Author Archives: Rosaliene Bacchus

The Writer’s Life: Finding Joy Amid the Insanity

01 Sunday Mar 2026

Posted by in The Writer's Life

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Camellia Trees – Overlooking Footpath to Parking Lot – Los Angeles – California – January 25, 2026

Our Peace Maker has launched war on Iran: Operation Epic Fury. While insanity continues to be the order of the day under political leadership lacking in moral courage, I do what is in my power to avoid contagion. I draw on lessons learned in my youth during the turbulent years in the pre- and post-independent years of my native land, when the grown-ups had found ways to keep joy alive in our lives. As in those days, I brighten my workday by playing the radio in the background. KOST 103.5 is my preferred local radio channel for bringing me my favorite songs of yesteryear as well as today’s top hits.

The biggest killjoy during my workday is “Barbie’s” invasive radio ad campaign, warning illegal aliens to self-deport.

“Is war,” says Jamaican reggae singer Bob Marley (1945-1981).

Back in the day, weekend get-togethers with our extended family members and close friends relieved distress from the violence seeping into our day-to-day lives. I remember the bottom-house parties with music and dance: birthdays, weddings, wedding anniversaries, arrival of a new baby. Every achievement, school or job-related, was cause for a celebration, adding more joy to our lives. We also went all out with Christmas and year-end festivities. What a joyful time of the year! My happiest memories of growing up in Guyana.

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Thought for Today: A World in Chains

22 Sunday Feb 2026

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Front Cover Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse by Luke Demp (USA, 2025)
Photo Credit: Penguin Random House

Looking at both the long-run trajectory of Goliath and current trends, our Global Goliath appears destined to hurtle down one of three paths. The first, and most likely, is self-termination. The second is a world in chains. The third is a world in which we somehow manage to shackle and control it. Reversing inequality and establishing deep democracy in a lasting fashion has unfortunately been a rarity throughout history. It is a highly unlikely outcome, which makes it worth fighting for even more desperately. While throughout history the collapse of a Goliath was usually temporary and a liberation, in the future it threatens to be permanent and take us and much of the planet with it. We are passengers on a journey that looks likely to end in chains or evolutionary suicide. Our Global Goliath will die explosively unless we kill it first.

Excerpt from Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse by Luke Kemp, published by Penguin Random House, New York, USA, 2025, p. 406.  

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“Uprising” – Poem by Saint Lucian Poet John Robert Lee

15 Sunday Feb 2026

Posted by in Poetry

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Saint Lucian Poet John Robert Lee
Photo Credit: The Voice St. Lucia News / Photo by Tara Lucien

My Poetry Corner February 2026 features the poem “Uprising” from the poetry collection Belmont Portfolio by poet, preacher, and retired teacher and librarian John Robert Lee, published by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2023). Born in 1948 in the Caribbean Island nation of Saint Lucia, he majored in English and French Literature, including Caribbean Literature, at the University of the West Indies in Barbados (Cave Hill Campus) and Jamaica (Mona Campus) in the early 1980s.

Ordained in 1997 as an Elder of Calvary Baptist Church, Lee continues to be active in his local Baptist Church where he preaches occasionally. While he remains connected to the pulse of Caribbean literature and the arts, he is no longer actively involved in theatre and broadcasting as he once was. Father of three children, he lives with his wife in Saint Lucia.

During an exclusive interview with Caribbean Writers and Poets Magazine in November 2023 to talk about his poetry collection Belmont Portfolio, Lee said:

“I explore my world and what is happening in it, Caribbean and international; my culture and its history, its music, both traditional and contemporary, its life in all that complexity; my own personal experiences of maturing, aging, and my ever-deepening faith.”

Belmont in the title is a historical and cultural neighborhood in northeast Port of Spain, capital of the Caribbean Republic of Trinidad & Tobago. During his stay in Belmont, while attending the Caribbean Festival of Arts (CARIFESTA) in 2019, Lee took photos of the area that later inspired a series of ekphrastic poems.

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The Changing Earth – Awareness

08 Sunday Feb 2026

Posted by in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Human Behavior, Nature and the Environment

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Apusiaajik Glacier – Greenland – NASA Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) Mission – 2016-2021
Photo Credit: NASA Sea Level Change: Observations from Space

This is the first article in my series about our changing Earth from interviews with Native Americans shared in We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth (USA 2022). My presentation does not follow the order of the interviews.

