The Stones You See

Report on Zimbabwe's Cyclone

Meeting with the survivors and examining the rubble covering the residential places where homes were destroyed and lives were lost was heartbreaking. Most of the survivors are failing to cope with the trauma. Whilst several humanitarian organizations are distributing aid and offering counseling services,  the interventions  lack proper coordination.

There are so many people needing help who are left neglected. Some are drowning their pain and sorrows in abusing drugs and alcohol. At one of the shelters we visited, most of the young men and women including some elderly folk were heavily drunk. Women and children comprise approximately 80% of the people who died or are still missing. They were either swept off by the floods or  covered in mudslides that were subsequently covered by huge stones which emerged from the ground as top soil layers had been swept off by the unusually heavy rains.

Most painful is  that the two places extensively impacted were settlements  erroneously set up by the city council in places well known to be waterways. These places had been designated as unfit for human settlement during the colonial era, However, after Zimbabwe attained independence in 1980, the local city council authorities disregarded these regulations and proceeded to permit residential building there. All the houses along the two waterways were wiped out and most of the residents were either swept off into the ocean or severely injured. A few survivors remained with absolutely nothing--food, shelter, clothing all gone. All that remains are the huge stones covering the place  they used to call home. 

Sophie Chirongoma, July 2019

A Song of the South

The road is never straight, the way is seldom clear. I went to Savannah, Georgia, to take part in a Jewish wedding. I ended making a journey to America’s racist past--and present. In 1790’s Georgia, the 13th and last British colony (the name Georgia is after King George), enslaved persons were thirty-five percent of the state’s population. Over the course of forty-eight years, Savannah was an integral part of trading in people. Toiling as urban slaves, those human beings, from both Africa and the Caribbean, enabled Savannah to prosper. Though the United States Civil War (referred to by some die-hard southern nationalists as the War of Aggression) ended most physical slavery, the psychic wounds continue one hundred fifty years later. In 2019, I am reminded of that part of my American psyche bound up with the story of enslaved human beings in the country in which I was reared.

The reminders come from a tour around Savannah, led by a passionate African-American who insists that slavery cannot be forgotten. I see squares where blocks of up to four hundred humans were sold . I look at carriage houses in which humans were locked in after their day’s work. In one of Savannah’s most beautiful parks, I gaze at a statue of an unrepentant Confederate soldier. At the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum, I stare at a wood and plaster replica of a 1960’s lunch counter, complete with a seated African-American awaiting a cup of coffee that never comes. Looming over him, arms crossed and pistol at hip, stands a law enforcement officer. An audio of a waitperson informing the seated man he is not welcome plays in the background. She is shouting insults.

Observing present day Savannah as an outsider, I note that Blacks and Whites move in equal but separate spaces. African-Americans have full access to public places, but it feels as though ‘separate but equal’ still prevails. Two parallel non-intersecting tracks,with an occasional nod or conversation between individuals and groups. The predominant sense is of separation, an agreed upon boundary which keeps people from seeing themselves as part of the same neighborhood, let alone the same nation.

A Savannah resident remarks on the city’s bigotry, suggesting one can quadruple the normal racial tension in any other city and have an accurate gauge of what racial life is like in Savannah.

I don’t live in the US now. Its wounds impact me less than when I lived there, and felt, even in incredibly open northern California, the profound racism which is as much a part of the American psyche as motherhood and apple pie. It’s hardwired into the US citizen’s brain. One of America’s premier African-American intellectuals,Toni Morrison, writes “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” In one of her many brilliant books, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, she argues that every white American carries a shadow Black person in their interior. It’s an Other upon whom one can locate inner savageries too difficult to own up to in oneself.

I was a young woman in the Civil Rights era, the days when Martin Luther King made his clarion calls for racial equality, when young people came from all over America to march against segregation, when too many died trying to break apart America’s insistence that Black lives don’t matter. Sure, we had a Black president in Barack Obama. But that was an anamoly. In today’s climate of exclusion and hatred and racists at the highest levels of government, including presidential, it feels like nothing has really changed and that Black lives still don’t really matter.

……………….

Rose Levinson, July 2019

Ruminations on Exhaustion

.".. in the centre of our lives, this time, this day... this spring among the politicians playing cards. In a village of the indigenes, one would have still to discover. Among the dogs and dung, one would continue to contend with one’s ideas." Wallace Stevens, The Glass of Water.

RUMINATIONS ON EXHAUSTION

Just when I think it can't get worse, it does. 'It' is the current state of world politics, particularly the western world with which I'm familiar. More specifically, the US and the UK. A crushing sense of weariness threatens to drown out my belief that futility is not an option. At the moment, it feels like everything I assumed is no longer correct. In short, all bets are off.

How could I have been so stupid as to believe in the idea of progress, things getting and staying better? How could I have thought if I struggled hard enough, I'd be happy instead of tormented by an endless hunger to comprehend? How did I naively assume I'd cease struggling to reconcile endless contradictions? From what can I draw sustenance as I confront my own personal mortality along with the knowledge of the infinitesimally small part I play in the unfolding human drama?

Okay, this is a wail of anguish from a person whose own life is in pretty good shape. I'm a member of the intellectually elite middle class. I live in a city-state I love (London) with another house in northern California from which I emigrated. I have more than enough money. I have a loving life partner who emotionally supports me despite his difficulties with my restless searchings. I have surrogate sons and daughters and grandchildren who fill the gap left by own (unregretted) childlessness. I have much for which to be grateful. I try to practice this difficult emotion.

But along with gratitude and weariness, I'm enraged. I cannot take in how two such despicable human beings as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are leaders of so-called first world countries. I cannot forgive Jeremy Corbyn's stand on Brexit, (rigid spinelessness [sic] ), his refusal to make clear what a disaster Brexit will be for this small island. I'm baffled that an old white guy like Joe Biden, who plays to destructive nostalgia for the good old days, looks like the Democratic frontrunner. I'm overwhelmed by finally understanding how corporations really do run the world, how Big Tech and Big Pharma are nearly untouchable behemoths.

I'm sickened by fake news, false advertising, relentless distortion of truth, shilling on all sides by those with more money than they'll ever need extracting even more from those who can least afford it. And I'm stunned as I realize it's not inconceivable climate catastrophe will wipe out multiple species, including humans.

I react out of my own temperament which is quick to judge, to form opinions. to insist on my rightness. I recognize this to be a limitation as well as a strength, so I struggle to take in views of others who are not in agreement. I try to take a longer, larger view, and sometimes succeed. I strive to nurture others and to be generous. I find my smallness comforting. The realization I'm insignificant in Deep Time is less a matter of distress than of comfort.

I believe if history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes (as Mark Twain reputedly said). Human beings are continually messing up but then finding ways forward. And I think there are wondrous things happening in discoveries around space, time, connectedness--enlargements of the human imagination that will lead to new openings.

That is if--if we don't destroy ourselves and our earthly home before the next period of stability arrives--whenever it does and however it looks. It will take some time for this tumultuous upending of the old order to balance into new solidities. I'm sad and furious I won't get to witness what arises from the ashes of today's crumbling certainties.

Rose Levinson, July 2019