Willow Walk

fiction

what we have made is not enough for song

so we are told by critics of the age

who always urge the young to disengage

and tell the old they are no longer strong

the middle-aged must see they can't belong

and therefore are required to quit the stage

it seems there is no text left on this page

that can't be so thus the whole tale is wrong

where we began no hero could pretend

to claim the moment and the victor's crown

but infant struggles of the teller's art

convert each listener into a friend

bring each lost wanderer safe back to town

and know the climax is there from the start

Revaluing People

John Maxwell

On my first visit to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, my wife's hometown, I was struck by some immense differences with Kingston, a city of the same size. Apart from the absence of slums and substandard housing the major difference was in the way people treated other people. One day I was taking a tram but the tram got to the stop before I did. I had been running and was about to stop when I noticed that several seconds after the last passenger had boarded the tram had not moved. I trotted in to find that the last passenger before me had blocked the door, stopping it from closing and preventing the tram from starting. I thanked the woman and thought to myself that I could not imagine a similar show of the kindness of strangers in any other large city I could think of. I noticed other things; how unobtrusive the police were although they were always about; how many street gardens and flower boxes there were; how many street markets flourished and lots more. In my latest visit, to be treated for advanced lung cancer at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek /National Cancer Institute I noticed much more. Over the eight months of my treatment I cannot remember a single unpleasant encounter in the polyclinic. Everybody, from the mainly immigrant cleaners to the highly trained oncology nurses and technicians to the specialist physicians at the top of the tree clearly knew their jobs, were determined to put their patients at ease and certainly in my case, radiated optimism even knowing that my chances were not good. Having since read an internet piece on the morbid effect of depression on cancer patients I now realise that my response to the treatment –which surprised even my doctors – probably was enhanced by my own optimism and refusal to surrender, some of it owed to the people who were caring for me.

love ties its hopes

love ties its hopes to what it thinks a rock

the furthest outlier of a merry isle

where there's no foe except the hateful clock

 

your modesty inclines you to take stock

in all those things that we would not revile

love ties its hopes to what it thinks a rock

 

impervious to any mortal shock

we hope to land and stay for quite a while

where there's no foe except the hateful clock

 

our ship is not for any normal dock

we've gone way past the ordinary style

love ties its hopes to what it thinks a rock

 

rejects enclosure will break every lock

and has more power still than any bile

where there's no foe except the hateful clock

 

though you despise and though you still may mock

our sacred purpose you cannot defile

love ties its hopes to what it thinks a rock

where there's no foe except the hateful clock

Black is a State of Mind

John Maxwell

Much of the Western media and the people they serve, are almost reflexively racist. No other people are as concerned with the ethnic credentials of their neighbours. At no time was this syndrome better exposed than by the murder trial of O.J. Simpson. TIME magazine apologised for picturing him on the magazine's cover as "darker than the hero he was". Newsweek opined that Simpson was trying to become white – "He even played golf." This week, in illustrating a story about the increase in a world hunger the stock illustration has been a black Somali woman with her terminally malnourished baby. The story was not about starvation in Africa; it was about hunger worldwide: World Food Aid At 20-Year Low, 1 Billion Hungry Now there aren't a billion people in all Africa, so even the most boneheaded of editors should have used his imagination to illustrate the story differently. According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation the tally of the hungered is as follows:

642 million in Asia and the Pacific 265 million in Sub-Saharan Africa 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean         42 million in the Near East and North Africa

