Unsaid Words

Winfred L. Laker, P’ Ocitti Aliker

Description

Unsaid Words: A Collection of Poetic Family Letters is a collection of poetic letters addressing difficult family conversations. These are conversations we knowingly or unknowing avoid yet if we had spoken these words, it would have improved our family conversations and family relations.
In this book, authors Aliker P’Ocitti and Laker Winfred. L. juxtapose the male and female positions in our families to create characters that provoke unspoken words in their poetic letters.
In their recollections, the authors open our minds to the salient issues in our families that they wish had been talked about that is never aired out in family conversations.
These salient issues are never spoken about because of cultural barriers and sometimes poor family relations in our everyday family life.
The authors choice of poetic letters is to symbolize the distant relations between parents and their children and the timing and setting of the book.
In the book, the children are already in family relationships and living away from their parents and reminiscing conversations they should have had with their parents and siblings while they were one family.
The poetic letters are written by a daughter addressed to her father, a son addressed to his mother, and a brother addressed to his sister.
In the response to these poetic letters, the father and mother reply to their son and daughter opening up the family space for conversations, they should have had in their family.
The purpose of this book is to incite open conversations in our families today to improve family relations and prepare children for their next family life in marriage and society out there.
Poor family relations are one of the leading causes of family breakups, separations and divorce, we hope this book inspires readers to normalize the unsaid words and say them to provoke the difficult conversations we must have to prepare readers for a new family life.

Sujets

• Unsaid
• Word
• Poetry
• Words

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 28 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669829430
• Langue: English

Extrait

UNSAID WORDS


Poetic Letters







Aliker P’ Ocitti & Laker Winfred L.



Copyright © 2022 by Aliker P’ Ocitti & Laker Winfred L.

Library of Congress Control Number:
2022917971
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-2945-4
Softcover
978-1-6698-2944-7
eBook
978-1-6698-2943-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.





Rev. date: 09/28/2022




Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
842502



Contents
Acknowledgement
Dedication
Foreword
Father & Daughter Letters
Reference Letter: 001
Reference Letter: 002
Reference Letter:003
Reference Letter: 004
Reference Letter: 005
Reference Letter:006
Reference Letter:007
Reference Letter: 008
Reference Letter: 009
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Letters To Our Departed Fathers
Reference Letter: 21
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Brother & Sister Letters
Reference Letter: 31
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Awobi And Anyaka Letters
Reference Letter: 49
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Mother And Son Letters
Reference Letter: 73
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Acknowledgement
Facebook made us Writers. Our Facebook poems were only meant to entertain our online readers.
However, stories of encouragement like Lucy .L. Anena’s dedication to share our poems on her phone with her daughter every morning of the weekly poetic letter series inspired this book.
We have never met Lucy but through this book we hope to meet her and read for her daughter the poems she enjoyed reading on her mother’s phone.
The kind comments from our many online fans like OS Cornelius and Kalokwera Polycarp from Uganda, Sangita Dc from India, Ngong Gumbir from Southern Sudan, Butuke Joan, and others, who are always entertained by our disagreements online kept us writing.
While others get hurt by the position of our characters in the poems, these fans saw therapeutic healing in these poems and encouraged us to publish our works.
To Arao Ameny ( Daughter of Lango ) whose online works we admire and adore greatly; in you, we found a literary elder sister, inspiration and mentor to look up to in our writing journey.
Thank you for accepting to write the Forward of this book. We feel this is a powerful endorsement of our work and confidence in our writing careers.
It takes the craft of different professional writers to find quality in a book. As alumni of African Writers Trust (AWT), our manuscript can never be ready for publication unless it has gone through your Manuscript Assessment Program (MAP).
Thank you for the mentorship; we are better writers because of your peer review opinion of our work. We confidently present to the world our work because it passed through the best eyes and hands in the trade. Wapwoyo Matek.



Dedication
We dedicate this book to our departed fathers whose absence denied us the chance to hold these difficult family conversations.
If they had lived long enough, perhaps we would have been lucky enough to have had these family conversations and improved on our family relations and better prepared for the realities of life.
Thanks, Ocitti Silvester (R.I.P) for introducing your son (Aliker P’Ocitti) to an encyclopedia at an early age and bringing along News Papers to our boarding schools on visitation day.
To Lieutenant Mark Okello Oryema (R.I.P), the News Papers you kept for our holiday reading program and your inspirational war stories introduced your daughter (Laker Winfred. L.) to reading and the appreciation of storytelling.
In a very special way, we also dedicate this book to the widows we call our Mothers, Pastor Caroline Laloyo and Aguti Florence Ocitti who against all odds in the absence of our fathers stepped in their shoes to educate us amidst the two-decade war in northern Uganda.
If our single mothers had failed to educate us, we would not be able to write and publish this book. We may have missed out on these difficult conversations, but we will forever be grateful for the opportunity to attain valuable education that has enabled us to tell our story.



Foreword
I believe poetry is our mother tongue, the genesis of all forms of storytelling, the entry point to our consciousness. I believe poetry and poets continue to speak to each other across time, generations, and worlds. I believe poetry is the bridge to human connections and understanding human conditions. When I read Unsaid Words: Poetic Letters by Aliker P’ Ocitti and Laker Winfred L, I finished wanting to read more of these letters and conversations packed with vivid imagery, a reservoir of depth and imagination, engaging the reader with vibrant voices and personas. As a listener, a reader, and a traveler, I embraced the poems’ lyricism and music. I was immediately pulled into a back-and-forth conversation among different personas who exchange letters and these letters are fat with life lessons, lived experiences, journeys, and relatable universal experiences and truths.
The poems are letters between a father and daughter; a son and daughter’s letters to their departed father; siblings, a boy and a girl, writing to each other; letters between a husband and wife; and the last section are letters between a mother and son. As I moved from one realm to another, one piece to another, I was struck by the beautiful writing—the repetition, the melody, the ups and downs, the colorful imagery, the distinct voices, the quiet joy, the heavy sadness, and the different paths each poem etched in my imagination. The set of 80 poems or conversations begin with a father advising his daughter as she grows and transforms in her adult life and ends with a poem with a mother guiding her son on how to maneuver life and how to treat a future spouse.
The words of poets Aliker P’ Ocitti and Laker Winfred L, both in English and Luo, are gently picked, poised, and placed before the reader with thoughtfulness, and authenticity, much like the recurring image of a bittersweet tamarind dancing throughout the poems “Like Tamarind” and “A man is a man”. I read this poetry collection during this time of global upheaval and uncertainty, where a pandemic and other unsettling realities are now our current realities. It’s also a time where more people are looking for and building genuine human relationships, especially family relationships, despite what’s going on around the world. I felt an overwhelming sense of home and empathy as I read these poems. I recognized myself in these poems, in these worlds. I also felt the heaviness of memory, longing, and remembering in the ‘departure’ poems. That’s what good poetry is supposed to do—shake you, wake you, unsettle you, leave you better than you were, and make you feel less alone in the world.
Poets Aliker P’ Ocitti and Laker Winfred L remind us that poetry is the bridge to human connections and understanding human conditions. Poetry can also be a vessel that explores the uncomfortable and the taboo. As Laker Winifred L writes in “Unsaid Words,” the poem that gives this collection its title, “Won’t unsaid words become a wilderness? Wont’ our mouths swell up like a frog about to explode with poison?” These poems aim, shoot, and drive straight to the heart as good poetry should.
Arao Ameny
Winner of The Southern Review’s James Olney Award (2020)
Finalist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize (2021)
Nominee for the Best New Poets anthology (2021)



FATHER & DAUGHTER LETTERS