Next-- A Book of Poems by Charles Deemer

Photo of Deemer by his wife, Harriet.

With school out of the way (for now), it is time to move on to another project (or two). I'm looking forward this month to seeing the manuscript Charles Deemer is assembling for his new book of poems, "In My Old Age," which will appear soon as a Round Bend title.

I've seen many of the poems on Deemer's Writing Life II blog, and if you've followed my previous announcements regarding this collaboration, or you are a regular Deemer reader, you probably have as well. I've seen good, solid work from a West Coast artist I have known for 25 years.

I have no problem telling it the way I see it, of course. This book will be the best book of poems published in Portland this year. In fact, this might be the best book of poems published in Portland in the past one-hundred years.

Here is why I like the poems I've seen.

Language. Fuck the obscure and the "poetic" language of the "poets." Deemer is a writer. He is concerned with the truth, and he is concerned with getting there as quickly as possible. He is concerned with the truth, even if it turns out to be a lie. Direct, strong metaphors, humor, pathos, joy, all of it a sudden exposure of something universal in the human condition.

Economy, in other words, drives the writing. Get in, say something that thinking adults can grab hold of, and get out.

Above all else, that is the function of poetry.

Believe me. I've been in this game a long time and I know.



TS

There is Much to Be Done (African Studies)

Well, I did it! I turned in my final history paper today at PSU, and provided I didn't completely blow the assignment I have earned my bachelor's in History, a project that has lately taken on a "just do it and get it done and move on" feel. I love to read history, and my "History of Health and Healing in Africa" class at the university was both inspiring and tedious. The reading was a load, and not all of it was scintillating. But I liked it. I liked being there, sitting with a group of very bright kids (for the most part) who were engaged (for the most part) and serious and determined to learn. I had a great instructor, a young woman named Jennifer Tappan, who knows her stuff and communicates well and demanded that her students work and get as much out of the classroom and reading experiences as possible. All and all a great educational experience. I think I learned something. Glad I did it.

Here is my final paper, sans the footnotes.  I've included a bibliography of sources.

There is Much to Be Done: Hegemony and the New Africanists--An Evaluation of the Past and Present

The focus of this paper will attempt to explore whether actual change has occurred in numerous African states since the Berlin Conference of 1871 set off the “Scramble for Africa.” In the context of a partial and fragmented historiography of health and healing, the contrasts and similarities of the West’s present vision of Africa with that of the colonizers’ will be evaluated from numerous angles, including biomedical and localized healing therapies, political economy and hegemonic control, individualized and group resistance to hegemony and biomedicine, migrant labor, gender considerations, and the scourge of AIDS. An interpretation of the historical and present reality of hegemony, gleaned from select texts, is the dominant theme of this effort.

A triumphalist narrative steeped in myth flourished in the colonial documents of the nineteenth century—the myth of a forbidden, dark, and disease-ridden continent inhabited by uncivilized “savages” who only needed to learn the foundations of a Westernized worldview and hygiene to pull themselves out of their culturally deprived and sickly lives (Prins 159-162, Ranger 256, Swanson 387, Marks 205). Coveted for its natural resources and a favorite target of Christian crusaders in the late nineteenth century, Africa was haphazardly partitioned, coerced, and at times brutally manipulated by European elites, who rarely suspected nor were overly concerned that the unintended consequences of their actions could and often would lead to unimaginable suffering among the African people. In the case of Congo, which Leopold claimed as his private dominion, a deliberate genocide coincided with colonization. In more recent times, in large swaths of Africa, a benign genocide could be said to have occurred vis-à-vis the West’s neglect of HIV/AIDS victims, a situation marked by mismanaged and underfunded attempts to eradicate the disease (Vaughan 56, Landau 262, Hunt 432, Nguyen 1-187).

The rise of African studies as a discipline in the academy has countered many of the lingering effects of colonialism as an intellectual barrier to our understanding of how African health and healing conundrums have evolved over time. By giving health and healing an historical foundation, Africanists have created new narratives that unfold in direct opposition to lingering colonial constructs and the presence of new, highly developed methods of surveillance and coercion, new technologies, and reorganized economies. The new history of health and healing in Africa is very much concerned with power—who held it during the colonial era, who holds it now, and who may hold it in the future (Feierman 75).

While the new historians are laudable, one worries that, like newly developed drugs with an unknown efficacy against AIDS in 1983, their impact will not (or cannot) translate into an antidote against those who would, in the context of health and healing issues, abuse the fundamental right of every human being to lead an optimal existence free of poverty and its associated diseases. It is also presumed that the new Africanists are not responsible for empowering Africa, though such an outcome would be welcomed. When many of the citizens of the richest countries in the world are severely limited by their own incapacity to evolve from racist and/or impoverished modalities, or unable to clearly enunciate the dilemmas confronting them while demanding change, the chances for a final victory over servitude are diminished. The chance of overcoming class constructs on a scale large enough to effect economic power and control is diminished in the face of elites’ business and governmental interests. Collusion on that level is necessarily confined to hierarchal structures that trample the individual economies of the majority while enriching the few. That is as true today as it was in the colonial era, when localized authority guarded the interests of European elites, because it is an aspect of capitalism that is non-negotiable and unlikely to ever change (Nguyen 1-187).

