clutching, grasping, holding onto, gulping down, hungrily, each breath, every breath, fearing the onset of the years, the splinters of time, embedding, piercing, this moment, the very now, numbed by repetition, embalmed by trepidation, of tomorrows yet to dawn, suspiciously sifting through the strands of greying hair, seeking clues, the because to the whys, the slow mornings, restless nights, jabbing reminders, as years, decades, scurry, scamper, flee, feeling it all slipping away, standing, immobile, stilled by the implacable sentinels at the doorstep, these immovable sentries, concealing the door, that leads to today …
Behind the barricades, tucked away beyond the layers of the impregnable buffer,
secreted in the unshakeable edifice, hewn deep into the rock of solitude,
countless thoughts blur, hazily scurrying past, adrift on the breeze, yesteryears embers that cannot last.
These embers, these flurries of memory, escape high above the ramparts of this fortress of stunted, shackled thought,
fleeing the fears, the tears streaming down eyes unblinking, eyes devoid of light, eyes rendered blind, leaving grainy photographs etched in the receding mind.
All these memories, this nostalgic tugging, sewn into the detritus of what was once beloved, of what was once dear and true,
all those sun-kissed moments, once woven by infinite tendrils of hope, lie strewn here and there, and everywhere in between, all those dreams now merely flotsam and jetsam, thrashed upon the waves of the ocean so jagged, so stinging, yet so boundless in its shades of aquamarine blue.
Yet there exists, in folded recesses, layered in shrouds, wrapped in papyrus,
armoured sentinels, mutely grasping, onto all that was once all of you, onto all that was once all of me,
armoured sentinels,
standing guard, fiercely protecting against forgetting,
fierce sentinels, holding firm onto the persistence of memory.
As we all grapple with this strange and scary new world we now inhabit, it makes one think of what is truly important in one’s life.
The love and caring of family has above all else become our new “normal”.
This is not to say that we didn’t love or care for family before this pandemic and before our state of lockdown but we had begun to take things and people close to us for granted.
The Covid-19 microscopic virus has turned our world as we know it upside down.
A tiny collection of cells so minute has laid bare our arrogance as human beings.
The world’s largest and most powerful countries have spent trillions on large weapons that rain death on innocent people, and now we see all of us – large global powers or small island nations being “levelled” by the novel Covid-19 virus.
This is staggering, for me at least, having grown up in the era of the Cold War with its doctrine of “MAD” or “Mutually Assured Destruction”.
The Novel Coronavirus has, in a matter of months, disposed off all that human arrogance of power and our beliefs in that we control life and death.
The Covid-19 pandemic has flung into the the garbage bin of history the conceit that we are alone in, and secure in our wealthy countries and in our wealthy homes.
We are facing the realisation that we are all fallible.
We are pummelled finally, by the understanding that we are one race – the human race – and what affects one certainly affects the other.
The South African philosophy of “uBuntu” or “I am because we are” – that simple yet profound understanding that all of us are linked by a common shared humanity.
For those who believe in a higher power, these moments are particularly poignant as “Allah” or any other deity or name the different religions refer to “The Almighty” as is being seen as almost “humbling” us all, His errant children who have strayed from the path of justice and equality and truth and tolerance, and frugality, and respect for one’s elders and the countless humanistic tenets that religions share and espouse.
For those who believe in “The Almighty”, these are moments of solemn humility and prayer – salaah – masses – prarthanas – as we implore our maker to forgive us our trespasses – even the ones we may be unaware of having trespassed.
Such deep philosophical and existential ideas all prompted by a lethal microscopic virus that threatens to wreak even more misery and death upon human beings – with of course the most vulnerable in our societies bearing the brunt – the poor, the destitute, the oppressed, the beaten-down masses who have been savaged by the capitalist “profit over people” motive and the prevailing worldwide accepted economic model.
But, I see light here. I see glimmers of hope. This may sound all very well coming from one who lives comfortably and does not have to eke out survival on an hour to hour basis as almost five billion of our fellow humans on this earth of ours have to do daily.
