My husband’s tongue
Is bitter like the roots of the lyonno[1] lily,
It is hot like the penis of the bee,
Like the sting of the penis of the bee
Like the sting of the kalang[2]
Ocol’s tongue is fierce like the arrow of the scorpion,
Deadly like the spear of the buffalo-hornet
It is ferocious
Like the poison of the barren woman
And corrosive like the juice of the gourd. (SoL, 38)
The bitterness of the tongue is not only directed at Lawino but to her relatives and blacks in general. Okot again draws on Acoli similes as cultural resource in conveying Ocol’s arrogant behaviour:
He behaves like a hen
That eats its own eggs
A hen that should be imprisoned under a basket.
His eyes grow large
Deep black eyes
Ocol’s eyes resemble those of the Nile Perch!
He becomes fierce
Like a lioness with cubs,
He begins to behave like a mad hyena. (SoL, 39)
The similes are used satirically to undercut Ocol’s pride and present him as a non-conformist to Acoli culture.
Kinship and marriage
The comparison with ‘a hen /That eats its own eggs’ is symbolic when we learn from Lawino that Ocol hates noise from his own children. He may be wishing that he never had those children like the hen that will never see its chicks since she has eaten them at the egg stage. It is therefore out of shame that he wants to ‘uproot the pumpkin’ thus cutting himself from the culture that values children, family and relatives. In the Acoli social world, the centre of anyone is the family and Okot elaborates this philosophy in an essay, ‘Man the Unfree’ (Okot 2011:20):
Man cannot and must not be free. ‘Son’, ‘mother’, ‘daughter’, ‘father’, ‘uncle’, ‘grandfather’, ‘wife’, ‘clansmen’, ‘mother-in-law’,… and many such other terms, are the stamps of man’s unfreedom. It is by such complex terms that a person is defined and identified. … The central question, ‘Who am I?’ cannot be answered in any meaningful way, unless the relationship in question is known. Because ‘I’ is not only one relationship but numerous relationships.
[1] The lyonno is a climbing plant which belongs to the lily plant type but has very bitter roots which are sometimes harvested, washed and boiled and the juice mixed with other herbs as medicine.
[2] Kalang is a small black insect that moves in groups in a military formation but once the head is killed, the rest scatter in disarray. The kalang stings mostly the bare buttocks of people who sit on bare earth or those walking barefooted either in the compound, along the footpaths or in the garden where there is competition for space or way. It is a very painful sting.