On the bright morning of June 16, 1976, thousands of students from the African
township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg, gathered at their schools to
participate in a student-organized protest demonstration that had been carefully planned by the Soweto Students' Representative Council's (SSRC) Action Committee and support from the Black Consciousness Movement and teachers from Soweto .
The immediate cause for the June 16, 1976, march was student opposition to a decree issued by the Bantu Education Department
of the South African apartheid government to start enforcing a
long-forgotten law requiring that secondary education be conducted only
in Afrikaans, rather than in English or any of the native African
languages. This was bitterly resented by both teachers and students.
Many teachers themselves did not speak Afrikaans (an extremely difficult
language to learn) and so could not teach the students. The students
resented being forced to learn the language of their oppressors and saw
it as a direct attempt to cut them off from their original culture. Moreover, lacking fluency in Afrikaans, African teachers and
pupils experienced first-hand the negative impact of the new policy in
the classroom. By 1976, several teachers were ignoring the directive
and were fired, prompting staff resignations. Tensions grew. Students
refused to write papers in Afrikaans and were expelled. The students of
one school after another went on strike. The government response was to
simply shut the down schools and expel the striking students
The protestors in Soweto carried signs that read, 'Down with Afrikaans' and ' Bantu
Education – to Hell with it ' while others sang freedom songs as the unarmed
crowd of schoolchildren marched towards Orlando soccer stadium where a
peaceful rally had been planned. The march swelled to more than 10,000
students.
En route to the stadium, approximately fifty policemen stopped
the students and tried to turn them back. At first, the security forces
tried unsuccessfully to disperse the students with tear gas and warning
shots. Then policemen fired directly into the crowd of demonstrators. Students started screaming and running, as more gunshots were being
fired, and the police let out their dogs on children who responded by
stoning the dogs. The police then began to shoot directly at the
children.
One of the first students to be shot dead was 13 year old Hector Pieterson. Pieterson was picked up by Mbuyisa Makhubo (an
18-year-old schoolboy) who together with Hector's sister, Antoinette
(then 17), ran towards the car of photographer Sam Nzima, who took a
picture of them. The picture (at the top of this post) and Hector became an iconic symbol of the Soweto uprisings. and was seen worldwide.
The police patrolled the streets throughout the
night as the students came under intense attack. Emergency clinics
were swamped with injured and bloody children.The police requested the hospitals to provide a list of all victims with bullet wounds but the doctors refused to create the list, and recorded bullet wounds as abscesses.
The shootings in Soweto sparked a
massive uprising that soon spread to more than 100 urban and rural
areas throughout South Africa. It is estimated that when the police and the army responded to the
demonstrators by firing tear gas and then bullets, between 400 and 700
people, many of them children, were killed with thousands wounded. That was followed by a cycle
of protest and repression that reverberated across the country.
To understand the context within which the uprising occurred, it is
important to note that at the time, South Africa’s government had a
long-standing policy of apartheid ,
which called for racial segregation and sanctioned political and
economic discrimination against nonwhites in the country. Furthermore,
the issue of language was a sensitive one. Black Africans demanded
recognition of their own languages and cultures. While there was always
some opposition to apartheid within the country, the government was
powerful enough to suppress virtually all criticism.
The Soweto uprising also came after a decade of relative calm in the
resistance movement in the wake of massive government repression in the
1960s. Yet during this "silent decade,' a new sense of resistance had
been brewing. In 1969, black students, led by Steve Biko https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/09/bantu-stephen-biko-dec-18-1946sept-12.html (among others),
formed the South African Student''s Organisation (SASO). Stressing black pride, self-reliance, and psychological liberation, the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1970s became an influential force in the townships, including
Soweto. The political context of the 1976 uprisings must also take into
account the effects of workers' strikes in Durban in 1973; the
liberation of neighboring Angola and Mozambique in 1975; and increases
in student enrollment in black schools, which led to the emergence of a
new collective youth identity forged by common experiences and
grievances (Bonner).
16 June 1976 was a major turning point in South African history. The
protests by Soweto school children on that day marked the end of
submissiveness on the part of the black population of South Africa and
the beginning of a new militancy in the struggle against apartheid.The firing of teachers in Soweto who refused to implement the Afrikaans
language policy exacerbated the frustration of middle school students,
who then organized small demonstrations and class boycotts as early as
March, April and May.
On the days following 16 June, about 400 white South African students
(in the spirit of solidarity) from the University of the Witwatersrand
marched through the city of Johannesburg in protest of the massacre of
black secondary school students and condemning the police brutality. South
African black trade labourers laid down their tools and joined the
demonstrations. Most of the black youths in townships expressed their
frustrations and anger by burning down schools and any symbols of the
apartheid regime. Many students were arrested, while others fled the
country to join the liberation movements in exile.
Internationally, most
of the anti-apartheid political parties, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), countries and the United Nations strongly condemned the South African police’s actions in the using of maximum force that led to the massacre of the students, and images of the police firing on defenceless students led to international revulsion against apartheid in South Africa, and instigated a world-wide boycott of South Africa produce,against the regime's violence and oppressive system. The violence inflicted on this day at least exposed the ruthless an merciless lengths the reacist apartheid forces were prepared to go to maintain a system of domination and exploitation.
Writing with dignity and suppressed rage shortly after the Uprising
where so many unarmed peaceful people, largely children and youth were shot by the
apartheid state’s police and those they directed, the South African poet Mazizi Kunene (12May 1930 -11 August 2006) was
resolute:
‘We have entered the night to tell our tale
To listen to those who have not spoken
We, who have seen our children die in the morning,
Deserve to be listened to
Nothing really matters except the grief of our children.
Their tears must be revered, their inner silence
Speaks louder than the spoken words; and all being
And all life shouts out in outrage…
There is nothing more we can fear.’
South Africa would never be the same again. From 16 June 1976 onwards,
South Africa's youth took centre stage. They would remain in the
forefront of resistance to apartheid, alongside an increasingly powerful
trade union movement, until the unbanning of political organisations in
South Africa in February 1990. It also established the leading role of the African National Congress (ANC) against the apartheid regime and marked the turning point in the opposition to white rule in South Africa.
June 16 is now commemorated as National Youth Day in South Africa. The public holiday commemorates the hundreds of
students killed during the protests, and aims to raise awareness of the
problems faced by the young community in South Africa.
Let''s never forget those that were killed in the Soweto Uprising. Lets neither forget that the scenes of the current conflict between Palestine and Israel are reminiscent of the 1976 Uprisings where we see insurgent youth in Gaza taking to the streets in a desperate attempt to regain their humanity and their land. Young people are among those leading the protests, demonstrating their frustration against the continued stifling of their hopes and dreams in their occupied land..Much like the Soweto Uprising, Palestinians have used these demonstrations as a way of regaining their agency as citizens and remind us that an apartheid system still sadly cruelly fllourishes in our world. Like the one that was once in place in South Africa, the Apartheid system of Israel must fall too.