If you add together those hungry in Black (sub-Saharan Africa with those in North Africa you will get 307 million, still less than half those hungry in Asia and the Pacific. Yet, the cliche picture is of Africans. Being black is an undefinable abstraction. A back shoemaker in Washington 50 years ago did not recognise me as 'black' because of the way I spoke and the way I walked. In the BBC's newsroom in the late '60s my colleagues ranged between those who saw me as a black outsider – nigger – and the typist who though I had the 'most wonderful tan'. There were those who said I must be from the South Seas and others who thought that Jamaicans lived in trees. While I was at the BBC one of their commentators said on television that 'X' was the first white man to finish in the 100 metres at the Tokyo Olympics. He came sixth. When Randolph Turpin beat Sugar Ray Robinson for the world middleweight title he was transformed from a 'darkie from Leamington' to 'the Briton' by the time the fight ended. The process was reversed in the next fight when Ray Robinson beat the daylights out of Turpin. Last weekend, at the US Open tennis championships, the world's best tennis player lost her temper and the title match after she shouted imprecations at a lineswoman who had – wrongly – called her for a foot-fault. (Nobody mentioned that fact) Serena was in a bad mood because the American hoi polloi, who mainly patronise tennis, was rooting for Serena's opponent, a Belgian, against their own home grown champion. In tennis, with its polite hand-claps, it is much easier for the spectators to unsettle a competitor than in most other sports. Serena lost her temper not just with the lineswoman but with the whole racist cabal of tennis officialdom and the media. YouTube videos heralded the moment by speaking of 'the jungle' and similarly flattering epithets Serena was fined 10,500 and reprimanded. While she was apologising for her behavior, another tennis star, this time white, male, Swiss and named Roger Federer, was abusing the match umpire using precisely the same language as Serena had. Abusing a lineswoman is obviously a crime. Abusing a match umpire in the same terms isn't, in the free and democratic United States of America, where Free Speech rules. Federer was not penalised and most of the media ignored his lapse.

at the dockside

we go to meet

the losing side

nowhere to hide

the river's fleet

 

time has in tow

all our desire

so tell the choir

how much you know

 

out from the port

no ship departs

the while our hearts

each hope distorts

 

choices are made

visions described

policemen bribed

that is the trade

 

so when we learn

just how to speak

in the antique

manner you yearn

 

to see us grasp

all of your pride

held well inside

falls from your grasp

 

what is said true

within these walls

nobody calls

honest or new

 

nothing but old

rumours and lies

that we despise

pass here for gold

autumn vintage

there's nothing noble in this kind of rot

we weather storms but reach no harbour sure

our choice is clear pay up or lose the plot

 

some day there is an answer this time not

no other means our safety to ensure

there's nothing noble in this kind of rot

 

we tell ourselves there is but we forgot

how much of nonsense we have to endure

our choice is clear pay up or lose the plot

 

like children here with noses full of snot

we cannot breathe and cannot find the cure

there's nothing noble in this kind of rot

 

so we must leave but first undo the knot

that binds with certainty both raw and pure

our choice is clear pay up and lose the plot

 

leaving behind enough to fill the slot

in hope that reason will some day mature

there's nothing noble in this kind of rot

our choice is clear pay up and lose the plot

Preying on the Public Interest

 

John Maxwell

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Jamaica's so-called Urban Development Corporation (UDC) is not about urban development - no matter what its name says. It has been my contention for years that this entity would be more aptly named the Universal Devastation Conglomerate to better reflect what it actually does.

I must declare interest, since I have been personally involved in disputes with the UDC for more than 30 years - as every sensible Jamaican would be if they knew the facts. My first run-in with the UDC came in 1974 when, as I have previously related here, I attended a news conference the UDC had mounted to impress its new minister, Allan Isaacs.

Great was the consternation when I asked the chairman of the UDC, Moses Matalon, for a copy of the corporation's annual report. There was none. Could I have the previous year's? There was none, and so right back to the formation of the UDC six years before. There was more pandemonium when I asked why had the UDC, a government agency, been involved in borrowing money, by way of IOUs, in foreign currency from money lenders in New York. Allan Isaacs was livid, thought the UDC had made a fool of him, and demanded that before anything else was done the corporation should produce annual reports for the missing years. The UDC eventually produced a document, alleged to be the consolidated annual reports from 1968. The only useful fact contained therein was confirmation of my statement about IOUs.

