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Three Worlds One Vision

Monthly Archives: January 2020

A Hundred Seconds to Midnight

26 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption

≈ 40 Comments

Tags

Climate activist Greta Thunberg, Divesting from fossil fuels, Doomsday Clock/Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Global climate emergency, Global Risks Report 2020, Increased threat of nuclear war, Michael T Klare, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, World Economic Forum 2020 in Davos

 

On Thursday, January 23, 2020, our atomic scientists advanced the Doomsday Clock another twenty seconds, bringing the fate of humanity to a hundred seconds to midnight. For those who don’t know, midnight signifies humanity’s self-annihilation with its nuclear arsenal. The guns that Americans cling to, like a toddler clings to his teddy bear, would be rendered useless in the face of a nuclear threat. To learn more, read the full statement issued by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

In his article “Twin Threats,” published in The Nation magazine (issue dated 01/27/2020), Michael T. Klare argues:

“All things being equal, rising temperatures will increase the likelihood of nuclear war, largely because climate change will heighten the risk of social stress, the decay of nation-states, and armed violence in general…”

Of special concern are India, Pakistan, and China—all well-armed with nuclear weapons of mass destruction—that will face conflicts over dwindling water supplies. Pakistan and western India share the same Indus River system. Likewise, eastern India and western China both depend upon the Brahmaputra River for their water needs. Unlike oil, water is essential for human survival.

While the American government continues to publicly disavow our global climate emergency, Klare notes that our “nation’s senior military leaders recognize that climate disruption is already underway, and they are planning extraordinary measures to prevent it from spiraling into nuclear war.”

On Friday, January 24, at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, during a panel discussion about the impact of climate change on the global economy, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was quick to say: “Let’s call it an environmental issue and not climate change.” What’s more, he argued, experts are overestimating its monetary impact.

During a press briefing the day before, Mnuchin dismissed climate activist Greta Thunberg’s call for divestment from fossil fuel companies. He told Yahoo Finance: “After she goes and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us.” What can Greta and the rest of us economic neophytes learn from the experts?

On January 15, prior to its event in Davos, the World Economic Forum released The Global Risks Report 2020 in London, UK. Bear in mind that this report, produced in partnership with Marsh & McLennan and the Zurich Insurance Group, deals with financial risks for transnational corporations and national and the global economies.

Over 750 global experts and decision-makers were asked to rank their biggest concerns in terms of likelihood and impact. For the first time in the survey’s ten-year outlook, the top five global risks in terms of likelihood are all environmental. In concise terms, these risks are:

1. Extreme weather
2. Climate Action failure
3. Natural disasters
4. Biodiversity loss
5. Human-made environmental disasters

The political landscape is polarized, sea levels are rising and climate fires are burning. This is the year when world leaders must work with all sectors of society to repair and reinvigorate our systems of cooperation, not just for short-term benefit but for tackling our deep-rooted risks.
~ Borge Brende, President of the World Economic Forum

Biologically diverse ecosystems capture vast amounts of carbon and provide massive economic benefits that are estimated at $33 trillion per year – the equivalent to the GDP of the US and China combined. It’s critical that companies and policy-makers move faster to transition to a low carbon economy and more sustainable business models. We are already seeing companies destroyed by failing to align their strategies to shifts in policy and customer preferences. Transitionary risks are real, and everyone must play their part to mitigate them. It’s not just an economic imperative, it is simply the right thing to do.
~ Peter Giger, Group Chief Risk Officer of the Zurich Insurance Group

I’m no economic expert. I know only that the soulless corporate personhood has devised ways to thrive on the chaos and detritus of human calamity. To the billionaire-class and those who aspire to join them, gathered recently at the World Economic Forum, I say: Your self-enrichment economic system is the Number One risk to humanity’s continued existence on Planet Earth. While you continue to amass unimaginable wealth, the explosive inequality among the masses of real people worldwide just requires a climate-induced drought and famine in a nuclear-armed nation for ignition.

When the Doomsday Clock strikes midnight, money markets and a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) will lose their value and meaning for any surviving remnant of our species.

 

 

“My Mother’s Blues” – Poem by British-Caribbean Poet Malika Booker

19 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Poetry

≈ 44 Comments

Tags

British-Caribbean poet Malika Booker, Poem “My Mother’s Blues” by Malika Booker, Poetry Collection Pepper Seed by Malika Booker (2013), The Caribbean Woman

British-Caribbean Poet Malika Booker
Photo Credit: University of Leeds Poetry Centre

 

My Poetry Corner January 2020 features the poem “My Mother’s Blues” from the poetry collection, Pepper Seed, by British-Caribbean poet Malika Booker. Born in 1970 in London, UK, to a Guyanese father and Grenadian mother, she grew up in Guyana. At eleven years, she returned to the UK with her parents where she still lives. In June 2019, she received the Cholmondeley Award for her outstanding contribution to poetry.

