How can it be that it is good for Bristol Palin's baby to live and good for Troy Davis to die?

rethabile has asked us to write an American sentence for Troy Davis. This is my American sentence.

To kill Troy Davis is to kill a foetus that has been fulfilled.

America applauds Bristol Palin for keeping her baby then its courts turn around and kill a man, indeed a man about whom there is doubt as to his guilt for the crime for which he has been sentenced. How come it's immoral to kill a foetus, but moral to kill a foetus that has grown and become the person it was meant to be? That seems somehow perverse, having less to do with ethics and more to do with some kind of ethereal, romantic notion about the helplessness of babes in the womb. If to kill in cold blood is wrong, then it matters not whom we kill. (We won't get into the issues of war and self-defense here.) Or does "pro-life" mean pro-foetal life? How can the same morality that is served when a foetus is preserved, also be served when a full-grown human person is killed? Isn't the argument made that it is wrong to kill a foetus because it is human life? And even if we were to agree that capital punishment is an appropriate verdict for a capital crime, must the state not pause when there is uncertainty that the person convicted is guilty? Or is there more going on here? Is this an issue that concerns race? Class? Both? It's impossible to pursue at this time all the relevant issues in this case, and we will hopefully return to at least some of them, one less obvious one being that idolatry is a subtle sin, one we commit when we purport to value "the sanctity of human life" when it is prettily wrapped up in a developing baby but regard it as disposable in grown human beings. We say, where I come from, "What go round, come round." Also, "Time longer than rope." They are interesting encapsulations of the idea of the inexorability of justice, elsewhere expressed in aphorisms like "Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind." Outside, beyond, over and above all our behaviours, individual and collective, as citizens, communities and states, the same inherent order (or Order) that sees to the rising and setting of the sun governs human behaviour. We should perhaps look to it.

Everyday matters...

Never mind the gorgeous weather, I spent the day tiling a bathroom – believe me, a challenging activity for someone who has osteoarthritis! It's not really by choice. In a city short of tradespeople, it's hard to find someone who will do a small job – which this one had to be, since it's a small bathroom, or washroom, as they say here. (I hate the term, talk truth.) Even when you find someone who agrees to take the job, chances are you'll get that fatal call a day or two before the big day that tells you, "Sorry. No longer possible." An intricate job too, since the tiles (they were already there: I was replacing maybe half of them) are small white octogons interspersed with much smaller black squares. They come set out in pre-set, one foot mosaics that are attached to netting, and that helps in putting them down, but only if you are working in those large dimensions. Patching tile by tile is something else! But what to do? One does what one must, so I'm pressing on. Hopefully I'll be done tomorrow. Then we'll return to painting, and after that, cleaning. I sometimes think I might have been happier living in a cave or in a tent as a nomad – though I suppose having and raising a family in the wild or on the move would not have been any easier, or simpler. Ah well! BTW, if you need to clean carpets, ordinary soda (the white chaser that you use for drinks) works. By the same token, baking soda works too, especially for carpets with pile. There are lots of safe, environmentally friendly alternatives to chemicals. And they're easy to find online and worth trying. On a bookish note, I've just finished reading Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm. Has anyone read it? I'd love to hear what people think. And Nalo Hopkinson's New Moons Arms has won the Sunburst Award! Congrats, Nalo! Keep them coming, and keep them winning! rethabile, thanks for visiting and for the translation. "Sunflowers" now exists in French and Spanish translations. Going to go. Retiring early tonight, as I've more tiling to do tomorrow. Stay focused – and pray! They're doing crazy things with the atom in a 27 km tunnel that runs across the French-Swiss border. A (very, they say) few critics think the experiment, due in late October, might precipitate a black hole that will drag in earth and everything on the planet. Maybe more on this soon...

"Sunflowers" – "Tournesols"

Something a little different this time, folks. Here's a poem from my last collection, The True Blue of Islands (Sandberry Press, 2005 – available from amazon.com). I've tried to translate it into French; I knew some French once, but I've forgotten much of what I knew. I'm putting both the poem and the translation up, in the hope that someone whose French and kwéyol is better than mine will make a comment. I'm especially interested in whether there's a way to 'translate' the pun (English "guest" and creole "guess") in the last word. All comments welcome

Sunflowers

Vincent Van Gogh the sunflower man
cut off his ear when Paul Gauguin
wouldn’t stay to paint with him
in southern France.

I burnt my veil and wedding dress
scarred both my cheeks
tattooed rosettes
along my arms with cigarettes.

We both needed a man to stay.

You think that it was
loneliness? I don’t
think so. Madness
has always been my guess.

© Pamela Mordecai 2005


Tournesols

Vincent Van Gogh, l’homme des tournesols
s’est coupé l’oreille quand Paul Gauguin
ne voulut rester avec lui pour peindre
au sud de la France.

J’ai brulé ma voile et ma robe de mariée
je m’ai marqué des cicatrices les joues
j’ai tatué rosettes
au long de mes bras avec des cigarettes.

