Stephen Harper's ecology; Stephen Harper's prison housing

Well, once again I managed to miss Blog Action Day, this time about climate change. I forgive myself by saying that it's one of this blog's ongoing concerns. It's like Christmas and Easter being every day of the year, rather than December 25th and whenever the calendar dictates. What I did do on that day was try to figure out MY carbon footprint, which anyone can go to Zerofootprint (link provided on this blog) and do. Some things that I/we are already doing (medium size car – looking for smaller, no air conditioning, drive or train rather than fly) come up looking good, but we still have a far way to go. The Danes and the British are good at this. Canada, I'm ashamed to say, can only be described as disgraceful, the government for its total lack of perspicacity on this matter, and us Canadians for being wanton consumers of energy.

But of course, without leaders who can 'vision' for them, the people perish. We can take that quite literally in the case of climate change. I always feel pretty bad about the climate change thing, because I'm not looking at living another 50 years. In other words, I don't think it's climate change that's going to kill me. Stephen Harper's children have many, many years before them, which is why I cannot understand the dimwitted-ness of the man on this particular matter. Surely he should wish to act out of enlightened self-interest?

But some people refuse to learn and Mr Harper is dedicated to not learning on other matters as well. One of these 'other matters' is affordable housing. It appears, as some wag in the Globe and Mail's letter-writing column has pointed out, that his notion of providing affordable housing is building prisons, for which purpose his government has just voted millions of dollars, in anticipation of an increase in the prison population as a result of "new, tough laws". For crying out loud! Doesn't he know that homelessness is a direct and indirect cause of crime? It seems to me that even a nitwit would understand that it's smarter and wiser to spend $200,000 on building one unit of housing for a family of 4, 5 or 6 (he'll only have to do it once) than to spend it to house 10 prisoners for ONE year? (A rough estimate of the cost of keeping an inmate in jail for a year is $20,000.00.) Is that so hard to grasp?

But then being 'tough on crime' plays so well to the voting fans, doesn't it? Just like banging out a Beatles song with Yo-Yo Ma! I couldn't believe that Harper's ratings climbed in the next couple days after that (SARCASM HERE, IN CASE IT'S MISSED) signal event. Have we turned into a nation of blockheads? We don't need prisons, Mr Harper. We need housing, clean water, an improved social safety net, improved health care, child care, decent schools. When we don't have these things, crime ensues. As a good fundamentalist, you know that God isn't sitting up there, making criminals and sending them down to be born. He makes babies; we turn them into criminals.

Michelle Obama's – and most black people's? – white ancestry

"Everybody have their white grandmother!" including the wife of the President of the United States. Well, it's a white male progenitor, in her case. Many of us have always assumed it to be true of black people and white ancestors, grandma or grandpa. There's an apocryphal tale of Kamau Brathwaite stopping the presses at Oxford as they were about to print The Development of Creole Society 1770-1820 because he had found enough evidence of racial intermarriage in church registries to suggest that it had been more extensive than previously thought. So he had rewriting to do, for which the venerable presses at Oxford waited.

If we accept the notion of more pervasive white ancestries than supposed, there are implications as well for all those persons who insist that people who are phenotypically black are the only true blacks in the diaspora. In other words, if your genes haven't cooperated to produce very dark skin, tings tuff wit yu. But I guess it may be a case of, "My white grandmother is okay, for she kept her genes to herself. Too bad about yours!"

There are several academics and an author (Ishmael Reed) offering comments on the matter of Mrs Obama's white ancestry in the New York Times, including one biology prof who reminds us that human beings are far more similar than they are different. According to Mark Shriver, "on the molecular level... 85-95 percent of human genetic variation is shared across all populations." This could suggest that race is only skin deep, but Shriver doesn't rush to say that. I'm not prepared to agree, since I think the history of a people finds its way into their molecular structure, so, in a sense, race may be a people's history. And there's a remark that Prof Shriver makes that is consonant with this notion: "The genome is not singular and different genes have independent evolutionary histories." Now there's an interesting discussion to pursue at another time...