When workers left the merafe in post-World War II Bechuanaland to work in South Africa’s mines for wages, they lost a crucial part of themselves, a part that could be reclaimed only by an adjustment of their “moral imaginations,” an adaptive survival mechanism. Workers were literally changed by the newness in their lives as old paradigms of culture and ritual eroded. The phenomenon demanded resolution and a direct confrontation with new realities. Money (madi) gained import to Batswana because its meaning was forced upon them in an atmosphere of colonial control and increasingly forced dependence upon it. By the same token, the discovery of madi’s liberating qualities appealed to many workers, as did the hard work itself, which gave them new insights into their lives. Strength and individualism emerged as valued assets for many workers in the mines, but the dangers of the job could also create apprehension about the future as Batswana witnessed an onslaught of debility and the toxic effects of unsafe hard labor, as well as the damaged ecology of the merafe, where jobs grew scarcer and scarcer and the Batswana way of life changed (Livingston 107-141).

In Bechuanaland and elsewhere in Africa in the colonial era, the social cost of debility was borne by the workers, just as it is in much of Africa and other parts of the world today. This narrative argues that control within the ongoing economic hegemony of the West comes with profound costs. As “developing nations,” states such as Cote d’Ivoire, which gained Independence in 1960 and at first flourished before growing increasingly dependent on foreign loans to compete amidst nascent globalization, the crush of hegemony is crucial to understanding the new Africanists’ point of view. The neoliberalism of political policies best exemplified by Reaganomics and Thatcherism in the 1980s tied Cote d’Ivoire to its debt and caused the state’s educational system and other institutions to collapse. The newest shibboleths of the West’s economy in the 1980s precluded anything like a reasonable effort to fairly and equitably distribute social costs. The neoliberal model of doing business carried over in the initial fight against AIDS in the mid-nineties, when the known efficacy of ARV therapies should have given the West a better opportunity to do the right thing, but was rather squandered by a reliance on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the pharmaceutical industry to carry the fight in a poorly designed and underfunded model of therapeutics. Today Cote d’Ivoire is struggling to pull itself out of the ravages of a recent civil war, in no small part created by the effects of hegemony (Thomas, Livingston, Nguyen 187).

Like Bechuanaland after World War II and the Meru district of Kenya, in Cote d’Ivoire during the early days of the AIDS crisis, and in other colonies throughout the colonial era, individuals became entangled in colonial systems of surveillance and control and were forced into relationships with governing entities from faraway lands. Bodies, formerly conjoined to cultures guided by vastly different cosmological views, fell under the hegemonic spell of the colonizers in ways that suggest pure hubris on the part of the European powers. In Meru, the British seemed unable to settle on a clear direction of influence; several times creating laws that contradicted former policies in what a modern politician would call a “flip-flop.” It is fair to suggest that elements of individualized resistance (see footnote) came into play in some cultures. Meru’s girls, exemplified by some of their reactions against the ban on circumcision, grew entangled with colonial rule. Some girls circumcised each other and themselves, or at least attempted or pretended to as a show of solidarity against patriarchy, Christian objection, and London’s at-the-time small but noisy feminist movement in the mid-twentieth century (Thomas 1-186).

The history of Africa is a history of political struggle even within the highly nuanced, micro historical discussion of health and healing which the new Africanists favor in the texts under scrutiny here. In the conflation between missionary work and therapeutics that developed under colonialism in Congo, emerging methods of mobility (bicycles) and communications (letter writing) were designed to aid and abet Belgian companies in the control and dissemination of health care to maximize business interests. Where concern for the health of the Congolese was elucidated and carried out, it was conflated with business interests, patriotism, and attempts to keep and promote a ready-made system of forced labor and servitude, aspects of the genocides alluded to above. Health care systems as political and hegemonic exercises took precedence over purely humanitarian reasons for organizing bodies and placing medical dispensaries in key population zones throughout Congo in the colonial era (Hunt 160-195).

The historical analysis under scrutiny here repeatedly draws comparisons between the efficacy of biomedicine and “traditional” or localized forms of therapy. Implicit in discussions of that duality has been the recognition that an historical bias regarding Westernized medicine has dominated the general discourse, particularly in the political and economic realm, from the colonial era through the present. Yet, repeated instances of the efficacy of localized therapies are known. The new Africanists seek to integrate biomedicine and known herbal and cosmological remedies among Africans in their understanding of the history of health and healing in Africa (Whyte 289).

It is important to understand that the persistence of the faith in biomedicine in some circles is a product of the medical hegemony of the West—an understandable but limited result of the undisputed efficacy of certain biomedical therapies worldwide. Since the 1970s, the new Africanists have focused on “medical pluralism,” a conjoining of Westernized and local therapies, as a way to understand the history of disease and healing in Africa. The recognition of this phenomenon, mined out of deep ethnographic and anthropological studies in a multi-disciplinarian effort to locate knowledge, creates testimonials of individualized native resistance to colonialism in a medical context. But the new Africanists succinctly note that medical pluralism also generated new ideas about disease and the efficacy of localized therapies among healers and tribal leaders in parts of the continent. Pluralism was a good thing if allowed to be explored outside the fold of biomedical biases, in other words (Whyte 291).

