 Ring-tailed
Lemur - Issue Fifty |
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by Iftekhar Sayeed
What I have most wanted to do…throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. - Orwell The power of poetry broke through again when Genocide Joe vetoed a resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza. Oliver Goldsmith’s little masterpiece saved me from complete despair and breakdown. GJ is a churchgoing Christian, much like the character the dog bites - and dies. This
dog and man at first were friends; Around
from all the neighbouring streets, The
wound it seemed both sore and sad But
soon a wonder came to light, “For poetry makes nothing happen,” opined Auden. Really? Nationalism, anti-Semitisn and love of violence linked themselves in some heroic bosoms, such as that of Lord Byron’s. The nationalism first: This must he feel, the true-born son of Greece, If Greece one true-born patriot can boast: The “sickle-into-sword” theme constitutes the nationalist narrative. Indeed, Fichte, like Machiavelli (whom he “enthusiastically praised in an article”), had ranted against the Christian aversion to warfare, and even against limited warfare (Vittorio Hosle, A Short History of German Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), p 104)). A decade after the martyrdom of Byron (admittedly, through fever, not bayonets), Giuseppe Mazzini proclaimed, prophetically enough, that “Ideas ripen quickly when nourished by the blood of martyrs”. As John Hutchinson observes, “warfare has been central for much nation-state formation”. He quotes Charles Tilly: “War makes states and states make war”. More chilling are his own words: “Many nationalists subsequently have cited the willingness of populations to sacrifice themselves for the nation-state as an indicator of its validity”. Byronic anti-Semitism goes hand in hand with his anti-capitalism as well as nationalism, the Jew being cosmopolitan: Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign Those, and the truly liberal Lafitte, The dog, neither left nor right, bit a pious man belonging neither on the right or left (the churchy GJ veers to the left, and churchy Republicans to the right). The right and left have no monopoly on evil. And yet today, any hint that a free market may be a force for good stands to cancel the heretic. Dissident Voice refuses even to answer my emails because, I fear, I put in a few good words for old Adam Smith. New Hope International asked me to blame the violence in Bangladesh, not on democracy, but on the IMF and the World Bank. Counterpunch declined to answer, probably because I stood my ground. Fleas on the Dog accepted my poems, then followed up with a mysterious technological excuse. I fired back: “Something I wrote in "The Poet Speaks"--something you white folks with your white sensitivity didn't like. THE POET SPEAKS… After our democratic transition, the country divided into two political groups with their private armies: these boys did the unthinkable and the unspeakable. Our silence and denial drove me to write the poems. The verses, both free and metrical, of D. H. Lawrence impressed me with their debunking of social myths. I sometimes like to call myself a “pongographer”: one who writes about the pong. Nevertheless, or perhaps therefore, poetry is a kind of inner prayer, in line with Matthew Arnold’s prediction that in poetry we will “find an ever surer and surer stay”. That democracy is your creed--forced on us militarily, financially and psychologically--and that you are just a voice of your state should make your readers cringe. Chomsky was right: you're "a herd of independent minds marching in support of state power." We natives are SICK and TIRED of sucking up to you.” And the editor wrote back, saying: “Hey! We like this better than your poems. Can we publish it in upcoming Issue 12? Seriously. Ciao. Charles.” I mention all this as a tribute to The Fear of Monkeys, which has never tried to position me on a scale, but looked to my writing as socially and politically conscious. Many online journals claim to publish material on small countries (like Bangladesh) but they rarely walk the talk. Fear of Monkeys published my poem on the famine of 1974 caused by socialist government neglect and oligarchic greed. No other outlet has shown a corresponding interest. One would think Dissident Voice and Counterpunch might be curious about an obscure corner of the world, but one would be wrong. The nineteenth century saw art for art’s sake to a great extent, but the events of the last and the current centuries leave no room for artistic solipsism. “The private life is dead,” says Pasha Antipov in the film Dr. Zhivago (1965). The demise has been exaggerated, but today, more than at any other time, public events force themselves on our attention with a force unfelt before. If poetry makes nothing happen today--consider Byron and Gabriele D’Annunzio--much of the blame lies on the nature of the industry. One grave shortcoming has already been mentioned: the left-right pigeonholes. The other lies in the poverty of journals looking for socially conscious writing. They are few and far between. That is no surprise. When the literary world lies sundered between Us and Them, pity and sensitivity go by the board. The remaining journals focus on micro-issues for micro-audiences. One can't blame them. Poetry never meant to change the world--but to arouse horror