August 21, 2019 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
The American dream has turned into a nightmare. The effect on neighbouring countries and to many other countries around the world has been significantly adverse. America is deeply divided with blood on the streets, in schools, in homes, in public places with gunmen using weapons of mass destruction at will. No one is safe. Even the police have come under attack.
Trump swore as President “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”. His actions and words point to the opposite! That Trump has had a hand, and an influence, on the spread of wanton attacks on immigrants and people of colour in the US are undeniable. His racist rhetoric, disregard for law and order, insensitive words and actions, and dictatorial actions while abusing the Office of the President have been an abuse of the Constitution. Mueller’s investigation points to at least ten instances where impeachment can be used.
Trump promised to “Make America Great Again”. In less than three years, America has slid backwards and is soon facing a predicted major recession, the worst in many decades. In fact, the world is facing a world-wide depression, caused in no small part by Trump’s unpredictable behaviour, trade wars with several major countries, and “trickle down” economics, which benefit the top one percent of the population at the expense of the other 99 percent!
His propaganda about a great economic recovery under his presidency is a great lie! The national debt has been increasing by 17 percent each year. The deficit has soared to several trillion dollars as a result of Trump passing tax laws giving huge tax cuts to the super rich, including his own family and cronies, and supporting businesses and organisations like the National Rifle Association, and gun manufacturers who are the chief providers for guns and assault weapons in the street. The money from his “trickle down” economics must be in a leaking bucket because the poor and middle class are struggling to make ends meet in health care, shelter, and bread and butter issues.
The rich stash their money away in offshore tax havens, money laundering and tax avoidance strategies. Trump is well aware of these practices and is determined not to reveal his income tax assessments, which are always in a state of perpetual “auditing”. He has spent billions on the military and nuclear build-up, tossing the world into a new arms race. This is called “Trumponomics”.
Trump personally has been a financial failure. The records show multiple bankruptcies, bribery, corruption, scamming of workers, businesses, breaking of contracts, tax evasion, among others. Instead, he was given the keys to the White House with the help of the Russians and made Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful nation in the world!
His claim for any economic success in the White House has to be credited to his predecessor President Barack Obama, who took over a nation in deep economic trouble and gave it a miraculous turnaround. Just about all that has been destroyed by Trump, who intends on undoing everything that President Obama did in office.
Trump is being served by a Republican Congress that is focused on being re-elected, with a blind eye on the President’s other questionable actions. They are in fact co-conspirators and accessories, and they too should be held accountable. Trump’s behaviour is in fact unconstitutional in many ways. With a lack of government oversight, the constitution can be virtually torn up and thrown away. Trump has made it clear that he hasn’t really started to “use his power” as yet! There is talk of impeachment by the Democrats but with a Supreme Court with Trump appointed judges, and a cooperative Republican Senate, that seems unlikely.
His coziness and dealing with Putin, the Russian dictator, is a deal with the devil. These are far from normal circumstances, and the abnormal has become the new normal.
Trump is now fearing that the predicted economic collapse will see his base fractured as Americans scramble to survive their “greatness”. He is trying to bully the Federal Reserve authorities to change their economic strategies and to blame them, the media (fake news), and everyone else for the downturn; everyone but himself. His twisted psychopathic mind cannot see things otherwise. He suggests that if Americans don’t vote for him, they will lose everything – the commander in chief of conspiracy theories.
The best that he can do is “drain the swamp” by closing the doors and walking away from the White House with his family and cronies, taking the billions he has stashed away. His tenure of using the office of president as his personal fiefdom and kingdom, which he ran like a king, will be up.
The American nation will continue to bleed for a long while and will need time to bind its wounds and heal its divisions, if it ever does. The suggestion that Trump and his associates will ever be taken to court is unlikely. The scales of justice are rarely ever balanced. The Democrats are fearing, and with good reason, that Trump will not leave the White House willingly if he loses the next election.
There is a lesson that we in Canada and in other democracies can learn. We must stand guard for our country as the words in our national anthem say. We are not immune from so called “nationalism” and “populism” – baits that Trump and other dictators like Hitler used successfully.
We must protect our multiculturalism and immigration from attacks by unscrupulous politicians. These “wedge” politics are increasingly evident in Canada and other countries. Our courts and the rule of law must be upheld, whatever the cost, unlike the American Constitution. Failing that, we are doomed to follow the path of our neighbours to the south.
If the creeks don’t rise and the sun still shines, I’ll be talking to you.
By Romeo Kaseram
Lindsay Barrett (now known as Esoghene) was born on September 15, 1941, in Lucea, in the parish of Hanover, Jamaica. His father, Lionel, was a farmer, and the senior agriculturist with the Jamaican Ministry of Agriculture. According to Wikipedia, Barrett’s great-uncle, A. P. Hanson, was the founder of the Jamaica Agricultural Society in the early 1930s. The young Barrett attended Clarendon College. It was here where he was inspired to live in Africa following a 1957 school visit by the pan-Africanist Dudley Thompson. Writing in 2012 in The Africa Report, Barrett says: “In that visit [Thompson] spoke eloquently of the cultural links that existed between Africa, especially Ghana, and Jamaica. He told us that the future held great potential for the restoration of our souls if we found ways to renew our links with the continent.”
