Poetry was the subject of the first Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute seminar I participated in spring of 2023. As a fellow in the Poetry as Sound and Object seminar led by Yale English Professor Feisel Mohamed I had the opportunity to research the poetry of Langston Hughes at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at Yale University. I could access his drafts and see the development of his oeuvre over time through these primary documents. The unit I wrote for the seminar, The Dream Keeper’s Quest was designed for 8th grade visual arts students. During last spring’s seminar I created a commonplace book with drawings with copies of paintings by Michelangelo of the Sistine Chapel. Commonplace books were kept during the Victorian period as repositories comparable to collections in Wunderkammer or museums but were particular to the interests of the author. (1) I chose to create a commonplace book following the traditional pedagogical method in Western art of learning by making copies from masterworks. I never signed the book but kept it as a place to exercise technique. It was inspired by the children’s book of poetry Langston Hughes wrote for children, The Dream Keeper that was illustrated with prints by the artist Brian Pickney. I chose this poetry text because it was written for children and was accompanied by artwork.
As an undergraduate student at New York University I received a book of poems by the Comparative Literature Professor Ipek Celik. Inside of the book, Early Poems by William Carlos Williams, Professor Celik wrote: “Dear Kasalina, Thought a little poetry could help out on the way…” This poetry in this book of poems evokes visual images. At the time the focus of my BA studies was literature and it foreshadowed my work in the Myth, Legend, Fairytale seminar led by Associate Professor Marta Figlerowicz of Comparative Literature at Yale in 2024. I have found themes of cyclicity and morphology in the readings in the seminar especially meaningful in the development of this visual arts unit for students in grades 3 – 4.
I continue to learn about literature and art as I develop my visual arts pedagogy. When classes completed this June, I began a daily schedule to develop my technical skills as an artist. Every day I dedicate time to using different materials. These materials include: watercolor pencils, watercolor paint, charcoal, acrylic paint, experimental mixed media and block printing. I have a growth mindset about learning. I hope my attitude is a spark that encourages students in the art classroom to be excited about materials. As part of this art discipline I have had insights that relate to this unit, regarding visual art and poetry. The catalyst for this unit is a collection of folktales by the Sociologist Ernest Balintuma Kalibala. Kalibala introduces these African folktales with a dedication “for the children of America from whose racial inheritance these stories were taken.” (1)
I first read the writing of Kalibala as an MA student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. I read his work while researching collections of African art in museums in the global north for my thesis on Baganda Art from Uganda, Africa. Kalibala was a PhD graduate in Sociology from Harvard University. He also spent time teaching in the American South at the Tuskegee Institute. As I completed my thesis I read the dissertation, The Social Structure of the Baganda Tribe of East Africa, that he submitted on May 24, 1946 and had it digitized remotely. (2) During this research I also found through the Schomburg Center for Black Research database online that he wrote to W.E.B. DuBois, also a Sociology PhD graduate, and the first black African American PhD student at Harvard about an article about Uganda he read in the magazine The Crisis. (3) Kalibala responded with great interest in the connections he saw economically regarding cotton and personal knowledge having been born in Uganda that he wanted to share. (4)
During the Poetry as Sound and Object seminar I visited the Schomburg Center. There I visited a mosaic memorial by the artist Houston Conwill dedicated to Langston Hughes. Under this memorial the ashes of Hughes are interred in a book shaped urn near the entrance. (5) The memorial is a cosmogram. A cosmogram is geometric representation of the universe. (6) Hughes’s breakthrough as a poet came when he was just 17 when he wrote The Negro Speaks of Rivers. (7) I found through research that Langston Hughes once visited Uganda during a trip to Africa in 1923. (8)In The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Hughes the flow of human blood is compared to the great African rivers of the Nile, Euphrates, Congo, and the great American river of the Mississippi on which many black people were sold into slavery. These ancient rivers are like bloodlines that Hughes saw connecting him to Puerto Rico where Arturo Schomburg, the Afro Hispanic founder of the Schomburg was from, Africa and North America. (9)Schomburg as a young student was told that black people had no history. He made it the mission of the Schomburg Center to be a focal point of cultural life and learning. (10)It is neither a museum, nor a library, but a vital intersection within Harlem, New York City of many contributions of black history.
Knowledge of the origin of the Nile in East Africa was limited for Europeans during the mid-nineteenth century. The Scottish explorer David Livingstone believed that unicorns could be found at the source of the Nile. (11) When I visited Uganda in 2018 one of the places I went to was the source of the Nile in Jinja, Uganda. Seeking the source of the Nile brought the British to Uganda. In Uganda the British first encountered and were surprised by the highly organized Baganda Kingdom. (12) Black people who were brought on the Middle Passage had everything taken away from them materially and their ties of kinship were undermined to dehumanize them. (13) I can see the rivers connecting to the veins of black people who died in the ocean during the Middle Passage and also into the Pitts Rivers Museum, Oxford and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge in England. In these museums sacred bundles containing the umbilical cords of the Bakabaka of Baganda (Kings of the Baganda) have been displaced during the colonial disruptions of the past century. Each sacred bundle is the spiritual twin of the soul of the Kabaka (King of Baganda). Hughes wrote his seminal poem connecting the ancient rivers to the history of black people long before he visited them in person. He must have had an deep-rooted cultural memory within connecting him to past generations, even through bondage.
