Rights as habits of human conduct

At the current rate, there will come a time when the people who require the greatest protection on grounds of the universality of human rights will begin dismissively forging alternative pathways to justice, peace, freedom, and equality.

In my view, generally muted national, regional, and global observance of Human Rights Day last Sunday signalled a state of cognitive dissonance induced by cynically routinised breaches in the letter and spirit of enshrined rights of all varieties.

I would like to think that when the world assembled in 1948 to declare the universal, inalienable nature of human rights and to prescribe their tangible expression it was expected that the ravages of global conflict at that time would have provided an impetus that was urgent and seen to be indispensable.

Alongside the civil and political rights eventually came a vast suite of economic, social, and cultural rights. National constitutions and laws were codifying them. Systems of justice were being crafted to interpret them. Civil society was inculcating rights as foundational values for advocacy and change. More than 60 international human instruments have been created and adopted.

Our leaders were all over the planet signing pieces of paper and delivering speeches and press releases. We were seeing some as exemplars and others as reckless violators and pariahs. There was the institutional entrenching of values deemed to be important pillars of true development –intangibles that belong as much to statute as to stature and status. 

Yet, four days ago, some of the loudest state voices on such imperatives were found, when thin outer coatings were stripped, to be actively presiding over violations of the rights of children, military non-combatants, the poor, the displaced, the different, and the weak.

This is no esoteric parable. Genocide, invasions, threats to territorial integrity, systemic discrimination, state-sanctioned murder and violence – all there in real time before all our eyes.

Despite this, our Caribbean region, whose peoples have been collectively victimised through historical antecedent by the issues frontally addressed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been slow to consider recognition of human rights as being the stuff of official instinct and habit.

Witness active resistance to the notion of all rights as an entitlement of all people. Our countries neither officially nor informally recognise such a truism.

Had the contrary been the case, current attitudes toward the LGBT community, migrants, reproductive rights, freedom of expression, and the rights of the vulnerable among us would have been settled matters of public policy and life.

It would have also helped us come to terms, far less painfully, with current regional and global developments that require an understanding of territorial integrity especially as it relates to the rights of inhabitants, deadly aggression at times of illicit collective punishment, discrimination on account of race and ethnicity, and the more stringent application of civil and political rights as preconditions to the achievement of economic, social, and cultural rights.

We could have told there would have been this difficulty with countenancing such difficult terrain. There is a sprinkling of special interest activism but too few national umbrella organisations in our region (I think our Bar associations should lead this, but they don’t) to capture these obligations within the context of developmental objectives.

The Sustainable Development Goals provided important pathways to understanding the connections, but our countries have not yet taken the hint. For example (and I raise this yet again), SDG 16 speaks to the promotion of “peaceful and inclusive societies” for sustainable development through “access to justice for all”.

A key target (16.10) promotes public access to information and the protection of fundamental freedoms. The Global Forum for Media Development, of which I am a part, put up a stout fight to have this target expressed. Caribbean countries (not T&T so far) have also signed on to the Escazú Agreement on access to information and public participation in environmental matters.

I am unaware of a single political organisation in T&T that put Sunday aside to remind their devotees about these things. Additionally, how many sermons in holy places addressed them?

It seems to be hardly a necessary annoyance at this time to let people know that there are terrible things in the world today that could have been so much different had people resolved to convert rights into durable habits of human conduct.

Edward Baugh speaks on Passages

 

LAUNCH OF WESLEY GIBBINGS’ PASSAGES

(The Observer Board Room, 31 May 2019)

 

Prof. Edward Baugh reviews 'Passages'

The title of the book is Passages.  Since that isn’t the title of a particular poem in the collection, we try to guess where it is taking us, for the word may have various meanings.  As we read, we find that most of the poems deal, in different ways, with comings and goings, sometimes between one person and another, grappling with the idea that these relationships are never fixed or conclusive.  The situation is one of moving towards, of passing, of passing by, of moving away, of inconclusiveness, of ending, of endlessness.

 

So, in “Shadows,” “the shadows born one day ago / are hunting lights, / the forms that put them there / long gone / behind a spaceless sky.”  In “That Time Has Come,” the persona tells us that the “time has come,” presumably to arrange for departure:  “We have waited long enough / The tide has turned / The ship is in.”  He will put his house in order, rearranging the books of poetry on his bookshelves.  “The time has truly come / For old diaries with blank, unturned pages / City streets with tired feet / To flee the frame.”  In “In the End,” “the streets are bare / we greet each other / with knowing, lonely / eyes // And we say goodbye.  Goodbye. / Goodbye.”  The poems make us think; they tease thought.

 

Here is “The House:”

 

              It was a house

              Of many absences

 

              Dust settled on her bed

 

              Outside, the green of mountains blue

              Inside, the shadowy dim of things we knew

 

              I met you here

 

              This empty house

 

              Echoes spliced between silence and quiet

              Nothing etched with nothingness

 

The first poem in the book is titled simply “The Poem,” and it may be read as a prelude, speaking to and for each poem, prefiguring the mind-frame and drift of the collection.  The poem, in its way a love poem, shies away from making any great claim for itself, from conclusiveness, from elation.  In the process, it advances the necessity of moving on, of leaving, of being left:   “I would prefer that you hold / the page to your heart / upside down / and read it once / and put it away,” “and walk away, / slowly, as if on forbidden ground.”  “Just hold the damn poem / in your hand / and read word by word / and just throw it away / and leave it there.” The idea of passage, of passing is being engaged:   “How good it would be / if you read it aloud / so the words sail away / to never / return.”  The line break after “never” in “sail away / to never / return” prompts a double meaning.  The words will sail away, never to return, but also, the words will sail away to “never,” a place, a condition.

