Sherry Chandler

Firebombing, revisited

A day or two ago, I did a post about James Dickey’s poem, “The Firebombing,” and I was very pleased when Dickey’s son, Christoper left a comment. Here is part of what Christopher Dickey said:

Back in 2003 I wrote a long essay about “The Firebombing” because it struck me that the poem tried very hard to come to terms with the weird detachment that has come to characterize much of modern warfare. Anyone interested can Google “Firebombings: From My Father’s Wars to Mine.” The direct link to the pdf is http://www.strom.clemson.edu/events/calhoun/guests/dickey.pdf

Christopher Dickey is an excellent war correpondent, a man whose writings we should all have given more heed. Maybe then we would not have gotten ourselves into the mess of Iraq. But as he says himself, mostly Americans just want to forget about the rest of the world.

Dickey also writes well and interestingly about his father. In 2007, I wrote a post here about his article “War and Deliverance.,” which appeared in Newsweek on October 2007 on release of the Deliverance movie to HD DVD.

So naturally I went looking for the article “Firebombings: From My Father’s Wars to Mine.” Here is part of what Christopher Dickey has to say about James Dickey’s poem “The Firebombing:”

At my father’s poetry readings, he’d usually give a pretty long introduction to this poem “which attempts to come to terms with modern warfare and with the fact that for many people engaged in modern warfare there is no guilt, because guilt depends ultimately on contemplating the destruction that one is responsible for.

“So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it,” my father would explain to the audience. “The man in this poem has been twenty years ago a bomber pilot and has made firebombing raids on civilian populations over Japan. He is a decent fellow, like most pilots were, and are, and he’s thinking now twenty years later in his pleasant suburban home that he is the same person who burned women and children alive with jellied gasoline called napalm.”

As I have said before, and will probably say again, I was born during the firebombing of Dresden, though I didn’t know that until I was grown. Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five was one of the formative events of my life. And then, of course, there was Viet Nam, which overshadowed my life from ages 15 to 30.

As one who had lived through Viet Nam, I was horrified by the glee with which our nation welcomed George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War, the way we all gathered around our televisions to watch the smart bombs fall, as though this were some virtual reality game. And, in many ways, for us it was all a game.

Here is Christopher Dickey once again:

For more than fifty years after World War II, and more than thirty years after my father wrote that poem, technology, especially American technology, continued to dehumanize the inhumanity of war until, by the late 1990s, we were able to convince ourselves, at our great distance from the destruction, that such a thing could be waged as a war that was humane.

Now, that’s a pretty dangerous concept if you think about it. Because a humane war, especially one waged from a sanitary distance, is implicitly an EASY war. It doesn’t have to be righteous. It doesn’t even have to be memorable.

. . .

Have you ever heard the term “fire and forget”?

“Fire and forget” is a bit of military jargon that describes, say, an anti-tank missile that does the work of tracking and hitting the target by itself once you pull the trigger. The munitions the Air Force and Navy use today, the “smart bombs” and cruise missiles, might also fit into that same category. It’s about guidance systems. But “fire and forget” could just as aptly describe the way the United States makes war and the American people have learned to perceive it in the last quarter century. And it tells us a lot about some of the misguided fights we’ve gotten into of late.

Since 1981, we have carried out an act of war, on average, just about every year.

This article was written early in our current “War on Terror” — terminology that seems blessedly to have been dropped lately — before the “Surge,” before hawks were able to declare something like victory in Iraq, though it was published a few months after George W. Bush’s ridiculous “Mission Accomplished” stunt.

In the meantime, I hope we have learned some difficult lessons about the nature of war. I hope we have learned what Dickey, father and son, kept trying to tell us — that, though we ourselves may be detached from our war making and though we may consider our technological warfare humane, things looks considerably different to the people on the ground being killed and maimed.

As Christopher Dickey says:

If you’ve been on the ground at the receiving end of those American bombs, however, among the people who won’t forget, don’t get closure and can’t just change the channel, you know that much of the hatred of the United States in the world comes not from these leaders who are “jealous” of its strength, as some in Washington would have us believe, and not from people who “hate freedom,” certainly, but from those innocent people who’ve either been victims of America’s awesome, insouciant power, or fear that they might be.

Consider that word insouciant.

Though I have strong reservations about Barack Obama’s decision to try to go back to Afghanistan and “win” that war, I do applaud his willingness to put people on the ground there to help rebuild, to give our country a more human face. Civilians, too. I also have some reservations about using armies as nation builders, not because I’m against nation building, but because it blurs a line that ought not to be blurred.