Yesterday evening, hundreds of people gathered outside the Home
Office, protesting against the government’s policy of deporting asylum
seekers to Rwanda. Moments before the protest took place, the Court of Appeal ruled that
the first deportation flight would go ahead, despite the best efforts
of various campaign groups.
The first plane was set to fly with 11 asylum seekers on board, down from 130 after a flurry of individual legal battles. While the government claimed the policy of removing migrants who arrive
in the UK illegally will deter people from making dangerous channel
crossings, campaign groups such as Care4Calais have described it as “cruel and barbaric.”
However in heartwarming news and a massive victory for all who campaigned against it the planned flight to deport refugees to Rwanda by Priti Patel and the toxic Tory Governmment was forced to cancel their unlawful plans last
night, at 22.00 minutes before it was due to take off, after an intervention by European Court of
Human Rights (ECHR) judges ruled they face real danger of inhuman and
degrading treatment there.
This is a truly historic moment and a powerful first step against this barbaric policy. The ECHR rarely intervenes in the legal affairs of its member countries and only does so when they believe that people's fundamental human rights are at serious risk.essential outcome for the people seeking safety. But alas this is not a permanent injunction against Rwanda deportations. The European Court of Human Rights intervened because a final decision about whether this policy is legal has yet to be made in UK courts.
This all serves to show us hown important human rghts protections are.
We
should celebrate last night as a victory for justice, but the
fight is far from over.as the Tories say they are already planning the next flight. and are hellbent in pressing on with this inhumane and heartless plan, even if only one person was on ord, a move which would have made someone the most expensive refugee ever by a margin of several million pounds, and today we see the Government lashing out, blaming everyone
but itself for this cruel farce. In particular, it will see this as an
opportunity to pursue its anti-courts, anti-rights, anti-protest agenda –
continuing to attack those who hold it accountable.
In
July, there will be a hearing to determine whether the Rwanda policy is
lawful or not. It remains to be seen whether the Government will
attempt another flight before then, as it had planned.
It’s all the more important we continue to build and amplify resistance to the Rwanda deal from all sides.
The people the UK Government wants to deport came to the UK seeking sanctuary and protection..They are our responsibility. .Being an asylum seeker is not a choice. People are forced to leave their
homes and risk their lives to seek safety. Currently in the UK thy face
deportation to the an unknown and unsafe destination, to country with
an appalling human rights record, that they have no connection with
whatsover Seeking asylum through the UK's hostile system is already
traumatic enough, and the cruel Rwanda plan is the last strike to
destroy what is left of asylum seekers' spirit..
The ongoing threat of removal will continue to cause human suffering,
distress and chaos for desperate people who have escaped war,
persecution and torture. Shockingly, those at risk include young people
who have been incorrectly assessed as adults.This is having a huge impact on their mental health, with distressing reports of self-harm. Our human rights are designed to protect us from these exact situations which fundamentally threaten our safety and that would have put people at risk of serious harm had they been deported to Rwanda.
I support free movement and equal rights for all. We as people should be
trying to promote unity between all.This is what a free society
encompasses, the freedom of movement, including freedom of immigration
and emigration. We should support the rights and dignity and respect of
immigrants and refugees, and people forced to live without status.Many
people are forced to live undocumented after having their applications
for asylum refused, many escaping persecution, war, fleeing in fear,
escaping danger, in search of safety, a better future. Forced to live
underground, hidden lives.
We all have the right to settle wherever we please, are we not
according to the principle ' From each according to his ability, to each
according to her need ' entitled to equal access to the worlds land
resources.' Immigration laws are inherently racist, because their
purpose is to exclude outsiders, and feed and legitimise racism, and in
the process causes intolerable suffering to many people.
People of the world should all be entitled to the same universal
social, political and economic rights and conditions, with or or without
papers, with the same entitlement to the world's resources.We should
at same time recognise the many valuable contributions to society made by migrants,
immigrants and refugees stretching back centuries. Every country in the
world has it's richness and diversity because of the waves of
immigration that have occurred. We should recognise the people who
daily, risk everything, including their life, to leave their own
country's, their family and friends, in search of a new and better life.
I see no contradiction in my support for the Palestinian people against
their illegal apartheid wall, the walls that have been created in open
air prisons in Gaza, the West Bank, are the same as any other border
wall strewn with barbed wire that bleed migrants, or walls that are
erected as barriers to dignity and humanity, from Mexico, and the
internment camps of Australia, to Fortress.
From the Hostile Environment to the Rwanda cash-for-humans scheme, the
anti-migrant agenda has
such a devastating impact on the people affected. Instead of looking for safe and legal routes, instead of funding
peace-building, conflict prevention programmes around the world, the
government are still in all their evil not giving up their plans to send people who have come here looking for asylum to somewhere where they’re not going to be safe. If the Government truly wanted to stop people smugglers and save lives they would give refugees visas to cross the Channel in a similar way to Ukrainians . With these visas, refugees could then claim asylum on arrival in the UK This would put people smugglers out of business straightaway.
We
must continue to fight every day against the cruelty of Patel and Johnson's hostile racist environment, who have as expected found the judgement ' sursprising' and ' dissapointing' , this says so much about their moral fibre, to me not a grain exists, both lacking any form of coompassion or empathy for fellow human beings.
Lets maintain our opposition to Rwanda offshore detention and deportations, scrap the Natioonality and Borders Act, while helping to make make
Britain a place where our communities our strong and open, and standing up for the rights of those seeking a safer life here, while at same time do all we can to stop the
British government and British corporations fostering conflict, poverty
and inequality around the world. Solidarity is a beautiful and powerful thing. Imagine a world free of borders, it's easy if you try, the sky has none,
there is only one world. no borders are necessary, no one is illegal. Refugees are welcome here.
The Irish
poet, dramatist and mystic visionary William Butler Yeats was born on this day June 13th 1865, in Sandymount, County Dublin.
He is widely considered as one of the most foremost figures of 20th-century
literature, and regarded by some critics as among
the greatest poets in all English language. Yeats was also a
significant Irish and British literary pioneer and an irrevocable figure
in Irish politics, having served as a senator for two terms.
William Butler Yeats was born as the son of a famous Irish portrait
painter and lawyer, John Butler Yeats. His whole family were Anglo-Irish
and descended from a linen merchant, Jervis Yeats, who had served in
the army of King William of Orange. Yeats’ mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen,
was a member of a wealthy Anglo Irish family of County Sligo that had
played a role from the end of the 17th century in controlling the
economic, political, social, and cultural aspects of Ireland.
