The title of Alicios' poignant song, Posa Ya Bolingo, is best translated, I think, as A Yearning for Love. Bolingo is a commonly-used word in popular Lingala songs. Lingala is a language widely spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Bolingo is admittedly a truly lovely and such a musical word for that lovely thing we know as Love. Even Love itself, as a word, pales in comparison. I dare say that the Swahili words for Love -- Pendo, or Penzi -- are Bolingo's worthy 'rivals'.
Click here to watch the Posa Ya Bolingo video
While Posa... literally means a yearning, a longing or a desire..., I think that after you've read Alicios' account of her family's desperate flight (while she was still a little girl) from the outbreak of armed combat across the DRC, and more specifically in her hometown of Goma in Eastern DRC -- to the relative safety of Nairobi City in distant Kenya -- you will begin to get more complex vibes, and allusions, from her high-emotion but tearless song (which she published on October 2, 2013).
On the one hand, it is the loss, the seemingly utter loss, of her capacity for love that she moans -- whatever its cause. On the other hand, it is on her male partner she trains her blame for all the misery and the incapacity she feels, seeing all the pain as something he has caused her. Goma and DRC more generally seem to be a profoundly connecting factor, though, whichever way you look.
What we'll have to figure out in our different ways is whether the partner of whom she sings is a real character (personified or 'acted' by the man in the video) recollected from a past love she'd rather forget now, a fictionalized one used only for the purposes of weaving a pure artistic narrative, or the symbol of a real and much more terrifying and existential power she and her family once encountered, there in Goma.
What is certain, in the meantime, is that Alicios sings of the absence, the loss indeed, of a love she once felt -- and which was love. Confoundingly, she also sings about it, about this pain of loss, in a truly lovely and even loving way. You would have thought that such cruelty as she narrates and such melodic tones and love as accompany the telling could not possibly be twin-products of the same state of mind -- but they are! And, I know for sure, the melody and the tone and the love will endure in our memories; as will the images of Alicios in that video.
READ: Kenya-based Congolese Singer Alicios Theluji Makes a Comeback
ALSO READ: Peter Oduor's "Up Close and Candid with Alicios Theluji..."
CLICK: 1. Posa Ya Bolingo Lyrics (With Swahili Translation)
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