Like, for example, when our civilian President salutes his military.

But we are still depending on our technological war toys. We’re still using drones that maybe are killing terrorists but definitely are killing their wives and children. We have young soldiers killing in Pakistan now without ever leaving the continental United States. For this work, we recruit the ones who are good at video games.

That is really frightening.

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By the way, today is Albert Einstein’s birthday, that man whose hindsight was much better than his foresight. Like all of us, I guess.

More stuff

The Last Moonshiner. Any comments?

Shenandoah turns 60 and turns digital.:

Shenandoah will publish in its usual format in fall 2010. In spring 2011, there will be a limited-edition anthology of poems published in Shenandoah over the last 15 years. And then will come the biggest change of all. “For the foreseeable future,” said Smith, “that will be the last print issue of Shenandoah.”

Starting with the fall 2011 issue, it will be entirely online. A paid subscription will be a thing of the past. “It is perhaps inevitable when we look at what has happened to other literary journals,” said Smith. “Literary magazines per se are going to have to change their way of conceiving themselves and of reaching their audiences. And this is all tied up in the deep inquiry going on in our culture about the future of print. There is time to make that transition and be an innovator.”

The way the journal involves students in its work will be innovative as well. “The interns will not just observe and theorize about the actual editorial decisions, from design to contents to policies,” said Smith, “but they will also participate in the decisions, plus do things like screening submissions and blogging.”

See Death of a lit mag, and thanks to Edward Byrne for the news.

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light

. . .

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

I’m not sure why Texas gets to hold our entire education system hostage but there it is.

On the other hand, the most Draconian version of Utah’s anti-abortion bill did not pass:

DENVER — A sweeping anti-abortion statute in Utah that would have allowed up to life in prison for a woman whose fetus died from her intentional or reckless behavior was withdrawn by its sponsor on Thursday and will be revised to be narrower in scope.

. . .

The sponsor, Representative Carl D. Wimmer, a Republican, said he had removed a key clause that would have allowed prosecution under Utah’s criminal homicide laws for a “reckless act of the woman” that resulted in death to a fetus. Language will remain, he said, that makes a woman’s “intentional” actions, if resulting in the death of her fetus in an illegal abortion, a felony.

The bill was prompted by a case last year in which a 17-year-old who was seven months pregnant sought to induce a miscarriage by paying a man to beat her. She was arrested, but released by a judge who said seeking an abortion was not a crime.

Legal abortions, performed by a doctor, would not be affected by the old bill or its replacement. But Utah has statutes on the books intended to discourage abortions, including a parental consent requirement for minors.

My bleeding heart instincts say that any 17-year-old as desperate as all that should be treated with great compassion and not exploited as a poster-child for turning women into criminals.

Meanwhile, there’s this from Amnesty International. I would somehow feel more sympathetic toward the anti-abortion idealogues if I thought there was any real compassion involved. But I see little evidence of it.

Amnesty International’s report Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA, urges action to tackle a crisis that sees between two and three women die every day during pregnancy and childbirth in the USA.

A total of 1.7 million women a year, one-third of all pregnant women in the country, suffer from pregnancy-related complications.

The report also revealed that severe pregnancy-related complications that nearly cause death — known as “near misses” — are rising at an alarming rate, increasing by 25 percent since 1998.

Minorities, those living in poverty, Native American and immigrant women and those who speak little or no English are particularly affected.

“This country’s extraordinary record of medical advancement makes its haphazard approach to maternal care all the more scandalous and disgraceful,” said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA.

, , ,

“Mothers die not because the United States can’t provide good care, but because it lacks the political will to make sure good care is available to all women,” said Larry Cox.

Amnesty International’s analysis also shows a health care reform proposal before the US Congress does not address the crisis of maternal health care.

And then there’s this, an antidote to Oscar hype (though I’m pleased about Jeff Bridges):

Firebombing

We have been having some heated discussions in our household lately over the question of whether an evil means can ever be justified for a good end.

Specifically whether dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations was justified because it put a quick end to the war with Japan and saved, not just American lives, but also Japanese because the Japanese military were gearing up for the kind of guerilla defense involving women and children that we’ve seen in Iraq.

We did not, of course, resolve this discussion. Both sides merely conceded that it is a difficult question, and the men who made the decisions were neither demons nor saints.