As First World Africanists and their cohorts in Africa explored new techniques of gathering and disseminating knowledge, they made a remarkable discovery—the locals, these supposedly backward and afflicted citizens of the world, were doing the same thing! Scholars discovered that networks of information-based knowledge in many forms were an aspect of the historiography of Africa long overlooked. Recognition emerged—the history of Africa was a living thing. Notions of African existence being static rather than an amalgam of heterogeneous groupings of people who had created and organized their cultures, were just plain wrong-headed. It was time to take Africa and its diverse people, cultures and many languages (750 to 1000) seriously. The Africanists looked to the medical and cultural anthropologists, interpreting their data flow, and developing a vocabulary suitable to the tasks of scientific and medical exploration. Disease no longer was something that simply happened in the historical narrative of Africa. Rather the Africanists, shaping the shared discoveries of other scholars into medical narratives, gleaned meaning from associated disciplines. One example—it helped to thoroughly understand the historical and scientific differences between rinderpest and schistosomiasis, their causations, cultural significance, and historical markers. It also helped to learn the language of the people one communicated with, particularly as it applied to gathering oral histories and using that material to forage theses which revealed what people actually think and believe about health and healing, about their pasts, their present lives, and what the future may hold for their families and cultures (Kodesh 208, White 1381, Feierman 73-131).

Much of the textual evidence examined herein is concerned with the tension wrought between individuals suffering debility and powerlessness against both state-run and localized hierarchies organized to control populations through two centuries of highly sophisticated and evolved monetary and social design. What is the difference between colonial era bans on circumcision and controversies over perinatal drug trials in Africa today? The answer to the question suggests that power is regenerative; methods of subjugation and control are reissued and updated in new forms of surveillance aligned with the moral sponsorship of social, cultural and economic hegemony. Historically, abused bodies, discipline, and evolving apparatuses of control are constants in the evidence gathered by the new Africanists since their discoveries soared into consciousness in a not-too-distant past and continue to move ahead. Not coincidently, those barriers to actual freedom from abusive power, or what Nguyen refers to as the “therapeutic recolonization” of Africa, are with us as much today as they were in the nineteenth century (Wendland 4, Nguyen 185).

Given the complexity of their exercise, what are the new Africanists capable of offering the world? The argument herein is that hegemony and a persistent method of social, cultural and economic control organized and disseminated by the West, have conspired, whether deliberately or through a pattern of unintended harmful consequences, to give the academy much to stress about. While a new vision of what has happened and continues to happen in Africa has been elucidated, the gap between knowledge and the enactment of strategies to eradicate debility in Africa remains large. The business of creating a link between the histories of health and healing in Africa and the present quandary of Africa is unfinished. African nations remain among the poorest in the world. One is inclined to ask, what is the purpose and intent of the gathering of the knowledge the new Africanists have produced in recent decades? The scholarly disciplines have merged and been hashed out, with plenty of opportunities ahead to make discoveries, but what will be their effects? Can hegemony and the “disease of capitalism” be eradicated from the world? Will capital ever reconcile itself to the earth’s suffering and provide enough to help rather than hinder progress in the field of health and healing? These are difficult questions to answer at this time, and may never be answerable (Malowany 325).

Despite the recognition of the difficulties that lie ahead, new collaborative models are being dreamed of in some circles. James Pfeiffer asks that the policymakers and the researchers and the heads of the foundations and the workers in the NGOs and the rest of the health industry finally admit that current models have to a large degree failed. He lists a number of advisable systemic changes to the bureaucratic nightmare that accompanies programs of disease eradication in Mozambique. These changes make sense for health systems throughout Africa. Pfeiffer is an anthropologist and his ideas deserve consideration, as the twenty-first century is quickly speeding along and there is much to be done in Africa and elsewhere (Pfeiffer 736).

Sources and Bibliography

Articles and Book Chapters

Steven Feierman, “Struggles for Control: The Social Roots of Health and Healing in Modern Africa,” African Studies Review 28:2/3 (1985), 73-147.

Gwyn Prins, “But What Was the Disease? The Present State of Health and Healing in African Studies,” Past and Present 124 (1989), 159-179.

Shula Marks, “What is Colonial about Colonial Medicine? And What has Happened to Imperialism and Health?” Social History of Medicine 10:2 (1997), 205-219.

Maureen Malowany, “Unfinished Agendas: Writing the History of Medicine of Sub-Saharan Africa,” African Affairs 99 (2000): 325-349.

Susan Whyte, “Anthropological Approaches to African Misfortune, from Religion to Medicine,” in Anita Jacobsen-Widding and David Westerlund (eds.), Culture, Experience, and Pluralism: Essays on African Ideas of Illness and Healing (1989).

