Jim Aitken introduces Sapling and Wood by David Betteridge, available here

A sapling, as we know, is a young tree. If this young tree manages to grow further it will be because it has been nourished by water and by light. Patrick Geddes once said by leaves we live and this comment recognises the relationship we have with Nature – it is a symbiotic one. This is something that Betteridge also recognises when he has spoken about the integrated view of things.

A sapling is also an individual young tree. However, its journey to maturity means that it may one day be part of a wood. This dichotomy is absolutely crucial to Betteridge’s overarching, integrative vision. He has little time for individualism and seeks after the collective instead. In the poem Like Young Barley, he says exactly that when he states a preference for the we rather than I.

Yet David was once a sapling himself. He takes us back in time as he recalls his grandfather telling him about Walt Whitman and William Blake. He passed on books of their poems to him. The radicalism of these two writers worked on him as he grew to maturity, realising that his place was with and for others. His subsequent work in teaching was for others and his politics too was for others. This is apparent throughout the pages of Sapling and Wood.

Though it could be said that Tories are with and for others too, the others they see themselves with are the few and David is for the many; the many on the receiving end of what he calls the carnivals of evil down the years. And this ‘carnival of evil’ has been constantly directed by the few against the many so that the few can have their yachts and limousines which David derides as the trappings of a wasteful Few.

The integrative vision of Betteridge is in clear contrast to the quotation he uses from the Book of Psalms – where there is no vision, the people perish. David laments the lack of vision for the many and he asks Will we ever get out of here? His solution is not to hide in some ivory tower honing his craft but to take on the words of Blake – I will not cease from Mental Fight/ Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand.

This is yet another expression of the integrated view of things that David holds dear. His writing, like the rest of his life, has been for others, for the many. His writing has been put in the service of the emancipation of the many. He would like to see’ the world’s people rise/resist, rethink, and organise’. 

Just as Nature should be loved and cherished and constantly noted, so too should Culture be seen as something that elevates and grows to maturity just as trees and people transform into greater versions of themselves. This is why culture matters for David. It is another aspect of his integrative vision to change the nature of what he calls our poor conflicted humankind.

Poetry is also a key element in what David has called a rounded truth. This truth includes nature, culture and politics and it is through the medium of poetry itself that David integrates his rounded truth. Poetry is his outlet, his wider voice, his chosen form of communication. Poetic forms enable the transmission of values that are the antithesis to the prevalent and prevailing norms of capitalism and what Betteridge calls its heaped contaminants.

To challenge these ‘heaped contaminants’ requires both diligence and discipline. If you see ‘the whole world’ as your ‘wide frame of reference’ then the poetry had better be good. It would have to be able to express itself in a variety of forms and be careful with how the words fall on the page. Betteridge manages this challenge superbly well. One example of this is in the poem called Wonders, a poem addressed to Marjorie Stevenson and in memory of Ronald Stevenson, the composer. There is a line that reads ‘in Nature’s never-ending mind’ and Betteridge could so easily have used the word ‘everlasting’ rather than ‘never-ending’ since it would have retained the same number of beats. However, had he chosen the word ‘everlasting’ he would have lost the alliterative presence in the line where all the n sounds reinforce the importance of Nature.

This is but one example that shows Betteridge considers his words carefully and wants to maximise their impact. He inherited this importance of the word in the right place from all those he read. As well as Whitman and Blake, David has spoken of his debt to the work of John Berger. He has also said that his one-time college tutor, Maurice Levitas, stressed the importance of choosing the correct word. It was Levitas, a veteran of Cable Street and the Spanish Civil War and a lifelong Communist, who possessed real genius as a reader who could see in a single word an entire world of meaning. A careful writer therefore prefigures a careful reader and in this way Culture itself becomes the beneficiary by being enhanced.

Sapling and Wood uses many quotations from other writers and there are a number of poems addressed to close friends. While the sapling was Betteridge as a boy, the grandfather who introduced the boy to literature was a sturdy oak tree. The collection is an actual wood but also an imaginary one. In this wood stand all the writers who have influenced him. Blake and Whitman, Berger and Burns, Brecht and Edward Said and so many others besides. They stand like tall poplars with their arms reaching ever-higher. His friends over many years are the silver birches who have stayed with him and with his writing. It is their comradeship that has kept grief at the world’s harms/ from swamping me, as he says in Nearing the Hive. In this number a special mention has to be made for his illustrators Bob Starrett, Tom Malone and Owen McGuigan and their work can be seen throughout this collection.

To the left of the wood can be found two trees that seem at odds with all the silver birches and the poplars. One is a beautiful copper-red acer and that is Rosa Luxemburg, and near to her is a giant redwood and that is Karl Marx. These writers and thinkers wanted to change the world in favour of working people and that is exactly what Betteridge has sought in his own writing. His work is not linguistic or literary decoration but a serious attempt through the serious use of word and verse form to aid the process of nothing less than the liberation of mankind.

Of course, we can all feel ‘swamped’ by the world and the tyranny of Capital but there can still be joy. The grandfather’s words resonate in this regard – Whatever you decide to make – let there be joy in it. Sound advice indeed. There is an underlying joy in this collection precisely because it is given in joy to all those who have influenced him and all those friends who stayed with him and, above all, to a future world that is immeasurably fairer than we one we have today.

As seeds grow into plants of all kinds including trees, so too the seeds of writers’ ideas can grow inside minds. And poems can aid that growth and lead us into kinder, wiser ways as Betteridge says in The Dear Place. Sapling and Wood can surely be a companion on that joyous journey.

 Sapling and Wood by David Betteridge, £14, is available here

The current horror in Gaza is just the latest in a long line of such horrors. The present incursion is called Operation Swords of Iron. The metallurgical concept of this ‘operation’ recalls a previous one in 2008-9 called Operation Cast Lead. While it would be fair to say that ‘cast lead’ sounds fairly deadening, the idea behind ‘swords of iron’ is designed to give the impression of heavy-handed retribution.

Smiting by Israel is all Palestinians have known for several generations now. And that thin strip of land called Gaza has seemed to be on the receiving end of continual bouts of smiting in recent years. There have been some fine poems and intelligent essays written about this horror, but very few novels in the West have ventured to try and give some understanding to this interminable and intractable conflict. 

It is therefore gratifying that John Wight has been brave enough to take this challenge on in Gaza: This Bleeding Land, in which he brings his considerable knowledge as a political commentator to add the requisite information on the complexities of the Israel-Palestine impasse.

The media throughout the West and, it should be added, throughout the Arab Western – oriented world, give a rather superficial view of this conflict. In the West it is largely a case of good Israel and bad Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. Added into this mix is Israel, with the memory of the Holocaust and ‘the smell of the ovens and gas chambers of Auschwitz’ unable to go away. In the Arab world with its Western-baked governments, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran will be painted as un-Islamic and as terrorist.

If only things were as simple as that. Jews and Christians good and Muslims bad has been the dominant narrative in large swathes of mainstream political commentary in the West for some time now. Wight shakes this all up, digging much deeper in both the historical and political sense.

He uses a dual narrative throughout the text. One narrative comes from Omar. He lives in Gaza with his parents and siblings and grows up to become active in the Palestinian resistance. Wight is clearly more nuanced in his terminology here. The term ‘Palestinian resistance’ is much more open than the word ‘Hamas’ would ever be. Using the latter word would be simply to negate it as terrorist since that is how brow-beaten we have become with regard to our understanding of what is happening.

The other narrative comes from Gabriel, who has grown up in a Jewish family in Brooklyn. With echoes of West Side Story, Gabriel gets involved in gang violence and ends up in a juvenile detention centre. His sense of his Jewish identity had been fairly minimal until a teacher at ‘juve’ took an interest in him and told him about Jewish history. Gabriel’s father, it turned out, was a non-believing Jew who viewed Zionism with a deep sense of hostility.

It also turned out that Omar’s father was a non-believer. These subtle touches show that there is never one convenient narrative concerning religious and ethnic identity. Humans are much more complicated and complex. They respond to their histories in a variety of ways. Later in the novel we discover that Omar’s mother had been born into a Christian family in Bethlehem, though they later moved to Ramallah.

