March 20, 2019 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
it great again?
His vow to build a wall along the Mexican border has had little traction and much opposition. His serial lying, his concoction of a “national emergency” about a wall, his control of the Republican Party, and his attempt to usurp Congress have fallen flat. The wall does not exist and for all practical purposes will never exist.
His propaganda about the great economic recovery under his watch is a myth and a lie. The national deficit has been increasing by 17% each year, according to the Treasury Department. It is now almost a trillion dollars! At this rate, one can only imagine what it could be under the rest of Trump’s mandate. Compare that to the great economic recovery of his predecessor President Obama.
The deficit has soared as a result of Trump passing laws giving huge tax cuts to the super rich including his family members, cronies, individuals, companies and organizations. Instead of investing the funds to create jobs for the lower and middle classes, the rich have put their money into savings, offshore tax havens, money laundering and tax avoidance strategies. He has promised billions more for military and nuclear build up, in preparation for another potential war. This is what is called “Trumponomics”.
Trump promised a détente, to bring “peace” to the world, keeping North Korea under control, and enjoying good relations with Russia and China. He is the man who said he was a master of “making a deal”. Well, it looks like he made a deal with Russia, all behind the scenes that even his own government doesn’t know the details of; a deal that involved humongous amounts of money in private business, and scandal, and even suspicion of “treason” under American law! Russian interference into his corrupt election is suspected to be part of that deal which is being investigated by Mueller and associates.
His deal with China turned out to be a trade war with China and other countries around the world, throwing the global economy into a spin and the threat of a recession. Financial markets have been fluctuating wildly. The Chinese are selling even more goods and services to the USA, leading to a growing trade imbalance.
Like the North Koreans, the Chinese have stood their ground against Trump’s “bullying” type of making a deal. The trade deficit is rising in spite of all of Trump's promises and propaganda. Is that how you “make America great again”?
The falling value of the Boeing Corporation, a giant in military and aerospace development, in jobs and spending, in the United States, is another sign of the decline of that US industry. The company knew that their plane was fatally faulty but did not fully level with the buyers or correct the problem. Trump incidentally, is a big supporter of Boeing which reportedly made a hefty contribution to his presidential campaign. Is that how you make America great again?
Trump thought that he could corral “rocket man” as he called Kim, the North Korean president. Kim had other plans which caught Trump by surprise. In fact both “summit meetings” were no more than a stage show for both parties. Trump’s negotiating skills are sub-zero. To surround himself with military “hawks” as advisers did not help matters either. The United States and the world was a much safer place when Obama was in power. Americans could go to bed and sleep peacefully knowing that the country was in good hands.
Whatever happened to Trump’s promise “to drain the swamp”? He placed his family and mob type characters in high office. He ran the presidency like a mob boss issuing threats and intimidations to those who crossed his path. There has been no accountability and a blind eye shown by members of the Republican Party in House and Senate to his transgressions. Congress and Government oversight, for all practical purposes, disappeared over the last two years in the Republican controlled Congress and Senate.
The White House has been a revolving door. What happened to his boast that he was going to get “the best team of men and women in America” to do the job as his advisers? He got the best team of liars and lawyers to cover for him, a number of whom have already arrived in jail, or are under investigation, or are waiting for trial, and the hammer to drop. Trump seemingly is being protected by the American constitution, so far. He is trying to twist the constitution and bypass Congress and the law. He believes he is above the law. His luck may run out as it did for “Tricky Dick”, former American President Nixon. As it stands now, many of the investigations seem to be leading to the White House where the swamp is the deepest!
What has happened to the peace and prosperity that Trump promised Americans? Instead the level of division, hatred, racism, discrimination, religious intolerance, and increasing violence appear to be taking the country to the verge of civil war. The breakdown of law and order is a growing cancer on the Presidency and the country. You reap what you sow.
Trump's boast that he has “the police, the army and Trump bikers who can play tough, very tough and it would be bad, very bad”, was a warning to left wing supporters and law abiding people. It is in line with a number of threats and his support for violence and right wing, radicalized individuals in his presidential campaign and during his presidency.
The recent attack and massacre of Muslims as they practised their faith in New Zealand, is a support for Trump’s call for nationalism, intolerance and right wing radicalization. We heard that propaganda from Hitler. Does history have to repeat itself? The rise in attacks on ethnics, Muslims, Jewish and other religions in the United States and other countries is frightening, in spite of Trump’s denial of same.
It comes as no surprise that the terrorist in the recent New Zealand massacre, hails Trump “as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose” in his manifesto, delivered before his attack. The terrorist in his manifesto also decried “the decaying culture of the white, European, Western world”. He went on to state his objections to immigration and multiculturalism. Does this sound familiar?
Sadly, I have heard these sentiments close to home in our beloved Canada. Has Trump had an influence in the rise of racism and violence, in and out of the United States? The answer is obvious.
Trump is hoping for a re-election to keep him out of jail, waiting for a statute of limitations to apply. There are times when a presidential pardon for himself won’t work. The emperor has no clothes. It will be interesting to see how long his campaign of lies will sustain his base. His promises of “making America great” has brought a great nation to its knees. The United States has lost friends and allies from around the world. Their democracy is being attacked from within and without. Can you imagine the world with a second term of Trump presidency and mob rule? If the creeks don’t rise and the sun still shines I’ll be talking to you.