# 1:  Raquel Ramirez (Ho-Chunk, Ojibwe, Lenca) – Awareness
        (Chapter 4, pp. 48-60)

Born on that memorable day of September 11, 2001, Raquel Ramirez is the youngest participant interviewed via Skype during the pandemic lockdown in midsummer 2020. She defines herself as an urban Native American, Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe, and other strong Native family roots. Growing up in California, she’s greatly influenced by the state’s indigenous cultures.

In addressing the crises we face on our changing Earth, Raquel considers awareness as a challenge to confront and overcome. Breaking free of ignorance in society and our own ignorance is, she acknowledges, an emotional and difficult process.

Awareness doesn’t just mean listening or hearing or recognizing. It is very much being present and being conscious of people beyond you!

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A Salute to Our Everyday Heroes

01 Sunday Feb 2026

Posted by in Immigrants, Social Injustice, United States, Urban Violence

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Alex Pretti
Renee Good

Alex Pretti & Renee Good – Killed in Cold Blood – Minneapolis – Minnesota – USA – January 2026

Mother, the situation has gotten out of control among the members of our fractured collective American family. Father is not well. Without you around to rein in his worst instincts, he acts like a vengeful god, punishing those who don’t obey his commandments or kneel before him. He cannot tolerate independent thinking. Even a simple “no” enrages him. Nowadays, if you defy him, he doesn’t hesitate to leave you out in the cold to be trampled upon by his goons. If you die at their hands, he blames you for putting yourself in harm’s way.

Our siblings who enable Father’s tyrannical rule are shameless, feckless, and spineless. Big Brother is the worst of them all—he’s truly creepy. Mother, you wouldn’t recognize the man he has become. He and the other enablers seek only to remain in Father’s favor and share in the spoils of his vast business empire. Father says that the only limit to his power is his own morality. I’m afraid to even consider what he means by that.

I wish you were here, Mother.

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Thought for Today: Have we all become “cloud serfs”?

25 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by in Economy and Finance, Recommended Reading

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Front Cover Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis (UK/USA, 2024)
Photo Credit: Melville House Publishing

The digital revolution may be turning waged workers into cloud proles, who live increasingly precarious, stressful lives under the invisible thumb of algorithmic bosses…. But that’s not the most significant fact about cloud capital…. The true revolution cloud capital has inflicted on humanity is the conversion of billions of us into willing cloud serfs volunteering to labour for nothing to reproduce cloud capital for the benefit of its owners.

[…]

Technofeudalism made things infinitely worse when it demolished the fence that used to provide the liberal individual with a refuge from the market. Cloud capital has shattered the individual into fragments of data, an identity comprised of choices as expressed by clicks, which its algorithms are able to manipulate. It has produced individuals who are not so much possessive as possessed, or rather persons incapable of being self-possessed.  

Excerpts from Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis, published by Melville House Publishing, UK & USA, 2024, pp. 88 & 182.

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“Jaguar Song” – Poem by Asian American Poet Laureate Arthur Sze

18 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by in Poetry, United States

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Asian American Poet Laureate Arthur Sze 2025-2026
Photo Credit: U.S. Library of Congress (Photo by Shawn Miller)

My Poetry Corner January 2026 features the poem “Jaguar Song” from the twelfth poetry collection Into the Hush by Arthur Sze, Poet Laureate of the United States 2025-2026. He is the first Asian American to serve in this position. The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection which explores humanity’s impact on Mother Nature together with glimpses of her untouched beauty.

Listen—in an Anchorage night, / a crunching resembling cars colliding, / and, as the incoming tide slaps, / you will never forget inlet ice breakup; black spruce branches are etched / against the sky; far from a city lined / with fast-food spots, bars, and pawnshops, […] you marvel at the green translucency / of leaves, the mystery of photosynthesis; / as grief and joy well up, you step / into the vernal sharpening of the day— / apricot trees are the first to bloom. (Poem “Spring View” p. 5).