This detail is important, because it reminds us all that Christians are also on the receiving end of Israeli aggression. Their churches, just like mosques, have been reduced to rubble too. This subtle detail is also at odds with the Christian evangelicals in the USA who unreservedly support Israel. There is no solidarity with their Christian – Palestinian brethren. Wight reminds his reader that it was members of the Bush administration – as well as many others in the US - who believe that:

Armageddon, as they call it, when the world will be engulfed by fire and the chosen ones lifted up by Jesus to take their place at the side of God in an event described as the rapture.

This is where Wight uses his extensive political and historical knowledge to not only enlighten the reader but to expose many of the contradictions involved in this ongoing conflict. While the two narratives of Omar and Gabriel develop their momentum, there is also input by Wight to give us a much broader understanding of how historical and political forces compound themselves in the Israel-Gaza conflict of today.

Zionism was the response to centuries of anti-Semitism and persecution of the Jews by their new cheerleaders in the West. And Omar’s decision to join the Palestinian resistance has come about simply because he sees no alternative. Wight reminds us that Israel itself was created through terrorism and a former Prime Minister, Menachim Begin, was once a member of the Irgun who fought the British when they held the Mandate over Palestine.

Such details make us as readers see a fuller story. It is the fuller story that Wight infuses into the dual narratives of Omar and Gabriel. You are left understanding how Zionism can appeal and equally how armed resistance can also appeal. Both characters are trapped by all that has gone before them. And, of course, what has gone before them has not only been western anti-Semitism but western imperialism in the Middle East. This has trapped both peoples.

While the characters of Omar and Gabriel tell their stories and can be seen as credible characters in their own right, at the hands of Wight they also represent the living embodiments of the histories that have gone before them. The novel gives a historical lesson as well as an engaging narrative.

If we think of Suella Braverman suggesting that those marching in opposition to the genocide in Gaza today are nothing more than a ‘hate-filled mob’, we can see how such comments have come to create the idea that everyone on such marches is somehow anti-Semitic. Not only that, such a comment also implies that Israel is the eternal victim. Yet, not only are there Jews who regularly attend such marches and speak out against the genocide not being in their name, Wight reminds us that it was Western countries who supported the creation of the state of Israel precisely because they were anti-Semitic, and did not want Jews in their countries after the Second World War.

There is a tier of aggression and violence in the novel and it is both real and metaphorical. Both families have outbursts and both characters seem created by violence. This source of much of it comes from an international economic system that creates inequalities, creates winners and losers, creates constant scapegoats. Violence is often the response, since it is capitalist violence that violates people around the world, and their response to this is invariably violent, both among themselves and to others.

Gabriel becomes a Zionist after discovering his Jewish history and identity and heads off to Israel with his wife, Rachel. He lives in a settler community and wants to join the Israeli Defence Force. He came from a violent background in America and will bring that violence to his new land. He is accepted into the elite Golani Brigade.

What Wight has also told us previously in the novel is the story of left-wing resistance by Jews and how they also have socialist and communist stories in their past. However, the Zionist one has been the determining one that will lead to Operation Protective Edge which took place in 2014. This is the ‘operation’ that Gabriel will take part in, and the one that Omar will resist.

Both narratives quicken their pace towards the end of the text to suggest the tension as Omar and Gabriel will face each other in combat. Though the text does not actually say it the suggestion is that Omar will be killed and Gabriel will be victorious. Omar’s entries towards the end of the text become much shorter and essentially amount to a series of prayers as he will inevitably find martyrdom.

The ending could not have been other than it was simply because this is what we have witnessed so often. Yes, Wight implies that this is the appalling level we seem to have reached in political terms. The absence of any political discourse in the West is largely responsible for this. We have seen this recently during the UK General Election where all the main parties have not mentioned the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Is Wight’s novel polemical? It is and unashamedly so, because the political commentator that Wight is simply used the structure of the novel to fill in all the blanks that are generally missing from any discussion on the issues around Israel and Palestine. The novel, however, does possess credible characterisation and there is even a journey when Omar and his family visit an uncle in Amman, Jordan.

The final word must go to Omar as he awaits the Israeli onslaught. He tells us, ’Where we go, others will follow after us.’ Unless there is a solution to this dreadful conflict that is exactly what will happen. Wight’s novel screams out for an end to such a pointless waste of life.

Jim Aitken reviews The Orgreave Stations by William Hershaw, illustrated by Les McConnell, some of whose images in the book accompany this review

‘The Orgreave Stations’ , published by Culture Matters, is the companion set of poems to his earlier work ‘The Sair Road’ (2018).

These earlier poems remain the finest poems written in Scots this century. These two books of poems complement each other in that they both use the Stations of the Cross as an organising structure, and in both books Jesus is a miner at the heart of the struggles in the Fife and South Yorkshire coalfields.

In both books Hershaw’s Jesus has been stripped of any hint of organised religion and there is no attempt at any point to proselytise for any religious faith. However, the Jesus we witness in Orgreave offers a religiosity that is remarkably similar to our understanding of what socialism should be. This Jesus would certainly be recognised by the Levellers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and Keir Hardie. For Jesus of Orgreave ‘a Christian has to be a socialist.’  

Yet the Stations remain purely structural and the appearance of Jesus as a miner serves to add a moral dimension to the story of Jesus handed down from the New Testament. Each Station uses an opening quote from the Gospels to add further context to the moral imperatives that Jesus of Orgreave proclaims.

Hershaw tells us in his Introduction that the use of the Stations and the role of Jesus as miner in the action is for the purpose of ‘symbolic religious imagery’ so that the poem can bring out ‘the full moral implications’ of what the destruction of a once proud industry meant.

The NUM – the 'enemy within'

Orgreave is 40 years old this year and for those miners who were there it must seem as if it was yesterday. It was a deeply traumatic event for the striking miners, to be met on one side by mounted police and on the other by police handling dogs to form the welcoming party. Orgreave, as Hershaw tells us, was ‘a pre-planned ambush.’ All the resources open to the British state were used to smash an irritant trade union that Thatcher at the time labelled ‘the enemy within.’

 As well as the 14 Stations, Hershaw gives us a poem called Early Doors: At the Cross which precedes the Stations, and After Hours: Fear No More which comes after the Stations. Much of the poem is written in iambic pentameters, and Hershaw also uses a version of the sestina rhyme scheme (ABABCC) for his final poem. These poetic devices bring seriousness and gravitas to the sequence of poems, since the subject matter clearly demanded nothing less.

Station 1: The Road to Gethsemane Allotments

In the first Station Jesus calls his fellow miners ‘comrades’ and tells them to forgive those who seek their demise – ‘love the lousy lot.’ He also uses a couple of mining metaphors to labour this point. In one he says they should think on their own ‘slag heap of faults’ before they condemn others. And in another he asks them to make sure ‘their lives are pit-propped with love.’

While love remains the essence of the Christian message, it is also the basis of socialism. People, after all, become socialists because they care about others. A genuine socialist society would be one without hatred or division and the Jesus of Orgreave gets himself into deep trouble for preaching such a gospel of love.

Station 4: Big Pete

Jesus is duly arrested – ‘You’re lifted, Trotsky – in the fucking van’ and he is sent to jail. Jesus’ comrade, Big Pete, is shown to have his doubts as he seems to fall victim to what the right-wing press are saying, ‘The papers say that Thatcher will not turn.’ And he worries about the fact ‘There’s even some in Labour who agree.’ The then Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, now an unelected Lord, argued at the time for a ballot just as the Tory press told him to do. It has ever been thus with Labour, just as it is today with Starmer praising Thatcher and saying he will stick to Tory spending plans if elected, so that nothing will really change. The poor, marginalised and oppressed will remain unloved.

Station 5: Judged by Pilate

In Station 5 Jesus is judged by a smarmy Pilate who tells him, ‘Instead of helping losers, help yourself.’ Pilate recognises the strengths that Jesus has and asks him to come on board – ‘there’s room for those like you.’ Jesus can even become ‘a stakeholder in days to come.’ Jesus of Orgreave stands firm but these lines make us think about all the former Labour MPs and trade union leaders who have taken ermine, becoming so-called stakeholders in a system that continually exploits others at home and abroad.