Neil Kodesh, “Networks of Knowledge: Clanship and Collective Well‐Being in Buganda,” The Journal of African History 49:2 (2008): 197-216.

Megan Vaughan, “The Great Dispensary in the Sky: Mission Medicine,” in Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, 55-76.

Paul Landau, “Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith,” Journal of African History 37:2 (1996), 261-281.

Luise White, “They Could Make their Victims Dull: Genders and Genres, Fantasies and Cures in Colonial Southern Uganda,“ American Historical Review 100:5 (1995), 1379-1402.

Terence Ranger, “Godly Medicine: The Ambiguities of Medical Missions in Southeastern Tanzania,” in Steven Feierman and John Janzen, eds., The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa (1992), 256-282.

Nancy Rose Hunt, “Nurses and Bicycles,” in A Colonial Lexicon of Birth, Medicalization and Mobility in the Congo (1999), ch. 4.

Nancy Rose Hunt, “Le Bebe en Brusse”: European Women, African Birth Spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 21:3 (1988), 401-432.

Maynard W. Swanson, “The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900-1909,” The Journal of African History, 18:3 (1977): 387-410.

James Pfeiffer, “International NGOs and Primary Health Care in Mozambique: The Need for a New Model of Collaboration,” Social Science and Medicine 56:4 (2003): 725-738.

Claire Wendland, “Research, Therapy, and Bioethical Hegemony: The Controversy Over Perinatal HIV Research in Africa,” African Studies Review 51:3 (2008): 1-23.

Textbooks

Lynn Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (University of California Press, 2003).

Julie Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (University of Indiana Press, 2005).

Vinh-Kim Nguyen, The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS (Duke University Press, 2010).


TS

Vinh-Kim Nguyen's "Republic of Therapy"

This is the third of my required response papers to the texts I've been reading for my "History of Health and Healing in Africa" class at Portland State. I signed up for the class without knowing what to expect because, frankly, I knew next to nothing about sub-Saharan Africa at the time. Oh, I knew something of the continent's colonial past and the rise of its various strongmen and dictators who have ruled over the years, and of course apartheid held a certain fascination for me as an American since our own legacy of human rights abuses is well-known, despite the denials of certain members of the jingoistic mob.

What follows is a response to Vinh-Kim Nguyen's "The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in the Time of Aids." Nguyen was one of the first Western physicians to work in Cote d'Ivoire after the severity of the AIDS crisis escalated there in the early nineties. He teaches and practices in Montreal, but he did his time on the front lines in the battle against AIDS, and this is his well-told story.

There are lessons in this story that reflect on America's stratified health system as well, but I'll not get into that now. My paper--

Death by Neglect: The Tragedy of Early AIDS Therapeutics in West Africa

Fewer people are dying of AIDS in Cote d’Ivoire today than did a decade ago, and the struggle for survival is marked by heroism. But given the known efficacy of “AIDS cocktails” since the mid-nineties, the powerless, even the unafflicted, must face the tragedy of what transpired early on, when failed policy initiatives, greed, and the economic hegemony of the West overtly influenced who lived and who died in West Africa.

The collapse of Cote d’Ivoire’s educational and economic systems in the 1980s generated “technologies of the self,” coping mechanisms resulting from the slow response of the world community to the West Africa nation’s poverty in the time of AIDS (Nguyen, Ch. 2, 6). Nguyen has linked the limited success of early HIV/AIDS therapeutics in Cote d’Ivoire to the “unintended consequences” of globalization and the policies of the World Bank’s neoliberal insistence on the privatization of nearly every sector of the nation’s economy as a pre-condition to ensuring developmental loans. The World Bank’s demands, premised on the notion that competitively-winning structural economics might naturally follow, proved disastrous as the nation plunged into poverty and debt in the 1980s and the divide between the haves and the have-nots widened. By the 1990s the poor and sick were paying the price in a barren environment of underfunded therapeutics, corporate (pharmaceutical companies) control, and NGO aid responses reliant on limited resources (Nguyen, Ch. 6).

The economic hegemony of the World Bank helped create conditions unsuitable to battling HIV/AIDS vis-a-vis its politicalized ideology of privatization. The “republic of therapy” in the author’s title suggests the shift of sovereignty from Cote d’Ivoire state to the boardrooms of “Big Pharma,” with NGOs from many locales competing for the limited resources of a donor-dependent fight against HIV/AIDS. Economic coercion strapped the Cote d’Ivoire government to its debt, limiting the depth of its own reaction to the health crisis, which intensified as the population’s poverty and numbers of sick grew (Nguyen, Ch. 6).

In effect, what remained for Ivoirians as the health crises blossomed was the power of the self and “communication technologies,” which Nguyen elucidates by referencing the theories of Foucault to examine how people respond as individuals in group environments, how leadership emerges and evolves, and how hierarchies are created from the energy borne of group dynamics. Therein lies another aspect of the author’s research—that sovereignty not only passed to corporations and NGOs in the early fight against HIV/AIDS, but also to individuals scrambling—literally—to survive in the face of limited drug trials and self-help opportunities. Necessarily, there were few winners in the scramble (Nguyen, Ch. 2).