And we now know that humankind began in Africa, with homo sapiens heading out from there, not north, but rather south and then across to India, the Far East and Australia, so that – presumably black skinned – folks were 'down under' before we humans made our way to Europe in a much later migration. In sum, what we really ought to be saying is, "Everybody have their black grandmother!"

Two interesting by-the-way things. As I understand it (always ready to be corrected!) studies of mitochondrial DNA in fossils have established that all human beings link back to a single female placenta, and therefore, progenitor – the original, black Eve! Why the fundamentalists haven't galloped off with this, I can't imagine. (Maybe skin colour getting in the way again?) Also, human beings are more differentiated in Africa than anywhere else on earth because humankind has been on that continent the longest.

Anyway, all of that is a long preamble to my own imagined account of forced racial intermixing, as related in the story of Great-Granny Mac. The whole poem (I've included only a part here) is to be found in The True Blue of Islands, available on amazon. It's a long narrative poem that tells the tale of Madeleine Lazare Mungo, a young girl whose family is broken up and sent to owners on different estates. Missing her sisters and brothers and mother, she's enslaved on the plantation of a black slave owner named Bellmartin. So it's not the traditional white-master-rapes-black-slave story, but it witnesses to the fact that there was coercion of all sorts in slavery times, and so plenty blood mixing. Here then begins the story of Madeleine Lazare Mungo:

Great Granny Mac

1
Before Bellmartin buy Great Gran
she working in the pikni gang
on a plantation that belong
to Mr Serle, a backra man.

That white man own her family –
mother, two brother, two sister
and she, Madeleine. “He was
a cruel man,” my Great-gran say.

“He love a whip. The cat’ o’nine
was like a flask of wine
to him. He could get drunk
with lashing slaves. When his

“arm hoist is like you see
inebriation rise inside
his veins his muscles brain
his whole entire flesh on fire.

“He lash man, woman, pikni
too. Even his friends advise,
‘Don’t be a fool. You spoiling
your own property! You pay

good money for those blacks!’
He answer: “So – I flog them
as I please.’ One day
sudden the man take in

“with belly workings.
Doctor come but cannot
find no remedy. ‘I’d change
the cook,’ he recommend.

“ ‘Some nigger trying to poison
me? I’ll rid me of the lot
of them.’ Backra break up
our family. Sell us all bout.

“I bawling watch my brothers go
two different ways. I see one bigger sis
leave for Green Island; t’other one
they take to Annotto Bay.

“They haul my mother to the far
north shore. Me, smallest, stay
on a modest estate in town.
Mr. Bellmartin purchase me.

ii
“The day I see him little most
I drop down from the sight. Top hat
and ruffles riding crop barouche –
this man as black as night!

“When he buy me, I was seven
years old. For days I suffer fever
in my head. Don’t rise, don’t eat,
don’t sleep. Make up my mind

“to dead. Then Ma come in
a dream and say, ‘ Best you
let go of us, Madeleine.
Put us away – inside.’

“I do as Ma say. Rise
next day. I still can hear
her whispering
my name, ‘Madeleine’.”

iii
“At Bellmartin’s plantation
I turn cunning. More times
they catching me with book, paper
and pen. I well know if they find me

“with them things is plenty lashes
else is starve they starving me
for days. But chile, my navel string
cut on deceit, dissembly, lies.

“Tricky like Brer Anansi I
maintain ‘I only have such things
because Miss Meggie cannot bear
to play with any foolish

“darky girl.’ The little girl
is black as me but my excuse
don’t fall askew on any ear.
I go on with my tale.

“ “She say that I best learn
to read and write – and cipher too.
I try to learn, sir, though
it’s hard. I always likes to oblige.’

“Dropping a curtsy I open
my big eyes bold make four
with his — and I make sure
I learn to read like a machine.

“Poor Meggie struggling
with words dark like her own
black skin. I eat those words
like they is food.

iv
“Time I become fourteen
I cipher well enough to help
keep books for the estate.
‘This is my smartest nigger.’

“So say Bellmartin, and he rent
me out to some small-holding
folks too poor themselves
to employ help full-time

“to render their accounts.
I never like it from the first.
I know one of them small-hold
man was going grab hold of me

and take his dim-wit purple
pen and write his seed
inside my abdomen...

