Articles Available Online

The tyrant’s sickest triumph is to make his subjects watchful The landscape of Nick Makoha’s first collection – an abstracted, mythologised yet sometimes bitingly concrete version of Amin’s Uganda – has been scarred by tyranny, to the extent that it adopts the vigilant gaze of its population ‘The stones on the riverbank have seen you’, announces the first line of ‘A Crocodile Eats the Sun’: ‘A praying mantis skating along blue mud / knows your secret’ These might be ironically deflected internalisations, but the point is serious: if you can get rivers and insect life to do your surveillance then martial law becomes superfluous, almost, and self-sustaining Watchmen are important characters in Kingdom of Gravity, taking their place alongside informers and collaborators in the network of acolytes who make a violent world go round ‘Watchmen’ intimates the allure of life on the right side of the tyrant’s law A ringleader (‘the one who Gaddafi knew’) ‘picks up a sheep in the soft grass and tears it apart by the ribs’ His followers lean into the spectacle:   By now all the herders and huntsmen have a gleam in their eyes and have stripped down All their sighs are of victory I am one of them, my hand carrying coals to set up fires   But spectacle is by its nature open to interpretation, and watchfulness can quickly turn to paranoia, seeking meaning where there might be none The men pass round the sheep’s heart:   Those who could see better than hear, read too much into the gesture Some of them let off a few rounds, using whatever their palms and feet could find as drums   In a world of danger and shifting circumstances, sight has to compensate for failures in hearing Hearing is a vulnerable sense, perhaps too close in a warzone to its empathetic relative, listening Seeing, on the other hand, is summary and acquisitive It scans the horizon, makes a snap judgement, and fires off ‘a few rounds’ to be sure   The ‘I’ that strafes through this collection mutates with the settings, striking notes of