Nnorom Azuonye
Democracy and the Lottery of Haunted Hours
The methods by which democracy is now being spread the world over have made everyday living for the common man a game of the brave. The very next day after the July 7, 2005 bombing of London’s transport network, Londoners went out playing chicken with terrorists. Anybody who had to earn a living tagged along with the brave, sweating, and staring with apprehension at every rucksack-carrying young man. Since that fateful day, the tube has been populated with a wrecked bunch of the frightened brave. It is all with thanks to democracy.
Defining bravery in our time is a tricky business. Is the teen American or British soldier risking his life on a mission to kill an Iraqi in Iraq a brave person? The angry young Muslim callous enough to look innocent men, women and children in the eye and then blow them all up, is he a brave person? The Londoner who catches a bus or a train, either because he does not own a car, or owns a car but cannot afford to pay the exponentially-rising congestion and parking charges, in the face of real risk of a terrorist attack everyday, is he a brave person? It all depends on who is asking and who is answering the question, but the truly courageous are those who reject habits or actions that kill, actions such as smoking, unprotected sex, gambling, and warring. It is only these courageous beings that live out days not marred with regrets. Such people, not the owners of marble palaces and golden marques - possibly spoils of crime, or war, have successful lives. A man is not what he owns, or what he does. He is what remains – the seen and the unseen, the shareable and the unshareable - after what he owns and what he does have battled with what he believes in:
A man is what’s left at the end of his earthly travels,The flame burning in living memory of mankind,The sum of his words and deeds he felt able to share,But more, the graver ones making up the private him,Details of which go unvoiced with him to the grave.- Nnorom Azuonye, “Man”, Letter To God & Other Poems (Nsibidi, USA. 2003)If what is left standing is a mere shadow of a person who might have turned out better, by any parameter of judgment, the victory may be worse than death.
There is confusion. Early in education stories were told about the Jihads and how Islam – a religion and a way of life was spread by the sword. In the 21st century, although there is still some God-related religion going on, it appears that democracy is the new religion. In a somewhat unsettling way, all that has become evident is that the way the American government particularly and in a supporting role, the British government, deem most appropriate to spread democracy is by bullets and shells.
If the action the American-British Coalition took against Iraq in 2003, which has continued to this day is to be assessed as a yardstick for defining the nature of the spread of democracy in the 21st Century, specifically both governments’ disregard of what was clearly lack of popular support for the method of policing and democratising the world, by gambling their political fortunes against the perception that “elected officials tend to be short-sighted because they long for popular approval and success in the next election, making them exceedingly receptive to all sorts of pressure,” as stated by Ludovic Comeau Jr. in ‘Democracy and growth: A relationship revisited’ (Eastern Economic Journal, Winter 2003), then there is a temptation to see the actions of the leaders of the coalition governments as autocratic. History is resplendent with examples of people in authority pushing their agenda against public opinion in the name of democracy. The way to sum up all of these, to mirror the opinion of Psychiatrist Ikechukwu Azuonye who believes that “evolution was the method God (nature) used to achieve creation”, I dare say that autocracy is an indispensable tool and weapon for the spread and actualisation of democracy.
Should one take a hard and long look at Iraq since the 2003 invasion, shall it be inappropriate to apply W H Auden’s words to a man like President George Bush?:
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was afterAnd the poetry he invented was easy to understand;He knew human folly like the back of his hand,And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,And when he cried the little children died in the streets.-- W. H. Auden, “Epitaph on a tyrant” As it turns out, every time a man plays a game that may cost another human being his or her life, be it to safeguard his future against certain or imaginary social, religious, or political threats, he raises the stakes in the gamble. Where he actually ends a life, either by his own hands, initiative, obeying an order, or giving an order from the topmost floor of a war building, no matter how he justifies it, he wins only the lottery of haunted hours. The hypocrisy and the crime of the Iraqi invasion, the autocratic rather than the democratic dimensions are succinctly captured by Eric J. Hobsbawm in “Spreading Democracy: The world's most dangerous idea” (www.utne.com):
“…the decision to invade Iraq was made not by the Americanelectorate, after all, but by a small cabal of the wealthy and powerful.And, speaking of Iraq, it's difficult to champion democracy as aharbinger of peace when you're dropping bombs on those you professto be liberating.” The world is full of people who have reaped their haunted hours, people who may have been lucky at the economic, political or social wheels of fortune and lived or live out miserable lives as ghosts or companions of ghosts. Sometimes, there is no vengeance from victims or casualties of aggression. Sometimes, they just forgive, even though they cannot forget:
Prophesies of westward fire shall sink like the bodyof a weighted debtor to the bottom of mypain’s ocean. My coming of age must rain no bulletsupon your heads or explode me in your heartlandslike those damned fools of the 7th of July.Only gratitude with jaundice shall darerepay liberation with the murder of childrenin underground trains scattering blood, flesh and dreamsupon railtracks in tunnels dark and airless.I shake your hands across that ocean of my pain,forgive your faith in Freedom, the fear that forced youbomb my playmates who hopped and laughed to the marketto buy potatoes and tomatoes for supper.If my friends lived, your children would not see old agethis is why Freedom chewed my brother and sister. See me now in Great Britain, limbless boy paintingpictures, brush between my teeth, like a gifted snake.I am spectacle. I am inspiration. I am propaganda.And Freedom is a god. A warrior god so ruthlesshis shrine glowers with blast offerings, my peopleincinerated like fraud papers in our little homes.The end, ultimately is good, though I cannotget a piece of my sister on my burning chestout of my mind, my father’s brain spattered upondebris of our former home nightly haunts my dreams,I fall on my face and kiss the foot of Freedom.I am free, and it’s all because of you, I amfree, free from the burden of sibling love, free from the weight of a wholesome body,free also from the sanctions of conscience.I thank you, my liberator. Peace be unto you. - Nnorom Azuonye “What Ali Said To Me In A Dream”
The Bridge Selection (Eastern Light, UK. 2005) p.34
In “Changing Times”, Poetry Monthly #97(April 2004) p.5, Nnorom Azuonye stands on Winter’s side, understanding why she is going away and the world is getting warmer, including “those awful posters stuck on leafless trees/the kindest of which declare with heartless joy/’Winter bugs are here again…’/”. Global Warming is a serious enough issue and the heavy war machines deployed the world over definitely are not environmentally friendly. There may be no tomorrow left anywhere to come, it makes no sense afterall, a pre-emptive war to ensure it is what Nigerian singer Patti Obasi describes as the gift of Mammywater (the water spirit/mermaid) as “Wete isi bia were isi” meaning bring a head to take a head. This is what poet Carol Ann Duffy means when she says to Hephzibah Anderson (The Observer, December 4, 2005): “Our abuse of the planet and our resources is an anxiety – childhood for children not yet born will be darkened in ways we can’t imagine.”