The hope I speak of is the true humbling of all of us.
We have been humbled and this tiny virus has us terrified.
We have also been exposed to being petrified.
So the hope I speak of is that perhaps, just perhaps, the human race will emerge from this indescribably brutal pandemic with at the very least, having pondered and reevaluated what we as human beings have valued and taken for granted all these decades past since we began to truly progress in the fields of medical science and information technology et al.
These are just a few thoughts on this Monday the 8th of March 2021.
I will endeavour to introspect more.
I want to be less arrogant about anything – be it religion, race, social status, level of education, and all the other yardsticks by which we have until this point in our history measured what “success” and “happiness” really mean.
Prayers and wishes and thoughts to all those battling this plague, and to all human beings, but particularly to the teeming multitudes who have been for centuries beaten down and trampled upon.
They are fellow humans.
They must be accorded the dignity we so blindly take for granted.
They may have wished they were Paperback Writers, and yet they’d never Imagine soaring with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds high above and across those fragrant Strawberry Fields Forever leaping Across the Universe With a Little Help from their Friends while running Helter-Skelter singing paths to Give Peace a Chance while Twistin’ & Shoutin’ their way to old Eleanor Rigby’s funeral with Father McKenzie, while all she craved was the human touch of Wanting to Hold your Hand when All my Loving Can’t buy her Love so Please Please Me and tell Jude not to be so sad cos’ the War is Over and its a Happy Christmas as the battles rage on and all we do Watching the Wheels go Round and Round, is saying Hello Goodbye to the Obla-dis Obla-daas leaning drunkenly on Penny Lane and being Working Class Heroes if only you’d Love me Do and if only we’d afford a Ticket to Ride to burn some Norwegian Wood Yeah Yeah Yeah cos’ She Loves You, because Yesterday we wore out our Rubber Souls strolling down Abbey Road soaking in The Ballad of John and Yoko while Letting it Be but only and only, once again, if we Come Together, at long long last, and striving, flailing to Give Peace a Chance …
The world as we once knew it is being ravaged by a microscopic pathogen.
These are deadly times for many, and yet as always, it is the poor and the impoverished who bear the brunt of this invisible enemy.
It has been said how the Coronavirus is a great leveller. How it sees no race, no gender, no class.
But it does see class.
It does wreak it’s unimaginable havoc on the poor, the destitute, the hungry, those for whom the new buzz word of social-distancing means little or nothing at all.
The dregs of society.
The unwashed masses, in the “new normal” of sanitisers and gloves and masks and soap and of water.
Yes.
Water.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says:
“Billions of people around the world are continuing to suffer from poor access to water, sanitation and hygiene, according to a new report by UNICEF and the World Health Organization. Some 2.2 billion people around the world do not have safely managed drinking water services, 4.2 billion people do not have safely managed sanitation services, and 3 billion lack basic handwashing facilities”.
Yes.
Water.
The billions of our fellow human beings who are at most risk of the Novel Coronavirus are those who live in the “developing” world.
These are countries who have been ravaged not just by misrule, but by the incessant oppression of their peoples and the plunder of their bountiful resources by the North.
The Uranium of Namibia, the Coltan of the Congo, the oil of Venezuela, the the $1 a day – young women mostly – who stitch together designer label haute couture for the rest of us.
Yes.
Us.
We are those who don the garb of luxury, as well as the t-shirts that seem insanely cheap.
Yes.
They are cheap because they are manufactured in the East and the South where scores of workers, and again always mostly women or young girls, sweat it out for obscene lengths of time, and for a pittance, and of course with no “social-distancing”, even as the rest of us shy away from family and friends.
These are some of the billions of fellow human beings with whom we inhabit this earth.
The “lucky to at least have a job” folks.
Where are the sanitisers, the gloves, the masks, the keeping of a safe distance between these human beings who stitch our daily wear.
There aren’t.
Why should they be afforded the same Personal Protective Equipment we demand in our various lands.