After the brutal battle at Orgreave where the police ‘Brought batons down upon unfended heads, and sent dogs on the miners and called them ‘commie scum’, the action changes to an earlier time. Jesus was once the Safety Rep., approaching the pit manager to tell him about poor ventilation down the pit. He gets nowhere and is told by the boss, ‘I’ve seen your sort/ Out to create bother, always complain.’ In these short but prescient comments we can think of other miscarriages of justice – Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday, Hillsborough and Grenfell, Windrush, the Post Office, the blood transfusion scandal, and many more besides. Bosses are especially chosen because they can be relied upon to put Caesar first.

The case of Paula Vennells, the former CEO at the Post Office, is an excellent example in recent times. It makes the comment of Hershaw that a Christian has to be a socialist somewhat ironic in her case – at the time she was CEO at the Post Office she also served as an Anglican priest. The Christian message is to love one another, and she obviously loved the Caesar she served more than the sub-postmasters beneath her.

The solidarity of the miners

Also, in another time Jesus recalls when he was saved by Simon of Cyrene after he slipped. Together they managed to lift a pit prop and the message here was,’ When they both worked as one, their load was light.’ These ‘other’ sections enable Hershaw to follow the original Stations but also allow him to show us the importance of solidarity. The miners were a workforce defined by their solidarity due to the nature of the job underneath the earth.

Station 8: Simon of Cyrene

That solidarity was dangerous when it was expressed above ground, when miners demanded better wages and conditions and were prepared to strike to save their jobs and their communities. As Shelley said in those famous lines ‘Ye are many – they are few’: working together workers can change the world, they can inherit it. The Pilates, however, seek only to divide worker from worker and in this they are aided by a class-compliant press and media.

Station 9: The Women

Similarly, in following the original Stations, Hershaw can make important mention of the work done by the wives and partners of miners during their year-long struggle. For him the Government was, ’Furious at your will to make ends meet.’ Their contribution must never be forgotten. Just like the faithfulness and loyalty of women like Mary Magdalene in the Gospels, it was the selflessness of the women against pit closures that shamed the ‘shallow lives’ of the Government and of all who supported them.

The crucifixion of Jesus is brought about through a pit accident; this recalls the thousands of fatal pit accidents that happened to miners down the years. Many of these accidents, of course, could have been prevented had bosses acted on advice given by Safety Reps and others. The miners of yesteryear are in fact no different to the football fans at Hillsborough, the sub-postmasters or the residents of Grenfell – all are sacrificed on the altar of Caesar.

Orgreave was our bloody Calvary

In Station 12 Jesus is on the cross, and he speaks to his mother. This speech is essentially what has happened after Orgreave and the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5. The victory of deep reaction has brought ‘Cultural and material poverty.’ It has brought the rejection that Society exists and all ‘To serve a selfish ideology.’ And this has been achieved through the violence of the state as their ‘dogs of war’ were used to attack ‘its own helpless folk… unleashed on communities.’  Universal Credit, homelessness (a lifestyle choice, according to Suella Braverman), zero hours contracts, student fees, drink and drug addiction, denial of the right to strike or protest and so much more besides – all these things flow from what happened after the Battle of Orgreave and the defeat of the strike.

Station 10: The Crucifixion

And yet, in the immediate post-war world there was hope for the working class. Jesus, we are told, ‘was born in a post-war dream/Jesus was born in a housing scheme.’ At that time, he had been born ‘with the highest of hopes.’ The defeat for the miners at Orgreave has given rise to a lived nightmare now for many. For this reason, Hershaw says, ‘Orgreave was our bloody Calvary.’

In Station 14 Jesus has died and there is an inquest into his tragic death; a death like so many miners before him. Hershaw mentions the names of Joe Green and Davie Jones, two miners who died during the strike while picketing to save their jobs, their communities and their class. Hershaw gives a telling line when he says, ‘Profit’s never mentioned at an inquest.’ How sickeningly accurate this line is.

The question now, of course, is will there be a resurrection for the working class? Hershaw offers two differing outcomes. In the pre-Station poem Early Doors: At the Cross he muses that ‘a new Happyland will come.’ But at the end of the Stations in After Hours: Fear no more he looks back on the great struggle of the miners to say, ‘May all your struggles now be past/ All souls like coal must turn to ash.’ While the earlier quote of a new Happyland sounds promising, the latter one suggests the opposite. Hershaw is being deliberately ambiguous because we do not know what will happen in the future. He is not saying we will be saved by believing in him though he does say, ‘Your solidarity be praised.’ Until that solidarity grows and people begin to realise that the state in which they live is geared only to the few and not the many, then a Happyland will come – but if this is not realised, then it will all turn to ash.

The Orgreave Stations is a profound reminder of how great the stakes are. The heroic struggle of the miners has to be remembered and celebrated precisely because it tells us about the need for solidarity. At the same time Hershaw’s Orgreave Stations makes us realise how he has lifted the poetic bar to a higher level by invoking the figure of Jesus the miner. This Jesus preaches socialism and his creed is dangerous to the ruling classes. The message of the New Testament is remarkably similar in that both creeds place love at the heart of their message.

Marxism is about political love

In a recent article in The London Review of Books (25^th April) by Terry Eagleton (republished by Culture Matters here) called ‘Where does culture come from?’ he discusses the issue of ‘clashing self-fulfilments’ which he resolves by reference to Marx. Marx, he tells us, gives the name ‘communism’ to what Eagleton calls ‘reciprocal self-realisation.’ He then goes further and quotes from The Communist Manifesto – ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’

This is the high moral ground upon which any socialist or communist society should be based. No-one is excluded or victimised in such a society. There is recognition that we are all one body. Eagleton comments further:

When the fulfilment of one individual is the ground or condition of the fulfilment of another, and vice versa, we call this love. Marxism is about political love.

This is precisely what Hershaw is saying in The Orgreave Stations. Jesus of Orgreave embodies this kind of political love through his solidarity with the miners. This solidarity, of course, extends to everyone who wishes a better, fairer society, even to those who do not wish it. Such generosity is unthinkable in a class-based society where a ruling class decides on who the winners and losers will be.

In Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, we see something similar when he says, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ Comments like this had been around in the early days of the socialist movement and Marx simply refined it. However, a remarkably similar comment can be found in Acts of the Apostles where the lifestyle of the community of believers in Jerusalem is described as ‘communal.’ This meant that no-one retained any individual possession of goods – ‘distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.’

The Jesus of the New Testament and the Jesus of Orgreave recognise this communality. This is what makes them dangerous, precisely because their views challenge the vested interests of the few. Socialism is the higher creed in terms of morality since it represents sharing, fairness, kindness and care. These are lethal values for those who represent greed, selfishness, expropriation and exploitation.

Jesus of Orgreave, Grenfell, Windrush and Hillsborough

The Orgreave Stations expresses a high moral level, a socialism that stands as the antidote to all the profanities in our late capitalist world. It should also be remembered that when we consider the Stations of Jesus of Orgreave, we are also talking about his Passion, the short final period before his death. The Passion comes from the Latin patior meaning to suffer, bear, endure. That is what the miners did at Orgreave and throughout their strike. That is also what the working class continues to do. Jesus of Orgreave is also Jesus of Grenfell, Jesus of Windrush, Jesus of Hillsborough, of Ballymurphy and the Bogside and of the sub-postmasters.

Hershaw’s text makes us think about the renewal, or the resurrection, of socialist ideas and practices. Such is the power and the implications of these poems. They make us return to source, to the Christian values that set out to change the world. This poem makes us think of the words of Nikolai Ostrovsky:

Man’s dearest possession is life. It is given to him but once, and he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying, he might say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world – the fight for the liberation of mankind.

Jesus of Orgreave has no burning shame or torturing regrets. He sought the liberation of mankind and he did so without the baggage of any denominational dogmatics. His story lives as the story of the class he came from lives on. It has to, after all, since it remains the only hope for humanity and for our world.

Hershaw’s poem has been blessed by wonderful illustrations, by Les McConnell, some of which illustrate this review. They not only enhance the pages of the text but give it an updated twist, by illustrating ordinary people who are recognisable and relevant to the period of the strike. The artistic solidarity of the poet and his illustrator could be said to be a match made in heaven.

The Orgreave Stations is available here. There will be a launch of the book at a memorial event on Saturday 15th June, at 2pm at the Willie Clarke Centre, Lochore, Fife. 

