I first heard of Jason Ntaro from a member of the Lantern Meet of Poets and she described him as “a poet with a brilliant mind”.
When I met Ntaro during a night out, nothing about him reflected the image his poetry had created of an elderly, bespectacled introvert that talks to himself. In his late twenties or early thirties, Ntaro does not wear glasses, and is far from antisocial.
Ntaro is the third of four children born to Jack Sabiiti, the former FDC MP for Rukiga county, and Stella Mystica Nyonyozi Sabiiti, a peace worker with the African Union. He was born in Mulago, but refuses to say when, although his name, Ntaro, meaning war, could be indication he is a 1986/87 child.
His older sister Rita Asiimwe Magara Sabiiti is a music teacher at the International School of Uganda (ISU), while his elder brother Moses Sabiiti is a producer and his younger sister Tabitha Kentaro Sabiiti also works with the African Union. Ntaro’s earliest memories of his school life were at the European School of Bergen in Holland where his family had fled during the war.
Upon their return to Uganda, he joined Kitante primary school in P5, before joining Greenhill Academy, where he sat his PLE. He joined Kiira College Butiki, then Vienna College for his A-levels.
Ntaro studied Human Resource Management at Makerere University Business School (Mubs), but transferred to Nkumba University for Public Administration and Management. Still, he felt like he was doing something he did not want to, so he quit.
Ntaro describes this time as “very dark”; “School had failed and nothing was working. I didn’t know what to do with my pain so, I started drinking very heavily.”
Then in April 2007, he met architect and poet, Guy Mambo, who introduced him to the Lantern Meet of Poets, and he felt he had found “something different and interesting”.
These poets in a hut at the National Theatre showed him a different outlet for his emotions: poetry; he grabbed it with both hands, pouring out his thoughts, pain and frustrations, poem after poem. In the beginning, his poems reflected his dark state of mind, so much that his poetry came to be known as Jasonic poetry.
“I found it easier to be angry and feel pain than to be happy,” Ntaro remembers.
Ntaro had met poetry in school, but while he had written with his head then, at the Lantern Meet, he was writing with his heart. Because he writes with his heart, Ntaro has quite a pull on the ladies, and has “attracted some very strange girls” that have in some cases turned into stalkers.
“My poems are ideas of what I’m thinking at the time, and are not particularly who I am,” he explains.
While on the subject of women, I ask Ntaro his thoughts on love.
“I don’t believe in soul mates, or love at first sight. I believe in companionship and trust. I believe love is an attachment that you form with another person. I believe we are not perfect, we are flawed and we make mistakes; and at the end of the day what matters is, are you going to work this out regardless and sacrifice to be with this person?”
Ntaro is no stranger to love, but “we were young. Today, my heart is blind”.
Away from love, what is it like making a living out of poetry?
“Very hard!”
The poet says some poets are used as curtain raisers for rappers and comedians at events dubbed “poetry events”.
He decries poor pay for poets, calling it “sad, painful and annoying”.
Yet, he refuses to get what others refer to as a “real job” as he believes at such jobs “the mind is stifled, put in bars and chains, and can’t be free”.
Also, the different highlights of his career keep him going. Take the evening he had just performed one of his most acclaimed pieces, a poem on domestic violence titled Three Years, Two Months And Five Days, and a woman walked up to him after the show with tears in her eyes. She told him he had spoken of something she was going through and she had always felt alone.
“That I could get into someone’s soul and help that person realize that they aren’t alone was very uplifting,” Ntaro says.
He also harbours a desire to disprove all who think poetry cannot go far; those who tell him he is wasting time and should find a desk job. Now Ntaro is involved in training and mentoring youths interested in poetry.
His mother once went to watch him perform on stage and when he pointed her out to the audience, she stood up and cheered for him. He knew her presence was her way of endorsing his choice of career.
“She believes in me and has given me great opportunities.”
I ask for his favourite works and he lists: One Day, Someday Will Be This Day; Watching The Rain; Three Years, Two Months And Five Days; Intimacy Minus Intricacy; Sweeping The Streets; Single Drop…
“I guess I like lots of my poems.”
I bring up the elephant in the room: the fact that he comes from a well-known opposition family…
“I’m non-partisan and I don’t really get this opposition rivalry with the government. I believe the two can still work together…it should be about Uganda,” he argues.
Still, Ntaro takes being the son of Jack Sabiiti in stride.
“I don’t really let it affect my life, though I do have to think twice about telling people whose son I am,” he says. “They ask ‘why don’t you use that opportunity?’ but that is his job; poetry is mine.”
Ntaro reveals he always has music on when writing, and has an earpiece on playing music when performing so that he can recreate in his mind the same feeling he had when writing the poem. With the amount of passion Ntaro has, he will leave a huge mark on the world of poetry.
margaretwamanga@yahoo.com