Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol

Ocol does not like that Lawino is not a Christian and remains an adherent to the traditional Acholi religion. Lawino explains her personal history with Christianity, revealing that she has considered becoming both a Catholic and a Protestant at various points but decided against both branches of the religion for different reasons. Her oldest sister, Erina, has converted to Protestantism, and she remembers joining Erina at church one day. Lawino was terrified when the minister offered the congregation the body and blood of Christ to eat and drink, and she ran out of the church feeling sick: “O! Protestants eat people! / […] They exhume corpses / For dinner!” (75).

At a different time, she attended evening classes at the local Catholic church but did not understand the priest’s sermons (delivered in Latin) or the Acholi teacher’s lectures, finding them meaningless. One evening, she was in class while a traditional Acholi dance was occurring outside, and she could hear the drums outside. As the teacher drunkenly shouted phrases in Latin at them and the students repeated the phrases back, Lawino grew increasingly agitated. She heard the chorus of musicians singing her song and beckoning her to the dance, began to think of how much more meaningful the dancing songs were than the Catholic teachings, and ran out of the building to join the dance. The teacher followed her and the other girls to the dance and began groping Lawino’s breast. She spat in his face, and he threatened to dismiss her from the class. She didn’t care because she was not going to attend any longer regardless. Lawino moves on to say that all the teachers and priests in the Catholic church have a lecherous attitude toward women.

Ocol is also upset that Lawino has not taken a Christian name. He has christened his children with names that she does not understand the meaning of and cannot pronounce, and he calls all the names she likes Jok names. Lawino is proud of her name, especially the “Bull name” that was given to her because she was chief of girls. She goes on to list various Acholi names and their corresponding meanings and reiterates that she does not find white names to be as meaningful, saying that they sound like gibberish to her.

Lawino recalls that when she attended Catholic classes, the teachers and priests hated students asking questions but seemed eager to collect donations to the church. Priests, nuns, and teachers alike would all get angry at her when she tried to ask questions about the religion, and she did not understand why. As a result, she is left with many unanswered questions about the Christian god and how he created the universe. Ocol also does not like it when she asks him questions; he tells her that she is insulting him with “Typical questions from village girls./ Questions of uneducated people” (87).

Lawino therefore has nobody to ask her questions to. She knows it is not wrong to ask questions, but she also knows that she will get no answers, and this makes her frustrated and angry. She continues to ponder her questions in silence while completing domestic tasks. One thing that continues to confuse her is the immaculate conception; in Acholi culture, women who are engaged to be married are encouraged to have sex with their fiancé as soon as possible, so it does not make sense to her that Mary could still be a virgin despite being married.

Ocol criticizes Lawino’s use of traditional medicine (Lawino’s father was a diviner priest), telling her that it is superstitious. He tells her that her family members are dirty and disease-ridden and will spread illnesses to their children. He will not let neighbors, or even his own mother, enter the home because of their poor hygiene. Lawino finds this all very insulting and does not understand why he calls her superstitious when she knows that Christians also have superstitious practices.

Ocol acknowledges that sometimes Acholi medicines work, but he thinks this is accidental. He also acknowledges that not all patients are healed in European hospitals. He will not allow Lawino to go to the diviner priests who claim to cure the diseases that she believes are caused by Jok. He even went so far as to chase the priest away from their house and threatened to cut down an Okango tree that was growing on his father’s shrine (this tree is revered as sacred in Acholi culture). His mother threw herself on to the tree to protect it from his axe, and he was forced to walk away.

Lawino does not understand European medicine and is very comfortable relying on the healing practices she learned from her mother. She believes that there is always a social cause behind illness, and she is convinced that when her son becomes ill, it is because he has been cursed by a community member. She does not believe in accidental misfortune, and she does not believe that the European hospital can cure these curse-based ailments; only diviner priests can. She believes that larger societal misfortunes are caused by discontent among the ancestors and that these issues can be solved by the clan elders completing certain ceremonies. Ocol calls her a pagan for these beliefs, but Lawino refuses to believe that white medicine is any better than Acholi medicine. She concludes that medicines of all kinds work only when an individual has not reached their allotted time of death and that when that time comes, no medicine can help.

Lawino reports that Ocol has become completely consumed by his work as leader of the DP. He is obsessed with achieving “Uhuru” (a commonly held tenet of Pan-Africanism that takes its name from the Swahili word for freedom), but Lawino is not convinced by these principles because Ocol is actively hostile to his own brother. Ocol’s brother is a member of the UPC, and Ocol is convinced that he is a communist trying to destroy the country with poverty. Lawino does not understand what communism is or why Ocol believes she should be afraid of it. She agrees that poverty would be bad but also knows that if something were to happen to Ocol, she would become his brother’s wife according to tradition, and she does not see the point in antagonizing family.

Ocol’s brother is also hostile, claiming that the DP consists of stupid men who are overly beholden to white Catholics. Lawino has hosted many DP leaders in her home and knows that although many of them “have really numbed heads / Like the head of [her] husband” (106), others are very intelligent. She does not understand what Uhuru means, practically speaking, if families like her own cannot even achieve unity. She is worried that independence will collapse because of the hypocrisy of politicians like her husband and their failure to effectively communicate with the common people.

Lawino blames reading for all of Ocol’s recent behavior. She believes that books have emasculated him and filled his head with ideas that are hostile to the traditional Acholi way of life. She likens Ocol’s study to a dangerous forest, telling listeners:

If you stay

In my husband’s house long,

The ghosts of the dead men

That people this dark forest

[…]

The deadly vengeance ghosts

Of the writers

Will capture your head,

And like my husband

You will become

A walking corpse (115).

She addresses Ocol, telling him that he is subservient to white men, like one of their dogs, and that this is not befitting of his status as a prince of their chiefdom. She calls on the community to mourn the death of their prince and the loss of all their young men, who have been indoctrinated in schools and emasculated by books.

Despite his failings, Lawino has hope that Ocol can change his ways. She puts forward a proposed plan for curing him. First, he should eat millet porridge and fish soup. Then, he should eat omwombye root to clear his throat, lurono (White’s ginger) root to loosen his tongue, and lukut (grass) to soothe his knees. He should let the people pour simsim (sesame) oil into his ears to clear out what he has learned in European schools. He should remove his glasses and the scales that she believes formed over his eyes while he closed them to pray. He should clear his eyes using labikka (black-jack) seeds and rhino horn powder. The diviner will help heal the blindness caused by books, and eating lapena (pigeon pea) and olim (sycamore fig) will further clear his throat. He must force himself to vomit to get rid of the shyness he learned in church. Then, he must brush his tongue to clean it of all the insults.

Once all of these physical remedies have been completed, Lawino tells Ocol that he will be ready to make offerings to his ancestral shrine, where he will beg for forgiveness and the restoration of his manhood. She asserts that the abusive language he has used against her is, in fact, abuse aimed at their entire culture and that his threat to the Okango tree was a threat to remove himself from his heritage altogether. Once he has begged forgiveness at the shrine, she says he should go beg forgiveness from his mother. She concludes the song by telling him that she only has one request once he heals: that he stop distancing himself from her and “Let no one uproot the / Pumpkin” (120).