Interview: Nick Makoha’s shame

“My shame was my father wasn’t there,” says Nick Makoha, the London poet who represented Uganda at the recent Poetry Parnassus. This frank vulnerability is at the core of his first collection of poetry and his new theatre performance, ‘My Father and other Superheroes.’

Uganda is a source of tension for Makoha as both the place of his birth but also a place he fled, a place from which he feels distant. “Most people are from somewhere else,” he says. “So the story of the exile isn’t the minority, we’re the majority. Look at T.S. Eliot, by all rights and purposes he belongs to America. He liked French poets, Italian poets.”

Makoha seems easily at home where we sit at Euphorium café in Islington in a rare patch of midday sun. I challenge him on the idea of the exiled artist — is this a helpful label?

“I’m just glad that I have the courage to step back into my culture,” Makoha says.