Anancy; Anancyism; ways of discovering and passing on stories

This post grew like Topsy out of a response to a comment of Geoffrey Philp's. Thanks to Geoff, my friend, Ruth Minott Egglestone, FSJL, Martin, Nalo and all the folks who listen in to our conversations...

Geoff:

In general: I don't think we are ever 'just writers', in all the ways that signifies! Our interests and operations can never be just as writers because it's impossible for any of us to be just that. I also worry now, in my old age, about the dangers of arrogance, my own especially.

As for the case in point: I am now, as a result of our conversation, concerned not merely with the Anancy phenomenon itself, but with the procedural example it offers, the opportunity for finding out HOW TO FIND OUT about cultural tings, especially in an oral society. So for me, there IS a problem of being right, in the sense of accurate. My particular concerns are inevitably also as an old teacher, an editor, a compiler of textbooks, one who seeks to understand the culture, and especially one who is worried by those with power and access to the means of overhauling things and serving them up differently – whether on purpose or by mistake.

Those powerful people include us, you and me, and we need to care enough about our stories, our his/tories and her/stories, our myths, our conundrums, our ring games, etc., etc., to try to pass them on intact – for there will always be changes, willy-nilly, no matter how hard we try. Ruth Egglestone, for example, was correct, meticulous, scholarly, when she told us her source for that particular understanding of Anancyism, and gave us, therefore, the opportunity of asking, “Well, who is this person? What does he know?”

The stories and understandings will come in many forms, and that multiplicity, that variety, is also precious. Some of the stories will have changed over time, and we want to know about those changes and, if possible, when and why they occurred. And contemporary writers and storytellers will themselves make changes (as you, Geoff, have done in respect of Anancy, say) and that's good, too.

But I'd like to know when and who and why changes occurred, whether by accident, and, in that case, what was the nature of the accident, or whether on purpose, and in that case, what was the nature of the purpose. That's all part of the story, the history, belonging to it in the way an etymology (Cicero calls etymology the veriloquium) enriches the significance of a word. It pleases me, for example, that we can know how the word ‘chortle’ came about, that it was a conflation of chuckle and snort, coined by Lewis Carroll in THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (1871). Knowing dat likl tory is part of my pleasure in the word.

For now, that's how I'm seeing our stories, including this Anancy one.

I do know that Anancy, before the Atlantic crossing, was Creator God, and that he survives in our Anancy Stories in a diminished state, as the Trickster-Spiderman, a version of, inter alia, the Signifying Monkey, and of the orisha variously known as Exú, Esu Eleggua, Esu Elegbara, Eshu Elegbara, Elegba, Legba, Legba-Petro, Maitre Carrefour and Eleda. (For one thing, he figures prominently in my PhD dissertation!) But I’d venture to say that Legba is NOT diminished, certainly not as Anancy is, and thereby hangs a tale in which I’m interested.

Nor have I ever thought of Anancy as weak, even in his diminished state on this side... But that’s perhaps best kept for another post, for hopefully did likl chat don't done yet. Selah!

Wayne Brown and Trevor Rhone

I wrote this to a friend today about Wayne Brown and Trevor Rhone. I know she won't mind my repeating it here. There are tributes aplenty and richly deserved in the media to them both, but I wanted to say a little about what they meant to me, these men with strong personalities and views but without malice or guile – more than can be said for most of us!

"One mourns both men mostly because one will miss them. They are, after all, trite as it may be to say so, past pain, worry and distress at this point. I felt I knew Wayne well, perhaps more than our interaction justified, but he was always warm when one did see him, most recently here for Rachel[Manley]'s launch of HORSES IN HER HAIR... I was very disappointed that the online journal didn't work out. I think it would have given him such satisfaction if it had. Trevor I have known these last 50 years, though I've not seen much of him the last two-three decades! But I was part of the original Theatre 77 group, and we have always liked each other well, and I have always admired how absolutely confident he was from the beginning that he would make a big difference to theatre in Jamaica.