I bring this up because today is the 65th anniversary of the firebombing of Tokyo (Wikipedia says tomorrow. My source is the Encyclopedia Britannica), when U.S. B29s dropped napalm that burned a quarter of the city and killed something between 80,000 and 100,000 people. I was blissfully ignorant of this event until I picked up Buckdancer’s Choice in the 1980s and read “The Firebombing,” easily the most horrifying poem I have ever encountered.

Gun down
The engines, the eight blades sighing
For the moment when the roofs will connect
Their flames, and make a town burning with all
American fire.
           Reflections of houses catch;
Fire shuttles from pond to pond
In every direction, till hundreds flash with one death.
With this in the dark of the mind,
Death will not be what it should;
Will not, even now, even when
My exhaled face in the mirror
Of bars, dilates in a cloud like Japan.
The death of children is ponds
Shutter-flashing; responding mirrors; it climbs
The terraces of hills
Smaller and smaller, a mote of red dust
At a hundred feet; at a hundred and one it goes out.
That is what should have got in
To my eye

And shown the insides of houses, the low tables
Catch fire from the floor mats,
Blaze up in gas around their heads
Like a dream of suddenly growing
Too intense for war. Ah, under one’s dark arms
Something strange-scented falls—when those on earth
Die, there is not even sound;
One is cool and enthralled in the cockpit,
Turned blue by the power of beauty,
In a pale treasure-hole of soft light
Deep in aesthetic contemplation,
Seeing the ponds catch fire
And cast it through ring after ring
Of land: O death in the middle
Of acres of inch-deep water!

I should point out that Dickey himself doesn’t seem to have been involved in bombing big cities like Tokyo.

Buckdancer’s Choice and “The Firebombing” and Robert Bly pretty much ruined Dickey as a poet.There’s a nice description of that conflict here at Edward Byrne’s One Poet’s Notes. Dickey didn’t help himself.

But folk are reconsidering the poem. Byrne refers to this statement by Joyce Carol Oates:

In her book about the visionary in literature, Joyce Carol Oates devotes a chapter to James Dickey and regards “The Firebombing” as a crucial poem: “It is unforgettable, and seems to me an important achievement in our contemporary literature, a masterpiece that could only have been written by an American, and only by Dickey. Having shown us so convincingly in his poetry how natural, how inevitable, is man’s love for all things, Dickey now shows us what happens when man is forced to destroy, forced to step down into history and be an American (‘and proud of it’). In so doing he enters a tragic dimension in which few poets indeed have operated.”

Had I read this poem when it was published (1964), I would probably have been thoroughly convinced by Bly. There is much in Dickey’s poetry, especially an espousal of violence, that distresses me. Reading the poem in my middle age, as a mother of sons, I was appalled and frightened but also impressed by the power and honesty. Now, nearly 50 years later, I tend to agree with Oates.

“The Firebombing” does not glorify war.

More from Byrne, whose whole post you ought to read:

Dickey once commented: “To have guilt you’ve got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don’t feel the guilt you ought to have. And that’s what ‘The Firebombing’ is about.”

. . .

In a 1990 Contemporary Literature interview as reported in Henry Hart’s excellent biography of the poet, Dickey explains “the guilt at the inability to feel guilty.” He continues: “You’ve been given medals for doing this. Your country has honored you—but there are those doubts that stay with you. You feel as a family man what all those unseen, forever unseen, people felt that you dropped those bombs on. You did it. The detachment one senses when dropping the bombs is the worst evil of all—yet it doesn’t seem so at the time.” In “The Firebombing” his persona lives in an average American suburb two decades after the war and still seems haunted by the Japanese living in the homes of neighborhoods beneath his plane during those bombing runs so long ago.

And the poem itself ends this way:

Come in, my house is yours, come in
If you can, if you
Can pass this unfired door. It is that I can imagine
At the threshold nothing
with its ears crackling off
Like powdery leaves,
Nothing with children of ashes, nothing not
Amiable, gentle, well-meaning,
A little nervous for no
Reason        a little worried        a little too loud
Or too easygoing        nothing I haven’t lived with
For twenty years, still nothing not as
American as I am, and proud of it.

Absolution? Sentence? No matter;
The thing itself is in that.