I installed an interior door next to a low wall within my artist studio in the first semester as an MFA student at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2016. When this door was opened by a visitor to the studio audio was programmed to play the voices of my parents welcoming me home and describing their lives. Passing through this door the visitor put on a virtual reality headset and then could see and interact with drawings I embedded in the program. At the time I was in the midst of reading the PhD dissertation The Psychological Aesthetic and Creative Aspects of the Visual Arts in Uganda. (14) This primary art historical text was written by my uncle George Kagaba Kakooza who was an artist, educator and head of an art school at Makerere University during a pivotal point in Uganda’s history after independence that was a time of great hope and also violence.
I presented my MFA thesis at Makerere University in Uganda in April 2018 and continued onto MA studies in Art History and Art Archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. While in Uganda I visited one of my grandfather’s homes. I found materials such as photographs and books that the caretaker said he wanted me to have. Under his bed I also found a box of handwritten papers written in cursive by him that recalled commonplace books we studied and created in the Poetry as Sound Object seminar. Along the way I found many written records which informed my understanding of Baganda collections that were displaced abroad in museums. My grandfather, Omwami Musa Mukooza named me before I was born. My name is the female version of my uncle Kakooza’s name within our clan which is the Ente Clan. This fall my nephew whose middle name is also Kagaba returned Kakooza’s dissertation to Kakooza’s son who is also an artist, sculptor and professor of art. I belong to the sub-clan of the Ente Clan, the cow without a tail through my father, Jamson Sulemani Lwebuga-Mukasa, MD, PhD. A cow without a tail is rare in herd and considered sacred. It is one of more than 52 clans in Baganda which center around the Kabaka who is the head of all the clans. The Ente clan traditionally were the Royal Ironworkers for the Kabaka. When my father returned to visit my grandfather to get my name the civil war in Uganda had just ended in 1986 and the area was still recovering.
As an MA student I read Sir Apollo Kaggwa Discovers England an account of a trip taken for the coronation of King Edward VII in 1871. (15) Walking through the British Museum in 1871 Katikirro Sir Apollo Kaggwa and his Secretary Ham Mukasa observed:
Different articles from our country, some had been given by Sir H.H. Johnston, who had given a great many things, and other Englishmen: The Rev. J. Roscoe had given a great many, and others too had given things from our country of Uganda. (16)
Kattikiro (Prime Minister) Sir Apollo Kaggwa was sent by Kabaka Daudi Chwa II. There were other representatives who had been sent to England during the reign of Kabaka Muteesa I as envoys during the 1860’s to meet Queen Victoria. (17) On reading this description objects at the British Museum I reflected that Kaggwa and Mukasa took care to note that Englishmen had given the materials from Uganda to the museum. This made me pause and I decided to retrace their steps by taking a research trip in the summer of 2019 to England. On the first half of my trip I spent time looking at the objects associated with Kaggwa and noticed that a Royal Drum from Baganda was in the collection. This set off alarm because I knew that type of drum is culturally significant and I began research of museum collections. I collected information about objects in person and through email correspondences throughout 2019 to 2020. I began a comprehensive enquiry across museum collections in Europe and the United States to see where materials from Uganda are located. I found contested materials such as the royal bundles and other royal drums. I intuited that there was much more. I wanted to continue onto to a PhD because the scope exceeded the number of materials I could arrange to visit. Around this time, I also attended a presentation at the French Embassy in New York City about The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy. (18) This report caused a reignition of enquiry around materials in museum collections from the continent. I realized what Kaggwa and Mukasa had noticed in 1871 was part of a huge iceberg of African cultural history and memory embedded in objects and human remains within museums in the global north. The significance of Kakooza’s work became apparent as I found his artist folder at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and saw his 20-foot-tall sculptures in Uganda. Like Hughes I had a sense work that there was much behind doors that I could find a way to open into a deep space with history that stretches out like the universe. Museums like the British Museum flourished England during the Victorian colonial period. Other African countries such as Nigeria have contested materials in museums and had important restitutions especially of Benin Bronzes some which were returned to the Oba of Benin in 2023. (19)
Grasshopper, 2021, Watercolor Pencil, By Kasalina Maliamu Nabakooza.
