Sing Through Me, Drums: the Features of the Epic, and Composing an Epic Poem

When a people wants to remember who it is, it often turns its greatest stories into long, grand poems. Ancient Greece had Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; the Mali empire had the epic of Sundiata. The old Rwandan kingdom kept its own heroic verse: ibisigo, dynastic poems that recounted the deeds of the kings, a word Alexis Kagame translated as "what is left, or bequeathed, to posterity"; and ibyivugo, poems in which a trained warrior, an intore, praised his own courage in the first person. New ibyivugo are still composed for itorero today. In this lesson you study the features that make a poem an epic, read the openings of two Greek epics and a new epic fragment, and then compose an epic poem of your own.

1Two Greek openings

A. The Iliad, translated by Alexander Pope (1715–1720), lines 1–2

Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing!

Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home …

ingenious: clever and inventive; sacked: destroyed and robbed (a captured city).

2A new epic fragment: The Song of Ngunda

Written by Ganzaa for this lesson. Rwandan tradition remembers Ngunda as a man of enormous strength and appetite whose labour is said to have made the country's hills; everything else in this poem is invented.

I
Sing through me, drums of the evening fire,
sing of Ngunda the hungry, the hill-maker,
whose hands were wider than a threshing floor,
whose hunger was older than the rain.
Tell how he dug, and why, and what it cost him,
and how the land we stand on keeps his labour.

II
The rains had failed for seven seasons running.
The sorghum stood like old men, bent and grey;
the cattle had forgotten how to low,
and children sucked on pebbles to fool their stomachs.
Then Ngunda rose, Ngunda of the bottomless belly,
who once had emptied a granary between two songs,
and said: "If the sky will not come down to us,
then I will go down to the water under the earth."

III
As a buffalo in a dry season tears the riverbed
and stamps and stamps until the mud gives water,
so Ngunda struck the plain with his iron hoe,
and every stroke threw a hill across his shoulder.
Behind him came the people of the valleys:
the potters with their pots to carry water,
the smiths with new blades to share the digging,
the herders driving thin cows towards the hollows,
the grandmothers with songs to keep him going.

IV
On the ninth day the hoe rang on wet stone.
Water leapt up, cold and older than kings,
and filled the hollows he had dug, and ran
between the heaps of earth he had thrown aside.
Those heaps are our hills. Those hollows are our valleys.
But Ngunda lay down in the eastern grass to rest
and never rose; and when the mist lies in the valleys
at dawn, the old ones say, "Ngunda is breathing."

3The features of an epic, with examples

Your turn: compose an epic poem

Write an epic poem of 24–40 lines in four sections. The hero may come from legend (Ndabaga, Ruganzu, Nyirarucyaba), from history, or from your own community: a midwife who walked through a storm, a team that rebuilt a road. Whoever it is, the deed must matter to many people.

Then perform it. Epic poetry was made for the voice. Recite your poem to a group, standing, with a steady beat and a pause after each section, as an intore would recite an icyivugo.