Crossing Borders

CROSSING BORDERS

autrement dit,

Poèmes Sans Frontières (P.S.F.)

Hilary Rouse-Amadi

Crossing Borders

Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2018

Tel: +44(0)1227 472 874 www.theconradpress.com [email protected]

ISBN 978-1-912643-99-8

Copyright © Hilary Rouse-Amadi, 2018

The moral right of Hilary Rouse-Amadi to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

Typesetting and Cover Design by:Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk

The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

For my sons, my sister and

All the women and men who believe

A better world is possible

And labour, with love, to usher it in.

Special thanks go to Barbara Požgajčić

for her technical assistance,

unfailing support and instinctive

understanding of the worldview

expressed in these poems

and to the always here to help staff

of Canterbury Library, whose commitment

to public service shines bright, in our

clouded, profit-over-people, privatising times.

INTRODUCTION

I think I was born to cross borders, perhaps even before birth that pre-natal essence already the expression of a border crossing, for my Mother was a proud Lancastrian, my Father a Lowland Scot, with an understated, abiding love for his native land.

As a child, I became aware of belonging to at least two cultures, simultaneously distinct yet similar and intertwined. But, I also became aware of painful mysterious tensions, arising from a history of contested encounters and narratives. It was my Mother who told me, when I was still a wean¹., of the hurt she had felt, as a new wife, left wondering why she would never meet the much admired teacher her husband had suggested they visit, sometime after their wedding in nineteen forty five.

After congratulating his former pupil on his recent marriage, with the quip about time Jim!, Jim’s former teacher expressed the hope that he would soon meet the bride, casually asking and which part of Scotland does the lass come from? My Father’s answer elicited a short awkward silence, followed by a clumsy withdrawal of the invitation warmly extended moments earlier. Well glancing at my diary, it seems I’m awfully busy for the next few days. Let me have your phone number and I’ll see what can be arranged. There was no phone call. Nothing was arranged. My Mother smarted from the sting of rejection and my Father never spoke to his fallen hero again.

Fast forward thirty five years and I recall a lengthy conversation with an Ikwerre friend on the schisms and divisions in Nigerian society, the disruptive histories of slavery, colonial interventions and incursions, the imposition of imperial divisions, the rupture and forced amalgamation of cultures and peoples, followed by flag independence, civil war and neo-colonial exploitation in the era of the so-called oil boom, popularly and more appropriately designated oil doom. After all, my friend reminded me, when you ask why from time to time tensions arise and occasionally erupt between, for example, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa, I would ask, in return, what of the tensions in your country between Scots, English, Welsh and Irish, furthermore your history of nationhood is considerably longer than that of the state construct known as Project Nigeria.

The poems in this collection move across a multiplicity of borders, visiting some of the problems and challenges of Our Troubled Times. Many celebrate what we share in common, as members of the same species: the human family. Today, more than ever, our children cross borders, exploring and expressing their evolving multiple identities. Is this not to be preferred to the dangers of inward-looking narrow nationalisms and imperial agendas? And so I lay claim to multiple identities, along with Andrey Kurkov, the anonymous World War One veteran, Dr David Nott, Chelsea Manning, Muhammad Ali, Shaker Aamer, Joy Hurcombe, the Igbo heroines of the 1929 Women’s War, Celia the Philippine nurse, Irene the Glaswegian granny, the courageous Northern Nigerian women, unlocking doors to new eductional opportunities for their sisters and daughters, the Syrian refugee children……and the many other inspiring voices, honoured in the following pages, where critique, anger, lamentation, hope and celebration abound, for as Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837), Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) have variously insisted, the politics of dark times demand poetic response, a certain kind of music, a certain kind of singing, a certain kind of empathetic and engaging reflection, prefacing the call to action and change.

MOTTO

In the dark times

Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing

About the dark times.

Bertolt Brecht (1938)

SEE – Bertolt Brecht Poems, Part Two 1929-1938. John Willett and Ralph Manheim editors, with the co-operation of Erich Friel. London: Eyre Methuen, 1976, p.320.

NOTE – wean¹.- a young child, Lowland Scots.