I am American, and sometimes, though not always, proud of it, and I stand firm in my conviction that you don’t make war to bring peace or set fire to cities to save lives. Though once a nation is in a war, it has to fight to win. But is winning by evil means — torture, for example — ever a real victory? We have not left off firebombing in the last 60 years and the legacy of the atomic bomb drop has been dark. Not that the men who made that decision in 1945 could see that dark future.

All my reservations, however, do not diminish the power of Dickey’s poem.

The middle way

I have been reading Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford University Press, 1964), a book recommended to me by that mad Kayaker John Lane.

Marx defines the pastoral ideal as a middle way between the evils of the city (oversophistication) and the equal evils of wild nature (this might be seen as Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forest). He traces the ideal back to Virgil’s Eclogues and begins his examination of how the pastoral plays out in America by looking at The Tempest as “Shakespeare’s American Fable.” It always comes as a surprise to me to realize that the mythologizing of the New World reaches as far back as Shakespeare, but, as Marx points out, the promotion of the New World paradise had begun this early not only because Europe needed hope but also because men like Sir Walter Raleigh needed to raise money for their expeditions.

For Englishmen of Raleigh’s ilk, this New World paradise was Virginia. The other story, that of Puritans braving wilderness for their religious ideals, must also be factored in, but it is not the only American story.

In his chapter “The Garden,” Marx examines what has come to be called Jeffersonian agrarianism. But Jefferson had precursors and one of them was J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. In Letters from an American Farmer (1782), de Crèvecoeur’s farmer finds in his Virginia farm the pastoral “oasis of rural pleasure” described by Virgil. But while Virgil’s shepherd lolled under a beech and played his pipes between Rome and the marshland, de Crèvecoeur’s farmer has

Eastward . . . Europe, encompassing l’ancien régime, an oppressive social order of “great lords who possess everything, and of a herd of people who have nothing.” Westward . . . the dark forest frontier where something “very singular” happens to Europeans. Their lives being “regulated by the wildness of the neighbourhood,” ther become “ferocious, gloomy and unsociable.” As he describes the frontiersmen, they are “no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals” — native American Calibans. [p. 111]

I have been spending a lot of time with these Calibans in the West of Virginia (Kentucky) in the last year and de Crèvecoeur had a point. Frontier Kentucky was a brutal place but the brutality, it seems to me, came not from men who had gone native but from those who were determined to drive the natives out in pursuit of de Crèvecoeur’s ideal.

And yet, the ideal itself doesn’t seem so evil.

Though it may be that it is an aristocratic ideal. And always, even as far back as Virgil, one that is somehow exclusive. See this passage from Moses Austin’s journal:

I cannot omitt Noticeing the many Distress.d families I pass.d in the Wilderness nor can any thing be more distressing to a man of feeling than to see woman and Children in the Month of Decembr Travelling a Wilderness Through Ice and Snow passing large rivers and Creeks without Shoe or Stocking, and barely as maney raggs as covers their Nakedness, with out money or provisions except what the Wilderness affords. . . . can any thing be more Absurd than the Conduct of man, here is hundreds Travelling hundreds of Miles, they Know not for what Nor Whither, except its to Kentucky, . . . the Promis.d land . . . Milk and Honey. and when arriv.d at this Heaven in Idea what do they find? a goodly land I will allow but to them forbiden Land. exausted and worn down with distress and disappointment they are at last Oblig.d to become hewers of wood and Drawers of water.

In the end, even de Crèvecoeur’s farmer has to pull up stakes and light out for the territory, driven out by the hostilities of the American Revolution. de Crèvecoeur himself went home to France, where he got caught up in the French Revolution. He was a French aristocrat and he had his problems there, though he managed to survive with help from his American connections.

John Lane suggested that I read both Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests. The Shadow of Civilization (Univ Chicago Press, 1992) and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, and though I am not very far into the Marx book, I think I can see why. Harrison begins Forests by saying “The story is full of enigmas and paradoxes.” And so it seems is the story of America.

Clothes make the man

Melverina Elverina Peppercorn may strike you as a silly name. It may strike you as a name from a silly children’s rhyme. Something by Dr. Suess maybe.