Born in 1950 in New York City to Chinese immigrants, Sze is an award-winning poet with twelve books of poetry published, a translator of classical Chinese poetry, and editor. His journey to becoming a poet began in 1968 during his first semester at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he was pursuing a career in the sciences. As he tells it during an interview in 2025 with Jim Natal for Marsh Hawk Press:

“I sat in a large calculus class and felt increasingly bored by the lecture. I remember flipping to the back of a spiral notebook, and I started writing phrases to a poem. I was excited at what came to me, and, before the end of class, I had a rough draft…”

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The Writer’s Life: New Monthly Series on the Changing Earth

11 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by in Nature and the Environment, Recommended Reading, The Writer's Life

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Front Cover: We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth – Edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth
Published by The New Press, New York, USA, 2022

During the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, Dahr Jamail – an American award-winning journalist and environmental advocate – and Stan Rushworth – an elder and retired teacher of Cherokee descent living in Northern California – interviewed several people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic. Their featured collection of interviews offers us a wide variety of perspectives on a much more integrated relationship to Earth and all human and non-human beings.

Turtle Island is a term used by some Indigenous peoples, primarily those in North America, to refer to the continent. This name stems from various Indigenous creation stories which describe the landmass as being formed on the back of a giant turtle. The concept of Turtle Island is deeply significant in many Native American cultures as it reflects their spiritual beliefs and relationship with Mother earth.

As inhabitants of these lands for thousands of generations before the arrival of European conquistadores and colonizers, Native Americans carry in their ancestral memories the rise and fall of great civilizations before ours. They have much to teach us about surviving collapse and healing our broken relationship with Mother Earth.

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Year 2025: Reflections

04 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by in The Writer's Life, United States

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Earthrise – NASA Apollo 8 – December 24, 1968 – Photo by Astronaut William Anders
Source Credit – Wikipedia

I’m still trying to process everything that has happened since the Earthrise on January 20, 2025. The punches were fast, violent, and relentless. They upended the global order established at the end of World War II. European allies have been left out in the cold to face what was once our mutual Cold War adversary. North American allies are treated with contempt. Venezuela’s coveted vast oil reserves have transformed the Caribbean Sea into a danger zone. How did we get here?

Sorry Greenland. The sovereignty of nations be damned. Your rare-earth metals are essential to our technological advancement. Our Big Tech giants are in a race to colonize Mars and the vast expanse of space beyond. They need these metals to build and power their AI machines. They also need lots of energy (and water) to operate their vast AI data centers.

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“The Day of Revolution” – Poem by Guyanese Poet Mahadai Das

23 Sunday Nov 2025

Posted by in Guyana, Poetry

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Guyanese Poet Mahadai Das (1954-2003)
Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press (UK)

My Poetry Corner November 2025 features the poem “The Day of Revolution” from the poetry collection My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982) by Guyanese poet and teacher Mahadai Das; included in the posthumous publication of her work (1976-1994) A Leaf in His Ears: Collected Poems by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2010). All excerpts of her poems are taken from the Peepal 2010 publication.

Born in 1954 in Eccles on the East Bank Demerara, Guyana, Mahadai’s father was a rice farmer. She attended the prestigious Bishops High School for girls in the capital, Georgetown, where she began writing poetry. Then in 1971, her mother died while giving birth to her tenth child, leaving Mahadai, then seventeen, with responsibility for her siblings. Later that year (November), she was crowned as the “Miss Diwali” beauty-queen. What a boost that must’ve been for the adolescent Mahadai!

In the early 1970s, while taking care of her siblings, Das earned her BA at the University of Guyana and became a volunteer member of the Guyana National Service.

Disillusioned with the corruption and authoritarianism of Burnham’s regime (1974-1985), she became involved with the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), co-founded by Walter Rodney (1942-1980), an African historian and political activist. In the poem “Militant” from her debut poetry collection I Want to be a Poetess of My People (1977), Das declares her commitment to joining the fight for change in Guyana (pp. 39-40):

Militant I am / Militantly I strive. / I want to march in my revolution, / I want to march with my brothers and sisters. / Revolution firing my song of freedom. / I want my blood to churn / Change! Change! Change!… // Child of the revolution! I want to grow… grow… grow! / I want to grow for my revolution. / I want to march for my country!

In her quest to grow professionally to better serve her country, Das left Guyana to obtain her MA at Columbia University, New York. After earning her MA, she began a doctoral program in Philosophy at the University of Chicago, Illinois. While there, she became critically ill and never completed the program.

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