The Yeats financial life was more than okay, having been indulged in
trade and shipping. Although W.B. Yeats took huge pride in being from an
English descent, he was also very proud of his Irish nationality and
ensured that his playwrights and poems included the Irish culture within
its pages.
William spent summers at the family’s house in Connaught, where he
developed a close relationship with nature. These nature experiences
proved to be very important for his development as a poet. John Yeats took his wife and five children to live in
England but, unable to make much of a living, he was obliged to return
to Dublin in 1880. William met a number of Dublin’s literary class at
his father’s studio in Dublin at which he thought of producing his first
poetry and an essay on the Ulster Scottish poet Sir Samuel Ferguson.
Yeats found his early aspiration and muse in the prominent novelist Mary
Shelley and the works of the English poet Edmund Spenser.
Yeats belonged to the Protestant, Anglo-Irish minority that had
controlled the economic, political, social, and cultural life of Ireland
since at least the end of the seventeenth century. Most members of this
minority considered themselves English people who merely happened to
have been born in Ireland, but Yeats staunchly affirmed his Irish
nationality. Although he lived in London for fourteen years of his
childhood (and kept a permanent home there during the first half of his
adult life).,As years passed by and Yeats’s work became more specialized, he maintained his cultural roots and he drew more andhe drew more and more inspirations from the Irish folklore and myths (specifically the one that emerged from County Sligo).
Yeats’s in‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ draws extensively from Irish
folklore, Classical Greek mythology, and occult symbolism, intertwining
those influences with Yeats’s personal experiences and expressive style
to create a magical hybrid of whimsical, yet sorrowful, poetry. The poem
is loosely based on the legend of Aengus, the God of Love, Poetry, and
Youth, and his everlasting search for his lover. However, despite the
happy resolution in the myth, Yeats’s protagonist is not afforded the
same happiness; not only is he unable to join his lover, he has also
grown old through the fruitless years of searching, and now waits for
death, hoping that it may give him the union with his lover he so
craves. A unique blend of hope and resignation, ‘The Song of Wandering
Aengus’ bears all the trademarks of Yeats’s evocative verse.
The Song of WanderingThe Aengus
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Yeats interest in the mystery and the unknown was quite unhindered from an early stage in his life.
One of his school acquaintances, George Russell, a fellow poet and
occultist, was an influential figure in his tendencies towards that
path. Together with Russell and others, Yeats founded the Hermetic Order
of the Golden Dawn. It was a society for the study and practice of
magic, esoteric knowledge and with its own secret rituals and ceremonies
and elaborate symbolism. Yeats’ obsession with the spiritual world infused his poetic mind he was also a member of the Theosophical Society, but he went back on his decision and left shortly.
In 1889, Yeats published The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. Four years later, he kept shaking the literary world to its core by bringing forward his collection of essays entitled The Celtic Twilight followed in 1895 by Poems, in 1897 by The Secret Rose, and in 1899 he published his poetry collection The Wind among the Reeds.
One
of Yeats’s more notable early poems, ‘The Stolen Child’ shows the
extent to which he was influenced by Gaelic mythology, as well as his
abiding interest in Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite verse. Narrating
elegantly the attempts of a charm of fairies to persuade a boy to come
away with them, ‘The Stolen Child’ is both magical and beguiling in its
dreamy intensity. The refrain of the bewitching faeries is also
reminiscent of the haunting siren song from Homer’s Odyssey, and its verse has often been set to contemporary music by bands like The Waterboys.
StolenChild
Where dips the rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake The drowsy water rats; There we've hid our faery vats, Full of berrys And of reddest stolen cherries. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim gray sands with light, Far off by furthest Rosses We foot it all the night, Weaving olden dances Mingling hands and mingling glances Till the moon has taken flight; To and fro we leap And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles And anxious in its sleep. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes From the hills above Glen-Car, In pools among the rushes That scarce could bathe a star, We seek for slumbering trout And whispering in their ears Give them unquiet dreams; Leaning softly out From ferns that drop their tears Over the young streams. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he's going, The solemn-eyed: He'll hear no more the lowing Of the calves on the warm hillside Or the kettle on the hob Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob Round and round the oatmeal chest. For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.
The Stolen Child -The Waterboys
His poem
‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ was critically acclaimed by its French and
English audience, who praised it for its lack of conformity to poetic
standards previously established by English poets. A short, 12-line
poem, it expresses the narrator’s yearnings for the peace of a place
‘far from the madding crowd’ (Thomas Gray, 1751), as opposed to the
chaos of the urbane environment in which he currently lives. ‘The Lake
Isle of Innisfree’ is both an eloquent elegy to and a celebration of the
bliss that tranquillity can afford.
The Lake
Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
One of Yeats’s most famous poems, ‘He Wishes For The Clothes of Heaven’
is a passionate confession of devotion that has inspired generations of
readers. The speaker of the poem is Aedh, who
represents the lovelorn hero hopelessly enthralled by ‘la belle dame
sans merci,’ the archetypal female, who shows little regard for him or
his devotion. Eloquent in the expression of yearning and thankless
passion, the poem itself has become such a powerful literary symbol that
it has been quoted repeatedly in a surprising range of media, from the
film Equilibrium (2002) to the song ‘Delilah,’ by The Cranberries.
He Wishes For The Clothes of Heaven
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Yeats came to maturity at the beginning of the twentieth century and
his poetry stands at the turning point between the Victorian period and
Modernism, the conflicting currents of which affected his poetry.
In essence, Yeats is considered a remarkable pioneer in traditional
poetic forms while recognized as one of the most incredible gurus in
modern verse, which unequivocally signifies the versatility in his
works. As he got older in life past the youth phase, he was very influenced by aestheticism and Pre -Raphaelite art
as well as the French Symbolist poets. He had a very strong admiration
for the fellow English poet William Blake and developed a lifelong
interest in mysticism. To Yeats, poetry was the most suitable way to
examine the powerful and benevolent sources of human destiny. Yeats
idiosyncratic mystical perspective drew on Hinduism, Theosophy and
Hermeticism often more than Christianity, and in some instances, these
allusions make his poetry difficult to grasp.
Yeats found his first love in the year 1889 in the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne,
a young heiress who was heavily involved in Irish politics and
specifically the Irish Nationalist Movement. Gonne was the one who first
admired Yeats for his poetry, and in exchange, Yeats found a muse and a
delicate symphony in Gonne’s presence that made her have an effect on
his works and life.
In a shocking turn of events, Gonne rejected Yeats’s proposal when he
offered to marry him the first time. But Yeats was relentless as he
proposed to Gonne a total of three times in three consecutive years.