But Melverina Elverina Peppercorn, from the Tennessee mountains, was a very serious soldier in Civil War. She enlisted in in the Confederate Army in December of 1862, alongside her brother Alexander the Great, aka Lexie. (Their mother, I think, was a bit of a poet.) She was 16 when she enlisted, “tall, big-boned,” and what’s more, she could spit a stream of ambeer 10 feet. According to Deanne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook in They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War (Viking Civil War Library, 2003),

When Melverina Peppercorn enlisted in the Confederate army, she could shoot as well as the twin brother she joined with and was ’strong as a man,’ and no one in her family doubted that she could do the job. [p. 55]

Whatever the Victorian restraints on women of the middle and upper classes, 19^th century farm women were not creatures of the parlor, subject to the vapors. Of course, it probably also helped that she had her brother to run interference for her, bunk with her, help her keep her secret.

Melverina only fought in one major battle. When Lexie was wounded, she went with him to the hospital to nurse him. After he had recovered, the twins wanted to re-enlist but by then the war was almost over.

According to Blanton and Cook, there were something like 250-400 women who fought as men in the Union and Confederate Armies during the Civil War. That number is statistically insignificant but socially it seems too many to be dismissed as some sort of freak or fluke.

These women joined up for reasons as varied as those of men. Some joined out of patriotism. Some wanted to fight to end slavery. Some, like Melverina, didn’t want to let a brother or a husband go alone, didn’t want to be left behind. Some joined because being a soldier seemed better than being a prostitute. Some joined because a soldier’s wages were far above what they could earn as a woman working at what women were allowed to do in those days. Some were already passing as men before war broke out, because men could earn more money than women.

Not all of the women who joined up were working class. Mary Ann Clark, a Hardinsburg, Kentucky woman who joined the army of Braxton Bragg, was middle-class and college educated. As best I can figure it out, she joined the army for the same reason a lot of men have: to get out from under a rotten relationship.

Some women fought while pregnant, one woman was not found out until she gave birth.

Women were found out for a number of reasons besides the obvious one of giving birth. Some, like Melverina, unmasked themselves when their male companions were wounded or left the service for some other reason. Some, like Mary Ann Clark, were found out when they were wounded and/or taken prisoner.

Not a single one of these women soldiers was ever given away because she was unable to fulfill her duties as a soldier. Several were promoted. Mary Ann Clark re-joined Bragg’s army after she was released from prison and was promoted to Lieutenant.

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”

Lately, I seem to be trafficking in Nobel Prize acceptance speeches. Here, for MLKJr Day 2010, is a link to that one made by Dr. King on December 10, 1964. Dr. King begins like this:

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highness, Mr. President, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I accept the Nobel Prize for Peace at a moment when 22 million Negroes of the United States of America are engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice. I accept this award on behalf of a civil rights movement which is moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger to establish a reign of freedom and a rule of justice. I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death. I am mindful that only yesterday in Philadelphia, Mississippi, young people seeking to secure the right to vote were brutalized and murdered. And only yesterday more than 40 houses of worship in the State of Mississippi alone were bombed or burned because they offered a sanctuary to those who would not accept segregation. I am mindful that debilitating and grinding poverty afflicts my people and chains them to the lowest rung of the economic ladder.

Therefore, I must ask why this prize is awarded to a movement which is beleaguered and committed to unrelenting struggle; to a movement which has not won the very peace and brotherhood which is the essence of the Nobel Prize.

After contemplation, I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of that movement is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

. . .

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the “isness” of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal “oughtness” that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

The passage of forty-five years has made us cynical and would seem to have trampled on Dr. King’s vision. Forty-five years have given us Pat Robertson as the voice of Christianity, a voice that seems to drown out the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. His vision of unconditional love seems to have been overcome by a prosperity gospel, which says God rewards the righteous with the goods of this world and those who suffer are being punished for their unrighteousness.

Forty-five years have passed and our current Nobel Peace Prize Laureate tells us we have to make war for peace, an idea I had been foolish enough to think safely discredited by pretty much the entirety of the 20^th Century. Forty-five years have passed and the owner of Blackwater International can — beyond the power of any secular law — declare himself on a Christian Crusade to wipe out the infidels, an idea I had thought discredited by pretty much the entirety of the 12^th century.

It seems to me now that we desperately need to be reminded of Dr. King’s vision, to be reminded that nonviolence is not the same as cowardice, to be reminded that Dr. King said that every man should have something he’d be willing to die for, not something he’d be willing to kill for. And to be reminded that

. . . right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today’s mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land. “And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.” I still believe that We Shall overcome!