(I'm listening to an interview bet. Peter Nazareth and Wayne at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/vwu&CISOPTR=57&CISOBOX=1&REC=7
as I write...)"

The excerpt from my e-mail ends here, but Brown-Nazareth interview connects nicely with a piece by Nicholas Laughlin in CRB's blog from a while back which celebrates crônicas, Wayne among them. http://www.meppublishers.com/online/crb/issues/index.php?pid=1036

An excerpt:

...it’s occurred to me that some of the most interesting work by contemporary Trinidadian writers does not come in conventional fictional or poetic forms at all, but rather in the form of fragmentary, discontinuous, first-person non-fiction narratives in the periodical press — i.e., newspaper columns — which we may have some difficulty identifying as “literary” — or even identifying as “narratives” — because of the format of their publication. I’d certainly include... Wayne Brown’s “In Our Time” columns, which began appearing in the Trinidad Guardian in 1984, moved around from one Trinidadian newspaper to another, and now appear in Jamaica, where Brown has settled, in the Observer. (Many of these columns — with their supple, acrobatic prose that can swoop from high to low, exalted to demotic, in a single paragraph — were collected in The Child of the Sea in 1989 and Landscape with Heron in 2000, where Brown describes them as “stories and remembrances”; it’s clear he’s thought of these pieces as literary from the start.)

Rest in peace, bredren. We all of us would be happy to have lived lives as worthwhile and as fulfilling as yours.

Is Anancyism the philosophy of taking serious ting make joke?

In note ten of a paper entitled "Anancyism in Jamaican Pantomime," scholar Ruth Minott Egglestone says:

"Anancyism is significantly more than a pattern of anti-social behaviour... it is a philosophy which enables an individual to laugh in the midst of adversity and thereby survive."

Dr Egglestone credits Carlos de la Motta of Kingston, Jamaica with this explanation, and it is the one about which I was curious. We all agree that Anancy is a survivor and his ingenuity is the means by which he survives, often in the face of great adversity. But mightn't we be undoing Anancyism when we regard it as a philosophy, with all that that implies, when we contain it, package it, give it the pretended respectability of attitude, proceeding presumably from a principle, of determinedly standing up to the oppressor and laughing defiantly in his face?

That seems so serious, whereas the essence of Anancyism, from another perspective, is the absolute avoidance of any such seriousness. Instead, Anancyism is a modus operandi, a stylee, a mode of profiling as cording to which, by means of wiles, ruses and general trickify, Anansi approaches every bad situation as an opportunity for wukking him brain and gaining advantage, often unfair advantage, over not just his opponents, but pretty much anyone in his way, ef him is in dat kinda mood. In other words, Anancyism is indeed a pattern of behaviour, though I wouldn't necessarily call it anti-social since it's often directed against downpressors who would therefore not be part of a social group to which our Sneaky Spider could reasonably be asked or be considered obliged to show allegiance.

The other thing about Anancy is of course that he is not to be tied down - and so, perhaps, certainly not to anything so predictable as a philosophy? He is a man of surprises with something forever new up his sleeve. No Cogito ergo sum for him. He doesn't think to be. Rather Cogito ergo ago. He works his brain, and then he acts, and by his willful, whimsical, me-no-care behaviour, his dedication to rambunctiousness, he not only succeeds in being, he thrives at it.

They mystics tell us that in rare moments of pure being, moments of awe, we touch eternity and glimpse God. Perhaps that is what Anancy is after? Working his way back to his original role of Creator Deity, in which all his thought was action, and all his action was creating, and every act of creation was an occasion for laughter?

Anancyism... and sluggish systems

Thanks to Geoffrey Philp for a great story in response to the last post, as well as the observation that: "There is something quintessentially Jamaican in this joke -- tragi-comedy, that Walcott says must be earned. It runs through our culture. We recognize the hard blows of life, yet affirm our dignity through humor."

I agree that 'taking serious tings make joke' is characteristic of our culture and should certainly (in some degree) be part of the stories that come out of it. Anancyism, as articulated and operated by our folk hero, Anancy, the original Spider Man, is perhaps another marker.