This is the grotesque face of the politics amd economics of Covid-19.
This is the ugliness on display for all of us to see.
But not to unite as a collective and to demand in this most perilous of times the rights and the most basic health and sanitised protection for these – the forgotten, would be an abrogation of our very humanity.
“Flattening the curve”, we are told will be excellent for us in our different countries, and yet for the billions of souls who slave away in every industry imaginable, there exists no “curve”.
They are dispensable.
“oh there are tens of people just wanting their jobs”, we are told.
Yes, this is true.
Yes, it is the knotted thread of the vestiges of colonialism and imperialism and economic subjugation.
2.
So, where do we go from here, largely depending on how many of “us” make it out alive.
We must take this dreadful and most vicious of times to reflect, yes, and to argue, yes too, but above all, to unite in a way that only something as virulent of a plague that Covid-19 is to rally and to speak up and to apply pressure on all our governments to live up to what they keep telling us:
That this is the “new normal”.
There cannot be the pre-Covid-19 business-as-usual model, be it financially and entrepreneurially and societally.
There will be a “new normal”.
And this is where that sliver of a window of opportunity opens for us to take back all that has been taken from us all.
Dignity. Wage protection. Socialisation of all the basics human beings need.
Yes, the Novel Coronavirus is yet to rip through our world, cleaving its insidious scimitar into many more lives and families and societies and nations.
But, this could also be that moment, that comes rarely in history when we, the collective, the people united, the ones whom future generations will look back on and either ask –
“did they never learn?”.
Or,
“they did learn”.
And by learning, by forging the links of internationalist solidarity, by reclaiming our commons,
by taking this horrific plague to reaffirm that we are all one people,
and by most importantly, taking the reins of humanity back from the 10% and by somehow, as a work-in-progress, with failures and mistakes being made along that long road ahead of of us,
to retake that which has been stripped off us – human dignity.
And maybe then, and only then, may generations yet to come see us for what we were capable of doing, and of what we achieved in the post Covid-19 world:
A true coming together as a collective.
A true exemplification of the ancient humanist South African philosophy of “uBuntu” – I am because we are.
A philosophy that must flow in our veins now more than ever, that all human beings are intrinsically bound by a common humanity.
no more cotton-candy floss, away with the veneer, banish the gloss,
i don’t want it if it ain’t real, if it doesn’t make me sing, cry, if it doesn’t make me feel,
lose the smile, painted on, all the while, tearing up inside, where i crawl away to hide,
so get rid of the flotsam, the jetsam, the crap we shovel each day, making a living, absorbing the uncouth words the bosses say,
cos’ I’m sick of this parade, this grand jury, this empty soulless charade,
of the fun and games, win, win, win, or be a loser, and end up in ashes burnt by the flames,
take me away, lock me up somewhere far, away from the booze, the broken hearts, the asphalt, far from the melting tar,
i can’t breathe here no more, with your cocktailed mocktails, your canapes and your fluff,
i swear i don’t need any of this stuff,
so stuff it all and lets flee these concrete walls, closing in as dawn and dusk falls,
night in and night out,
i don’t want it no more, i want out …
… away from this city of gold, where hearts are strung out in the cold, and once a year chocolate shaped candies are sold, and the lovers cling onto the fragile lives they tenuously hold,
i am tired of these fake verandahs, faux-fur, purple blouses, brown shirts, club soda,
talking regurgitated impotent worldwide injustice blues …
I have been here so many times before, spewing forth words that must be by now a repetitive bore.
Scribbling this and that, having said it all so many times, these tired, paltry, meagre words seem to be just cobbled together into rhymes.
All my belched words appear impotent to me today, scribbled over and over again, reeking of stale garbage, stinking in the rain.
Words and emotions felt deep, gnawing at my being, spat out, to ears unhearing, thrust before eyes unseeing.
So I ask myself why carry on this wordy parade, of simplistic rhymes, of grammar unsound, yet feeling compelled to keep going on this endless merry-go-round.