IDENTITIES IN CRISIS

10th February 2015

Can a Scot, not also be a Briton,

A Briton also a European

And a European, a global citizen,

Just as a multiplicity of sounds

And instruments create a symphony,

A fusion of intertwining identities

True to democratic principles,

A combination of colours and contours,

Weaving enriching harmonies

For every listener and musician?

But, if being a global citizen means

Enslavement to corporate exploitation,

If the direction of European Union

Promotes, all too often, jealous division,

Selfish club members remote from the People,

We will flounder, stranded, in a barren landscape;

And should our Scot become anxious to jump off

A discredited Westminster Ship of State

Piloted, perilous, towards ruinous rocks,

By self-regarding, Little England Boys

Quarrelling, fitful, among themselves,

Separation storms WILL exact a cost,

Fragmentation, a bitter, protracted divorce,

A narrowing of commitments and horizons,

New borders and tariffs subverting the Common Good,

As the democratic impulse is, once more,

Stifled and strangled, struck at the root.

So the question remains, stark, still unanswered:

Why can we not strive harder with honour,

To serve and protect our sisters and brothers,

For a shared planet is to our advantage,

A sine qua non¹. for human survival,

In a time when death cults and barbarous clashes

Run riot, across grim countries and continents?

Nor can we retreat into walled isolation,

In an age of global inter-dependence.

With today’s myriad crises in mind:

Blinkered nationalism with hateful eyes,

Empire rebuilding in populist guise

And crazed, theocratic despotism

Consuming nameless, innocent lives,

Identities smashed, justice denied,

The need is urgent, will not be ignored

To end this legacy of hurt and distress,

Crippling a wounded, traumatised world.

So let us revisit this poem’s beginning:

Surely a Scot can also be a Briton,

A Briton, also a European

And a European, a world citizen,

When identities find renewal

In a culture of co-operation,

Not the crass, cut-throat competition

Of nihilistic disintegration;

And isn’t the time long overdue

To fashion a new Westminster Home,

Where the Common People are welcomed on board,

As democracy calmly rolls up her sleeves

To evict those parasitic, patrician thieves

Serving the interests of the world’s super-rich?

And as for me, I am Scottish and English

With links to the Welsh and the Irish;

I am an exasperated European,

A frustrated lover of troubled Nigeria,

A simple troubadour with poems to share,

And a hopeful world citizen

With a precious dream, beyond compare,

Alive in Auden’s luminous line:

We must love one another or die.².

NOTE 1.) sine qua non¹. – indispensable.

2.) Auden’s luminous line – SEE - September 1, 1939. W. H. Auden. Another Time. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. Part One. People and Places (first published, 1940) pp.103-106.

3.) Taking a break from the interminable wrestle with words, I made myself a cup of coffee and switched on the radio, after reworking the concluding lines of my poem. I found myself listening, in wonder, to the tail-end of an interview with Shirley Williams, daughter of Vera Brittain, whose First World War memoir was one of my mother’s most treasured books. In 2014, a BBC and BFI film based on Testament of Youth, was making impact, focusing attention on the meanings and legacy of that catastrophic conflict. Shirley Williams’ interview ended with her quoting Auden’s immortal line, the very line I had written down several minutes earlier. Later, I revised and reworked my poem, trying to make sense of what was at stake, concerning the Scottish Referendum on Independence and the Referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Auden’s luminous line seemed never more apposite!

INTEGRITY

5th February 2015

for Andrey Kurkov, ethnic Russian and Ukrainian patriot, not either or, mais tous les deux.

His mother-tongue, Russian,

Rich and nourishing,

His sense of nation

A Ukraine, independent,

And for his refusal, categorical,

To excise one of these twin allegiances,

Deny his right to loyalties integral,

Came words, incendiary, fired in his direction

From forces, locked in futile contention,

Demanding he submit his creative spirit,

Compliant to one reductive agenda.

His response, expressed in public and private,

Followed a path, consistent and defiant,

To be BOTH Ukrainian and Russian,

A complex, authentic identity

No crass combatants will ever take from him.

