Renee Nicole Good’s death stirred me to write an earlier blog post this month about “when we became poets” because I could sense from the media reports that something was amiss about her and around her. Learning that she was a published poet, my mind has been on poetry since then, the type of poetry that was transformative and revolutionary. Those were the poems I wrote primarily at a time I when worked in a tightly controlled imperial environment at USAID after being in Jamaica’s social trenches for several years.
I saw firsthand in Jamaica how certain institutions and sectors within society like religion, education, health systems and law enforcement did not meet the needs of marginalized and vulnerable people. This resulted in many being excluded and pushed on the fringes. Others were often forced out of churches, schools, and away from health services because they were “non compliant” for one reason or another. For example, I always remembered the signage posted at government health clinics outlining the acceptable mode of dress and people would be turned away if they did not comply. What happened to Renee Good is another example of what could happen to any visitor, resident or citizen of a country when they did not “comply” with the rules. Whether it’s just a simple dress code for church, school or a clinic, or the resistance towards a police officer, a person who might not be in a position to adhere to the rules, could very well end up being locked out or even killed. Situations escalated often when there were clashes of personalities, unaligned values or perceived disrespect. I witnessed this quite often in Jamaica in my last home there, in communities and at work. And I knew for certain that if one of the parties involved had a gun, someone would have been killed. With all the changes in gender roles with women taking on many male functions, they were still expected to stay in their traditional female lanes and spaces. In the context of a ruling conservative government in America and the Christian Nationalist influence, the lines were more demarcated and “non compliance” or “disobedience” could cost you your life.
Earlier this week, a fellow blogger and a subscriber sent me a link about the story of Antonio Frederico de Castro Alves, the young revolutionary Brazilian poet and abolitionist who contributed to changing the course of his country’s history before dying of tuberculosis at the tender age of twenty four. His life story just confirmed what I had always known since I started writing poetry, that poetry was not always meant to be about the lighter, feel-good sides of life. Poetry for me emerged out of my own hardships and struggles and was in most instances, heavy and uncomfortable. Mirrors of my life in the people I served also heightened my interest in writing about suffering, poverty and other trials.
I had never visited Brazil but in graduate school I had to read an ethnography by Nancy Scheper-Hughes entitled “Death Without Weeping.” The book was so long with never-ending pages that students called it Death Without Sleeping. As it turned out for me, that book had so many familiar themes surrounding state-sanctioned violence and systemic injustice that literally kept me up in the wee hours of the morning writing poems in Jamaica. It was from that ethnography as well as others like Dr. Paul Farmer that I learned all the academic anthropology jargon for the social issues that I already experienced in Jamaica, The structural violence that still existed long after slavery was abolished in many countries seemed much more pronounced in Brazil and in other places like Haiti but yet the deep roots were the same, that is, from slavery, colonialism, racism and the broad oceans of poverty.
Among the worst type of violence was the structural violence of slavery and its associated institutions of colonialism with systems like Segregation in America and Apartheid in South Africa. A quick Google search stated that, “unlike war which has a beginning and an end, structural violence is often invisible, normalized and persistent…It is embedded into laws, policies and economic systems.” So painful and traumatic slavery was, that many people did everything in their minds and in their power to forget it. But there are others like my fellow senior, a black elderly immigrant from Costa Rica who refused to forget. Almost everyday that I met Trudie (pseudonym) in the lunch room at Westside Community Center, she would say the same words to me in lamentation.
“Four hundred years! Four hundred years! Where was God?” Those words became Trudie’s context for her knowledge of the past and her current reality in America. While she was not educated about structural violence, she knew in her heart and soul that slavery was the greatest evil and often reminded us in exclamation that “they are evil!” referring to to those who enslaved us and still oppress us. As Trudie recounted some of the recent occurrences in America she told me passionately and sincerely many times that, “I would rather die than being enslaved,” echoing the themes from Claude McKay’s historic poem, “If We Must Die.”
Like Castro Alves and Pat, I also questioned God many times. Questions about the unavoidable types of poverty, sickness, disease; universal cruelty; and perpetual injustice linger. I questioned all those things for years but recently in the backdrop of Renee Good’s death, I questioned deeply why structural violence in all its forms was allowed to continue despite man’s knowledge of it’s foundations and humanity’s claim to being civilized and advanced. Mankind has had the resources and the ability to eliminate all forms of structural violence yet the rulers of the world allowed them to continue. Renee Good’s death in modern America as a white female citizen with no criminal records at the hands of the federal government must remind us that the system will dehumanize us, criminalize us as domestic terrorists and destroy us when we pose a threat to their agenda; the same agenda that allowed structural violence to continue for centuries from ancient times until now.
Alas! It was beyond places like Jamaica, Brazil and Haiti, for modern America long needed its own painful poetry and its very own pages of unbearable ethnography exposed.
Seeds of Insight 