Booker began writing and performing poetry while studying anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she also earned her Master of Arts degree. In 2001, she founded Malika’s Poetry Kitchen to create a nourishing and encouraging community of writers dedicated to developing their writing craft.

Finding publishers for black poetic voices took time. Her chapbook, Breadfruit, came out in 2007. It took another six years for the publication of her poetry collection, Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013). Well received by British literary circles, it was shortlisted for the 2014 Seamus Heaney Centre prize for best first full collection published in the UK and Ireland, as well as the OCM Bocas poetry prize.

As a survivor of a verbally abusive paternal grandmother and her own broken family, Booker opens a window to the raw, hot pepper seed of Caribbean rum culture—legacy of the British colonial sugar plantation economy. Faced with sexual promiscuity, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, the three generations of women in Pepper Seed are hardened to survive the blows. This is evident in Booker’s six-part long poem “Red Ants Bite.” Booker expresses only love for her grandmother, even though she put this hard thing deep inside me.

I tried to make her love me,
but her mouth was brutal,
like hard-wire brush, it scraped me, 

took skin off my bones, made me bleed
where no one could see,
so I’d shrink, a tiny rocking foetus.

Hardened by sugar plantation life, Booker’s grandmother was equally brutal to her daughters and only daughter-in-law.

My father was her everything,
my brother her world.
her daughters reaped zigar.

In part six, the poet gives voice to her deceased grandmother in response to her question: Granny, what I do to you, eh? 

I lived till me turn one hundred and one,
live through back-break in backra sun.
I was a slave baby mixed with plantation white.
This creamy skin draw buckman, blackman,

coolieman, like prize. And if you did hear sweet talk,
if you did see how much fine fuck I get.
I
s hard life, hard, hard life and only one son I bear.
My mother tell me to kill di girl child dem –  

[…] 

I was the lone woman every man want to advantage,
I had was to sharpen meh mouth like razor blade,
turn red in seconds till bad word spill blood.
Scunt-hole child, you want sorry? 

[…]

I toughen you soffi-ness, mek man can’t fuck you
easy so. So fuck off, leave the dead some peace.

The way the Caribbean woman is shaped, moulded and made hard to deal with she man full of rum and carnival, unfolds in Booker’s three-part poem “Warning”:

Some great grandmother told her daughter,
Never let no man hit you and sleep,
pepper the food, boil hot water and throw,
use knife and make clean cut down there,
use cutlass and chop, then go police.

Booker didn’t realize how much her grandmother’s warning had toughened her until the night she invited a male friend, too drunk to drive, to sleep over.

I felt something in his look, he and I
alone in that room, and my blood raised up.
My pores swelled, I went to the kitchen,
took down that knife, marched upstairs,
told him, I cutting it off if you lose your mind.
Don’t think it and if you do, don’t sleep. 

In “Waiting for Father,” the poet describes her father as a flamboyant cockerel parading in sunshine with his floozies. His shameless infidelity made my mother stony, a martyr for her kids, brittle and bitter, till my stepdad unbricked her wall… 

In her 2018 conversation with British writer Hannah Silva, Booker relates how she struggled to write “My Mother’s Blues,” the final poem in the collection, in which she taps into her mother’s pain. It took her twenty-six drafts to figure it out. In presenting the poem to an audience, she came to realize its importance as a mother’s collective experience.

My mother knows pain
a sorrowful gospel type of pain – 

a slowly losing her eyesight,
eye-drops every night pain, 

a headache worrying for her children overseas,
praying for their safety pain,

a stare through each night, eyes blackening,
hope they are alright pain. 

Yes, my mother knows pain. 

Booker’s litany of pain goes on; pain that resonates deeply within me. It’s a pain without end, even when death beckons: it’s a don’t worry I go soon be dead and gone / and then you go miss me pain, the poet writes.

To read the complete featured poem and learn more about the work of Malika Booker, go to my Poetry Corner January 2020.

