Abedi Hakizimana, 25, who goes by the stage name ABCpoets, found his niche in poetry and uses the art to urge people to correct the wrongs that affect or may affect society in the future. The poet is aware that some people do wrong for different reasons, and that affects others negatively. From new cultures in society and people changing daily, he writes about different aspects that reflect people’s lives, including mental health. “I love life and I love death because for me, they are both schools. That’s why I write about life, love, death and everything in between. I take poetry as pills because every time I rhyme, I free my mind,” he says. 25-year-old Abedi Hakizimana. Hakizimana started writing when he was in primary school. He would do so whenever he was provoked by mates and got sad. He says he would take a notebook and pen his feelings to free himself. When he started high school, he found out that what he was writing had a poetic flair. He then started writing poems talking about his life as well as his surroundings. In 2016 when he was in Senior 5, he joined iDebate as a poet and wrote a poem called ‘Peace starts with me: What can I contribute?’ as prompted by the organisation, which, he says, helped him improve his skills. One day when he was watching “The Com Factory”, a comedy show that used to air on RTV, Eric 1Key, real name Eric Ngangare, also a poet, performed an expressive freestyle which Hakizimana fell in love with and was compelled to explore more about poetry. When he went back to school at St Joseph Le Travailleur, he started performing at major events, including Kwibuka. So far, two of his poems have been published in a literary magazine called “The Swala Tribe”. One called ‘White Elephant’ talks about one’s inner voice that discourages them and the other is ‘When’, where the speaker asks himself about things that do not change in life. He is currently working on a poem ‘Umwana wo mu Nkambi’ featuring Doris the Poet which he plans to release soon. Hakizimana has performed at different events such as Ingabo Poetry Night, Drippish Entertainment’s The Night of Arts, among others. He notes that poetry heals him through transferring thoughts and feelings to a paper after facing or encountering something that affects his emotions negatively. Talking about his uniqueness, he says it depends on the way he does poetry and believes in it. “I don’t want to be like Shakespeare or Saul Williams. I just want to create my new ways because poetry is fluid. I am not here to imitate; I am here to create. I believe that an artist is not supposed to only give people what they want. Artists are supposed to have a vision and unlock potential realities that didn’t exist before. Artists are meant to show people things they have never seen,” he says. According to him, it’s still challenging to do poetry in Rwanda as a profession since some organisers still want poets to perform for free, or just provide them with food and transport. He adds, “It’s hard to poke a nose into paper for like three hours. It’s hard to memorise 50 verses and it takes time to create, but in the end, you hit the stage for free.” Hakizimana calls for more people to invest in the poetry industry and for organisers to value poetry since many people are loving it. His poetry is not restricted to any boundary. So, he plans to keep creating more poems hence growing in every corner. Some of his works can be found on Instagram “ABCpoets”.