Eventually, Yeats ditched the proposal idea and Gonne went on to marry
the Irish nationalist John MacBride. Yeats also decided to go on a
lecturing tour to America and stay there for a while. His only other
affair during this period was with Olivia Shakespeare, whom he met in
1896 and parted with one year later.
Though she married another man in 1903 and grew apart from Yeats (and
Yeats himself was eventually married to another woman, Georgie Hyde
Lees), Maaud remained a powerful figure in his poetry.
Also in 1896, he was introduced to Lady Gregory by their mutual friend Edward Martyn..She encouraged Yeats’s nationalism and convinced him to continue focusing on writing drama
Although he was influenced by French Symbolism, Yeats consciously
focused on an identifiably Irish content and this inclination was
reinforced by his involvement with a new generation of younger and
emerging Irish authors. Along with Lady Gregory, he founded the Irish Theatre, which
later became the Abbey Theatre.
Having set up a name for himself, Yeats was very much welcomed by a lot of critics and literary audience.After 1910, Yeats’s dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly
poetical, static, and esoteric style. His later plays were written for
small audiences; they experiment with masks, dance, and music, and were
profoundly influenced by the Japanese Noh plays.
Yeats met Georgianna (Georgie) Hyde-Lees in 1911, and soon after fell in love with her and got married in 1917. She was
only 25 years old and Yeats was over 50 at the time. They had two
children and named them Anne and Michael. She was a huge supporter of
his work and shared his fascination with the mystics. Around this time,
Yeats also bought Ballylee Castle, near Coole Park, and promptly renamed
it Thoor Ballylee. It was his summer residence for much of the
rest of his life until nearly his death. After his marriage, he and his
wife dabbled with a form of automatic writing, Mrs Yeats, contacting a
spirit guide she called “Leo Africanus.”
Yeats’s poetry was adopted into a Celtic Twilight
mood in his earlier work, but soon enough it became heavily affected by
the surrounding livelihood and turned into a mirror of the struggle of
the classes in Britain and no longer became about the mystics. Thrown in
the plethora of cultural politics, Yeats’s aristocratic pose led to an
idealization of the Irish peasant and a willingness to ignore poverty
and suffering. However, soon after, the emergence of a revolutionary
movement from the ranks of the urban Catholic lower-middle class made
him reassess his attitudes.
As the demand for the political separation of Ireland from Britain
grew, Yeats became more involved with fellow nationalist literati such
as Seán O’ Casey, J.M.Synge, and Padraic Colum, and Yeats—among these
others—was one of those responsible for the establishment of the
literary movement known as the “ Irish Literary Revival ”
(otherwise known as the “Celtic Revival”). The Revival was an important
uprising in the fields of literature for the Irish. The movement had a
big and substantial role in the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre
in 1899. Abbey Theatre (or Dublin theatre) was then established in 1904
and It grew out of the Irish Literary Theatre. Shortly after, Yeats
worked together with William and Frank Fay, two Irish brothers with
theatrical experience, and Yeats’s formidable secretary Annie Elizabeth
Fredericka Horniman, to establish the Irish National Theatre Society.
In the crucial period from 1899 to 1907, he managed the theatre’s affairs, encouraged its playwrights (notably John Millington Synge), and contributed many of his own plays. Among the latter that became part of the Abbey Theatre’s repetoire are The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), The Hour Glass (1903), TheKing’s Threshold (1904), On Baile’s Strand (1905), and Deirdre (1907).
Yeats published several volumes of poetry during this period, notably Poems (1895) and The Wind Amongthe Reeds (1899), which are typical of his early verse in their dreamlike atmosphere and their use of Irish folklore and legend. But in the collections In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet (1910), Yeats slowly discarded the Pre-Rahaelit colours and rhythms of his early verse and purged it of certain Celtic and esoteric influences. The years from 1909 to 1914 mark a decisive change in his poetry. The otherworldly, ecstatic atmosphere of the early lyrics has cleared, and the poems in Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (1914) show a tightening and hardening of his verse line, a more sparse and resonant imagery, and a new directness with which Yeats confronts reality and its imperfections.
Although
strongly nationalist in belief, Yeats was not able to participate in
the violence of 1916 Easter Rising. He did however reflect on that
violence in the following poem.
Easter, 1916
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what of excessive love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse-
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly;
A terrible beauty is born.
His concern was to commemorate the individuals who suffered and died in
the struggle to bring about what he calls 'A terrible beauty', and in
his Nobel lecture he drew attention to the 'monstrous savagery'
perpetrated on both sides of the conflict.
In 1917 Yeats published The Wild Swans at Coole. From then
onward he reached and maintained the height of his achievement—a renewal
of inspiration and a perfecting of technique that are almost without
parallel in the history of English poetry.
In 1922 the Free State Government appointed him senator in Dáil Éireann,
He went head to head against the Catholic Church on many occasions over
the subject of divorce. He imposed that the position of the
non-Catholic population on such subject and many others were disregarded
by the Catholic community. He feared that the Catholic attitude would
run rampant and consider themselves the supreme religion in everything.
During his time as a senator,Yeats warned his colleagues,
“If you show that this country, southern Ireland, is going to be
governed by Roman Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will
never get the North [the Protestants] … You will put a wedge in the
midst of this nation.” As his fellow senators were virtually all
Catholics, they were offended by these comments.
Yeats
kept on learning and perfecting his trade, and I have to admire
anybody somebody who stays the course and improves with time. He probed
right through his life, constantly and ceaselessly – whether
it was Maud Gonne's hair, the cliffs of Sligo, Cú Chulainn or whatever.
In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
as the first Irishman to win this prize and be honoured for what the
Nobel Committee citation described as “inspired poetry, which in a highly
artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.”
The Tower (1928), named after the castle he owned and had restored, is the work of
a fully accomplished artist; in it, the experience of a lifetime is
brought to perfection of form. Still, some of Yeats’s greatest verse was
written subsequently, appearing in The Winding Stair (1929).
I am an outspoken admirer of Yeats and will forever maintain that his work
stands among not only the best of Irish verse, but the best English
language poetry period. It is precisely for this reason that I reject
the squeaky clean image of him as many who write about him fail to mention is his sympathy for Fascism.
Fascism today is an ideological bogeyman, a word that conjures images
of some of the most brutal regimes to ever wield an iron fist over
countries and peoples; images of purges and secret police and genocide.
Yeats lived at the dawn of the 20th century when Fascism had
none of the grime and bloodstains that it wears now and when it seemed
to many like an ascendant utopian ideology that would defend countries
from the evils of modern decay and act as a bulwark against the spectre
of communist regimes.