Nous deux avions besoin qu’un homme restât.

Tu crois que c’était
la solitude? Je ne
le crois pas. Toujours
j’avais pensé qu’il doit être la folie.

Are they ‘Christian’? Are they ‘right’?

Who are these people who have claimed the words "Christian" and "Right" as if they have some Divine entitlement to them? And why on earth have the rest of us allowed this foolishness? It’s bizarre that they’ve been able to license themselves in this way, making “Christian Right” into a label for a group of people who are no more Christian and no more right than any of the rest of us, and some of whom are very scary indeed. Yeah, yeah. I know Conservatives are right and Liberals are left, and hence the term (i.e., to refer to the Christian bloc among conservatives) but that is also a bit of folly that we've paid dearly for. The words have a powerful subtext. They’ve facilitated these folks arrogating unto themselves the moral high ground, so that the message is not merely that they are conservative but that they are discerning, wise, enlightened. (I suspect that most people hearing ‘right’ in “Christian Right” think not ‘conservative, but ‘correct’.) Perhaps the most frightening thing is that they’ve been allowed to get away with behaving in decidedly un-Christian, not-right ways. While they insist on holding the rest of us accountable, they don’t seem to have to live according to their beliefs. As a Christian, I try to nurture my relationship with the Holy Spirit, and to listen to his guidance as I deal with what I see around me. The Holy Spirit cautions me not to judge anyone but he also reminds me that Jesus gave me a yardstick in the Sermon on the Mount: "By their fruits shall ye know them." So perhaps we should look at some fruits. For example, when it comes to staying married, these folks don’t seem to do so well. I'm quoting from a 2004 article in the New York Times (See http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/weekinreview/14pamb.html): "As researchers have noted, the areas of the country where divorce rates are highest are also frequently the areas where many conservative Christians live." Mmmn. Not such a good fruit crop there… Perhaps we should look for some other telling statistics for the "Bible belt" states. Assuredly, they do not do well in the matter of peace. Peace is paramount in the preaching of Jesus. That teaching began with the angels at his birth, when they sang, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men.” (Luke 2: 14) He himself exemplified it throughout his life – with perhaps a couple exceptions, one being when he lost his cool and drove the traders out of his father’s house (Luke 19:46), another being when he condemned the Pharisees and Scribes – at some length, it’s worth noting. (Matthew 23). Jesus extols peace making in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.” (Matthew 5: 9) and, himself faced with weapons in the garden of Gethsemane, warned his disciples against the use of force, against making aggression a way of life: “He who lives by the sword shall perish by it.” (Matthew 26:52) Indisputably the modern version of the sword is the gun. Nonetheless we have ostensible Christians (many being members of the NRA) somehow managing to square their gun toting behaviour with that caution. (I’d especially like to hear Sarah Palin on this.) Worse (for us poor members of the human race, fodder for cannon), how come these claim-to-be-Christians get to support war and take pride in their store of troops, weapons, missiles, and their vast nuclear arsenal? The trouble is that for a lot of people the Holy Spirit is a dead God locked up tight in a book rather than a Live Person who sustains, counsels, guides and comforts. I believe in the Bible as a living Word, one that I contemplate with the Holy Spirit’s guidance. I know that God speaks to me, and that if I listen, I can hear him. Aha! Perhaps that's the explanation. Is it that we have not so much "pretend Christians" in the so-called "Christian Right" but deaf ones?

Is Stephen Harper's government to be trusted?

We're having an election in Canada on October 14th. In 2006 the Canadian government headed by Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, passed a law establishing a fixed date for elections. Mr Harper has now seen fit to disobey, ignore, circumvent that law – take your pick. It is beyond question that his government passed the law. It's also beyond question that he has chosen to break it. Some say it's because the polls were running in his favour, and there is indeed an Angus Reid poll in this morning's paper that has his party way ahead. I don't know about anyone else, but it makes me very nervous when a government uses the country's parliament in this whimsical kind of way. Either fixed election dates are a good idea or they aren't. If a government goes to the trouble of passing a law that says they are, I don't expect the same government to ignore the law two years later. None of the political commentary that I have read suggests that the country is in a state of crisis such that the government cannot function, which might be a circumstance in which breaking the law that fixes the election date could arguably be allowable, indeed, wise. If the election isn't being held because it's the best thing for the country at this time, then one must conclude that it must be the best thing for the governing party – in other words Mr Harper has chosen to break his own law because it suits his purposes. I don't care what the pundits say, I, plain old ordinary citizen, don't expect those entrusted with the running of my country to give me a six for a nine. Three card sharks, used car salesmen and vendors of snake oil behave in this way. Responsible governments don't. It makes me want to go find out what else he’s said that he's changed his mind about. It makes me think that when Mr Harper says he'll bring our troops home in 2011, he may well find a reason at some future time to change his mind. Makes me wonder whether I can trust anything he says. Makes me think about where I'll put my vote...

How do we read short stories?

