Photo Credit: Black Lives Matter
In honor of Black History Month in the United States, my Poetry Corner February 2015features the poem “Vida Obscura” (Obscure Life) by Brazil’s greatest black poet João da Cruz e Sousa (1861-1898).
Born in the Southern State of Santa Catarina, Cruz e Sousa was the son of freed slaves. (Not until 1888 was slavery totally abolished in Brazil.) When their former slave owners adopted and gave João da Cruz their surname Sousa, it became both a blessing and a curse for the child named after Saint John of the Cross.
After he revealed great intellectual aptitude, they enrolled ten-year-old João de Cruz in the Liceu Provincial where he spent the next five years studying French, English, Latin, Greek, mathematics, and the Natural Sciences.
Exposed to higher education and Brazilian white society, Cruz e Sousa assumed he could enjoy the same dignity and…
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Guyana Election Watch: I am merely stating the obvious …. By Dr. David Hinds
Guyana Election Watch: I am merely stating the obvious that some conveniently or tactically ignore.
Dr. David Hinds
By Dr. David Hinds
My letter, “After 23 years African Guyanese are being asked to vote for an Indian Guyanese Presidency,” (< click), published in the January 27 edition of the Stabroek News, has drawn varied responses from several quarters. This is to be expected. The central issue I raised in the letter has been and will continue to be the proverbial elephant in the room that most analysts, commentators and politicians tend to avoid like the plague. In such circumstances he or she who dares to raise the matter of race not in the bottom houses or in the privacy of like company, but in the open space and in a direct way, is bound to be maligned. It is a punishment I have long resigned myself to.
In this particular case I am confronting a seemingly growing mindset that has been shaped by the arrogant and heartless governance of the PPP. The PPP seems to have excited a deep feeling of popular alienation and frustration which manifests itself in a politics of expediency, “short-cut” and zero-sum horse racing, particularly among our elites.
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