DRESDEN, FEBRUARY 1945 AND 2015,DEBALTSEVA, FEBRUARY 2015

14th February 2015

In Dresden, piety was on solemn show

To remind us what the flames of war can do,

While in cities and towns of Eastern Ukraine,

Children’s lives are being blighted, beyond repair,

By weapons of war, discharging sorrow and pain

Into shattered homes, engulfed in flame,

On the orders of men, immune to shame,

Imprisoned within an imperial theme,

The curse of rivals, East and West,

Locked in their deadly game of chess.

REMEMBRANCE

17th February 2015

The Old Veteran took to the airways,

In the fading light of his closing years,

To explain why he would never march,

Uniformed and bemedalled, along streets

That would only unleash his bitter tears,

For my remembrance, he explained,

Is every day of every living year,

As I recollect and see and hear

Men, dispatched with insolent contempt

Into the abyss of meaningless death,

Belatedly labelled, glorious and blest,

To suit the army, politicians and monarchy

Betraying my brothers’ untold stories,

Buried in official pomp and circumstance;

And when I speak to the young, sitting

Alert and inquisitive in their classrooms,

My voice disinters some essential truths

To protect them, from the invasive coercion

That led to the graves of my lost generation;

And should a lively listener pointedly ask:

How can we make sense of our troubled past,

When we were taught, our officer-top-brass

Were undisputed masters of the universe;

And were the Kaiser’s compliant footsoldiers

Barbarian brutes, or puppet-men

Tricked and coerced into futile war games,

Disposable pawns, deployed just like us?,

I hear ghost-voices whisper in my ear,

Now don’t let us down, for our sakes and theirs.

So remembrance, for me, takes the form

Of acknowledging, both what I am

And what I once unforgettably was,

My feeble failures, transforming joys

And the deep, embedded memories

Of ice-cold trenches, in desecrated earth;

But above all else, I must use

My sunset days to craft my words

And warn against the horrors of wars

Packaged in false-patriotic salestalk,

A fate I have lived, now live to expose.

WHEN WILL WE EVER LEARN?

26th February 2015

Thoughts on a tangled web of relations between Ukraine, Russia, the U.S.A., Germany, France and Britain

AND

Memories of singing Pete Seeger’s Where Have All The Flowers Gone, during the Vietnam War catastrophe.

The truce has been breached

As we knew it would,

Words too formal-weak

To effect change for the good;

But we’re hardly surprised,

Since we’ve been here before

And truces, too often, fail to flower.

The truce has been breached,

The temperature rises,

The silhouettes of soldiers

Disturb the horizon.

It takes only a few generals and leaders,

Mirror image rivals, in distant locations,

To send families, scurrying numb with terror,

Into the depths of comfortless cellars,

And on the frozen faces of little children

The unspoken, angry, hopeless questions,

What did we do to deserve this horror

And why can our parents no longer protect us?

But in presidential offices and palaces

The talk is of national pride and honour,

And how to outwit and outmanoeuvre

An insatiable enemy, hungry for power.

The truce has been breached,

Still-born from the start,

War so easy to initiate,

When minds are assaulted and inflamed,

Fear-injected, passive-manipulated,

Propaganda-primed into acceptance

Of what should never have been contemplated;

And how hard are the means to bring war to an end,

When children die and parents outraged,

Turn, in despair, to acts of revenge,

Yet, each time wars of relentless attrition

Wreak devastation across generations,

Weary survivors shake solemn heads

And sagely chorus the familiar refrain,

This time, we must surely learn,

Never, never, never again,

For this is the debt the living owe,

To the blighted lives and victims of war.

And surely, as arsenals of W.M.D.¹.

Proliferate in stealth, out of control,

Our Times demand we answer the question:

Is there a future for humanunkind;

And why have we not interred

The old imperial paradigm,

Blindly followed down

Millennia of pain,

Punctuated by treacherous ceasefires

That disappear in smoke and flame?

The truce has been breached

As we knew it would,

Words too formal-weak

To effect change for the good;

But we’re hardly surprised,

Since we’ve been here before

And truces too often fail to flower,

When, like stubborn infants, we refuse to learn

The quintessential lesson from the past

That the legacy of war

Breeds harvests of distress,

Passed from one generation to the next.

And if the only beneficiaries of war

Are the arms dealers and manufacturers,