Yeat’s closest intellectual peers, modernists such as Ezra Pound and
TS Eliot, were no strangers to fascist sympathising and Pound especially
was well known for his extolling the virtues of Mussolini’s fascist regime in
Italy even up to the end of the second world war when the horrors of
fascism had been laid bare for the world. For a young, romantic,
nationalist like Yeats, Fascism with its talk of the “national spirit”
and “national myths”, would of course hold a great deal of appeal. The
rituals, ceremony and elaborate symbolism so beloved of Mussolini and
Hitler were reflective of and inspired by much of the same esoteric and
occult work that Yeats was such a great admirer of.
Yeats’ political
interests began with Irish nationalism and the struggle for Irish
independence and that is where many would have you
believe his political thoughts ended/ but at the time nationalism was on
a continuum with fascism and sadly in my opinion Yeats found greater sympathy with the
ultra nationalism of fascists than he did with left wing thinkers of the
time. However Yeats lived in uncertain times and reacted to them
without the benefit of our hindsight. but despite this managed in
his poetry to find a central humanity unfettered by ideology.Unlike many of his contemporaries, including
Gonne, he never expressed anti-Semitic views, and his friendship with
Pound was strained by Pound’s increasing fanaticism. and thankfully Yeats distanced himself from Nazism and fascism in the
last few years of his life and kept his stances to his own in his later life,
Yeats was at the same time, such were his paradoxes an anti-war poet who did not admire war. fought under any
pretext. In his last years, he wrote poems dealing with the crumbling of
modern civilization due to war. He believed that a revolutionary change
is in the offing. In “The Second Coming” written in 1920 he described what lies at the
root of the malady; The poem simply begins with the image of a
falcon flying away from its human master in the fear of being shot. In
medieval times, people would use falcons or hawks to catch animals at
ground level. In this image, however, the falcon has gotten itself lost
by flying too far away. This lost falcon is a reference to the collapse
of the traditional social arrangements in Europe at the time Yeats was
writing. The poet uses symbolism; the falcon getting lost is a symbol
for the fall of civilization and the chaos which will follow.
There is one more strong image of The Second Coming: it is
Sphinx. The poet takes the violence which has taken over society as a
sign that “the Second Coming is at hand.” He imagines a sphinx in the
desert; we are to think that this is a mythical animal. This animal, and
not Christ, is what is coming to fulfil the prophecy from the Biblical
Book of Revelation. The sphinx here is a symbol for the beast; the devil
who will come to our world to spread chaos, evil, destruction and
finally death.
The Second Coming - W B Yeats
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at laSt,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Dominic West Reading the Second Coming
.
Yeats’ later poetry is typified by a stark, naked brutality and
bluntness. His poems present the truth about the human state and he does
not hesitate to use blunt and brutal terms to express it. He called
spade a spade. He calls the world “the frog-spawn of a blind man’s
ditch”. He says that a man is:
'All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.'
In 1929, he stayed at Thoor Ballylee for the last time. Much of the
remainder of his life was outside Ireland, but he did lease a house,
Riversdale in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham from 1932. He wrote
prolifically through the final years of his life, publishing poetry,
plays and prose.
One of Yeats’ many concerns was old age which is seen as a symbol of the
tyranny of time. Rage against the limitations of age and society upon an
old man occurs frequently in his poetry. In “Among School Children” he
considers himself a comfortable scarecrow. The heart becomes
‘comprehending’, unfortunately attached to a ‘dying animal’. In “The
Tower”, Yeats calls the aged body an ‘absurdity’. A powerful expression
of Yeats’ agony facing old age appears at the beginning of “Sailing to
Byzantium”:
'That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the tress
Those dying generations – at their song.'
Yeats attitude
to old age cannot be typified. Old age is certainly a handicap to the
still strong sensual desires He talks of the limited choices available
to an old man who is simply a torn coat upon a stick:
'An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick,'
He was both romantic and modern and so talks about balance. In the
age of industrialization, man was losing the equilibrium between science
and religion. They were destroying their physical beauty by injuring it
for the elevation of soul. The balance was lost.
'O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance? '
Yeats’s work of this period takes its strength from his long and
dedicated apprenticeship to poetry; from his experiments in a wide range
of forms of poetry, drama, and prose; and from his spiritual growth and
his gradual acquisition of personal wisdom, which he incorporated into
the framework of his own mythology.
In 1938 he attended the Abbey for the last time to see
the premiere of his play Purgatory. The Autobiographies of William Butler Yeats was published on that same year.
After suffering from a variety of illnesses for a number of years,
Yeats died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France on January 28,
1939, at age 73.
Yeats’s wished to be buried in Drumecliff at his hometown in County
Sligo. He was first buried at Roquebrune but then his body was exhumed
and moved there in September 1948. His grave is considered a famous
attraction in Sligo where many people come to visit. The epitaph written
on his tombstone is the last line in one of his poems titled Under Ben Bulben
and reads “Cast a cold eye on life, on death; horsemen, pass by!”. The
County is also home to a statue and memorial building in Yeats’s honour.
I can''t claim I understood all that Yeats wrote but he left us with so much great poetry to read, learn, apply ourselves to, reread, never forget, and subsequently he made the world larger for it. His inspirational legacy continues to nurture the creative impulse not only in writers but in historians, artists and musicians.
There are moments in history when we can look back and say "Why didn't people do more to stop that?" One of those moments is happening now. The Rwanda flight has been given a green light and is going ahead next Tuesday, despite widespread outrage and growing opposition, the first flight from the UK filled with up to 130 asylum
seekers will, unless the Court of Appeal rules otherwise, take off.to Rwanda. A place 5000 miles away with an appalling human rights record, where they face an unknown future. No promise of safety, no family connections, no hope.
I am however so grateful to all who have already emailed their MP's to ask them to sign a pledge to fight the Anti Refugee Laws. Will you consider signing the pledge yourself.https://act.refugee-action.org.uk/page/107117/petition/1?ea.tracking.id=Email1&ea.url.id=5940698
By signing the pledge, you are saying that you will join the fight to end
these ugly laws, fight the deportations and remember our shared
humanity.
Back in April this year Priti Patel went against basic rules of
humanity, against the advice of her own top civil servants and against
the wishes of the general public to announce her intention to deport
asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda.
As
a deterrent, this plan manifestly fails. As a policy, it is potentially
illegal as it penalises asylum seekers for their method of entry, which
contravenes the Refugee Convention and the anti-trafficking conventions
we have signed up to, Which we helped draft when we were still a
civilised nation.
This does feel like a real turning point in British politics, with the
Conservative Party implementing the far right slogan of the 1970s of
'sending them back to Africa', even if they never came from there in the
first place.Our treatment of people fleeing war and persecution is what
colonialism and systemic racism look like in real time.The Rwanda plan
is “kick them out” put into practice.
