Title: Howls From a Hacienda
Author: Matsiko Godwin Muhwezi
Published: 2026
Price: 40,000 UGX
Available: All leading bookshops
Pages: 146
Ambiguity is the mother’s milk of great poetry. By allowing words to suggest multiple, simultaneous meanings, poets invite you to collaborate in the creation of meaning. It turns a poem into a living, dynamic experience rather than a straightforward puzzle to be “solved”.
Prolific Ugandan author and lawyer Matsiko Godwin Muhwezi cleaves to this ambiguity. By this literary vehicle, Matsiko employs each structural turn or metaphor as the emotional or logical pivot of a poem.
In so doing, his turn of phrase moves the reader from the setup to the realization. But not so quickly. You have to think and thinking takes time. Thereby ensuring you stay long with Matsiko’s books, he has written ten published books, which include Christian literature, novellas, and extensive poetry collections.
His eleventh book is elegantly titled, Howls From a Hacienda. To those who do not know, a hacienda refers to a large landed estate, plantation, or ranch in Spain and former Spanish colonies. The term also commonly describes the grand principal dwelling house located on these properties. Did you say literary Telenovela? Well, not quite.
Howls From a Hacienda is a piecing poetry dilogy that navigates the brutal landscapes of post-colonial life and the delicate terrain of the human heart. Wait a minute, you ask, did somebody say dilogy?
Oh yes. Dilogy refers to the use of an ambiguous or equivocal word/phrase in two senses simultaneously. It is also occasionally used as a nonstandard term for a duology (a story or series composed of two related works).
In two powerful books—-Clouds In These Eyes and Mashariki ya Azania—Matsiko delivers, as his literary wont, a profound meditation on love, political turmoil, and the enduring resilience of the soul. These verses are a raw, unwavering testament to the howls and whispers found where personal pain meets historical tragedy.
For historic context, quite removed from the diction of this book, we refer to another poetry collection that also had the word “howl” in its title. American poet Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) is a raw, impassioned manifesto of the Beat Generation that laments the loss of “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”. It fiercely condemns 1950s American conformity, materialism, and industrial capitalism—which Ginsberg famously personified as the destructive monster “Moloch”—while celebrating fringe artists, nonconformists, sexuality, and spiritual exploration.
Matsiko’s poetry offers similar depth, searing the reader’s presumed indifference to a crisp expression with words that are the author’s stock in trade.
In Book I, Clouds In These Eyes, we are treated to the highly relevant poem titled
“Smoke and Mirrors”:
“Decibels of coached emotion
High sounding speeches
Choreographed gesticulation
Praetorian guards
Mann wild habitats
Gold reserves, rice farms
Boreholes and sugarcane
Law abiding citizens
Scrape for allotted dues
Through bleeding gums
And swollen eponychium”
Before we decipher the poem’s meaning, let’s look at a stylistic device that the author frequently uses in his books. Matsiko has little use for full stops and other traditional punctuation marks because this would trammel, as it were, his structural flow, emotional pacing, and visual space as strict grammatical rules tend to do. Unlike prose, where punctuation is mandatory to anchor meaning, Matsiko’s poetry utilizes line breaks, white space, and rhythmic pacing as a reflection of poetry, as a genre, creating its own organic system of punctuation. You may call that poetic license.
The meaning of the poem matches its title. Not everything is what it seems. The authorities protect or purport to protect our national wealth on pain of making us poor. In the process, what we see in government is certainly not what we get out of government.
The word or metaphor “eponychium” is the thickened layer of living skin at the base of your fingernails and toenails. Its primary function is to seal the area and protect the nail matrix from bacteria and infection.
Book Two is titled Mashariki ya Azania which refers to the ancient historical name given to the southeastern coast of tropical Africa, primarily covering the modern-day coastlines of Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania. The poem titled “The Old Oak” in this book went deep.
Under an old oak-tree
Etched into a hillside
Lies a shade
Shadows skip
Growing younger
With every flashing ray
Under the oak-tree
Live no malingering ants
No nodding geckos
The old oak
Sends her roots
Under a river bank
To ease its nerves
This poem is an allegorical meditation on aging, resilience, and finding peace by staying grounded. It uses the life cycle and biological traits of an old oak tree (hyphenated here as a stylistic device) as a metaphor for surviving hardship and shifting one’s perspective on time. The oak tree is deeply intertwined with time through its immense lifespans, seasonal transitions, and historical symbolism.
Historically, an oak’s life is defined by three phases: “200 years to grow, 200 years to live, and 200 years to die.” While an oak typically matures and produces acorns at 40 years old, ancient oaks can survive for over 1,000 years, silently witnessing generations of human history, as the poem suggests and mediates on.