and pity. This is as true of the Antigone as of Becket (1964). What has changed since the nineteenth century is that the individual in lone agony tries to communicate that sympathy. And not necessarily in poetry or writing. In Cy Endfeld’s The Sound of Fury (1950), we see a mob lynching inspired by lurid newspaper reports. How true! Again, the aim: horror and pity. “Mr Kissinger, like many Republicans, worries that American education dwells on America’s darkest moments. “In order to get a strategic view you need faith in your country,” he says. The shared perception of America’s worth has been lost.” In the film Wolf Lake (1979), we find a conscientious Vietnam war deserter pitted against a patriotic American in 1976. The deserter, suffering from what we would today describe as moral injury, epitomises Kissinger’s nightmare. The film evokes horror and pity. That horror and pity are in scant supply may also be due to the tyranny of experts. Experts solve problems, no matter what. Scientific and bureaucratic rationality furnish the illusion that the insoluble is the chimerical. "The future of poetry is immense,” wrote Mathew Arnold, “ because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry." The prediction failed, and the reasons are given above. Poetry, and art forms in general, that come from neither left nor right, not from ideology and hatred, but from sacred depths in our finitude before havoc, capable of stirring horror and pity, poetry of such calibre alone deserve our mortal attention. "At our home when we were checking, I found pieces of human flesh. We found a whole lower limb belonging to a human that we don't know who he is. When I saw the pieces of flesh on the floor, I cried." "I know that this message means nothing to a lot of people," the MSF doctor from Gaza says "and will change nothing.” The same must be said about the last poetry of Refaat Alareer. If
I must die, Iftekhar Sayeed teaches English. He was born and lives
in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He has contributed to The Danforth Review,
Axis of Logic, Enter Text, Postcolonial Text, Southern Cross Review,
Opednews.com, Left Curve, Mobius, Erbacce, Down In The Dirt, The Fear
of Monkeys and other publications. Somewhat influenced by DHL, he
likes to write about the pong of society, as well as its deodorant:
He’s tempted at times to describe himself as, and feels himself to be,
a pongographer. He is also a freelance journalist. He and his
wife love to travel.
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The Ring-tailed Lemur is endemic to the island of Madagascar
where they range from gallery forests to spiny scrub in the southern
regions of the island. They are opportunistic omnivores, primarily
eating from as many as three dozen different plant species, and
their diet includes flowers, herbs, bark and sap, particularly from
the tamarind tree. They have also been observed eating decayed wood,
earth, spider webs, insect cocoons, arthropods (spiders, caterpillars,
cicadas and grasshoppers) and small vertebrates such as birds and
chameleons. They have a slender frame and narrow face, and their
long, bushy tail is ringed in alternating between twelve or thirteen
black and white transverse bands. Their coat varies from gray to
rosy-brown, sometimes with a brown patch around the tail region.
The hair on the throat, cheeks, and ears is white or off-white and
also less dense, allowing the dark skin underneath to show through.
They are relatively large, with their average weight at 2.2 kilograms
and their body length ranging between 39 and 46 cm. The average
troop contains 13 to 15 individuals and their home range size varies
between 6 and 35 hectares. They are a female-dominant species, and
females socially dominate males in all circumstances, including
feeding priority. Dominance is enforced by lunging, chasing, cuffing,
grabbing and biting. Although the females may seek outside males,
they typically mate within their troop. Their breeding season runs
from mid-April to mid-May and gestation lasts for about 135 days.
The offspring are born in September or occasionally October. One
offspring is the norm, although twins may occur. Due to their diurnal
lifestyle, they also sunbathe; the lemurs can be observed sitting
upright on their tails, exposing their soft, white belly fur towards
the sun. They will often also have their palms open and eyes gently
closed, as if meditating. Like other lemurs, this species relies
strongly on their sense of smell, and territorial marking, with
scent glands, provides communication signals throughout a group's
home range. They use many different calls, including those which
concern group cohesion and announce the presence of predators. Despite
their relatively small brain they can organize sequences, understand
basic arithmetic, and preferentially select tools based on functional
qualities. Listed as endangered by the IUCN, only about 2,000 ring-tailed
lemurs are estimated to be left in the wild in 2017, making the
threat of their extinction serious. Their native predators include
the fossa, the Madagascar harrier-hawk, the Madagascar buzzard,
and the Madagascar ground boa. There are also introduced predators
like the small Indian civet, the domestic cat and the domestic dog.
As this suggests, they are mostly threatened by the actions of people,
such as habitat destruction, the bushmeat and pet trades, and poaching
for zoos.