Mud Mothers

This morning, Allison Hedge Coke posted to the Wom-Po list a poem by Lenelle Moïse, “Mud Mothers,” which begins like this:

Mud Mothers

the children of haiti
are not mythological
we are starving
or eating salty cakes
made of clay

because in 1804 we felled
our former slave captors
the graceless losers sunk
vindictive yellow
teeth into our forests

what was green is now
dust & everyone knows
trees unleash oxygen
(another humble word
for life)

This poem reminded me that back on December 2, I mentioned Margaretta Mason Brown, wife of Kentucky’s first U.S. Senator, who wrote,to her husband that

the Monster Slavery may destroy the people of Kentucky before long [p. 57]

As I wrote then, Margaretta Brown was an emancipationist, one who favored a gradual freeing of the slaves. She made this statement because she was afraid of an uprising like that in Santo Domingo. She was afraid that the incendiary language of abolitionists would incite such a rebellion.

Once upon a time evangelicals were on the side of the angels, and in 1834, a particularly fiery abolitionist sermon by “a young Presbyterian minister, Mr. Davidson” in a church “to Galleries overflowing with Negroes,” caused Mrs. Brown to write to her niece:

The cause of gradual emancipation is gaining ground daily in the West, but these premature and violent measures, will have a tendency to create such a spirit of insubordination amongst the slaves, as will render it necessary to rivet their chains more closely in order to our self preservation, or they will be stimulated to take their cause in their own hands and the tragedy of St. Domingo may indeed be reacted here.

The passage above is from Helen Deiss Irvin’s Women in Kentucky. The paternalism of it makes me cringe, but it illustrates how the institution of slavery enslaved a whole culture. Look at this story from Irvin:

. . . Kentucky owners dreaded slave uprisings. Like other slaveholders, they feared poisonings and the hand raised against an owner that might begin some frightful massacre. [john W.] Coleman [author of Slavery Times in Kentucky] tells of a Lexington woman from Massachusetts, Caroline Turner, despised by whites for her insanely sadistic treatment of slaves. While she was whipping a young coachman in chains early one morning, he broke free and strangled her. Sympathetic as they had previously been toward the Turner slaves, Lexington citizens quickly closed ranks to hunt the young slave down and have him hanged. [p. 57]

It pains me to believe that the people of Haiti are still suffering because once they took their fates in their own hands. And yet, here is Pat Robertson illustrating that the memory of ignorant whites is long. If there is a devil involved here, I would say it has a white skin. How did such a man as this become the voice of evangelism, evangelism that once was on the side of freedom for all? I wonder how Mr. Robertson would react to being whipped in chains.

To learn more about the Haitian Revolution and how Robertson got it all wrong, see Juan Cole who reminds us that these things are never simple:

As Charles Tilly pointed out, all revolutions are multiple revolutions

Read more about the deforestation of Haiti here at the Alicia Patterson Foundation:

No matter how many environmental, agriculture and forestry experts in American and international aid agencies one talks with, there are no illusions that even the best techniques available today can save Haiti. It will never be restored to the richest jewel that adorned France’s colonial crown in the 18th century. The French brought a million African slaves to clear the forests for sugar and coffee. As a result, a huge part of Haiti’s precious woods were felled. This was followed by a procession of lumber companies in the 19th century that paid large sums to landowners and corrupt government officials for access to the forests. The Haitian peasantry also was in need of fuel, building materials and crop lands. They cut down more forests and ended up being blamed for the devastation, now in epic proportions.

(My emphasis)

To read more of Lenelle Moïse at her blog, where you will find links to donate to the Haiti earthquake fund.

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Added: Another good explanation of how Haiti came to be where it is today from The Guardian:

As Stephen Keppel of the Economist Intelligence Unit puts it, Haiti’s revolution may have brought it independence but it also “ended up destroying the country’s infrastructure and most of its plantations. It wasn’t the best of starts for a fledgling republic.” Moreover, in exchange for diplomatic recognition from France, the new republic was forced to pay enormous reparations: some 150m francs, in gold. It was an immense sum, and even reduced by more than half in 1830, far more than Haiti could afford.

“The long and the short of it is that Haiti was paying reparations to France from 1825 until 1947,” says Von Tunzelmann. “To come up with the money, it took out huge loans from American, German and French banks, at exorbitant rates of interest. By 1900, Haiti was spending about 80% of its national budget on loan repayments. It ­completely wrecked their economy. By the time the original reparations and interest were paid off, the place was basically destitute and trapped in a ­spiral of debt. Plus, a succession of leaders had more or less given up on trying to resolve Haiti’s problems, and started looting it instead.”