Only Oil Matters to the Empire

12 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in United States

≈ 54 Comments

Tags

ExxonMobil/Guyana, Fossil fuel industry, Gary Girdhari’s letter to Kaieteur News 01/07/20, Guyana’s Oil Reserves, Middle East Oil, No to War in Iran, The Empire & Oil

Oil drives our global economies. Oil is power. Oil fuels the Empire. Iraq and Iran together produce 8.3 million billion barrels a day of the liquid gold (figures from Offshore-Technology). Their joint oil reserves amount to 300,903 million barrels (figures from World Atlas). While the world’s largest oil producer with 12 mbbl barrels/day, the United States has only 39,230 million barrels of oil reserves. Venezuela tops the list with 300,878 million barrels. It’s no accident that the Empire is embedded in the Middle East. Controlling access to all that oil is vital to its continued survival.

Guyana will soon be part of that blessed-accursed herd of oil producing nations. With six billion barrels, and climbing, of oil reserves, Guyana now overtakes Venezuela in the overheated top seat. As a small country with racial divisive politics, the developing CARICOM member nation is easy prey for the Empire. It’s also corrupted at its core—the scourge of former colonial territories rich in natural resources. Trapped under the claws of the Eagle since its conception, the country is now secure in its nest.

In his letter to the editor of Guyana’s Kaieteur News on January 7, 2020, Dr. Gary Girdhari expresses misgivings about the legacy of oil giants in oil producing countries, even within their own home countries.

Guyana’s leaders, he writes, “ignore elemental facts, namely, in Africa, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere where oil wealth is secured in the pockets of Big Oil and a select few government officials and their cronies; and where inequality and extreme poverty spiral downwards.” 

Dr. Girdhari shares my concern about the impact of the fossil fuel industry on Earth’s environment and climate. He reminds the Guyanese people: “The International Press is replete with information regarding fossil fuel and its ruination to the environment – regarding carbon emission, depletion of the ozone layer, and extreme climate change. Already the world is witnessing the effects of permafrost melting in the Arctic and deforestation in Brazil and Africa. The tipping point is approaching sooner than we think.” 

I don’t share his hope “for total disbandment of oil in Guyana…and that good environmentally-friendly judgement triumphs.” I believe that it’s too late in the game. Guyana is already in the pockets of ExxonMobil and other players in the fossil fuel industry. 

To the Empire, only oil matters. It is prepared to use severe economic sanctions and military force to secure and control Earth’s oil reserves. Our lives—we the people of Earth—don’t matter. Let the trees burn. Let the ice caps melt. Let the wildlife die.

The Empire began 2020 with an act of war against Iran and Iraq. Warfare is Big Business. Warfare is barbaric. Warfare is self-destructive: It turns our young men into killers of innocent women, children, and babies. Heroes for the Empire.

I say NO to war with Iran. I say NO to the never-ending wars of the Empire. I say NO to more failed sovereign states. I say NO to ‘rubblized’ cities and uprooted broken families. I say NO to ecocide.

I say YES to ending our dependency on fossil fuels. I say YES to the Green New Deal.

 

Catching up…

08 Wednesday Jan 2020

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Reviews - Under the Tamarind Tree: A Novel by Rosaliene Bacchus

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

American bilingual writer Rebecca Cuningham, Praise for Under the Tamarind Tree: A Novel

 

I’m finally catching up after a year-end, ten-day break. No TV. No Internet.  My son, an independent contractor, decided that the December holiday season was the best time for him to tackle the flooring of our rental apartment that was in critical need of repair and renovation.

What a jolt to return to the drums of war with Iran! I missed sharing my year-end reflections, now rendered meaningless in the face of such reckless decision-making. In this New Year 2020, I wish that saner minds will prevail across our nation and worldwide.

During my absence from WordPress, I missed the following praise for Under the Tamarind Tree: A Novel, posted on my blog on December 28, 2019, by American bilingual writer Rebecca Cuningham, blogging at Fake Flamenco:

Characters extremely compelling.

Rosaliene, I’ve read your novel! I learned so much about Guyana; history, culture, language, food, and the ethnic backgrounds of the country. I felt I was learning deep culture from an expert and that my time reading was a journey. The characters were extremely compelling. The years leading up to independence from Britain are so momentous and full of tension. What a surprise ending and it also seemed right. Thank you for the education and the well crafted story.

Read more PRAISE FOR UNDER THE TAMARIND TREE: A NOVEL at my writer’s website, rosalienebacchus.com.


Dear Reader, my debut novel, Under the Tamarind Tree, is available at Rosaliene’s Store on Lulu.com and other book retailers at Amazon, BAM! Book-A-Million, Barnes and Noble, Book Depository, and Indie Bound.
Learn more about Under the Tamarind Tree at Rosaliene’s writer’s website.

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