Jim Aitken reviews the new antholgy from Smokestack Books, edited by Alan Morrison and Atef Alshaer 

‘Poetry is a duty because it records the last stand of the soul.’
- Atef Alshaer

Smokestack Books, together with editors Atef Alshaer and Alan Morrison, have produced not only an anthology of new Palestinian Poetry, they have produced both a living testimony and a memorial to the siege of Gaza which began in October 2023 and is continuing at this moment. The publication of Out of Gaza is a major achievement that deserves justifiable praise for bringing together fifteen Palestinian poets from Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora.

Tragically two of the poets in this collection died in the siege. Refaat Alareer, prior to an Israeli airstrike, had said that if the Israeli Defence Force attacked his house he would ‘throw my pen in the faces of the soldiers.’ Alan Morrison relays that according to Euro-Med Monitor (and other reliable sources) Professor Alareer was deliberately targeted with a so called ‘surgical bomb’ like so many other writers, intellectuals, doctors, academics and journalists.

The Palestinian poet and novelist Hiba Abu Nada was also killed by an Israeli airstrike while in her home in Khan Yunis. Grief-stricken at the onslaught against her people, and the rising levels of death and destruction, she said in the poem 'We are in the heights now

There is a new Gaza in heaven
without siege
taking shape now.

Understandably, the level of grief at what has – and is – being done to the people of Gaza is palpable. This is expressed in this collection with deep emotion and a moving sincerity. While we may be horrified at what we see on our TV screens, the people of Gaza are undergoing something deeply traumatic that we can only barely imagine.

The sense of grief and sadness and of desolation at what has been done causes Hala Alyan to suggest in her poem 'Naturalised' that ‘When this is over there is no over but quiet.’ Her sense of grief is so over-powering that in another poem called I don’t hate sparrows she movingly affirms –

We bear what we bear until we can’t anymore.
We invent what we can’t stand grieving.

This is the human response to what is going on by those on the receiving end of such horror. Ali Abukhattab in his poem 'Discourse of I/You' tells us ‘I build the kingdom of crying’ while Mohammed Mousa laments ‘there are no playgrounds for Gaza children/and cemeteries are always available.’ Mousa also states in I can’t keep up with the rhythm of war that ‘We wash in the rubble, we breathe under the rubble, we fight death as we gasp and fight for a life that’s ready to go.’

In Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem 'Moon Over Gaza' she writes of ‘A landscape of grieving ’and Farid Bitar in 'Unexplained Misery' tells us ‘The wars of Palestine are never ending… millions of olive trees uprooted… I keep thinking this is a bad dream/ And when I awake/ Everything/ From the previous day/ Is just the same.’

You have to experience the trauma of Gaza by being there to write such lines. While grief and sadness are clearly the likely sentiments to be expressed in such a collection, it was noticeable that there was nothing expletive or lines of invective directed against the Israelis or against Jews either. However, there were lines that compared the Siege of Gaza to what once happened to Jews. Refaat Alareer in his poem 'I am You' addresses Israel by saying: ‘The victim has evolved, backward, / Into a victimiser… I want you to stop hating.’

This insight comes close to what psychologists would describe as the once abused becoming the abuser. Alareer does not deny the Holocaust, he acknowledges it and is saddened that the Israeli government has learned nothing from it. He goes on to say at the end of this poem:

I am you.
I am your past.
And killing me,
You kill you.

These are powerfully succinct sentiments being expressed. Similarly, Farid Bitar in 'The Journalist' says ‘This enemy is insisting to relive/ Days of Warsaw ghettoes of WW11/ Vengeance is their calling.’ And Tariq Luthan shares such a view in his poem 'We Already Know This' when he writes ‘Genocide… did not start, and did not end at the Holocaust… everyone needs a place on the planet.’

What is so interesting about these lines is the tempered restraint that they have. There is no obvious hatred, no foul-mouthed rants at oppressors and no racism. When Alareer said 'I am You' he implies that not only is the suffering of the Palestinian people comparable to the suffering historically of Jews, but that both Arab and Jew are fellow Semites. This is rarely said. Hatred of Arabs is also anti-Semitism.

Mohammed Mousa in the poem 'Three military vehicles drive by' raises the question of identity, of being a Palestinian under occupation and attack when he tells us ‘I refuse to hand my body to a white soldier who has no identity and asks me to leave for having one.’

Palestinians know that they are Palestinian, and that is the same whether they are living in the horror of Palestine today or are part of her burgeoning diaspora. The restraint of the lines in this collection would still inevitably be deemed anti-Semitic since, it seems, no-one is entitled to compare the Holocaust to any other atrocity. As Pankaj Mishra said recently in his essay in The London Review of Books (21 March) called 'The Shoah after Gaza', the Israeli government ‘weaponises’ the Holocaust to justify all that it does:

Memories of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity have been built. But these universalist reference points are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians.

Though the poets in Out of Gaza show a commendable restraint in their language toward their oppressors, the same cannot be said about some former Israeli Prime Ministers towards the Palestinians. In 1969 Golda Meir said ‘There are no Palestinians’ and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Menachem Begin, described Palestinians as ‘two-legged beasts’. Yitzhak Shamir referred to Palestinians as ‘grasshoppers who could be crushed’. At the outset of the Rwandan genocide, leading Hutu politicians described the Tutsi population as ‘cockroaches’.

This is the dehumanising language of racism that implies others are less human than you are. It brings to mind the Nazi persecution of Jews as ‘vermin’ and ‘lice.’

On 7 October 2023, after Hamas launched its lethal incursion into Israel, the Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, said of Hamas 'We are fighting human animals'. And Benjamin Netanyahu went on to cite a biblical reference in the context of Hamas by referring to the ancient Amalek, to ‘eradicate this evil from the world.’ Of course, such a reference was designed to appeal both to ultra- right religious forces that support him, and to the Christian Zionists within the USA. The ‘annihilate Amalek’ theme brought favour from some 60 conservative evangelical leaders in the USA who all sent a letter of support for Netanyahu to the White House.

Rather than the endless smiting of others, it was humbling to read that the poets in this collection do not wish for more vengeance and bloodshed – but nonetheless, they do show their resistance to a brutal oppression. Marwan Makhoul, aware that writing poetry does not stop the devastation of Gaza, acknowledges ‘we may not change the world with what we write/ but we may shame it’. That is undeniably the case. Later in this poem he contemplates the idea of having to write politically and concludes:

in order for me to write poetry that isn’t
political, I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.

These fitting lines adorn the cover of the collection. In a perfect world there would be no need of political poetry but in a world of deepening injustices Atef Alshaer tells us ‘poetry is a duty because it records the last stand of the soul’. While it may well be the last stand as experienced by those in Palestine, it has to be the first stand everywhere else, especially in the Western countries complicit in this horror.

For Sara M. Saleh, in her poem 'Say Free Palestine', she includes an array of everyday comments we may make to one another, but for her we should dispense with such frivolities set against what is happening to Gaza, and just say ‘free Palestine’ instead:

don’t say ‘rush hour’ say free Palestine
don’t say ‘Happy Birthday’ say free Palestine
don’t say ‘humanitarian pause’ say free Palestine
say no justice, no peace,
from the river to the sea, then say free Palestine.

Resistance can clearly take many forms. Dareen Tatour tells us in 'The General, my brother and me': ‘I resist with the letter and with the poem’. Also, in the poem 'I will not die', Tatour states ‘the dead are those who do not dream… I will not stop my dreams’. This too is resistance. And in the poem 'Grisaille', Lena Khalef Tuffaha informs us that in the rubble of Gaza ‘Our children learn the maps of homeland in war time’.

The October 7 attack by Hamas is neither celebrated nor even mentioned by any of the poets in the anthology. This is because as Marwan Makhoul seems to imply in 'Lines Without a Home':

to be a ’48 Palestinian means
being the strangest citizen in the world:
you beg the world’s states to protect you
from your state.

Since the Nakba of 1948 Palestinians have only known displacement, death and occupation. Their plight is remarkably similar to what once happened to native Americans and native Australians. These people were similarly dehumanised and labelled ‘savage’ but they would rebel and fight back. Their actions were predictably ghastly. This also went on in Ireland for over seven hundred years. The actions by Hamas must surely be seen in the same light. Subjugated people, history tells us, will find the means to fight back. Unless, of course, you annihilate them – and this is why we use the word ‘genocide’ in relation to the Israeli response to the October 7 attack.

