11 August 2010 - 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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