Abruptly in the spring of 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic ended in-person classes and museum research visits. I finished my thesis remotely in Guilford, Connecticut. In 2021 I published an article, The Thinkers, in the African Arts Journal published by MIT Press. (20) I called for restitution of culturally significant materials and human remains which I had encountered in museums to the Kabaka of Baganda. This article was the culmination of my MFA and MA graduate independent research using primary literature, artwork and material culture.
My primary method of expression as an MFA was illustration. The pandemic was a period of frustration and growth. On one hand everything stood still and yet I had extensive time to read, contemplate alone, talk with others, listen to music, and make art. While spending time during the pandemic at home I observed and drew what I saw in the garden near wetlands. We planted many flowers and there varieties of dragonflies, butterflies, leaf bugs, spiders and praying mantises. One sunny day I saw an exquisite blue and green grasshopper about to be caught in a web with huge golden flecked eyes and it became the subject of the watercolor drawing above.
As I was reading the book Albrecht Dürer by Christof Metzger I saw a print from 1515 of a Rhino. (21) I thought the fantastical armour of the rhino with an extra horn drawn by Dürer reminded me of a unicorn with beautiful interlocking scales like the grasshopper I saw. I reflected that he had never seen a rhino and had to imagine it. Perhaps like me he had looked into the garden and seen a beautiful grasshopper and been inspired by it. I also admired his artwork, The Great Piece of Turf, a watercolor from 1503 which is a finely detailed botanical study of an everyday observation. (22) It reminded me that great things can be ephemeral, and are not necessarily always far away or monumental. Great subjects may be right in the every day world in front of us. I wrote a story about a grasshopper and a rhino from this drawing envisioned as a children’s book. It is a story about an angry rhino with tiny eyes who so surprised by a speeding grasshopper flying its eye. The rhino charges into a tree. It turns around to find the culprit and sees no one. And then it hears a tiny song. Bending its head, it calms down to listen to the song of the grasshopper and falls asleep.
This July another German watercolor came to my attention as I did my daily art practice. The watercolor is from a 1561 tournament book and shows two knights on horseback. (23) What I found curious was that the horses were wearing costumes that had horns on them. Then I remembered the rhino by Durer also had an small spiraling horn that reminded me of a unicorn horn. The lessons in this Myths, Legends, and Fairytales unit are whimsical. They are inspired by folktales about animals, real animals like rabbits and imagined ones like unicorns. Wakaima, a primary figure in the folktales collected by Kalibala is a clever rabbit who creates ingenious methods for navigating the world. Wakaima is culturally specific and would be recognized by children in Uganda. Br’er Rabbit is an African diasporic trickster figure who would be recognized especially by people coming from West African countries. A unicorn like Br’er Rabbit or Cinderella is a accumulation of many stories which have spread geographically and evolved overtime with no specific single origin but many. My students come from many cultural backgrounds. I feel that rabbits will be familiar animals in a North American context. I have observed students K – 8 have drawn unicorns frequently. I think the whimsy of unicorns can galvanize students’ artistic creativity because they are beyond the ordinary world.
The process of active learning in this unit will cause students to share stories that they know. It will also encourage students to communicate with others. Communication has been a challenge for students isolated and learning remotely from home during the pandemic. I teach students K-8 at a neighborhood school which promotes equal access to education. Students primarily come from Hispanic minority backgrounds that are economically disadvantaged and frequently have been affected by trauma in many forms outside of school, especially gun violence. Every student has a rich experience to share. This unit is structured to encourage their voices to be at the forefront of their education using humour, literacy and art.
Wunderkammer, the German word for cabinets of curiosities were the precursors to museums. (24) These collections were created during the Enlightenment in Europe as a view of the world constructed through objects such as automatons or horns that were supposedly from unicorns. (25) When I drew the grasshopper I imagined designing a metallic automaton like the Automaton in the Form of a Crayfish designed by the German artist Hans Schlottheim. It has a shiny protective shell that moves which animated within. (26) The sacred bundle represent the twin of the Kabaka. It is the soul that affects our world and animates our interactions. In the story of Wakaima and the King’s Cow, the rabbit has a beautiful cow with horns that sparkle. (27) Other animals are envious and wonder how the little rabbit had such a fine cow. So fine they believe it belonged to the King himself. When Wakaima perceives this, he tricks them into doing futile tasks and watches them from afar. He drives them away in terror by banging a drum to call the King’s army to come when they fail. The sparkles of the cow’s horn remind of the ironworking of the Ente clan which is represented by a sacred cow. The lion in the story exclaims, “How could I take the spark to the King when I could not even catch it?”(28) Contested materials are like the coveted King’s cow. I think that there is a spark animating certain materials and people which you have to have insider knowledge to perceive. The story of the Wakaima and the King’s Cow ends happily with a feast. All the animals who threatened to steal the cow have run away into the forest. Wakaima invites all of his friends and they have a wonderful meal together.