That brings me to a question. I'd like to know what folks understand the term "Anancyism" to mean. I've encountered some definitions that disagree (I'll come back to them in due course) and I know how I've always understood the term. Because there's lack of consensus, I'd be glad for wider feedback.

So to another, and quite different matter. There are some who say that one of the signs of impending apocalypse is the collapse of world communication systems. Seems that in some parts of the world, broadband, touted as the solution to 'super-fast' delivery of data, is failing to live up to its big promise. According to today's BBC World News:

"... in South Africa it seems the web is still no faster than a humble pigeon.

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm's slow internet speeds."

Not entirely sure why Winston should be characterized as 'humble'... Seems the epithet in this case might better apply to the web firm's lackadaisical service; certainly it would not be inappropriate for the firm's attitude, in the face of its poor performance. (Vain hope!) But it's worth bearing in mind that old ways are worth preserving. After all, birds flew before planes and messages crossed distances before there were fibre-optic cables. Selah.

Writing Out of the Culture…

It’s Martin’s proposition. Some Caribbean and Latin American authors write 'out of the culture.' So yesterday we spend a chunk of driving time (between South Hadley, MA and Toronto) batting this around. He clarifies: what he means is that they write from within the culture. ‘How can a reader recognize that kind of writing,’ I ask him. ‘What are its features? Does it perhaps have to do with language? Do those writers prefer vernacular languages? Is the extent to which they use those languages indicative of how deep into the culture they are, how far down they are dipping for the story?’

We agree that language would certainly be a marker. In colonized countries or countries where there has been an imperial presence, even if there’s been no formal ownership, the writer would privilege the vernacular, not the imperial 'standard' code. The local dialect would occur in dialogue as well as in the narrative, the reportage. We mention Samuel Selvon – someone who quintessentially wrote from inside Trini culture. In addition to language, the characters, the humour, the bad behave, the liming, mamaguying, masquerading, mauvais langue are all from this Caribbean root.

So we know the story must also have history, characters and mores, ways of ‘carrying on’ that are recognizably indigenous. Earl Lovelace is the first Caribbean author he names as an example. Right away I think that it’s not only writing from within the culture that he’s noticing. I don’t tell him yet, but I know that’s not all there is to it.

I talk about fable-like qualities in story, a particular style of narrative, one different from the customary ways, so that if, say, Anansi stories are the original Jamaican way of telling tales, the writer departs from them but still devises a mode that’s recognizably local. I know this native-but-something-more-than is what occasioned the mention of Earl at the start; I’m more sure when he mentions Gisele Pineau. I suspect this is in fact going beyond the cultural root to an artistic signature, something more mannered, author-pinned, though I'm just now saying so.

We talk about the ‘tale of the telling’ and the ‘telling of the tale’. If any one knows the source of these terms, I’d be glad to hear it. I’ve forgotten and haven’t succeeded in finding them on the Internet so far. We agree that there may be something about how the tale is told that can also mark its birth inside the culture, even when the approach to storytelling is innovative. So we’re not just talking language now: this is something else, of which language is a part, but isn’t it itself.

I think there is room for debate here, as to where the author starts observably, in a calling-attention way, to mould the matter from the cultural mud.

I tell him that some of the great Latin American male writers irritate me on this score. I feel rebellious, I suppose, because the manner of the narrative is so often macho, and, never mind they woo so well, I fight to resist their mighty pens. 'Get away from me!' I say. 'Go stick them into someone else… Invade some other mind; capture some other imagination.’

That makes him laugh.

We don’t really finish the conversation.

Certainly there are many writers, men and women, that fit the ‘culture-based’ bill, some more than others, but the women that come to my mind first, as I come back now to the subject, are Erna Brodber, Olive Senior and Nalo Hopkinson. Nalo is of course a special case and does something remarkable as she spins new, fantastic language complexes and cultural forms out of the regional warp and woof. Brodber and Senior pull from their deep down acquaintance with rural Jamaica – its city life as well. What we probably need to do is study Caribbean works under this lens, maybe devise a matrix that will help us talk with greater specificity about the manifestation of the cultural wellspring in literary works.

Any and all thoughts are most welcome. It’s just a little start on a big, intractable subject.