness to record sensation without judgment, and to walk with her own Catholic upbringing and faith even as questions about the goodness of God bubble through. What struck me as initial awkwardness with the distillation process of poetry, as in lines like "Clueless / as a gift chicken, I slowly learned / our lessons," resolved later in the collection with her tightly constructed "proverb" poems that explore Ugandan sayings within the dusty rural context.
     "Although Hegnauer is not a theologian, her verbal wrestling matches with Catholic practice and prayer lead into some of the best poetry here. Describing a gathering of women at a Wedensday morning mass that includes drumming by the baby-laden participants, Hegnauer delicately picks out a moment of charisma, of gift: "Crawling to his mother, a baby unbuttons her gomesi, nurses while she's drumming." Later at the mass, Hegnauer's ambivalence vanishes when she catches the whisper of prayer: "O God, you whisper, O God I glorify you. / O Lord, I praise you, I am created for you." And in a searing half line of honestly desperate response, Hegnauer replies, "O God, I pray, O God I'm intruding."
     "Likewise, the proverbs she plumbs, originally perhaps folk sayings, run parallel to the Proverbs of the Christian Bible as she numbers them and spins out a story for each: "Proverb VII: The Chicken" opens with, "When the chicken drinks water, / it lifts its head to heaven."
     "In a way, it's a disappointment to know the poet has returned to school, immersing herself in a creative writing program at a Midwestern university. I wanted the love stories of this collection—woman and man, stranger and home, lingua and tonguing—to deepen to the next layer and continue to probe that inner organization of the universe that faith impels. But the parting from the beloved, framed in each partner entering a form of seminary (with the linguistic implications of seed as well), is perhaps especially Roman Catholic. This is a remarkably honest collection. I look forward to Hegnauer's next exploration. —Beth Dugger Kanell, Kingdom Books

"The poetry of Lilah Hegnauer is something new and old at the same time, if only because it abandons the ideals of The Enlightenment. Among other things, The Enlightenment gave us the idea of the individual. Out of that came the esthetics of Romantic individualism with its belief in genius, which encouraged artists to construct worlds related to, but distinct from, the world itself. This is particularly true of poetry where value is usually equated with high individuality and/or formal accomplishment . . .
     "In Dark Under Kiganda Stars Lilah Hegnauer tries to lose herself in a part of the world, Uganda, all too typical of the world, overrun with poverty, AIDS, and the cruel forms of partriarchalism. This is a world she had certainly heard of, but which almost nothing in her Catholic American experience could possibly have prepared her for, except that religion’s history of charitable service. Out of it come poems, fresh and eager, that give themselves as completely as they can to entering the experience and language of another culture. The language of the poems is direct and descriptive, deceptively simple. “I don't know how to communicate," one poem says, "how to bend my head close to a friend's / with my quiet voice, but I try to fold myself in." Nor does she put on displays of formal expertise. It is more important to know, by being in, the world. At a number of points in the book, she almost stops being herself and becomes one of the world’s poor. These “voyages out of otherness,” as she calls them, include not just riding a crowded bus where she becomes “anonymous,” but also finally falling deeply in love with an African. They are voyages, too, from which, as she knows, she must return. Though, as Yeats put it in describing a different sort of revolutionary behavior, 'changed utterly.' . . .
    "Despite the occasional echoes of Herrick, a tradition of religious poetry which she certainly must know and have drawn on, and the remote admonitions of Thoreau to give oneself along with one’s charity, it is Mother Theresa I’m more reminded of, if not Whitman who said, ‘I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.’ Whitman, who reinvented poetry in the middle of the nineteenth century. Near the end of the book, the parish rosary maker summarizes much of this book’s force:

. . . In his lips,
caved around the gums, in his cloudy eyes,
was an intimacy that shook me—you are
living and dying with us, in the same world
at the same time, whether you see us or not.

      "This is a book to treasure and I think eagerly of what else it might lead to." —Roger Mitchell