Nguyen asks us to not paint a rosy picture of individualized sovereignty, for it created a subset of social problems within therapeutic groups, and of course was never the optimal way to fight AIDS. The author is just as clear that the corporatized/donor method of therapeutics was faulty. It follows that political policy as well as the NGOs’ dependence on the teats of foundations and ultra-rich donors did, if not sanction murder, at the very least create conditions for death by neglect in the initial fight against AIDS.

Source

Nguyen, Vinh-Kim, The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS, Duke University Press, 2010.

TS

U.S. Bank Robbery

As if more evidence need be offered of the class war that is making the good old USA such a bitch, I cite a letter I received from US Bank regarding my meager checking account:

"On July 24th, your checking account ending xxxx will transition to a U.S. Bank Easy Checking account. The monthly maintenance fee for this is $6.95 with online statements or $8.95 with paper statements."

Mind you, my checking account with U.S. has been free for the past 20 years. Now all of a sudden things are going to be "easy?"

I scoff...

The letter goes on to explain how this robbery can be avoided by depositing more money per month and keeping a floating balance above a set figure. Being on a fixed income at the moment, neither option is available to me.

This hokey missive then describes some of the new "benefits" I'll have by participating in the rape. Mind you, nothing at all is new as service except the fee/robbery.

Like the color-coded scale of "terrorist threat," the bank is offering new and improved "packages." They are Silver, Gold, Platinum."

Whoopie!!

All of which is to say, RIP Gil Scott-Heron. You'll be missed.



TS

Planning Ahead

I'm looking ahead to the end of spring term, the end of my run at a formal education (is that the right expression?) at PSU, and the beginning of something new--namely working with Charles Deemer as we prepare his new book of poetry for publication here at RBP. This is terribly exciting, a big move for the press, and something I've wanted to do for months now, i.e, find other writers who can help carry the legacy of RBP forward.

I've published two fine books by K.C. Bacon (see sidebar). With Deemer's "In My Old Age" and whatever else I can find in my lifetime added to the mix...well, let's just say I plan on leaving something behind. History will give it meaning if it is worthwhile.

In addition, I want to begin work in earnest on my second memoir. I've been writing it in my head for months now; it's time to commit it to paper.

Charles, an adjunct professor of screenwriting at PSU, is a busy man himself, but prolific in the poetry realm of late. He's on record saying he doesn't write poems. They come through him (or somesuch), which is what honest poets say.

I like this recent piece considering the weather.

Don't know if it'll make Deemer's final cut, but there is plenty more where that came from. I expect a mid-summer publication date, so stay tuned.


TS

Heart of Loneliness

The following are two essays I've recently submitted in my class on the history of health and healing in Africa. As I've recently more or less ignored this blog, with infrequent posts, I have been engaged in this final class to earn my undergraduate degree in history at Portland State. It has commanded a lot of my attention with a great deal of reading and rigorous analysis of the texts.

From the "For What It's Worth" Department here at Round Bend Press:


Heart of Loneliness: Love, Migration and Sexuality in Postwar Bechuanaland

Fissures in Botswana society resulting from colonial, industrial and economic influences created new conditions of loneliness among Batswana in the post-World War II era. A heart of loneliness displaced old paradigms of community as a new morality filled the vacuum created by migration, debility and disaffiliation. As social conditions changed, a re-evaluation of relationships and a new meaning of love between men and women arose from nascent alienation. The moral imagination of Batswana stretched into new territory.

By 1960, 20,000 Tswana men were working for wages in mines, having left the merafe of southeastern Bechuanaland to toil in South Africa. Another significant number of workers—men and women—joined the flow of migration, seeking alternative wage work where they could find it, often far from the merafe and the familiarity of their old communities (Julie Livingston, p. 145).

Love in the time of migration became skewed. Amid new moral and physical landscapes, many men and women searched for each other in their hearts. As the influences of the gerontocracy and the chiefs/rulers of their culture eroded, they struck out on their own. While the essence of the heart (bopelo), a cosmological reckoning steeped in the merafe and the quest for purity and ancestral pacification remained strong for a time, as did the habit of cultural deference to elders, conditions were inevitably altered in the face of an emerging economy of individualism. Where men and women once lived and slept with each other in environments that promoted mutual understanding amid Tswana rituals, suspicions, worry, and dread (and attendant legal issues) arose in unions fragmented by space and time and the erosion of familial and sexual rituals. Men and women began to “break the rules.”

The heart of loneliness brought attendant problems to the social framework of Bechuanaland. Livingston refers to Lynn Thomas’ research in Kenya, where similar paradigm shifts opened Kenyan society to new levels of disaffiliation in the colonial era, resulting in a surge of unplanned pregnancies, abortions, and infidelity. The new order and evolving worldview of many young Kenyans was as much an effort to “create something new” as it was a reaction to the floundering of the old order, the author quotes Thomas (Livingston, p. 144). Livingston aptly applies this phenomenon to her own research in Botswana, finding causal similarities in the two cultures.

