Blog
By Stephen Derwent Partington on 28 August 2010 at 13:13:14
Stephen Derwent Partington, Cinnamon Press author of How to Euthanise a Cactus, writes about Sudan’s Bashir in Kenya, and writing against injustice.
What happens if, to the ceremony to promulgate your country’s new Constitution, you invite a President for whom the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant, particularly if you’re a signatory to the Rome Statute that makes it obligatory for you to arrest such a person, and then you don’t? Further, if one of the key clauses of the new Constitution you’re at that moment implementing so that we can enjoy a ‘New Kenya’ states quite clearly that international law(s) to which your country is a signatory will form part of the Constitution?
Hmmm. For the more politically-blind postmodernists out there, it’s a fun paradox, the mere play of texts, in this case The Foundational text, the Constitution, alongside the ICC law. For us here in Kenya it’s more concerning, especially since we are as a populace waiting for the day when the ICC, as it says it will, issues arrest warrants for those Big Men identified by former UN General Secretary Kofi Annan as being complicit in our recent post-election violence, which saw up to two thousand killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. There is a worry that justice will not be done. We sat Kofi Annan three seats behind Bashir. Many of us also feel that the new Constitution and the so-called Second Republic has already, as a consequence, been treated with derision by the elites. And the future, which we cheered, now seems slightly less rosy.
Our responsibility as writers is now to hold the establishment to account: for this Bashir act, and at every step as the Constitution becomes fully implemented. We will retain the hope. I, for example, will continue to write the positive social and personal poems of the type that appear in How to Euthanise a Cactus, a collection dedicated to the displaced. But hope, like a cactus, has thorns; and hope, like even the hardiest cactus, can be euthanised.
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Did Copyright Law Hold the British back?
By Jayne Joso on 27 August 2010 at 15:15:38
Read this, (click on book cover) - it’s fascinating and highly provocative – for did Germany ‘experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law’? and was the establishment of copyright law in Great Britain in 1710 responsible for stifling knowledge and progress?
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TRAIN OF THOUGHT, PART NINE
By Richard Aronowitz on 26 August 2010 at 10:10:30Who would cut their finger-nails on the early-morning commuter train?
There I was this morning in one of my usual single seats by the loo, typing up a passage in my new novel, ARRIVAL, where the protoganist is clicking his fingers to the rhythm of the jazz number that he is singing in his audition in 1931 at the Palace Theatre on Broadway, when a snip-snip-snipping caught my ears.
A young, neatly dressed Chinese man had a white plastic bag on his lap and was cutting his nails with a pair of nail-clippers. Clip, clip, clip went the clippers as the quarter-moon crescents of his finger-nails fell into his carefully-arranged carrier bag. It quite put me off my coffee, and my writing.
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TRAIN OF THOUGHT, PART EIGHT
By Richard Aronowitz on 24 August 2010 at 11:11:41
It is now almost six months since the publication of IT'S JUST THE BEATING OF MY HEART and time to take stock of where this new novel has brought me. The highpoints have included some very nice reviews on literary blogs and in local and national newspapers, as well as seeing posters for my book at St Pancras Station in London as part of the "First Capital Connect Book Club". Less satisfying was a catty short piece by Alfred Hickling in The Guardian, who had seemingly not even bothered to read the book before writing his 'capsule review'.
What comes out of all of this - the newspaper and blog reviews, the posters, the book club, the one or two local radio interviews - is just how damned hard it is for small publishing houses with limited budgets to market and sell literary fiction. The novel was printed in an edition of just under 1,000 copies and there is still quite some way to go before this first printing is sold out.
Although an imprecise yardstick perhaps, just imagine how few copies of literary titles from small publishers must sell without such boosts? It seems that the only sure way of selling copies of books from smaller publishers who cannot afford large-scale marketing campaigns is word-of-mouth - the hardest thing of all to capture.
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Ou Est Le Swimming Pool
By Jayne Joso on 23 August 2010 at 01:01:22
Charles Haddon, frontman in the British electro-pop group, Ou Est Le Swimming Pool, has recently passed away in an apparent suicide at a festival in Belgium. He was only 22, and clearly a phenomenal talent with a very loyal and burgeoning fan base. It’s too obvious to say this is tragic, but so it is. And I’ve been up the last hours listening to some tracks of theirs, and I absolutely love them.
When I can’t write I listen to music, often new stuff and quite randomly, and fortunately the internet facilitates this brilliantly, allowing you to listen to at least snippets or whole performances on things like YouTube – then I buy the stuff that works for me. Then I listen for hours, often to the same track, this often seems to trigger something, and then I start to write. Anyway, for anyone as yet unfamiliar, ‘I just dance the way I feel’ by ‘Ou Est Le Swimming Pool’ is a great track, Charles Haddon fronting. He will be missed greatly, listened to lots. Wish he’d kept passing the open window...
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New Constitutions, Poetry and Hope
By Stephen Derwent Partington on 11 August 2010 at 09:09:04
Cinnamon Press poet, Stephen Derwent Partington, author of the recently-released How to Euthanise a Cactus, writes about Kenya’s new Constitution and new artists.
For a rare few days last week, Kenyans’ focus was exclusively inward, to our own country.
On August 4th, we held a referendum on a new Constitution and Bill of Rights that activists have been demanding for decades, occasionally to their deaths. This new Constitution – which promises, amongst other things, to create more centres of power and so hold the ‘monarchical’ President to account – was overwhelmingly approved. Perhaps it will help to prevent certain ‘troubles’ that have affected us in the past, or that still affect our neighbours: look where we sit on the map, and consider what you think you know about these places. Perhaps, though, it will just create more Big Men in smaller fiefdoms.
Many Kenyans are still in celebratory mood, claiming that this vote signaled the full realization of ‘The Second Liberation’, the first being that won from the British colonialists and settlers in the 1960s. The talk in the suburbs is of ‘New Dawns’ and other such hyperbole. Others, equally supportive of the new Law, nevertheless remain slightly skeptical.
A new Constitution effects a fundamental change in a country’s foundational Law. But Kenya is also alive culturally, and we are increasingly aware of the artistic changes that the country has undergone in the past few years, with poets, other writers, musicians, cartoonists and film-makers eloquently speaking out against societal injustice. The younger generation has done this with real talent and verve, creating something of a cultural earthquake alongside the more prosaic legal earthquakes. Perhaps the cultural changes have in fact enabled the legal changes. I think so.
But, like anywhere, there’s still a long way to go, in arts, in law, in politics – for example, when you speak of ‘the younger generation’ in Kenya, you’re still talking about anyone under the age of 80. Ours remains a visibly gerontocratic State with an often kleptocratic elite. It may also be that what we’re seeing with this new Constitution is merely a shift from the appalling, arbitrary Power of the Politicians to the no less worrying professional Power of the Lawyers, those Dons-of-Denotation. If so, there is still comfort in knowing that a freshly radical and thrillingly creative new group of artists (not all of them young) is ready to hold them to account, both on the ‘big issues’ and the smaller personal joys of regardless-of-everything everyday living! Potentially, a poem is a multi-connoting Constitution: it can change all manner of worlds.
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