Nobody was ever fired for these delinquencies and Moses - who was "God" before Vin Lawrence - continued happily destroying 'God-forsaken mangroves', pumping sewage into the sea and inflating our foreign exchange debt as he thought appropriate. After 35 years and at least three or four chairmen and an unknown number of new boards, little seems to have changed.

The last UDC Annual Report covers the year 2005 but, from internal evidence, was obviously presented late.

A run-through of the Annual Report confirmed the impression I have always had of the UDC - lots of marvellous chat but little effective action. The UDC's skin has been saved by successive governments giving it duties once more, economically and competently undertaken by the Public Works Department and the Building Section of the Ministry of Education.

Meanwhile, mouldering away in countless dusty filing cabinets are lavish brochures produced by the corporation over the years promising to redevelop downtown Kingston, to redevelop Rae Town, to create a misconceived 'city' at Hellshire and generally to revolutionise urban development in various towns across Jamaica, to rehouse people in 'de ghetto' and to provide civilised services to urban areas. Instead, it has become Jamaica's largest property speculator and real estate developer, though why we need one financed by public funds is a question only the IMF can answer. Few of the projects described in the brochure have come to fruition. Hellshire is a collection of suburban tract developments in a desert: Hellshire gets far less rain than any other part of Jamaica.

Yet, the geniuses at the UDC, in 1977, were planning to pump their sewage into a pristine underground lake of 'connate' water, formed more than half a million years ago. We at the NRCA managed to stop them then, but it is very likely that the corporation's resident demon has again convinced them that this transcendental act of environmental sacrilege is, after all, a good idea.

The UDC has had more than its share of disasters: at Negril, where its obstinate refusal to listen to environmental advice has ruined seven miles of beach and Jamaica's second most important wetland, itself a potent attraction if properly husbanded. Then there is the catastrophic debacle of Ackendown/Sandals Whitehouse which ended in enormous cost overruns and a black eye for Sandals which was unable to open the hotel on time because the building was still unfinished after huge delays and millions in wasted foreign exchange.

There are more than a dozen companies subsidiary to the UDC, many of them moribund monuments to Big Thinking. Most of them were chaired by 'God'.

no secret day

this is the limit of no secret day

when clouds depart and all enjoy the view

a sudden moment when each may renew

their sagging heart and then go on their way

more certain now of what's set in the play

than all the wise when first wild flower blew

but knowledge is not all that can fall due

nor is hard money the best mode to pay

here is the rule be silent and go forth

not caring how the errand shall turn out

only expect to see an empty plate

on your return from harrowing the north

you shall discover matters are less stout

yet all will be well on the proper date

Nothing Personal

John Maxwell

 

On September 18, 1938, Norman Manley said:

"All effort will be wasted unless the masses of the people are steadily taken along the path in which they feel more and more, that this place is their home, that it is their destiny. They will then do more for it, more work, more effort, more thinking, more sacrifice, more discipline, and more honesty, than by any other measure you can bring in this country."

People keep asking me why I am so hard on P. J. Patterson, George Bush and Edward Seaga. I thought that over the years I had made it plain why those three men have so deeply disappointed me. Bush is in a class by himself. Among Jamaican leaders I rank P.J. Patterson as the second worst Prime Minister we have ever had. He and Mr Seaga are almost tied in my estimation, but Mr Seaga's role in promoting strife in Jamaica gives him the edge by a short head.

I freely confess that having known Mr Patterson ever since we were both at school at Calabar I had not expected much from him as PM. I said so at the time, but I publicly revised my expectations after his inaugural speech.. He struck the right note in several areas but the promise that excited me was his pledge to disclose his earnings and assets annually – an implicit encouragement to other politicians and bureaucrats to do the same. It was a promise to seriously reduce the possibility of corruption

That promise was never kept.

P.J. was great at raising false hopes.