New levels of anxiety and alienation grew attached to personhood among Batswana in the postwar era through Independence. One is able to infer from the stark spike in mental health issues in the postwar era that men and women were suffering from more than debilities arising from war, industrialism and the economic abuses of the colonial system; they were also suffering in the realm of love. The heart of loneliness grasped them with an increasingly westernized discomfiture. As it happened, love did not so much fall apart as it rather grew irrevocably into something new and daunting in the Tswana psyche.

Livingston, Julie. Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana, Indiana University Press, 2005

I highly recommend the above work if you have the slightest interest in African culture and the impact of colonial rule in the twentieth century. It is a challenging and deep-seeded work by a brilliant historian. Despite its depth, or perhaps because of it, it is a remarkable read.

This second essay is on Lynn Thomas' "Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya. While it is not as readable as Livingston's book, it remains fascinating for its discussion of female circumcision as a cultural phenomenon in parts of Africa.

Entangled Meru, Entangled Methodologies

An incursive interpretation of Meru historiography shapes Thomas’s analyses of native gender and generational disaffiliation, and British political and religious influence in central Kenya during the colonial era. Thomas attacks patriarchy with subtle precision. She deftly eschews teleology in her analyses by dissecting common entanglements between integrated colonial and Meru cultures that restricted the power of Meru women, demonstrating how colonial and localized patriarchal authority undermined these women.

Anti-colonial resistance as a major element of change in Meru is thus given short shrift in the author’s understanding of the conditions that led to upheaval in Kenyan society as well as independence, as if to say in bold lettering, Cold War? What Cold War? Social and cultural entanglement, Thomas argues, is the most important aspect of the historiography in question. It is a narrow focus, but deep in meaning. The author paints entanglement as the tension wrought between the expectations of a pre-colonial Meru culture once engaged in ordinary acts of living against the encroachment of a westernized ethos based in classist, racist, sexist and generalized assumptions of reality. Much textual evidence of these historical markers exists. Thomas isn’t concerned with it.

Vaginas, not philology, formulate her dialecticism as she graphs how both the colonizing and subjugated cultures grew entangled over time through laws and policies regulating women’s bodies. These discredited regulations stranded colonists in an imbroglio of complex social problems they were unwilling to admit--or were unaware--they themselves created. Analyzing this mélange, Thomas develops the post-modernist’s array of precepts. She throws off genre interpretations of anti-colonial rebellion steeped in the nuances of political and revolutionary fervor in favor of a deeper, incursive analysis of patriarchy as it played out in the collusion of colonial and localized Meru interests. Her research demonstrates again and again the fallacy of a black and white, East versus West, interpretation of Meru historiography. The core of the author’s argument synthesizes imperial and localized patriarchy, and for good reason, for she claims it led to myriad abuses of young women. But her argument is just as intent upon demonstrating that Meru’s historiography is unwieldy, and that teleological and anti-colonial messaging based in ideology are problematic.

Thomas, Lynn. Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya, University of California Press, 2003.

Thanks for reading.


TS

Posting

I'm having a hard time with Blogger for some reason. Can't space paragraphs the way I want them.

It's really frustrating and turning into more work than I'm prepared to do just to post a few thoughts.

TS

Illness, Africa, Cinema

I have a yearly sickness thing going on. Last year at this time I went through a two-week period of general ill-health and discomfort. Since childhood, I've had sinus cavity issues. When I get congested and the snot begins to flow, it flows like the Amazon.

I'm having my yearly attack, but at least the feverish light-headedness has dissipated somewhat, which is not to claim I'm now all of a sudden clear-headed. That has never been the case, even in my young and vigorous times.

I'm taking a history course at Portland State, wrapping up a final class to earn a history degree at that fine university. Being sick and debilitated myself lately hasn't made reading about the long suffering of Africans any easier. The class is an overview of health issues in numerous African nations from colonial times through the HIV/AIDS crisis of today.

Twenty-percent of the citizens of Gaborone in Botswana are HIV/AIDS infected. Imagine that.

One thing that brings me succor even in these brutal times--I watch many movies. I've been on a kick lately, eyeing the monitor between sneezing and coughing bouts. I've revisited a few of my favorites and been catching up on a generation or two of films that I somehow avoided or missed in my slavish devotion to reading and watching sports from the 70s to the present.

A partial list of a few I've caught lately, in no particular order:

The Last Detail

Au Revoir Les Enfants

Endgame

Nowhere in Africa

The Interpreter

Insomnia

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

The Big Lebowski

Battle for Warsaw

A Prophet

Athens, GA: Inside Out

Once Upon a Time in America

Army of Crime

Carlos: Miniseries

Letters from Iwo Jima

The Battle of Algiers

The Man Who Wasn't There

Platoon

Trumbo

Fargo

Restrepo

Defiance

See how sick I've been? Unless you're spending a lot of time in bed, too discomforted to sleep, bored with your own sad state of affairs, it would be impossible to watch all these films without feeling guilty.