The absence of any mention in this anthology to the Hamas attack nonetheless speaks loudly. It does so because what is going on in Gaza just now is simply more ferocious than what has been happening before. Despite what the people of Palestine have gone through and have to endure, their tenacity, determination and resilience is incredibly uplifting. This is how they resist. While some will fight back with guns, the rest will fight back with a profound inner dissent, affirming their right to exist and exist in Palestine. This is what we see in these poems. They are all powerful testimonies of endurance, of resistance and of a belief in a better world.

Mohammed Mousa in 'They ask me who I am' describes Gaza as the ‘largest open-air prison’ but this does not prevent him from holding on to hope:

nothing I want more than a homeland,
unrestricted birthplace,
no fences of tyranny,
no walls of oppression,
no checkpoints to undress my fears,
with clouds heavy enough to carry my soul.

These are not only moving lines they are phenomenally brave lines. Dareen Tatour seems to encapsulate the existential condition of being a Palestinian when she says in 'When Gaza was killed':

my people still say: either martyrdom or steadfastness,
freedom then life.

Dareen was imprisoned for publishing a poem on YouTube and Facebook entitled ‘Qawem Ya Shaabi Qawemahum (Resist my people, resist them)'.

This anthology is a living testimony to resistance. The harrowing situation in Gaza also reminds us that without justice there will never be any peace and this is the call from Sara M Saleh to us all, to all those who believe in both Palestine and in a better world – say no justice, no peace.

The CPB recently published a short pamphlet with brief essays or 'provocations' on a sample of cultural activities, which is available to download below. Here, Jim Aitken reviews it.

This timely publication by the Communist Party of Britain comes out as the Arts Council of England (ACE) has just advised the organisations it funds to be wary of ‘overtly political or activist statements.’ While trying to maintain that ACE still supports freedom of expression, it tends to look a lot more like censorship.

Culture is now a battleground. It always has been, of course, but now this has become more heightened than ever before. There are several reasons for this. The first one is that capitalism won the Cold War, and rather than usher in an era of peace and prosperity for all, other enemies have been found to keep the lucrative arms industries happy. Not only that, but we can all see how the insatiable drive for more and more profit has destroyed our public services in order to maintain those profits. And in this mix conservative philistinism has also seen fit to cut arts spending as well.

Politically, since the end of the Cold War, the reformist parties have all moved further to the right. We see this with Labour today and we should recall that the party of Rosa Luxemburg, the SPD, though now in power in Germany, had previously been part of Angela Merkel’s CPD coalition government.

For Conservatives, the victory over the Soviet Union meant a victory politically, economically and culturally. And while the world economy is clearly capitalist in orientation and run politically by capitalist-minded politicians, the irritant for such people is that there is still far too much thought around that is socialist. It seems too many people are just far too decent and consider others as well as themselves. And regardless of how powerful and secure Capital may feel, inequality and the struggle for better wages will always endure and working people will always make up their own minds politically.

This is why culture today is such a contentious issue. In many respects it is the last bastion for alternative thought. Several contributors to Class and Culture stress that culture is a weapon in the class struggle. Scott Alsworth, however, in the section A Virtual World to Win, goes further by saying that ‘Culture is important not just because it unites us but because it’s an inviolable arena, belonging to the mind.’

It is almost like the Conservatives are saying that we should all be conservative in our thinking now. And that socialist, communist or even liberal thought is so last century, so passé. This is why there is a culture war going on today and this is why culture should always be allied to class as it is in this publication.

It was unfortunate that only a pamphlet could be produced by the CP since the topic of class and culture is so vast. Essentially, this is what the literary and cultural theorist Terry Eagleton has been writing about his entire academic life. Nonetheless, this pamphlet should start important discussions around this vital issue.

There are 10 areas covered in Class and Culture, all written it seems, by men which is unfortunate. The view of women is crucial here since their lives are so often under-represented in the cultural field or more invariably misrepresented.  A woman’s voice could have addressed this.

The topics covered range from the demand for cultural democracy that cites the thorny issue of access within an unequal society, to funding for classical music, poetry, literature, television, the virtual world, the bourgeois press, popular cinema, religion and the position of state monopoly capitalism.

All pieces are insightful and well analysed but it was disappointing that there was little mention of the role theatre can play in the class and cultural struggle. The recent TV drama Mr Bates v The Post Office (this may have come out after the pamphlet came out) is a case in point. This drama had the Tories on the clear defensive in Parliament. There was no reference to the Small Axe dramas by Steve McQueen on the difficulties that faced the Windrush generation on their arrival here. Similarly, the TV drama It’s a Sin by Russell T Davies explored what it was like for the gay community during the AIDS crisis.

There was no mention of how more popular music has impacted on the sense of how divisive society is, and the music of, say, Public Enemy or Stormzy not only reaches black audiences but white ones too. Everyone who reads this pamphlet will no doubt realise other omissions but the pamphlet itself is responsible for this because it engages in the way that it does.

Kevin Patrick McCann tells us in Poetry Matters of a desire for a ‘poetry of dissent, of rebellion, of revolution’ and he makes the point that ‘poetry is as natural as breathing.’ What militates against this as far as the ‘hostility to poetry from ordinary people’ is concerned ‘is the result of bad teaching.’ The education system is also picked up by Eddie Maguire when he tells us that the bourgeois press ‘continues the work that the education system has started.’

It was alarming to read that workers in the gaming industry can work more that 80-hour weeks without overtime payments and have to sleep in their offices during intense spells. And both the Army and arms manufacturers are involved in this industry with the Army actually advertising to gamers, ‘Binge gamers, the army needs your drive.’ And the games industry also reinforces racist stereotyping with good guys and bad guys with the bad guys ‘generic Middle Eastern terrorists. Or Iranians. Or nowadays, the Chinese or Russians.’ 

James Crossley in Religion and Culture argues convincingly that religion should be opposed to ‘reactionary and oppressive tendencies in all religions’ while at the same time promoting ‘freedom of religious belief.’ This is clearly true, but I couldn’t help thinking that Crossley missed an opportunity to take on the Christian nationalists in the US and elsewhere who act as a theological front for US imperialism. Just as culture is a weapon in the struggle, so too is religion.

It was also heartening that Maguire saw fit to make clear his republican credentials. Too often on the left it is assumed that republicanism is embedded but this is not always made explicit. Maguire bemoaned the large crowds mourning the late Queen and realises that royalty is an ‘excellent example of cultural hegemony.’ This was well said.

The Civilisation series that Kenneth (not Alan) Clark produced for TV in 1969 was informative, as Brent Cutler says in A Marxist Critique of Television. However, its patrician manner and elitist pronouncements so enraged John Berger that he wrote Ways of Seeing (1972) as a riposte. In this book he cut right through the mystification of all the professional art critics like Lord Kenneth Clark. It is Berger’s book that has enabled millions of people to look at and appreciate art for themselves by concentrating simply on how we look at paintings. It is Berger’s book that has undoubtedly had the greater effect. Berger, of course, was a socialist and Clark was not.

This pamphlet will hopefully create a great deal of discussion.  That must surely be its ambition and by linking culture to class the pamphlet deserves a wide focus. Alsworth spoke of there being ‘counter-currents’ within the gaming industry and there needs to be counter-currents created in all the arts. And these counter-currents must seek to link up with one another. Just as the ruling class fights on all fronts, including culture, linking the counter-currents in the arts becomes the challenge ahead. 

One final aspect occurs and that is the fact that we live in a multicultural society. Cultural links obviously have to be made across all areas because all cultures face the same issues of chronic underfunding. Not only that but some groups in society face racism and where that happens solidarity has to be shown. Cultures of the world, unite!

Celtic Connections put on a wonderful concert recently, in memory of Scotland’s great Marxist revolutionary, John Maclean (1879 -1923). Glasgow’s magnificent concert hall had the 2,000 strong audience deeply engaged with poetry readings and songs all commemorating a figure who entered Scottish folklore and legendary status after his untimely death, at the hands of a British state that had reduced him to appalling poverty and ill health.

Maclean’s parents were Highland clearance folk and came south to Glasgow to find work. Maclean became a primary school teacher in the city and was imprisoned several times for his anti-war activity in opposing the First World War which he said was –‘a bayonet… with a worker at both ends.’. He was given a brutal stint in Peterhead jail of five years hard labour and maintained his food was poisoned while he was there.