All my walls shattered, my ramparts battered, yet still I need to throw up these words, hither and thither scattered.
I ask myself how can I stop, when most of humanity is used as a ragged mop, when the few like vampires feast on the human blood they suck, squeezing out sweat from the many who are condemned to bleed in the muck.
I see the good people all around me, burying their heads so they never may see, their religiosity on display for all to ooh and aah, while their own religions’ humanistic tenets they keep afar.
The curse of neo-colonialism, neo-imperialism, and of bonded labour, strangle the many, while the 1% their champagne do savour.
Misogyny, child-abuse, spousal and gender violence, hetero-patriarchy, female genital mutilation, in 2021 upon women everywhere is still what is endured, with all dignity slashed, while platitudes are spoken from pulpits, the sham of indignation hypocritically rehashed.
Governments the world over spending trillions on weapons of death, while pleading poverty when it comes to free, dignified, professional health.
The 99% still slaves to the tyranny of shameful wages, the same conditions that have tortured their ancestors through the ages.
Words of struggle and of principled defiance, words like ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘justice’, ‘equality’, have been cynically pilfered, by those in the corridors of business and of political power, while choking grimy dust across the planet does continually shower.
My mother is still paid so much less, than the very men who conjured up this economic mess, and if she demands higher wages she is castigated for the thoughts, while the business tycoons, the government men blather on about their newly-acquired luxury yachts.
The struggles of Nelson Mandela and of Martin Luther King, are neatly repackaged gutting out their sting, remodelled to be acceptable, while burying the essence of their revolutionary call, the demand for free education, health, housing, dignity, justice and work for all.
We wear these icons of resistance on t-shirts made in sweatshops in Bangladesh, the ultimate betrayal of their sacrifice, of the humane values they espoused, while the fires of resistance are with brutal, apathetic drivel doused.
This planet, our common earth, is being pummelled each day, nature itself is for profit ravaged, caring not that we shall leave behind an earth that has been for greed savaged.
When by the most powerful, ugly male egotistical, macho posturing is bleated out, beating the drums and threatening endless for-profit wars, the rest of us are petrified, for the mighty have long reaching claws.
Racist notions of supremacy are bandied about without a murmur of indignation, the evils of casteism, religious fanaticism, tribal and narrow sectarianism, grotesque nationalism, gay bashing, and misogynist sewage is poured with glee, and still we turn our collective heads, pretending we can’t see.
When speaking truth to power is deemed a capital crime, how impotent I feel scribbling yet another listless rhyme.
When societies are structured to create a craving for the materialistic trappings of capitalism, how easily tainted into swear words are the values of socialism.
What is demanded are not mansions of ostentatious gaudy gold, each replete with a marbled hall, but water, food, electricity, dignified work, health, education, housing, and peace and dignity for all.
They truly want us divided, on religious, caste, racial, narrow nationalistic, sexual orientation, male-female, and all the other lies, while all the while the hungry child for just some food cries.
They know if we break out of our narrow cocoons, they shall have to face the wrath of a united world, a world become one, for then none of their machinations shall suppress us, and only then shall our truest battles be hard won.
I may be a hypocrite for scribbling these rhymes, but then so are you for not hearing the bell tolling for a radical changing of the times.
How long will it take for us to rise, to dissent, to question everything that has been to us said, from the economy to religion to race, class, and to gender too, what will it take me to see what is right in front of me, and for you to see what is right in front of you.
When shall we cast off these shackles that imprison us, the shackles of apathy and of looking the other way, not realising that together we can and should and must strive for a better day, not perhaps to rid us of all suffering and all pain, all oppression, and perhaps not in one fell swoop, but at least taking our first steps towards progressive progression.
These scribbled, worthless words, seem nothing but an empty vessel drummed on and on each day,
but from the heart I do write,
about what I believe to be wrong,
and what I believe to be right.
Yet still the talons of grotesque for-profit dig deep,
buy one and get two for freemium today,
and all this under the benevolent gaze of Mandela and MLK,
