Friday, 10 July 2020
Wednesday, 17 June 2020
America Upside Down by E. Ethelbert Miller
THURSDAY
June 18, 2020
PUBLISHED BY PHI BETA KAPPA
America Upside Down
Our country is in the midst of a paradigm shift
By E. Ethelbert Miller | June 15, 2020
Ella
(Flickr/cuboctahedron)
Social historian
Vincent Harding often felt it was best to describe black history as being much
like a river, flowing toward freedom and the delta of democracy. The challenge
we face today is how to navigate this river. Our inability to do this too often
leads us to compare historical incidents and movements to one another. We see a
protest or a riot and we immediately compare it to the 1960s. Why should one be
surprised by police brutality in the black community? Hasn’t there always been
one historical moment flowing into the next?
Is This the History
of Air?
I can’t breathe” he said.
I can’t breathe” he said.
But there was no
air.
Only the absence of
trees
and rope. The
swaying
of history over
another
black
body.
I wrote this poem
in 2014, after Eric Garner (a horticulturist) was killed in New York City by
the police. I could have written it in 2020. Not much has changed. It’s
as if God has returned, and we can’t find the fig leaf or the lie. Maybe
somewhere there is conjuring being done, forcing a president to hold a Bible
upside down.
The first month of
this year should have warned us that the unexpected was going to happen. Many
people around the world couldn’t believe it when Kobe Bryant died. January
26th. A sad day, a death in the global family. It didn’t get any better when
COVID-19 appeared. Suddenly the entire world collapsed as if it had been
unplugged from the Internet.
So much death these
last few months, too many jobs lost and never coming back. We have become
people of masks and gloves. There was no more basketball after Kobe. Could we
have predicted our predicament? Could the COVID-19 pandemic have been avoided?
It’s difficult to place blame, but one can point fingers. The
Trump White House has been a tsunami, sweeping away the achievements and
priorities of the previous administration. In many ways, it was the initial
crack of a door that has since opened onto a global paradigm shift. The
government of Brazil has become a sad replica of our own as a result of its
conservative leadership.
Racism will always
seek a vacuum. Recent weeks and months have revealed the extent to which people
of color are at heightened risk of contracting COVID-19. It has been difficult
to hide our discontent and anger at the Trump administration for that, too. It
is just one of the many ways we have been held hostage by the Trump base—as if
our nation decided to forget democracy in favor of being ruled by a small
minority and its king.
If the United
States has been turned upside down and the paradigm has shifted, we must
recognize that black people and the Black Lives Matter movement are
responsible—responsible for encouraging a new generation of white people who
are moving beyond mere dialogue on race matters and trying to do something
concrete. We are all now engaged in policy, even while continuing to protest.
This requires a different type of muscle to navigate the river of
possibilities. There are boulders before us and jagged rocks.
As a writer, my
first concern is always with language and how we compose a narrative. Too often
there is no time to workshop politics like poetry. The result is that we take a
slogan on a poster and try to define it as policy. When I heard “Defund the
Police,” it made as little sense to me as when I heard calls for abolishing
police departments. Really? I remember talking to some inmates in a prison many
years ago. I reminded them of the need to change their consciousness when they
return to their communities. We have to understand that we live in a world in
which police are needed. How many of us can recall the debate about whether
police should be permitted to wear cargo pants? Try being a police officer and
placing all the equipment you need around just your waist. Do we now replace
our police force with RoboCops as a way of getting around police unions?
Shifting money from
police departments to other needs and concerns won’t easily happen. The money
won’t be spent; it will sit or be wasted. Just look at the Pentagon. How much
waste each year? Even so, propose to cut the defense budget, and listen to the
howls of protest. Will we spend the money on something else? No. Instead, we
keep increasing the budget. Why? Because slogans too easily become shields. Someone
shouts, “Support Our Troops,” and you can’t get people to think about anything
else. This is where we are with “Defund the Police.” It makes perfect sense
when one reads the small print, such as what comes when you change credit
cards. But no one has time to read the small print anymore. We want change
without the complexity of change. We want our posters to speak like a tweet.
But how do we
ensure that the more perfect union our nation is supposed to aspire to doesn’t
end in divorce? How do we police tenderness into our lives? How do we end the
police brutality against black people and also stop the stones thrown at the
hearts of police? How did we become so black and blue, so separated, so
occupied? How do we rise from all this kneeling? How do we walk together? Tell
me there will be joy in the morning and another black mother will not have to
weep. Tell me it’s time we defund her crying and stop this
river of tears.
E. Ethelbert Miller is a poet,
teacher, and literary activist in Washington, D.C. He is a frequent contributor to Re-Markings, India (www.re-markings.com). He has co-edited with Nibir K. Ghosh Charles Johnson: Embracing the World (2011, Authorspress, New Delhi, India).
Tuesday, 5 May 2020
COVID-19 : Aesthetic Imprints from Robin Lindley (Seattle, USA)
"Harbors do not reduce the size of the sea." - Emily Dickinson
After by Robin Lindley 2020
Bystanders by Robin Lindley 2020
Night Words by Robin Lindley 2020
Long Day by Robin Lindley 2020
Robin Lindley, JD is Features Editor,
History News Network, Seattle WA 98115, USA.
His writings and reviews have also appeared in Re-Markings
(www.re-markings.com)
His writings and reviews have also appeared in Re-Markings
(www.re-markings.com)
Comment:
These illustrations are GREAT!
And the
last one with the
masked people is so timely!
I love what you're doing with
visual art!
Your work---the colors---are so vivid.
—Charles Johnson US National Book Award Winner
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2.
3.
4.