Following graduation in 1959, Barrett joined the Daily Gleaner, and its afternoon tabloid, The Star, as an apprentice journalist, Wikipedia tells us. Three years later, in early 1961, he was a news editor at the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, working with his mentor, John Maxwell, the journalist and political analyst. Barrett relinquished the role at JBC less than a year later, and left Jamaica for England, as Norval Edwards writes in Fifty Caribbean Writers. Here he freelanced with the British Broadcasting Corporation Overseas Department for a year, before leaving for France. As Edwards notes, for the next four years, Barrett was based in Paris, from where he traveled throughout Europe and Africa. He was in Dakar in 1966 for its Arts Festival, and remained in West Africa, where he lectured at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone; he also taught in Ghana. Finally, he settled in Nigeria. Here he taught at the University of Ibadan and worked in radio and television.
Edwards tells us Barrett belongs to a “small group of Afro-Caribbean persons who… made the Atlantic crossing in reverse, and his creative work reflects a preoccupation with the themes of Black identity, dispossession, and survival in the Diaspora”. He adds: “In his well-traveled and varied life, Barrett has worked in every literary genre, with a prolific output of short stories, poetry, plays, and several unpublished novels.” Barrett’s many roles have seen him as a journalist, an editor and contributor, a poet, novelist, playwright, a writer of film scripts, and an occasional visual artist working with paint.
Edwards notes Barrett’s first work in print was The State of Black Desire (1966), a collection of three poems and three essays, which was privately published. This collection, Edwards tells us, takes the position that “Black art, specifically jazz and other forms of Black music, contains positions of strength capable of shaping as well as articulating an aesthetic of survival for the Black man in the West”. Additionally, “Music is thus the form, the shape of Black desire; it is a weapon as well as art.”
While Wikipedia reports favourably on Barrett’s first novel, Song for Mumu (London, 1967; Washington, 1974), Encyclopedia.com notes while popular in some academic communities, it was either not widely reviewed, or the reception was ambivalent. While Encyclopedia.com tells us some critics “questioned the novel’s plotting and readability”, Wikipedia notes positive commentary from the New York Times’ Martin Levine, that, “What shines… is its language.”
As Edwards notes, the importance of Song for Mumu “lies partially in the themes evoked, but mainly in the significance attributed to these themes by Barrett’s fictive techniques: his transformation of the lives, loves, and deaths of his characters into poetic myth and fable, lyrical encounters, and intense evocation of human emotions”.
However, Edwards also notes the novel “was received for the most part with mild approval” by critics, adding “one extremely insightful review” by Edward Baugh in the Caribbean Quarterly (1967, 53) alerted readers to the “concern with ‘the souls of black folk’ and its polyphonic texture of prose, verse, and dramatic dialogue”.
Song for Mumu was followed by a collection of poems, The Conflicting Eye (1973). Edwards tells us this collection “explores a cluster of themes (racial conflict, emotional conflict, the landscape of exile)”; however, the poems “rarely impress, except for now and again a brief flash of elliptical, startling imagery”.
Wikipedia notes Barrett’s second novel, Lipskybound (1977) “has influenced the work of many younger Nigerian writers… interested in breaking the mould of traditional creative writing”. It adds: “As [Barrett] himself described the work in 1972, having struggled for several years writing it: ‘It is an exposition of the heart of natural vengeance in the soul of the transplanted African and of the violent nature of the truth of his spirit out of necessity.’ The third novel, Veils of Vengeance Falling (1985) is a set book used by the Department of English at the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
Barrett’s many plays have received widespread productions and performances. His Jump Kookoo Makka was performed at the Leicester University Commonwealth Arts Festival in 1967. Also, his Home Again was performed in 1967 by Wole Soyinka’s company, while his Sighs of a Slave Dream, a collage of drama, dance, and music, was staged at the Keskidee Center of Islington in the early 1970s. Blackblast was performed in 1973 in London, while After This We Heard Fire was on stage at the Mbari Theatre in Nigeria.
Over the years Barrett has been commended for his fiction and non-fiction writing, and he has received numerous awards. On his 75th birthday in 2016, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari cited his “love for Nigeria, which inspired his relocation from the Caribbean to settle in the country, raise a family and also take up Nigerian citizenship in the 80s”. Buhari also noted that “the thematic thrusts of [Barrett’s] writings on Africa, Africans in Diaspora and Afro-Americans have contributed significantly to global discourse on the history and identity of the black race and the renewed interest in the future of Africa and people of African descent”.
In 1970, Barrett received the Conrad Kent Rivers Memorial Award from the Illinois Arts Council. His poetry collection, A Memory of Rivers: Poems Out of the Niger Delta was shortlisted for the NLNG Prize in Nigeria in 2009; in 2017, he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award for “excellence in creative writing” by the Institute of Arts and Culture at the University of Port Harcourt. He has lived in Nigeria since the 1980s.
Sources for this exploration: Wikipedia, Fifty Caribbean Writers, Encyclopedia.com; and The Africa Report.