This collection should shake anyone out of his or her complacency. It sustains throughout a tone of wholesome candour. I speak as a ‘half-informed’ person who had some experience of race relations operating in the UK, particularly in the area of the Notting Hill Carnival. I do not share Connie’s Christian convictions but appreciate the way in which they are an incredible support for her.
Connie uses that literary device to make her protest against the consequences of Slavery. The personified, individualised black people hold the white man, the slave trader, the plantation owner, the segregationalist, to task.
After Effects of Slavery refers to a desperate struggle – ‘verbalizing loudly, without a true voice.’ Another Black Life Ending and Another One Down refer to confrontations between black rights demonstrators and armed police. This is supremely pertinent to me; I had tended to think that such atrocities happened in the ‘bad old days’. But they definitely pertain to the here and now.
Can Love Conquer Hate – the brutal, armed police are compared to the Taliban; I certainly know the term ‘state terrorism’ and yes: terrorism of all kinds threatens to become the ‘norm’. Choices is an impassioned plea for those motivated by brutality and force to think, and feel and love – to go on into a peaceful future.
Clarification is one of those ‘poems’ which practically stands as a political tract: Connie indicts journalists and academics alike for abstracting, and muting, confrontation with the issue of slavery and its consequences, which she depicts so unflinchingly. Those in (white) power dodge the issue: “It’s easier for them to blame rules, policy, laws and institutions rather than to stand individually responsible.” She makes a searing comment on the dynamics of oppression: “Even while psychology states, when a victim begins to believe the same values as the aggressor, they cease to be perceived as a threat and so there is born the ‘house niggers’ of this generation, they allow a few to get through, to sing their praise and sell their brand . . .
While the rest of us suffer from constant policing, low job availability and no preparation through a decent education, and they call us the ‘Thugs’. She urges both sides to end this dire conflict to respect each other. Error of our Ways is a highly devotional poem, censorious of mankind for deviating from the paths laid out by a benign God.
Fifty Years of Madness certainly awoke me to the ongoing contingency of the struggles of black people in the USA. Of course I had keenly followed the actions of Martin Luther King and the like, but like countless others, I had been lulled into a false sense of security, that they had succeeded in their protests and that black people had gained equality. Multiple accolades to Connie for keeping me abreast of reality.
Freedom, Justice and Equality – Connie makes a plea for all three states of affairs, but distinguishes between them: “justice denied could only be justice delayed/ but inequality ignored, keeps revolution stored.” Genocide – a panoramic vision of the massacred masses. Giving Honour to Vets – straightforward praise of combatants, who should perhaps be considered differently from those who give them their orders. Haiti’s Plight is a major challenge to humanity’s conscience.
Snippets is another exhortation to strive for the whole truth, knowing the entirety of events and experiences, and not treating fragments as totality. The Brother Malcolm X, I Remember is a well-reasoned attempt to assess the progress in black rights since Malcolm X’s time: ‘comparing how far we have come’. There has indeed been some progress, including Obama’s Presidency.
Connie was rightly disturbed about the harshness of some of Malcolm X’s actions and statements, but in view of the barbaric cruelty and oppression which he opposed, her final feeling is of veneration. Watch What You Say is a statement of the essence of free speech. Shallow, careless remarks, unchallenged, can do enormous damage; so can the practice of gagging and marginalising dissenting opinions and voices. This poem is admirably Voltairean:
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