Large crowds turned out to meet him when he returned to Glasgow after his release. He founded the Scottish Workers’ Republican Party, Scotland’s first pro-independence party. Maclean also supported Irish independence and would speak at meetings in Glasgow in support of Irish and Scottish independence.

After his death his memory entered Scottish literature with Hugh MacDiarmid and Hamish Henderson, Edwin Morgan and others all writing poems and songs in his honour. In 1973 a pamphlet called Homage to John Maclean came out to commemorate him 50 years after his death. This pamphlet was published by the John Maclean Society which formed in 1968.

The centenary concert featured songs and poems from this pamphlet including Matt McGinn’s Dominee, Dominee, which is the Scots word for teacher. MacDiarmid had several poems in the pamphlet and at the concert his poem John Maclean was beautifully read by Scotland’s former Makar, Jackie Kay.

The evening was put together by Siobhan Miller and Henry Bell. While Siobhan is a singer who is well known in Scotland, Henry Bell is the author of possibly the finest biography written of Maclean which came out in 2018 called John Maclean: Hero of Red Clydeside, published by Pluto. Both should be congratulated for putting together such a fantastic evening with terrific performers.

Everyone who performed on the night was superb. Karen Casey, an Irish singer, caught the mood when she said she felt she could say whatever she wanted to say to such an eager audience. Karine Polwart, Karen and Siobhan came together to sing Mrs Barbour’s Army, written by Alistair Hulett, and recalling the struggle of Glasgow’s women in refusing to pay increased rents as their husbands fought in WW1. Mary Barbour was a formidable woman and a comrade of Maclean’s. A sculpture to her and her women comrades stands proudly outside Govan tube station.

Billy Bragg was well received but the best cheer of the night was for Dick Gaughan who has been singing and campaigning for socialism over decades in Scotland and beyond. He has performed at previous Celtic Connection events and the crowd seemed to give him such deserved applause precisely because he has been such a champion for socialism and internationalism over so many years. He told the crowd with pride that he was a Scottish Republican which went down well with them. He sang The Red Flag with Billy Bragg to its original tune of The White Cockade by Robert Burns. Eddi Reader sang Burns’ A Man’s a Man for a’ That in her very distinctive way of singing Burns’ songs. She has become by far the best singer of Burns’ songs in recent times.

What was rather moving was to see and hear Maclean’s granddaughter, Frances Wilson, who came on stage to read out one of her grandfather’s letters to her mother. That was a really special moment and she was clearly delighted to receive such applause and to realise that so many people still held her grandfather in such high esteem.

Maclean’s speech from the dock was also read out in which he says ‘I am not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot.’ Such words are as relevant today as they were then.

Speaking to people after the concert, it was clear that many lamented the fact that such radical, internationalist politics is sorely lacking today. And after folk left the hall, they could have bought a copy of Now’s the Day, Now’s the Hour: Poems for John Maclean, published in late 2023 by Tapsalteerie. This book contains many of the poems and songs from the 1973 pamphlet along with new material from another generation of Scottish writers. The book is edited by Henry Bell and Joey Simons and was first launched in The Griffin bar near where Maclean would speak his anti-war, socialist and internationalist message.

The concert was very much a Scottish night but also an internationalist one. At the end of the concert both The Internationale and Henderson’s The Freedom-Come-All-Ye were sung by all the performers and by many in the audience.

John Maclean has been dead for one hundred years but his spirit clearly lives on in poetry and in song. If only his politics could live on too!

Tomorrow’s Feast by Gerda Stevenson is her third poetry collection. It is presented in several sections with a prologue called Albatross that tries to understand why the mariner in Coleridge’s great poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, decided to take up his bow and shoot the bird. By way of the sections called Heartwood, Corona and Collective Breath, the collection ends with the section Bought and Sold. The last poem in this section is called Mariner, a libretto in verse which offers a contemporary twist on Coleridge’s poem. By beginning the collection with a monologue from the dead albatross and ending with Mariner, the collection has clearly been cleverly choreographed.

The collection is dedicated to ‘all the young ones at tomorrow’s feast.’ Tomorrow is the future and for there to be a feast in the future we obviously have to come to terms with today’s world, and this is exactly what Stevenson attempts to do in this essentially optimistic collection. 

The local is the international

Stevenson travels widely, traversing continents and using both English and Scots, along with smatterings of Gaelic, to say what she says. This makes Tomorrow’s Feast international in its reach while still dealing with national, personal and local concerns. It was Tom Leonard who once said that the local is the international, and this is played out well in the poem Russian Gloves.

Life is beginning to open up, says Stevenson, ‘after the virus’ when a ‘red coffee van’ appears in her village. She is wearing a pair of gloves made and given to her by a Russian woman ‘who lived for a while/ over the hill.’ The gloves are admired ‘for their intricate pattern, Fair Isle style, with a Tatar touch.’ As she explains who made them and gave them to her in friendship, a man ‘casts a tiny grenade’ by saying ‘So they’ll be for the bin won’t they!’

Earlier in the poem we are told that the Ukraine war had started – ‘news of Ukraine bleeding from the radio’ - but in no way was this any justification for Stevenson to disown a pair of gloves given to her in friendship. The moronic man who uttered those words clearly swallows all that the media feeds him, and while war should rightly be condemned, in no way should we condemn all people in countries whose leaders perpetrate war.

An exercise of cold and brutal power

The poem Little Boy was written to commemorate the 75^th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb by the United States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The poem was published first in Culture Matters. This act of evil should never be forgotten. While Stevenson takes the Enola Gay on its journey to drop the bomb of all bombs, we are told that a chaplain uttered the prayer ‘armed with thy might / in the name of Jesus Christ.’

The religious blessing given to an act of such horror is – to use Biblical terms – both blasphemous and lamentable. Nothing could have justified the incineration of 140,000 people, an exercise of cold and brutal power. It was good to see this poem in the collection, reminding us of the appropriation of Christianity by the United States to sanction its imperialist foreign policy.

Today’s Christian nationalism in the United States is being used for frightening causes. Certain sections within the evangelical and pentecostal movements are calling for the re-introduction of slavery, the burning of gay people, an end to the American constitution for being too secular, and a theocratic state to emerge instead. These ‘so called’ Christian groups even have their own theology, appropriately called prosperity theology, that maintains that because you are fabulously wealthy God has graced you. It has nothing to do with a rigged capitalist economic system, chicanery or corruption, but with God’s favour.

This theology is not only functioning in America, but has been exported to Latin America and to Africa. It helped secure the Presidency for Bolsonaro in Brazil.  Margaret Attwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) possesses a deeply worrying resonance of what is happening in contemporary America. As is so often the case, it is our writers who see more clearly than any politician.

The Unites States of Alienation

It can, of course, be explained by the mind-numbing conformity that exists there, something Sartre noted on a trip in 1945 in his essay Individualism and Conformism in the United States. But it is much more than that today as American capitalism has advanced since the Second World War. It is the new Imperium in our world and the dangerous rise of Christian nationalism comes as a result of the severe alienation felt by millions of people who live there and are being won for even greater alienation. This does not matter so long as vast profits are made and the super-rich stay super-rich.

Marx, in his A Contribution Toward’s a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844), tells us:

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The religious justification for using the atomic bomb in 1945 now justifies America’s relentless overseas conflicts as well as fierce condemnation of any opposition at home. The psychological disorientation this brings to the American masses who are fed endless media messages about the enemies who threaten their way of life, finds succour in these forms of Christian nationalism. Sadly, such adherents fail to realise that the world’s oppressive nature, its heartlessness and soullessness can all be attributed to the capitalist, warmongering state that they actually worship.

War and migration

War destroys, disfigures and dehumanises us all. It does not end problems but creates more of them. There are several references to war in Tomorrow’s Feast. The mariner who shot the albatross was African and war, he says, ‘had hijacked every shred of my humanity’. Similarly, the soldier who served in Afghanistan who is now coming home in the poem Hame-comin, says that he ‘canna come hame in ma hert / noo I’ve duin whit I’ve duin.’ Just as the state sanctified the dropping of the atomic bomb, so a state sanctions the killing of people in foreign places who do not look like us. Yet the Children’s Chorus in Mariner succinctly reminds us ‘we’re all from somewhere else.’