TS

Kenneth Patchen

"The Way Men Live Is a Lie"

The way men live is a lie.
I say that I get so goddamned sick
Of all these pigs rooting at each other's asses
To get a bloodstained dollar-Why don't
You stop this senseless horror! this meaningless
Butchery of one another! Why don't you at least
Wash your hands of it!

There is only one truth in the world:
Until we learn to love our neighbor,
there will be no life for anyone.

The man who says, "I don't believe in war,
But after all somebody must protect us"-
Is obviously a fool-and a liar.
Is this so hard to understand!
That who supports murder, is a murderer?
That who destroys his fellow, destroys himself?

Force cannot be overthrown by force;
To hate any man is to despair of every man:
Evil breeds evil-the rest is a lie!

There is only one power that can save the world-
And that is the power of our love for all men everywhere.

Kenneth Patchen

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Four Absurd Plays

"Terry Simons writes silly plays, but he does so deliberately, with the intent to destroy all that is precious to those who would murder you..." --Buddy Dooley.

So writes my friend and sometimes nemesis, Buddy Dooley, addressing the consolidation of four of my plays into one handy volume titled, wisely enough, "Four Absurd Plays."

This book is Round Bend Press' can't miss pick of the week. One thing I admire about Dooley is his literary tastes, though never tell him I said that. He would be even more insufferable as a human being.


TS

Proper Names

Words Battered in a Bar

When your eyes
glazed over
was that you or me?

God knows I
would approve of it
if you knew Gramsci,

And did not readily
confuse him with
the “poet” Versace,

An able man
I guess, but not quite
up to the task

Of leading a charge
through the fire of history,
or humanity’s discontent.

You and I should part
as we arrived and look
for something less contrived.

Love may yet
find us—
outside this dive.



TS

Poem

A Laceration Before Dining

I have no
claim to sainthood
and it is true I don’t
like many people much
and occasionally use
such as a crutch
to touch upon the
cruelty of mankind
and whatever else there
is that makes us blind—
and of course I’ll
live with that if
you don’t mind very much—
which reminds me—isn’t it
nearly time for lunch?

TS

Forwarded from Lee Santa

How the GOP came to view the poor as parasites-and the rich as our rightful rulers. By Jonathan Chait

LAST WEEK THE Republican Party sounded two distinct voices. First we heard the angry demands of the Tea Party, speaking through its hardline conservative allies in the House, pushing the government to the brink of a shutdown. But then emerged the soothing tones of Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, who fashions himself the in­tellectual leader of the party, unveiling a budget manifesto he calls the "Path to Prosperity."

Ryan portrays his goals in reassuringly pecuniary terms - he's just the friendly neighborhood accountant here to help balance your checkbook. "I have a knack for numbers," he chirps. ABC News compared him to a character in Dave, the corny 1993 movie about an average Joe who mistakenly assumes the presidency and calls in his CPA buddy-that would be Ryan-to scour the federal budget and bring it into bal­ance.

If he has any flaw, he just cares too much about rescuing the country from debt, gosh darn it! In fact, the two streams-the furious Tea Party rebels and Ryan the earnest budget geek-both spring from the same source. And it is to that source that you must look if you want to understand what Ryan is really after, and what makes these activists so angry. The Tea Party began early in 2009 after an improvised rant by Rick Santelli, a CNBC commentator who called for an uprising to protest the Obama administration's subsidizing the "losers' mortgages." Video of his diatribe rocketed around the country, and protesters quickly adopted both his call for a tea party and his general abhorrence of government that took from the virtuous and the successful and gave to the poor, the uninsured, the bankrupt-in short, the losers. It sounded harsh, Santelli quickly conceded, but "at the end of the day I'm an Ayn Rander." Ayn Rand, of course, was a kind of politicized L. Ron Hubbard-a novelist-philosopher who inspired a cult of acolytes who deem her the greatest human being who ever lived.

The enduring heart of Rand's totalistic philoso­phy was Marxism flipped upside down. Rand viewed the capitalists, not the workers, as the producers of all wealth, and the workers, not the capitalists, as useless parasites. John Gait, the protagonist of her iconic novel Atlas Shrugged, expressed Rand's inverted Marxism: "The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those be-low him, but gets nothing except his material payment, re­ceiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains."

In 2009 Rand began popping up all over the Tea Party movement. Sales of her books skyrocketed, and signs quoting her ideas appeared constantly at rallies. Conserva­tives asserted that the events of the Obama administration eerily paralleled the plot of At­las Shrugged, in which a liberal government precipitates eco­nomic collapse. One conservative making that point was Ryan. His citation of Rand was not casual. He's a Rand nut. In the days before his star turn as America's Accountant, Ryan once appeared at a gathering to honor her philosophy, where he announced, "The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand."

He continues to view Rand as a lodestar, requiring his staffers to digest her creepy tracts. When Ryan warns of the specter of collapse, he is not merely referring to the alarming gap between government outlays and receipts, as his admirers in the media assume. (Every policy change of the last decade that increased the deficit-the Bush tax cuts, the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq-Ryan voted for.) He is also invoking Rand's almost theological certainty that when a government punishes the strong to reward the weak, it must invariably collapse. That is the crisis his Path to Prosperity seeks to avert.