The idiocy of the rationale for war and invasion of sovereign nations to deliver a brand of government is confounding: drop a few bombs, kill men, women and children in their sleep, destroy the environment for those that survive. In a scenario like that, what has been delivered is not democracy, but a death demon. Recall the words of Phillip Frazer in ‘What NATO's Bombs Did to the Environment’ (www.earthisland.org); “NATO's bombs not only destroyed Serbia's military machine; they also devastated the region's land, air and water. After several months of Serbian forces' burning villages and NATO's flying over 40,000 sorties that dropped powerful explosives on Yugoslavia, massive damage has been inflicted on the Yugoslav environment and neighbouring countries”
But what exactly does happen to men of power who give the orders to kill fellow human beings? Certainly, not all of them end up with long farcical trials like Slobadan Milosevic, or what is about to happen to Saddam Hussein, a tyrant that very few really care what becomes of, but who nonetheless will never receive a fair trial. These show trials are not where the judgments kick in hard. It is in the homes of those who will never come to trial. In their hearts, in their heads, and in their dances with ghosts, they reap their haunted hours. ‘Luck’ is a poem by Michael Kriesel, Poetry Monthly #97 (April 2004, P.3).That poem, apart from everything else, vindicates a man like Muhammad Ali who refused pointedly to fight a war that did not concern him. If all soldiers learned to question orders to go to war. If they stopped to look at it in simple terms that by agreeing to go to war, they agree to go and kill people’s sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, brothers, and sisters. By agreeing to go to war, they agree to go and take lives, period. If they clearly understand this, there would be very few wars, there would be very little room for the kind of indignity that American soldiers delivered on Iraqis in the Abu Ghraib prisons and elsewhere.
There are of course people who will sneer and say soldiers must take orders. Orders kill too. For instance in the 1992 Hollywood movie A Few Good Men, Col. Nathan R. Jessup (Jack Nicholson) states that if orders are not followed, “People will die”. His orders were followed and somebody still died - a helpless one at that, in the person of PFC Santiago, who was given a "Code Red". Marines, as the morality of that film states are meant to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves. The invading forces of Iraq, rather than fight for the people, have effectively murdered them, just the way Santiago was murdered.
In “Luck” the poetic character in Michael Kriesel’s poem describes how he always saw Ted, ‘a retired Navy Chief / who lived next door / & mostly drank alone.” In this poem, which everybody that lifts up a weapon against another human being ought to read, Ted speaks of how “he ran the war at night / when all the brass went home”. Kriesel writes:
Ted was at Pentagon during Vietnam& every night he’d get these giant photographsfrom air reconnaissance to analyze& every night he’d tellthe pilots what to bombBut it is in the closing stanza that Ted’s misery is articulated. As Kriesel’s character comes to the point of recognition:
I didn’t understand back thenthe way he drank alonewith his own ghostthough now I’m old enoughto just be glad I neverhad the luck to kill someonemuch less whole photographsIn truth, most people will never join the army of have the privilege of killing even one photograph of a nation or community. But for leaders of the world today, who are killing much more than photographs, Ted’s kind of future awaits. If President Bush should start drinking again, if he has not already, he might drink alone for a long long time, offering cans of beer to people who neither had his power nor his luck – his singular luck of ordering the death of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and also thousands of American marines. How many photographs and targets of opportunities on computer screens, like video games, he has had the luck of killing. George Bush is truly a great man. And so is Tony Blair.
After reading “Luck”, this writer found his way to a pub and celebrated the fact that his mother refused to sign a disclaimer form he received from the Nigerian Defence Academy. He was going to study Liberal Arts there in 1984. A military degree in Liberal Arts! According to the disclaimer, if he died or got wounded in training, the army would not be responsible. Perhaps if he had joined the Navy as he had hoped, he might have had the luck of killing someone, or even photographs. Today he toasts his mother because her refusal to sign that disclaimer form saved him from the path of a terrible luck; winning the lottery of haunted hours and drinking with his own ghost.
Nnorom Azuonye is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and publisher. He is the author of two books of poetry, Letter To God & Other Poems (2003), and The Bridge Selection: Poems For The Road (2005). In 2002, he founded the Sentinel Poetry Movement – the International Community of Poets. He is currently editor of Sentinel Poetry Quarterly.