“Every Morning (for Mom)” is a plain-speaking, arresting elegy, which begins: “There was no justice / in her leaving / in the middle of the / Poui’s short hello”, and ends, “This morning / I wait for you again / I hope / You too wait for me”.

 

In “The Poem,” also, idea is realized in one or two arresting images.  We should “Swallow [the] poem like a pill. / Like the one that ends / a headache on a plane / or speeding minibus / or riverboat.”  Again: “Drink from it like sweet coconuts / in the island sun. / Then burp politely / and walk away […].”  “Exit” ends with “the sound of the ocean’s / Muffled drums / That fade away / In the dying light.”  In “Once it was,” “the insomniac terrier / In the neighbour’s yard / Howled as if the moon / Had landed there.”  In “The Shore of Dying Dreams,” “Near the empty conch shell / where the groping waves cannot reach, / there’s an old shoe. / Sole lost to uneven pavements […].”  Maybe the reader will wish for more such evocative, meaning-pointing imagery.  Conversely, one might feel that the easy, vaguely poetic “dream” could have been a bit more sparingly used.  Similarly, there might have been some pruning of the little rhetorical redundancies.

 

The scene-setting images of small island, beach, waves, sea, ocean locate the collection, and provide a frame and grounding for the dominant themes.  This frame and grounding, for universal ideas, is Caribbean.  In the middle of the collection we come to a few poems that are set in the Caribbean and the wider Caribbean.  They shift focus from the personal and inter-personal, to the social, the public, the historical, the people, thereby widening the interest of the book.  “River Story” seems to be set in the Guyanese interior and to address ethnic interface in a manner that suggests the surrealism of the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris.  In “Bartica Dreams” we are still in Guyana, in the town of Bartica, at the confluence of the Mazaruni, Cuyuni and Essequibo rivers, gateway to the interior and to the gold and diamond mining areas.  The poem is a response to the Bartica Massacre of 2008, when a gang of criminal gunmen entered the town by boat, murdered twelve citizens and wounded several others.

 

The terror of guns is also central to “Red House Fears” and “Of Haiti And Other Wars.”   The Red House is the popular name of the Parliament building in Port of Spain.  In July 1990 a group of insurgents stormed the building and took captive the Prime Minister and members of his Cabinet, holding them hostage there for six days until the uprising was quelled.  The insurgents killed seven persons, including Mervyn Teague, an employee of the Government Broadcasting Unit and colleague of our poet, who writes: “angry, bursting bullets and angry tears . Mervyn loved it here […].”  Again,

                            

angry, crying bullets, rage and fury –

                             have they died?

                             have we died and, rising

                             with the sound of trumpets,

                             are left with Paradise unfolding?

                             I think not.      

 

 

“Of Haiti And Other Wars” evokes the complex spirit of Haiti’s history of struggle, resistance, loss, oppression and deprivation.  It begins:

                             Dark soldier at attention near the sea

                             A tear, like sudden blood,

                             Down sweat and flesh and the teeth of strangers

                             Through bullets and barrels of loaded guns

 

As the book moves toward its close, there is an upswing in tone and point of view.  There is a clutch of love poems, mostly lyrically affirmative, poems such as “At Night’s End,” “Young Lady,” “Tall and Slim and Wonderful,” and “Love’s Revelations.”

I quote:

 

                             There you are, young lady.

                             March, indeed, brings laughter –

                             brings sunny, Maracas kinds of days;

                             glimmering, tumbling waves

                             on little, noisy islands.

                                                          (“Young Lady”)

Or:

 

                             Because at night’s end

                             When your eyes betray

                             Your dreams

                             And your tiny hands reach like

                             Butterflies for the sky

                             I see the sleep rise

                             With mine

                             Above the groans and strains

                             Of waking earth

                                                          (“At Night’s End”)

Or:       

 

                             Listen to me, lady.

                             He does indeed love you

                             in the way the bee finds the bursting flower

                             in the early dew.

                             And like that time

                             before the evening fell

                             like a ripened mango and, startled,

                             he held you close

                                                          (“This Morning”)     

 

The love poems transition into poems about ageing, looking back on the past, dying, departure:

 

                             On the sands of the seas

                             We stand seeing the sunset

                             Melt before our eyes

                             And cry good-bye

                             To our years

                             Of leaping for golden clouds

                                                          (“A Story”)

 

                             … we both now know

                             each day goes faster than the last

                             a clock ticking on the wall

                             like a leaking toilet

                             in the night

                                                          (“Because We Know”)

 

In “When We Die” the speaker, now ageing, recalls himself as

 

                             I who once walked in the hot, melting asphalt

                             Cooled only by crushed pomeracs and dried dog shit

                             And fumbled sno-cones

                             And the old man’s crumpled sweaty frame

                             Awake from drunken, midday sleep

 

But eventually, departure is release, a going forward and upward.  “Come See Me Fly” ends: “Let’s leave / This weary, dying place / Let’s fly away / Let’s live / Let’s just fly and live.”  To end is to ascend; “passages,” again.

 

 

Edward Baugh