Many of today’s migrants are fleeing war and its aftershocks. They are unwanted despite our interference in their lands that made them migrants. The racism that seems to underpin such an outlook is based on migrants being foreign. Stevenson uses the Scots word for foreign in her poem Fremmit, telling us:

the hale warld, ow’r aa its airts
has boardit up and nailed ticht
its hert’s door fur fear o fremmit fowk,
their fremmit weys

As we know all too clearly, migration is being used to steer a rightward trajectory in our political life, Stevenson remains firmly on the side of humanity – of those forced to leave their homelands through no fault of their own. She reminds us in the poem Song of the Slabhraidh, how 298 people from St Kilda and Skye had to leave their homes and sail on the Priscilla in 1852 to their new home in Australia. Some 31 died on board and another 11 died at the quarantine station in Australia. Similar death tolls – and worse – happened to African slaves and to the Irish fleeing famine, and the forces who orchestrated such inhumanity are still active today.

In the case of the people from St Kilda and Skye, their reason for having to leave was the way their lives had been transformed by Union with England and how land use had changed from communal to private ownership. The ‘mighty mill-men of Yorkshire’ were active in the wool trade and this trade turned ‘wool into gold.’ Human beings became surplus to requirements. Donald and Anne McPherson, along with their hungry child, took with them the slabhraidh, the chain and hook that held the pot over their peat fire. It has been handed down to their descendants.

There is a powerful chorus that goes with this poem which could so easily be applied to all today’s migrants who may carry similar items –

I am the slabraidh, the hook and chain,
each link holds a story, the old refrain
of loss and profit, greed and gain,
of people and places, so many faces,
and too many farewells, again and again.

Such a Chorus is in support of migrant populations everywhere, to be seen as fellow human beings who share our world. Gerda’s poems speak of a shared humanity and differences in ethnicity and colour are deemed irrelevant.

In Mariner a Refugee Chorus, Gerda poses the question ‘Are we the cost of the world’s other half?’ The answer is yes, of course. The inequalities in our world are all designed this way by the rich and powerful who manipulate their elected politicians to do their bidding. However, at the end of Mariner, a song is sung where it is hoped we can all meet, ‘beyond beliefs of wrong-doing and right-doing’, where we can all ‘breathe the air of peace.’ Aye, to that.

A world to be cherished and shared

Peace is the key to any future but in all the pages of Tomorrow’s Feast it is implied that peace must come with justice. Migrants must be treated as our fellow humans, never demonised, war should cease and the young should be enabled to have their ‘dreams migrate like paper kites.’

Gerda’s poems remind us what it is to be fully alive. The wondrous skies above us light up the world we live in. It is a world full of beauty and wonder and it is a world to be cherished and shared rather than exploited for the benefit of the few. And this world must be the inheritance of the young.

The bright colours that adorn the cover of this collection were painted by Gerda’s daughter and in the poem My Daughter’s Painting, the poet tries to understand what her daughter saw as she painted it. She questions if it was maybe ‘the first garden, where all was new and equal, and knowledge good?’

This is the creation story as metaphor for Tomorrow’s Feast as a whole. The collection is commended for its humanity, its refusal to accept how things are and for its dogged optimism for the future of all our young people to one day ‘breathe the air of peace.’

Tomorrow's Feast, publiched by Luath Press, is available here.

In the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, city and church leaders cancelled all Christmas festivities this year to mourn the more than 20,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza. Below is the Christmas sermon, “Christ in the Rubble: A Liturgy of Lament,” delivered by Reverend Munther Isaac at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, which has received international attention for a Nativity scene depicting the figure of baby Jesus in a keffiyeh, surrounded by rubble (see photo above, by Munther Isaac). “If Jesus were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble in Gaza,” preached Isaac, who condemned the use of theology to justify Israel’s killing of innocent civilians. “If we, as Christians, are not outraged by the genocide, by the weaponization of the Bible to justify it, there is something wrong with our Christian witness, and we are compromising the credibility of our gospel message.”

Beneath the Rubble

by Jim Aitken

Beneath the rubble of Gaza
lie the broken bodies of babies, of children,
of their parents and grandparents too
along with the fragments of bomb casings
beneath the rubble of Gaza.

And it is a rubble that is generic
for it brings to mind Stalingrad
and Dresden; it brings to mind
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Mosul and Aleppo
and vast swathes of Afghanistan.

Beneath the rubble of Gaza
also lie some unlearned lessons –
the one about rubble begetting more rubble
the other one that peace only comes with justice
beneath the rubble of Gaza.

Uday, One Day

by Jim Aitken

In memory of Uday Abu Mohsen who lived only one day
after being killed during the Siege of Gaza, 2023.

Uday was the baby boy’s name. Uday, it was.
He would have known so little but he would
have known he was someone with being.
He would have been welcomed and loved.

He would have been welcomed with fear
and would have known little of the blast
that ended his one- day old life, mayfly Uday.
Yet he leaves behind much more than a name.

He leaves behind the insanity of surgical strikes,
the criminality of collateral damage, the nonsense
of precision bombing, the lunatic costs – and profits –
of warfare set against the massacre of the innocents.

Uday’s death certificate was bizarrely issued before
any birth certificate arrived and the bombing continued
after his death. But mayfly Uday must be remembered
and not just in Gaza and in Palestine, not just there.

The cry of Uday must be heard in Israel, in Syria, in Iraq,
in Russia and Ukraine, in Yemen, Tigray and Sudan.
Uday’s little whimper should cross oceans, mountains
and plains, teeming cities and deserts, turning louder.

Turning louder all the time so that the whole world
begins to realise that without justice there is no peace;
that only justice can guarantee peace. Uday, one day
peace and justice will reign in your name. Uday, one day.

 See also these reports on media coverage of the Gaza genocide, at the BBC and more generally.

Sixty years ago, in 1963, an Aeroflot flight from Moscow was on route to Havana and had to stop at Shannon airport due to fog. Shannon, then as now, is famous for fog. At that time an arrangement had been hatched between Shannon and the County Clare town of Kilkee to take passengers by bus to view the marvellous scenery this part of Clare offers.

Kilkee had long been popular with tourists and bathers, and the author of the imperialist novel King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard, had once visited Kilkee as did Charlotte Bronte who spent her honeymoon here. Alfred Tennyson also visited the town. The Irish actor Richard Harris, though born in Limerick, considered Kilkee his spiritual home and spent summers here as a boy. There is a statue to him in the town which was unveiled by Russell Crowe.

Back in 1963 a group of three men dressed in overcoats came in to Kilkee’s Marine Hotel via swing doors to the side entrance. Momentarily, it had that Clint Eastwood feel about it. They had been on the Aeroflot flight and after visiting Limerick they had been bussed here to Kilkee. A young sixteen-year-old student called Jim Fitzpatrick was working here in the bar on leave for the summer from the Franciscan Gormanston College in County Meath he attended.

Che Guevara, I presume?

Fitzpatrick was already a convinced leftist and recognised immediately one of the three men as Che Guevara. The young student had described his college as ‘right wing fundamentalist Catholic’ but he nonetheless admired the missionary work the Franciscans had been doing in South America. This was a period when liberation theology had taken root in this vast continent and Fitzpatrick had also been a keen student of the events surrounding the Cuban revolution, via Pathe News.

Guevara had realised that he had been recognised and asked Fitzpatrick to recommend a drink. While discounting rum, he suggested an Irish whiskey with some water. A Powers whiskey was duly poured and Guevara sipped it slowly. They struck up a conversation in the Argentinian’s faltering English with Guevara telling Fitzpatrick he was proud of his Irish roots. Guevara’s father actually bore the surname Lynch while his great-grandmother was from Galway, and other family members came from Cork.

Che was curious about Ireland ‘from a revolutionary point of view’. He was full of admiration for the fact that Ireland was the first country to ‘shake off the shackles of the British Empire’. He would have been well aware of the large population of Irish descendants, like himself, who lived in Argentina. It is reckoned to be over a million strong and these descendants form the largest Irish community in any non-English speaking country in the world. In fact, Argentina is home to the fifth largest Irish community in the world. The footballer Alexis MacAllister, who plays for Liverpool, is currently the most notable member of this community.

The Irish contribution to South American liberation struggles

Guevara would, of course, have been equally proud of the role played by the Irish during the South American wars of national liberation. The Liberator himself, Simón Bolívar, who not only managed to rid this continent of Spanish rule but had a vision of it being a united whole, had the outstanding support, both as aide-de-camp and as his diarist, of one Daniel Florencio O’Leary who hailed originally from Cork.