Sunday, 3 May 2020
POEMS from Saint Lucia by Mac Donald Dixon & Comments by Dr. Tijan M. Sallah
Self-Portrait by Dixon
POEMS by Mac Donald Dixon
BIOPSIES OF HATE
Don’
ask me Uncle Sam why everybody hate
you wid a rage dat mek dem want to spill your guts
wid
a two edge blade in de middle of the street
mass
produce like me in a third world country
dat
don’ have to roll dem ars to speak.
Fifty
years you stranglin’ a little nation; but
dey
call your bluff. You try to brek dem up
in
stocks and shares—smuggle rights to their rum,
cigars
an’ everything else you dip your hand in.
I
don’ start to speak yet. Don’ forget we not friends.
Your
moose-boys saddle their B52 to bomb
a beach where sand fly is king. You frighten
already?
Not
by chance you bounce up wid our beloved
In-Fidel.
Wid your contraband of pills, and every
other
brand of vice you sow discord on foreign soil.
You
tell me, in one breath, we friends, brothers seeking
peace
through trade, in a convoluted maze, our Latin
friends
and you, like mice in corridors, whispering…
Come buy the vines filling the fields where our
bananas
sprang.
Put food on the table again, Amego…
Riot
is not my bag, I have poetry,
words
not bombs, I only lacerate the soul.
What’s
that to deaf and dumb illiterates?
I
was dere doing my own ting in peace till you
intervene.
Check yourself Uncle Sam, I still surviving—
PAYS NATAL
Here I plod through ancient Egypt
Here I perish crucified on the cross...
Yevtushenko.
Today, I survey your bays and inlets,
casting my net over sea blue,
reflecting blond eyes – across your hills –
blue with the spark of
dawn.
Raptured by shades of morning alive
in your hair; freedom airborne on your wings.
Joy and sadness in this tale reflects in eyes;
your people transfigured from hunger
to seasonal plenty.
Your days are music; flute and drum, the breeze
dancing la comette with leaves on dusty
unpaved country roads. Laughter is the voice
of rivers, where women wash the last week’s clothes:
Doves feast on grit, piped from your land.
I come embracing you in a hot month
when the sweet sigh of cannelles perfumes your hills
and unctions
mixed with sweat embalm those smiles
that wear your face: Prayers fly from rosary beads.
I cannot rock the peace cradling my people’s
infant sleep, or nurse the fever of despair
that drives to the bottle’s quenching lease.
Silent, lies and schism subdivide the mind –
the simple folk – rhetoric dazzling
like polished door-knob brass; expose its myth
and truth has lost its part of speech.
Dawn unwraps
its crimson curves on Dauphin’s sky.
Brine-stained rocks recall a Carib burnishing
his adze in the sun’s first light, its gleam lights
a fire through the spines of timid tribes,
the bay
oozes red with fright.
A cluster of gulls, white feathers,
shower like clouds on this dream; squealing
Sunday sermons in a local phrase,
a pen transcribes reality.
WARS
ARE NOT WON BY ANY LIVING THING
Wars
are not won by any living thing,
flailing and blaring fuels the myth.
Nothing
negates the carnage that they bring;
No heron rises on its broken wing.
Wars are not won by any living thing,
dead men chanting from ancient scripts:
Chorus of blight, resound your nervous ring,
glorious deeds
leap from swollen lips.
Hymns whistle with wind on barbwire string,
clipped
like cracks from automatic clips:
Nothing
negates the carnage that they bring;
Wars are not won by any living thing.
Life’s wasted manhood mourns with every spring
severed youth rotting
on windswept cliffs,
urgency and cause,
but a forgotten thing.
Nothing negates the carnage that they bring.
A puppeteer plays with his broken gifts,
men like fools still follow his wayward trips.
Wars are not won by any living thing
Nothing absolves the carnage that they bring.
THE VETERAN
For Clement Welch – BWIR Veteran WWI.
The old man taps the pavement with his cane;
nervous rhythms like kettledrums roll on
the mind. Crisp khaki uniforms ironed
in files, march to their beat, unfazed by fine
threads of rain. The first world war explodes;
its splinters
fill his head.
Barometers record his mercury
sinking in
mud at Mons. Thoughts brittle
like splintered steel bombard a Flanders night
with broken limbs –
these wounds will never heal.
His mind sails with the Good Hope from Castries
through the shells’ recurring whine.
Two fingers, pincered like a crab’s, dip in
the same font where they were first baptised,
cleansing in holy water the blight crabbed
in with comrades in their burrows at Somme,
clawing to
dispel the stench of death
that hangs
like a death knell overhead.
Islands alive inside, revolt at ‘land
of hope and
glory’ themes leaping through
the maze, false courage foaming with heavy
breath, on those
who wait for final orders
lost in this doomed valley where the reaper
draws his sickle like a wand.
Pinned by rheumatic fever to his cross,
death’s signs are signalled by a bugler’s call;
painted battles on the mind vibrate through
walking stick, convinced that death has been unkind.
For every limb that moves, one hundred
young West Indians died.
Mac Donald Dixon with Seamus Heaney
COMMENTS from Dr. Tijan M. Sallah, the celebrity Gambian Poet
COMMENTS from Dr. Tijan M. Sallah, the celebrity Gambian Poet
"Dear Prof. Ghosh,
These are powerful poems
from Mac Donald Dixon. I like the CARIBBEAN patois poem best; it speaks to
the anguished relationship of the CARIBBEAN and South America vis-a-vis the US.
The others are also
beautiful in their imagery and lyricism. They remind me of the verses of
Derek Walcott. And the photographic icing on the cake is the photo of Dixon with
Heaney. How apt!
Thanks for sharing these gems." - Tijan
*Dr. Tijan M Sallah in the distinguished presence of Chinua Achebe and Nobel Laureates in Literature like Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, and Naguib Mahfouz
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