People aren't cattle. Sending them to Rwanda like this is an abomination. We must, at all costs, resist the removals to Rwanda, if we fail to do so our country is a fucking disgrace.This is a policy that shames our nation. There shouldn't be a difference based on nationality, We Are All Humans'. The people whose lives will be impacted have already suffered
enormously but are no different from us - they have families, hopes,
aspirations. They deserve a life of safety, not a future of uncertainty
and horror
A news report on Al Jazeera last week featuring Afghan children, one of them asked why don't people care about us the way they care about Ukraine. It's hard to hear that coming from a child. We have to be able to stop this - but how do we stop this monstrous policy? It seems to have gotten past the first round of judges and the
High Court has denied an injunction seeking to stop next week's
planned flight of asylum seekers to Rwanda. It says that each case
should be considered on an individual basis and there is no need for an
injunction. Campaigners
against the government's policy say they
will now take their fight to the Court of Appeal on Monday.
In the High Court, various arguments by the legal team representing
the charities Detention Action, Care4Calais and the PCS Union were made
hoping to block the first flight scheduled to leave on June 14, calling
the plan unsafe and irrational. According to the court submission from
Raza Hussain, the barrister representing the three groups, Patel’s
“assessment … that the UNHCR [Office of the United Nations Commissioner
for Refugees] is giving this plan a green light is a false claim.”
Government lawyer Mathew Gullick countered
the criticisms of the UK-Rwandan arrangement. They were
“backward-looking” and did not genuinely take into account the way
migrants were to be treated. Deterring illegal immigration was a matter
of “important public interest”.
Husain’s point was confirmed
by a last minute intervention from the UNHCR, which argued in its
submission to the court that the UK-Rwanda scheme failed to meet the
standards of “legality and appropriateness” in terms of transferring
asylum seekers from one state to another. Laura Dubinsky, QC,
representing the UNHCR, told the court
that the agency believed there were “risks of serious irreparable harm
to refugees” inherent in this “unlawful” plan. The UK Home Office has
peddled “inaccuracies” in claiming that the agency endorsed the scheme.
The court document
from the UNHCR revealed “serious concerns that asylum seekers
transferred from the UK to Rwanda will not have access to fair and
efficient procedures for the determination of refugee status, with
consequent risks of refoulement.”
Refoulement, a term Patel breezily buries when considering asylum seeker
claims, remains a canonical precept of refugee law outlined in Article
33 of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. Contracting states have an obligation
not to “expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee in a manner whatsoever
to the frontiers or territories where his [or her] life or freedom would
be threatened on account of his [or her] race, religion, nationality,
membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”
It wouldn’t be so bad if we were actually trying to help these poor people.It is estimated that over 70 percent of those with Rwanda notices have suffered torture or trafficking either in their home countries, or on the incredibly dangerous journeys they have made. Simply abandoning them with a one way ticket to a foreign country thousands of miles from anywhere is inhumane and an affront to the compassionate reputation which this country has proudly held.
Campaigners who brought the case have also expressed their concern for the welfare of people
set to be "forcibly deported". They had wanted to block the first flight
from leaving, as well as individual people being placed on it.
One
asylum seeker - an Iranian ex-police commander who has been held at a
detention centre since arriving in the UK in May - has said he fear being killed by Iranian has said he fears being killed by Iranian agents in Rwanda. he fears being killed by Iranian agents in Rwanda. He has been told he will be deported on Tuesday.
James Wilson, deputy director of campaign group Detention Action, said it was
disappointed, but added there were "some positives" from the case -
noting that six of the eight original claimants had their removal orders
withdrawn by the Home Office in advance of the judgement.
Clare Moseley, founder of Care4Calais, said the charity was "deeply concerned
for the welfare of people who may be forcibly deported to Rwanda, a
fate that could profoundly harm their mental health and future"
Patel as expected has revealed her cruel nature and warped logic haswelcomed the decision,Boris too.At this point I remind you of the fact that several cabinet ministers are descended from refugees or economic migrants. They all turn up to be photographed on Holocaust Memorial Day but had their Rwanda policy been enacted 80 years ago even more Jews would have died and and ironically Priti Patel the chief architct of this plan wouldn’t be here. They repulse me. They seem blithely unaware of how history will judge them. The UK is sinking into a toxic Patel puddle of putrid slime. But in an unprecedented move
even Prince Charles, the man who could become the next King says this plan
is "appalling."
The UK Government’s racist plans is not the way to treat people seeking safety and sanctuary, and people need to stop saying that refugees will be sent to Rwanda for ‘processing’. The policy is to send them there forever - there is no return. It is grotesquely cruel, immoral,shameful and orwellian. This is people trafficking by the Government. Not in my name or many others.
People fleeing for their lives from war and persecution should be treated with kindness not like criminals. Whatever our differences, we have to recognise our fundamental human obligation to shelter those fleeing from war and persecution, Richer nations must acknowledge refugees for the victims they are, fleeing from wars they were unable to prevent or stop. History has shown that doing the right thing for victims of war and persecution engenders goodwill and prosperity for generations, And it fosters stablity in the long run. There are other, more humane and more effective ways to both save lives and combat people smugglers. As compassionate people, we need to ask ourselves if an unnecessarily brutal and cruel plan like Rwanda is really what we want to do .
I have to say no, at a time when the people of the UK have been opening their hear and homes to those fleeing Ukraine, our rotten government is choosing to act with cruelty and rip up their obligations to others fleeing war and peresecution. and urge anyone who is able, to protest against these removals, and helpput pressure on airlines to drop the deportation flights. Join thousands who have emailed the airlines via Freedom from Torture: https://secure.freedomfromtorture.org/page/107146/action/1
Join the week of action against the Hostile Environment from 13-20 June.There are dozens of events happening around the country next week to mark ten years of this vicious policy: https://firmcharter.org.uk/week-of-action/
If
we act now, we can stop the Rwanda flights. And beyond this week, we
must fight for an end to the hostile environment and for the rights of
people to cross borders, whether it be fleeing wars, escaping poverty or
simply moving closer to loved ones or building a life in a new place.
Migration is a fact of life. We must work towards a world where global
freedom of movement can become a reality,end this climate of hostility .Refugees should be welcomed, everywhere. .Stop the deportations now.
Today marks the anniversary of the bloody massacre of hundreds of unarmed peaceful pro-democracy protesters in Beijing and
the arrest of tens of thousands of demonstrators in cities across China.
The Chinese government has never released a death toll of the June 4, 1989
crackdown, but estimates from human rights groups and witnesses range
from several hundred to several thousand.
China had slid into economic chaos in 1988 with panic buying triggered by
rising inflation peaking at more than 30 per cent in cities. Public
discontent, coupled with the death of purged reform-minded Communist
Party leader Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989, set the stage for the
demonstrations.
