I Am the Actor of My Mother’s Poetry

“If history is not passed down, we must go and seek it out; if we cannot find it, perhaps we must invent it…”

Note on the creation of the piece
29 December 2024
Mbuji-Mayi/Kasaï
 

Oh holy mother, here is your tribute, this memorial play, ready to take to the stage. In this theatre-world from which I celebrate you today, I extinguish the devil, who, lurking in the dark corners of the smallest detail, has led me up the garden path for so many years. After these three years of relentless quest, which have left fractures and indelible marks, my act is finally set free; my words, wrapped in your poetry, celebrate you here below. You’re dancing up there. Your remains, buried as they are, exalt life, lifting me just as high. I celebrate you here below, there’s singing up there; love in eternity is spoken, and the stammerer speaks!

“I am the smuggler of a story that I discover at the same time as passing it on. My uncle Norbert Mpoyi maps out the city for us with words. He tries to remember; we get lost with him, and as we lose our way, he guides us, and together we piece together a shared memory.”

Note on the creation of the piece
29 December 2024
Mbuji-Mayi/Kasaï
 

When my mother died, one of my uncles, Norbert Mpoyi, told me the story of their childhood home, which had been occupied by the South Kasai secessionists. I discovered a story that had left a deep mark on their childhood, and yet mum had never mentioned a word of it to us. From that moment of delayed mourning, of deep sorrow and reflection, I began a quest to uncover this missing part of our shared history; a quest that started in Mbanza-Ngungu, where I had relocated my company, and led all the way to Kabeya Kamuanga, the place where the grand history of the Congo intersects with that of my family.

“I have created a space where mourning and tribute are possible. Je suis l’acteur de la poésie de ma mère is a poetic cry in the style of the Kasala, blending half-sung recitations with a journey into the history of the Congo in the 1960s, following in my mother’s footsteps.”

Note on the creation of the piece
25 January 2026
Kinshasa
 

The Kasala is a performative literary genre whose purpose is to glorify a person or a tribe, to inspire courage in warriors, and to sing the praises of heroes and heroines. It is no ordinary song, but rather one that evokes an individual’s past, whilst at the same time retracing the stages through which they came into this mortal world. It is a song that recounts the great deeds of a clan, a tribe, a lineage, to commemorate according to the circumstances (mourning or celebration) and to send the individual back to their origins, reminding them that we are not only ourselves, that our body is as ancient as the origin of the world, that it carries within it the essence of our ancestors, that we have already been in the body of so-and-so, or of such-and-such, as far back as we can trace the family tree of the lineage.

“This is the third part of an open-ended trilogy that began with Sept Mouvements Congo (2018) and Géométrie de vies (2022), exploring our personal histories, the contemporary history of the Congo, and the experience of being an artist living and working in the DRC. So what part of the Congo’s history is connected to my mother, the source of my own history?”
 

This, then, is the story of a mother and a son; it is the story of a family and a people; it is the story of a land with a past as glorious as it is turbulent, a chaotic present, and a future as bright as it is uncertain; it is the story of the Congo. Our parents did not tell us the story of the massacres in their native Kasai, including that of Bonzola, which the United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld described as genocide against the Muluba people. It was war; everyone was fighting for their survival. After each massacre, they sang of their future vengeance and their allegiance to the secessionists. Song became a conduit for rage and resentment, but also a symbol of pride and of belonging to a community. This cycle of violence later led to the murder of Lumumbists, shortly after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba himself and his key allies Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito in Katanga. A song that spans generations becomes an archive that carries within it the seeds of that wind of horror that swept across the entire region.

“My mother is present in every poetic essence of my literary voice. So how to erase myself, let someone else appear who is actually the source of everything: my life, my poetry, the creator that lies within me… so that I may rediscover myself through a transformation that reflects the essence of what I have received from her. I must therefore erase myself to allow other bodies to appear through my own, on stage, and let other voices be heard through the magic of poetry. What kind of acting approach would bring this sort of theatricality to the fore?”

Note on the creation of the piece
30 April 2023

Poem by Marguerite Disanka

Heart in my hands
Rooted in my heritage
Facing the void
I call out to myself

My heart is pounding
It’s pounding hard, and harder still
Harder and harder still
Like an engine starting up

It resonates within me
Resonates through my very being
Thought, formed; form and thought
That draw me in

My spirit connects
To the sounds of its heart
And the waves in its depths
Multicoloured ripples

The breath, breathes
Coming from the depths
Spreads out in sparkling bursts
Right down to the roots, the whole plant bed

I become myself
The nice, gentle fire
Shining without going out
Nor burning others

Oh! I am nothing but fire
I love being this fire
I shall remain this fire
Which does not burn, but illuminates

• Translations by Jodie Hruby
• Michael Disanka