Viewed as an effort to reduce the debt, Ryan's plan makes little sense. Many of its proposals either have nothing to do with reducing deficits (repealing the financial-reform bill loathed by Wall Street) or actually increase deficits (making the Bush tax cuts permanent). It relies heavily on distant, phantasmal cuts. During the debate over health-care reform, Ryan insisted that Medicare cuts used to finance universal coverage might add up on paper but they'd never stick-they were too far down the road, and Congress would just walk them back when people complained. But Ryan proposes identical cuts in his own plan. What's more, he saves trillions of dollars from Medicare by imposing huge cuts on anybody who retires starting in 2022. So not only has he adopted the cuts he claimed would never come to pass because they're too harsh and too distant, he imposes far harsher and more distant cuts of his own.

Indeed, Alice Rivlin, the fiscally conservative Democratic economist who endorsed an earlier version of his Medicare plan, called his new plan unrealistic. (Ryan nonetheless continues to imply that she supports it.) Ryan's plan does do two things in immediate and specific ways: hurt the poor and help the rich. After extending the Bush tax cuts, he would cut the top rate for individuals and corporations from 35 percent to 25 percent.

Then Ryan slashes Medicaid, Pell Grants, food stamps, and low-income housing. These programs to help the poor, which constitute approximately 21 percent of the federal budget, absorb two thirds of Ryan's cuts. Ryan spares anybody over the age of 55 from any Medicare or Social Security cuts, because, he says, they "have organized their lives around these programs."

But the roughly one in seven Americans (and nearly one in four children) on food stamps? Apparently they can have their benefits yanked away because they were only counting on using them to eat. Ryan casts these cuts as an incentive for the poor to get off their lazy butts. He insists that we "ensure that America's safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency." It's worth translating what Ryan means here. Welfare reform was premised on the tough but persuasive argument that providing long-term cash payments to people who don't work encourages long-term dependency. Ryan is saying that the poor should not only be denied cash income but also food and health care.

The class tinge of Ryan's Path to Prosperity is striking. The poorest Americans would suffer immediate, explicit budget cuts. Middle-class Americans would face distant, uncertain reductions in benefits. And the richest Americans would enjoy an immediate windfall. Santelli, in his original rant, demanded that we "reward people [who can] carry the water instead of drink the water." Ryan won't say so, but that's exactly what he's doing.

Lee http://lee-santa.artistwebsites.com/


Thoughts worth pondering.

TS

Big Doings Planned for Autumn

Things are beginning to come together for a special Round Bend Press night at the Blackbird Wineshop in North Portland this fall.

The program will include readings by four or five Round Bend authors, hopefully giving them some positive exposure.

I've been furiously writing the poets affiliated in some manner or other with the press to sign them on.

Some "mainstream" recognition for the effort these poets are putting forth to create the legacy of their work and Round Bend would be nice.

You won't want to miss the Oct. 5th gathering, kicking off at 7 p.m. that Wed. night, as part of the establishment's ongoing, monthly literary/arts series.

I'll have many more posts between now and then to keep things on the front burner.

In related news, RBP is set to publish a book of poetry by Charles Deemer this summer. This well-known playwright, screenwriter and educator (Portland State) will enchant and confound you with his new collection, "In My Old Age." He'll appear at the Blackbird event and likely read from the new work.

Other writers I'm hoping can appear at Blackbird include K.C. Bacon, the author of two books of poetry from Round Bend, and Sam White, whose enigmatic "The Huncke Poems" kicks off the recently published RBP anthology, "Cold Eye."

Check out these writers work at the sidebar, along with many other RBP titles, all available from Amazon and Lulu.

This is the place, but much more later. http://blackbirdwine.com/.

A DRINKING SONG

Wine comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;

That's all we shall know for truth

Before we grow old and die.

I lift the glass to my mouth,

I look at you, and I sigh.

W.B. Yeats

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Seasonal Dysfunction

I can't recall ever looking forward to the end of the Oregon rainy season as intensely as I am these days. I've had it with wetness. I'm at the end of my weather rope.

When I retire (which I'll never do in actuality) I think I'll move to a sunny place in Mexico to live out my days. It's a fantasy of mine, but an economically unfeasible one at this point.

I have a friend who too often reminds me that forecasters are calling for another wet late spring and early summer in the Pacific Northwest. Last year was awful, with a very wet May and above average rainfall in June. We're to get another dose this year evidently.

I have another friend, from Florida, who loves our pissy, gray skies and doesn't miss the heat and humidity of his native state. Thinks he's in heaven here. I think he'd go shirtless all the time if it was socially acceptable.

I've lived in Oregon for most of my life, with the exception of four years total, when I lived in San Francisco, which was nice and foggy (in the Richmond), and in New England with its pronounced four seasons (remarkable, really, I was always torn between my Oregon roots and New England's climate variety).

It's getting bad. And I'm getting older and more crotchety.

Mmmmm...Mexico.



TS