More than one million people flooded into central Beijing, keen to vent
their anger against corruption, economic mismanagement, nepotism and
poor career prospects for students. Gathering in Tiananmen Square, the
students erected their own 'Goddess of Democracy' statue opposite the
official portrait of the Communist revolutionary leader Chairman Mao
Zedong.
The Tiananmen Massacre was precipitated by the peaceful gatherings of
students, workers, and others in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and other
Chinese cities in April 1989, driven by the hope for a better future,
they were
simply calling for freedom of the press and for some government
accountability, and the imminent problems of corruption, and began the
largest political protest in the history
of Communist China. #
The government responded to
the intensifying protests in late May 1989 by declaring martial
law.Overnight on 3 to 4 June, the government sent tens of thousands of
armed troops and hundreds of armoured military vehicles into the city
centre to enforce martial law and forcibly clear the streets of
demonstrators. The government wanted to 'restore order' in the capital.
As
they approached the demonstrations, troops opened fire on crowds of
protesters and onlookers. They gave no warning before they started
shooting.A
night of bloodshed on
June 3rd resulted with over 2,000 of protestors being
killed.As the troops kept firing into the crowds, some of those running
away
were shot in the back. Others were crushed to death by military
vehicles. Brave, innocent, the Chinese government has never accepted
responsibility for the massacre or held
any officials legally accountable for the killings. despite individual
souls, shotdown and massacred triggering shock and outrage across the
world.
The Tiananmen protests were immortalised in Western media on 5 June
through the image of a lone man in a white shirt carrying shopping bags,
facing an imposing column of military tanks sent by the government to
disperse protesters. The man is known simply as Tank Man: his identity
has never been confirmed.
Tank Man would not let the military
vehicles pass. He succeeded. Eventually, he was pulled out of the way of
danger by onlookers. But the image of unarmed man versus tank quickly
came to symbolise the struggle of the Tiananmen protesters - peaceful
protest met with military might.
'It demonstrates one man's extraordinary courage,
standing up in front of a row of tanks, being prepared to sacrifice his
own life for the sake of social justice' Stuart Franklin, Tank Man photographer
Stuart
Franklin took the Tank Man photograph.
Tank Man
In the following short film below he talks
about how he came to capture what would become one of the most iconic
images of the twentieth century.
In the aftermath long prison sentences were given out, one of which was
for 17 years for simply throwing paint at a portrait of Mao Zedong. We should take a minute and think about those
sacrifices and all those who died, so that their actions have not been
in vain. Sadly brutal suppression and censorship has continued to this
day, that condemns the Chinese nation and its people to a future
without freedom.
Today many activists are still being ruthlessly persecuted by the
Chinese Authorities, and the climate of free expression remains
stifling, with scores of writers still being silenced, also many social
media sites are still banned, and three decades later, China, under President Xi Jinping, is undergoing
the worst crackdown on human rights since the Tiananmen massacre. Hopes
that China would gradually liberalize politically as it opened up
economically have been dashed.
The Chinese regime to this day continues to bury the truth of
what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. Tiananmen remains one of the most censored issues in an internet and social media environment that has become
increasingly restrictive since Xi Jinping became president in
2012.Young Chinese
below the age of 35 today either know nothing about it or believe that
it was the protesters who were the criminals. A regime that sent tanks
and guns to slaughter its people now seeks to
hide the evidence, threaten its critics, eliminate alternative ideas and
impose absolute control. Seeking to suppress every form of freedom,
with Pro-democracy activists being jailed, and in every corner of
China's territory, from Xinjiang to Hong Kong, that has also seen
critics abroad being intimidated, threatened and, in the worst cases,
kidnapped.The Chinese government has never accepted responsibility for
the massacre or
held any officials legally accountable for the killings. It has been
unwilling to conduct an investigation into the events or release data on
those who were killed, injured, forcibly disappeared, or imprisoned.
For
those who participated or observed the events of 1989, however, the
search for truth goes on. Memories have not faded. The hard facts of the massacre
are etched into history.No one can erase it; no power, however mighty,
can alter it; and no words or tongues, however clever, can deny it.
Since this day a candlelight vigil has been held in Hong Kong to remember the victims, but the authorities banned the event in 2020. In 2021, union leader Lee Cheuk Yan, along with seven others, was sentenced to 14 months in prison for “inciting, organising and participating” in the candlelight vigil on the 4th of June 2020.
The Chinese government has long ignored domestic and international calls
for justice for the Tiananmen Massacre, and some of the sanctions that
the European Union and US imposed in response have over the years been
weakened or evaded. The lack of a sustained, coordinated, international
response to the massacre and ensuing crackdown is one factor in
Beijing’s increasingly brazen human rights violations.
Chinese authorities have over the past year stepped up the harassment and
persecution of activists for commemorating the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen
Massacre, Human Rights Watch said today. The Chinese
government should acknowledge and take responsibility for the massacre
of pro-democracy protesters in June 1989, and should immediately release activists held for commemorating
the occasion, and cease censoring discussions of the bloody crackdown.
As a party to a number of international human rights treaties and as a
current member of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which
obligates China to “uphold the highest standards of human rights,” the
Chinese government should urgently take the following steps with respect
to the Tiananmen Massacre:
Respect the rights to freedom of expression, association, and
peaceful assembly, and cease the harassment and arbitrary detention of
individuals who challenge the official account of the Tiananmen
Massacre;
Meet with and apologize to members of the Tiananmen Mothers,
publish the names of all who died, and appropriately compensate the
victims’ families;
Permit an independent public inquiry into Tiananmen and its aftermath, and promptly publish the findings and conclusions;
Allow the unimpeded return of Chinese citizens, exiled due to their connections to the events of 1989; and investigate all government and military officials who planned or
ordered the unlawful use of lethal force against demonstrators, and
appropriately prosecute them.
Permit an independent public inquiry into June 4, and promptly release its findings and conclusions to the public;and allow the unimpeded return of Chinese citizens, exiled due to their
connections to the events of 1989; and investigate all government and
military officials who planned or
ordered the unlawful use of lethal force against peaceful demonstrators,
and appropriately prosecute them.
The spirit of the Tiananmen movement continues to burn in the
hearts of veterans of 1989 and younger generations of activists who
fight for a more just China.We must continue to support all those that fight against state
oppression and censorship and never forget the tragic legacy of
Tinanamen Square that continues to haunt us as the memory of those that bravely died for democracy at Tiananmen lives on, remind ourselves that their light will never go out.
Allen Ginsberg's the visionary poet and founding father of the Beat generation who inspired the American counterculture of the second half of the 20th century with groundbreaking poems such as "Howl" and "Kaddish, " was born on this day in Newark, New Jersey on June 3, 1926.