Fsjl asks whether short stories should be perceived as novels in miniature, or as vignettes or as sketches. I'm tempted to say, well, they could be any of those. They could be all of those. They can be anything, because, after all, everything is everything these days. If Bristol Palin's breach of the sixth commandment – remember those ten rules written on the tablets that Moses struggled down the hill with? – has suddenly become the epitome of Christian virtue because she happens to be making a baby, well, who can doubt my argument? (I have to confess that I'm thinking of writing an epistemological essay called, "Everything is Everything" – footnote to Prof. Lauryn Hill whose ruminations inspired the title.) It's the age of prestidigitation, the age of virtual obeah. (I confess that I visited a few blogs this evening and they've left me a little bit high.) Everything is up here in the sky, and boy, believe me, it IS everything, double entendre intended! And in the midst of this plenty, who cares that Jamaican children don't know about Miss Lou and many have never heard an Anansi story? Who cares that there are teachers, in Jamaica and elsewhere, who can't tell the difference between a newspaper report and a story – long or short? And is there a difference? Don't both have a beginning, a middle and an end? Can't both affect you emotionally? Don't both have characters? So what makes the thing we call a short story itself and not something else? Apart from saying that a short story is by nature, short, it's not a question I plan to answer directly – not this time around anyway. Here are my reasons for not answering. We don't recognize things by applying definitions. That's an artificial activity. Indeed, definitions are, for the most part, a fiction. We imagine that because we can manipulate and describe things, we can define them. Not so. Outside the countable sciences, definitions don't hold, and once geometry gets into astrophysics and math graduates into infinity, supposed definitions in those sciences cease to hold as well. So how do you know anything? Recognize and identify it? By that same set of cognitive activities that you apply to know the difference between a duck, a turkey and a chicken! As has famously been said, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it's a duck. The above, translated, simply means that if you hear and read enough stories, you know a story when you encounter it. I invoke that set of processes that one Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky described long ago: "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts." So you hear a tale from your Granny (an activity between people, and so interpsychological) and then it settles into you as an experience to which you apply the name, 'story' and you begin to form a concept (intrapsychological), creating a little mental hat that fits this thing-called-story. It is this earliest, most satisfying human activity that becomes the basis of our ability to appreciate history, our Holy Books, our family lore, the lays of ancient days, the Harry-Potter-length novels of now – and the short story. It is this earliest activity of storytelling in which I am now most interested, and that we all need to hustle to preserve. So, for the moment, here's my word on the short story: if it looks like one, sounds like one, affects you like one, then it's one. If at one end, it seems to be slipping into a vignette, and at the other, it's carrying on like a sketch, that's okay too. That's how things in life are. Call it a short story if you like. No harm done. So why did I say Ms Urquhart should have included only bona fide short stories in her Canadian collection? For reasons of pedagogy and practicality that we will treat of another time. Have a good weekend, be well and happy and stay dry! We'll talk again soon. Insha'Allah...

Is Sarah Palin being faithful in the small things?

Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, has five children, all but the eldest under the age of eighteen. Sarah Palin's daughter, Bristol, is pregnant, and a teenager. Bristol is having her baby – a good thing, for, moral issues apart, in my experience one mourns a child even if it drops out of one's belly of its own accord. Bristol's baby father, Levi Johnston, is also a teenager, a self-described "redneck" who doesn't "want kids". So here's the situation: Bristol Palin, a child, albeit a sexually active one, is having a baby for another child, Levi Johnston, who doesn't want children. That's a complex, complicated, challenging situation in any family, and one that's certainly not solved by the teenage parents getting married. There are two other daughters in the Palin family: Willow is thirteen and Piper is seven. Mrs Palin's baby, Trig, has Downs syndrome. Barack Obama may have decided that the whole matter is off limits for discussion as an issue in his campaign, which is more evidence of the decency of the man, but I'm not running for anything, and so I'm free to say my say. The Palin family is in trouble, no question. What would I do if I were the mum? Do some self-searching about why my eldest daughter is making a baby at seventeen, and for a young man who doesn't want babies. (That's a big thing. Children need to be wanted, and if Levi Johnston doesn't want babies, he probably shouldn't be marrying Bristol or anyone else likely to give him one.) I'd be wondering whether, with the challenge of a little son with Downs syndrome, and the responsibilities of an onerous job, I'll be able to devote enough time to my other two daughters, give Bristol the support she certainly needs, and continue to nurture my relationship with my husband – not to forget my eldest child, about to be deployed to Iraq, and no doubt in need of lots of reassurance and advice, never mind his age. My uncle used to say that to love a person is to act always in such a way as to ensure the well being of that person. I can't for the life of me see how accepting the Vice-Presidential nomination is the best thing for the Palin family at this time. Maybe next time around, or the time after that, but not now. And if Sarah Palin can't act in the best interests of her family, well… I am reminded of Luke 16;10 “He that is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much: and he that is unrighteous in a very little is unrighteous also in much.” And, truth to tell, I don’t think by any means that Mrs Palin’s family situation is a small thing…