In 2010 the Venezuelan Government presented a plaque and bust of O’Leary to the people of Cork. Another bust of Chile’s first head of state who had also fought with Bolívar was Bernardo O’Higgins, and his bust resides in the gardens of Dublin’s Merrion Square. This square was once home to W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Henry Grattan and Ireland’s own Liberator, Daniel O’Connell. Today the fashion designer Louise Kennedy and Dermot Desmond, the major shareholder in Celtic Football Club, live there.

There were even two Irish battalions who took part in Latin American wars. The 1^st Regiment Venezuelan Rifles took part in the Venezuelan War of Independence and the Saint Patrick Battalion was an Irish American battalion that deserted and fought on the Mexican side during the Mexican-American War (1846-48).

The Irish writer Tomás Mac Síomón gave a fulsome expression of the extent of Irish involvement in Latin America in his book From One Bright Island Flown: Irish Rebels, Exiles, and Martyrs in Latin America. (Nuascéalta, 2022). As well as mentioning Guevara he also wrote of the exploits of one Guillén Lampart upon whom the legend of Zorro is based. Another Argentinian, Rodolfo Walsh, gave his assistance to the Cuban revolution by managing to decipher encrypted messages at Prensa Latina, the famous Special Services news agency he founded. Walsh passed on the message to Castro and enabled Cuba to prepare for the CIA invasion at the Bay of Pigs.

Sadly, Rodolfo Walsh was to be murdered at the hands of the Argentine military junta (1976-1983) because of his involvement with left wing trade unionism and for his journalism. The Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez described Walsh’s Open Letter to the Military Junta as a ‘masterpiece of universal journalism.’

Guevara would have been well aware of the Irish military diaspora’s exploits in Latin America just as he would have been aware of the exploits of previous Irish rebels throughout the long struggle for Irish independence.

The barman Jim Fitzpatrick would go on to become one of Ireland’s most famous artists. In 1978 he wrote and illustrated the cycle of Irish Myths, the Lebor Gabála Erenn. The book tells of the legends of the coming of the Tuatha dé Dannan to Ireland and their battles with the Fir Bolg. There is a painting by the Scottish Celtic revival artist, John Duncan, which beautifully imagines the coming of the Tuatha dé Dannan called Riders of the Sidhe (1911).

Riders of the Sidhe, 1911

This book, also called The Book of Conquests, is partner to a second book on the deeds of Nuada of the Silver Arm, and Lugh in their fight with the Formor. Both books are wonderfully illustrated by Fitzpatrick with intricate Celtic scroll work and knots. While Fitzpatrick has also produced artwork for the band Thin Lizzy and the late Sinéad O’Connor’s 2000 album Faith and Courage, his Portrait of Che Guevara in 1968 must have gone on to adorn millions of walls internationally as Guevara became the iconic face of world revolution throughout the late 1960s and 70s, and today also in many oppressed countries.

The Motorcycle Diaries

It was a previous photograph of Guevara done by Alberto Korda that seemed to inspire Fitzpatrick. Korda was Fidel Castro’s official photographer and he captured what he would later call the ‘absolute implacability’ of the revolutionary figure.  This implacability was engendered by Guevara’s trip around Latin America on motorcycle with his friend, Alberto Granado. Guevara was a medical student and only 23 years old, and from a wealthy though leftist family from Rosario. This trip brought him face to face with the social injustices of exploited miners, persecuted communists, ostracised and excluded lepers, along with the distressed descendants of the once great Incan civilisation.

Guevara’s diaries of this trip seemed to support Bolívar’s vision of a unified Latin America, only this time free from US imperialism. Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries would be posthumously published by Verso in 1995.The book was marketed as ‘Das Kapital meets Easy Rider.’ And a film of the book came out in 2004 starring Gael Garcia Bernal as Che and Rodrigo de la Serna as Granado. Interestingly, the actor who played Granado was the real life second cousin to Guevara on his maternal side.

Korda’s photograph – Guerrillero Heroico (Heroic Guerrilla Fighter) – was in black and white and it came in a chance moment in Havana in 1960 after a fiery speech from Castro denouncing the CIA for the attack on the French freighter La Coubre, which killed over 100 people. Also in attendance was Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir who were both great admirers of Guevara. Korda had also photographed them that day along with many others.

This photograph had been used in Cuba in the early 1960s but would make its way into Europe via Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. He was a publisher and had published Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa as well as publishing the writings of Castro, Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. He had also been a member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) at one time and also a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) on two occasions. He would later support and become involved with guerilla groups. He was involved with left wing and separatist groups in Sardinia and had hoped to turn the island into a socialist republic similar to Cuba.

He died in a botched attempt at blowing up electricity pylons outside Milan as a member of Gruppi di Azione Partigiana or GAP, the second largest militant organisation in Italy after the Red Brigades. As a supporter of the Cuban Revolution, he had gone to Cuba and visited Korda’s home where he noticed the photograph of Guevara. He was given it and after Che’s death this photograph sold over two million posters.

Korda had renounced any copyright of his photo because he wished it to have the widest possible distribution. Korda apparently forgave Feltrinelli for claiming copyright of his photo while praising the fact that the image spread around the world. Of course, crass commercialisation of the image would follow and Korda managed an out of court settlement with Smirnoff over the use of Che’s image and the $50,000 was donated to the Cuban health service.

As Guevara was being chased in Bolivia by the CIA and the Bolivian military, the Korda photograph also came into the possession of Jim Fitzpatrick. It had been sent to him by a Dutch anarchist group concentrated around their magazine Provo, and they claimed it had come to them via Jean-Paul Sartre. There are varying accounts of these details but suffice to say that Fitzpatrick’s Viva Che! portrait/poster would owe a considerable debt to Korda’s photograph of 1960.

With Guevara struggling in Bolivia, Fitzpatrick decided to make Che’s eyes slightly uplifted which seemed to suggest those saintly paintings of the Renaissance. Fitzpatrick has said that he did this subconsciously, no doubt influenced by his Catholic upbringing.

He chose only two colours, the revolutionary colours of black and red with only the badge on Che’s beret coloured yellow by felt-tipped pen. He also gave Che more hair, in keeping with the style of the time when having long hair was an act of rebellion. And also, like Korda, he donated money to the Cuban health service.

Like Korda’s image, Fitzpatrick’s would also adorn countless walls. And like Korda, Fitzpatrick waived copyright so that it could be used by left wing groups and saying, ‘I literally wanted it to breed like rabbits. I wanted it to spread.’

And spread it most certainly did. The town of Kilkee would go on and have annual celebrations of Che and Latin American culture, and an event was once addressed by Che’s widow, Aleida. A mural of Che also appeared in the town and it was removed after complaints from American tourists who said he was a murderer. Clearly these tourists had never heard about Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

In 2008 the Irish postal service An Post issued a 1 Euro stamp of Fitzpatrick’s poster and the initial print run of 122,000 sold out in days.

Sartre had said back then that Marxism was the spirit of the age. Guevara embodied that spirit and Fitzpatrick has also claimed to be Marxist while also still attending Mass.  And as for the murderer Guevara, it should also be pointed out that after his journey through Latin America, he did complete his medical studies. He was also extremely well read and loved the poetry of Mistral and Neruda from nearby Chile, Lorca, Keats, Machado, Vallejo, Rubén Darío, Miguel Asturias and Walt Whitman. He was also familiar with the writings of Aristotle, Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Camus, Faulkner and Gide as well as the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin. He also admired the work of Sartre.

And while commanding in the Sierra Maestra he would read passages to his forces from Cervantes and Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer much admired by his fellow Argentinian, Jorge Luis Borges. And Guevara would always see that the campesinos they came into contact with would be taught to read and write since, for Guevara, ‘ignorance was a battle’ that also had to be won. Predictably, his CIA file of 1958, declassified several decades later, would say that Guevara was ‘quite well read’, and with typical imperialist flourish also added that Che ‘is fairly intellectual for a Latino.’

The images of Che by Korda and Fitzpatrick can still inspire. It should be remembered though that it was Guevara’s Irish ancestry that inspired him. As his father said when his son was killed ‘the blood of Irish rebels ran in his veins.’