As a boy he was a close witness to his mother’s mental illness, as
she lived both in and out of institutions. His father, Louis Ginsberg
was a well-known traditional poet. After graduating from high school,
Ginsberg attended Columbia University, where he planned to study law.
There he became friends with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.
Together the three would change the face of American writing forever.
With an interest in the street life of the city, Kerouac, Ginsberg
and Burroughs found inspiration in jazz music and the culture that
surrounded it. They encouraged a break from traditional values,
supporting drug-use as a means of enlightenment. To many, their shabby
dress and “hip” language seemed irresponsible, but in their actions
could be found the seeds of a revolution that was meant to cast off the
shackles of the calm and boring social life of the post-war era. While a
nation tried desperately to keep from rocking the boat, Allen Ginsberg
and the Beats saw the need for a more vibrant and daring society.
One of the primary first works of the Beats was Ginsberg’s long poem
“Howl.” In an age plagued by intolerance, “Howl” (1956) was both a
desperate plea for humanity and a song of liberation from that
intolerant society. Ginsberg’s use of a gritty vernacular and an
improvisational rhythmical style created a poetry which seemed haphazard
and amateur to many of the traditional poets of the time. In “Howl” and
his other poems, however, one could hear a true voice of the time,
unencumbered by what the Beats saw as outdated forms and meaningless
grammatical rules.
For its frank embrace of such taboo topics as homosexuality and drug
use, “Howl” drew a great deal of criticism. Published by City Lights,
the San Francisco based publisher of many of the Beats, the book was the
subject of an obscenity trial. Eventually acquitted of the charges,
City Lights came out with Ginsberg’s second book in 1961. “Kaddish, And
Other Poems,” often considered Ginsberg’s greatest work, dealt again
with a deep despair and addressed Ginsberg’s closeness with his mother
while she was hospitalized and fighting insanity. The raw nature of the
subject matter and Ginsberg’s desperate emotions found a perfect home in
his poem “Kaddish.” Of “Kaddish,” Ginsberg wrote “I saw my self my own
mother and my very nation trapped desolate…and receiving decades of life
while chanting Kaddish the names of Death in many mind-worlds the self
seeking key to life found at last our self.”
Throughout the 1960s, Ginsberg experimented with a number of
different drugs, believing that under the influence he could create a
new kind of poetry. Using LSD, peyote, marijuana and other drugs he
attempted to expand his consciousness and wrote a number of books under
the influence including the “Yage Letters” with William Burroughs. For
much of the youth of the day, Ginsberg’s embrace of illegal drugs and
unrestrained sexuality made him a central figure in the rebelling
movements of the time. More than any other American poet of the 20th
century, Ginsberg used his popularity for social change. Coining the
phrase “flower power,” Ginsberg encouraged protesters of the 1960s to
embrace a non-violent rebellion.
On May 1st 1965 he was crowned 'King of May'( which is Kral Majales in the Cechoslovakian tongue) by an enthusiastic crowd in Prague town square (Vystaviste) in Communist Czechoslovakia. Soon underdover police halted the festivities nd un-crowned him. A few days later they seized his journals and summarily deported him. He wrote the following poem about the experience because he wrote poems about all his experiences. (It wasn't an experience until it was a poem).
Kral Majales (King of May)- Allen Ginberg
“And I am the King of May, which is the power of sexual youth,/and I am the King of May, which is industry in eloquence and action in amour,/and I am the King of May, which is long hair of Adam and the Beard of my own body/and I am the King of May which is Kral Majales in the Czechoslovakian tongue..”
By the 1970s, his fame had grown
enormously, and though he cast aside drug use for an interest in
Buddhism and yogic practices, he remained important to newly-formed
youth movements.
By the 1980s, Ginsberg was the most famous living American poet. As a
writer he continued to publish challenging and personal verse and as a
celebrity he maintained an international presence as a spokesperson for
peace and tolerance—working often as a teacher and lecturer . In the
last decade of his life, Ginsberg wrote and performed at the prolific
rate of his youth In 1982 he featured on the Clash song Ghetto Defendant. originally a poem called Capital Air..For his lyrics he researched punk rock culture and included phrases like ' do the worm' and 'n slam dance' as well as reciting the Bhuddist Heart Sutra. According to Ginsberg's biography, several sessions and collaborations were recorded but this was the only song ever released. .
Allen Ginsberg /The Clash - Capital Air
Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997 at the
age of seventy. At the time of his death, “Howl” had been reprinted
more than fifty times, and the words of William Carlos Williams’
introduction still rang true—”This poet sees through and all around the
horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He
avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it
as his own—and, we believe, laughs at it and has the time and
affrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record that love in a
well-made poem.”
7 th October, 1958, Allen Ginsberg's first reading of Howl.
To Struga Festival Golden Wreath Laureates & International Bards 1986
Stand up against governments, against God.
Stay irresponsible.
Say what we know & imagine.
Absolutes are coercian.
Change is absolute.
Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions.
Observe what's vivid.
Notice what you notice.
Catch yourself thinking.
Vividness is self-selecting.
If we don't show anyone, we're free to write anything.
Remember the future.
Advise only yourself.
Don't drink yourself to death.
Two molecules clanking against each other require an observer to become
scientific data.
The measuring instrument determines the appearance of the phenomenal world
after Einstein.
The universe is subjective.
Walt Whitman celebrated Person.
We are observer, measuring instrument, eye, subject, Person.
Universe is Person.
Inside Skull vast outside skull.
Mind is outer space.
"Each on his bed spoke to himself alone, making no sound."
"First thought, best thought."
Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.
Maximum infomation, minimum number of syllables.
Syntax condensed, sound is solid.
Intense fragments of spoken idiom, best.
Consonants around vowels, appreciate consonants.
Subject is known by what she sees.
Others can measure their vision by what we see.
Candor ends paranoia.
Kral Majales June 25, 1986 Boulder Colorado
Fifth Internationale - Allen Ginsberg
To Billy MacKeever
Arise ye prisoners of your mind-set
Arise neurotics of the Earth
For Insight thunders Liberation
A sacred world's in birth
No more attachment's chains shall bind us
Mind's Aggression no more rules
The Earth shall rise on new foundations
We have been jerks we shall be Fools
'Tis the Path of Accumulation
Let each sit on his place
The International Crazy Wisdom School
Could save the Human Race
Reprinted from Cosmopolitan Greetings 1992.
In this collection, Ginsberg proved his vitality, his mind still full of humanity and hopefulness and play, his unobstructured breath still dancing with Spiritus. I'm still listening, still learning . His subversiveness still echoing with reason.Thiis Queen of May whose poetry still burns bright. Happy birthday, Allen ! All aroud the world ,people will be raising a glass in celebration of the life and work of this great man, me included, will not be toasting another Queen that is being celebrated today.