By Romeo Kaseram
Maryse Condé (née Boucolon) was born on February 11, 1934, at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies, the youngest of eight siblings. Condé encountered Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as a young girl, and it became an incipient contributor to her desire to be a writer. As she told Annalisa Quinn of The New York Times, having read the novel, “I decided that one day I would write a book as powerful and beautiful”; notably, when she was 11 years old, Condé had already penned her first novel. Her early education was acquired in Guadeloupe, and after high school, she journeyed to the Sorbonne in Paris, where she attended the Lycée Fénelon, majoring in English.
According to Wikipedia, in the years between 1960 and 1972, Condé taught in Guinea, Ghana, and then Senegal. She was also politically active during this turbulent time in Africa, and was deported from Ghana during the 1960s. She was back in Paris following Africa, where she taught Francophone literature at Paris Diderot University, Paris Nanterre University, and the New Sorbonne University. She acquired her Master of Arts, and her Doctor of Philosophy degrees in 1975 at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she studied Comparative Literature, and examined black stereotypes in Caribbean literature. She married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor, in 1959, and together the couple had four children; they divorced in 1981. The following year, she married Richard Philcox, an English-translator, who has translated most of her novels.
Despite writing her first novel at age 11, and driven by the desire to “write a book as powerful and beautiful” as Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Condé did not publish until she was nearly 40 years old. The reason for such a late start, she told Quinn, being: “I didn’t have confidence in myself and did not dare present my writing to the outside world.” Wikipedia notes Condé’s first novel, Heremakhonon (1976), “was incredibly controversial”, and was pulled from the shelves after six months. According to Wikipedia, while “[the novel’s] story closely parallels Condé’s own life during her first stay in Guinea, and is written as a first-person narrative, she stresses that it is not an autobiography”. Heremakhonon is itself the story, as Wikipedia notes, which Condé describes as an “‘anti-moi,’ an ambiguous persona whose search for identity and origins is characterised by a rebellious form of sexual libertinage.” Since the publication of Heremakhonon, Condé has written 20 novels, including A Season in Rihata (1981), which is set in a late 20th-century African space; I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1986), a historical novel about a black woman condemned during the Salem witch trials; and her best-selling two-volume Segu (1984) and The Children of Segu (1985), which is set in historic Segou, now part of Mali, and examines the violent impact of the slave trade, Islam, Christianity, and white colonisation on a royal family from 1797-1860.
Condé’s “homage” to Brontë, her dream following her early reading of Wuthering Heights, was produced in the text, Windward Heights (2008). This novel is set in Guadeloupe, and according to Wikipedia, here “race and culture are featured as issues that divide people”. Interviewed for the Bomb Magazine in 1999 by Rebecca Wolff, Condé reflected on how she drew from her Caribbean heritage to write Windward Heights, saying, “To be part of so many worlds – part of the African world because of the African slaves, part of the European world because of the European education – is a kind of double entendre. You can use that in your own way and give sentences another meaning. I was so pleased when I was doing that work, because it was a game, a kind of perverse but joyful game.”
Quinn tells us Condé’s novels are “emotionally complex” entities that “reach across history and cultures”, while noting Howard Frank Mosher’s comment in his review of I, Tituba, that, “It is impossible to read her novels and not come away from them with both a sadder and more exhilarating understanding of the human heart, in all its secret intricacies, its contradictions and marvels.”
Condé moved to the US in 1986 following acceptance of a teaching Fulbright scholarship, where she became a professor of French and Francophone literature at Columbia University in New York City. She was the writer-in-residence for the 14th Puterbaugh Conference on World Literature at the University of Oklahoma in 1993. Along with her fiction, Condé also fulfilled a distinguished career as an academician, having also taught at the University of California, Berkeley; UCLA; the Sorbonne; The University of Virginia; and the University of Nanterre. She retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French in 2004.
Last year, Condé won The New Academy Prize in Literature, which was established as a one-off award by a group of over 100 Swedish cultural figures in response to the scandal and cancellation of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Chair of the judges at the New Academy, Ann Pålsson, described Condé as a “grand storyteller” who “belongs to world literature”, while noting, “She describes the ravages of colonialism and the post-colonial chaos in a language which is both precise and overwhelming. The dead live in her stories closely to the living in a …world where gender, race and class are constantly turned over in new constellations.”
Responding to the 2018 awards, Condé said she was “happy and proud”, adding, “I belong to a small island with no say on international issues. Guadeloupe is mentioned only when there is a hurricane, but I have always been convinced we have a wonderful culture fabricated from various influences: Europeans, Africans, Indians, Chinese. Winning this prize would mean that our voice, the voice of the Guadeloupeans, is starting to be heard. It would be the beginning of a true Guadeloupean identity.”
Condé also received Le Grand Prix Litteraire de la Femme in 1986; Le Prix de L’Académie Francaise in 1988, and, Le Prix Carbet de la Caraibe in 1997. She was named Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2001. She spends her time with her husband between the US and Guadeloupe.
Sources for this exploration: Wikipedia; The Guardian; Britannica; Columbia University; and The New York Times.