By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., March 24, 2024 – Several month ago when I was in a debilitating state of depression while reflecting on the mistakes I have made in my life that I blame for the current problems I am experiencing — financially and otherwise – my mentor, Sir Arthur Foulkes, sent me an email suggesting that I read an article in the weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova.
After reading the article, which addressed the root causes of my despondency, it reaffirmed how fortunate I am to have had Sir Arthur as my mentor from I was 18 years old when I joined the staff of The Nassau Daily Tribune in May of 1960 as a young man in pursuit of a career in journalism.
Sir Arthur at the time was The Tribune’s News Editor, essentially the person in charge of the newsroom. He took me “under his wings,” as the saying goes, and not only took a special interest in my development as a journalist, but also offered me some “fatherly advice” at those times when it seemed that I was spiraling towards allowing my commitment to the Black Power Movement to make me culpable to criminal behavior. Today, I am convinced if it were not for Sir Arthur, especially during the years in the mid-1960s when I worked with him at Bahamian Times, I would have ended up at Fox Hill Prison and my life would have been totally ruined.
Bahamians who can remember my participation in the struggle for majority rule in The Bahamas in the 1960s will recall that I was an avowed Black Power Advocate. I was not a disciple of the most renowned civil rights leader of that time, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his turn-the-other-cheek non-violent exhortation, but rather, I was a committed follower of Malcolm X, who advocated that racism had to be eradicated by “any means necessary.”
My nickname during my involvement in the struggle for majority rule was Rap Brown, which some people like my good friend Gladstone “Moon” McPhee, the legendary basketball coach who remembers my involvement in anti-racism activities back then, still calls me whenever we come in contact with each other. H. Rap Brown was one of the most radical “soldiers” in the war against racism in the United States in the 1960s as a top “lieutenant” of Stokely Carmichael, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
My outspoken views against racism back then were incubated and developed into a passionate personal crusade during my years as a young reporter at The Tribune when I was subjected to vile and abhorrent overt racism on some assignments that I covered.
This is far from being an isolated example, but it was such a humiliating experience that it has left a life-long scar on my psyche and is indelibly imprinted in my mind. I started at The Tribune in May of 1960 as a sports reporter, but gradually began covering general assignments – including occasionally covering the House of Assembly, which at the time was Nicki Kelly’s primary beat as The Tribune’s senior reporter and top political writer.
I can’t recall the exact year, but it was in the early 1960s when I was assigned to cover a banquet at the Nassau Yacht Club, at which the top sailors were being presented with their trophies. I arrived at the club around the same time as a white female reporter with The Nassau Guardian from England., who was promptly escorted to a seat to have dinner, while I had to stand in a corner and wait until dinner was over to take my pictures and take notes of remarks that were made.
This sort of treatment was “par for the course” at similar assignments that I went on, and combined with other overt racist policies at the time – such as black Bahamians not being allowed into the Savoy Theatre on Bay Street as late as 1962 – sparked a cauldron of internal hatred in me for the perpetrators of such racist behavior.
An extremely important piece of advice that Sir Arthur gave me back then was that “reading is the basis of all knowledge”, and I became, and still am, a voracious reader. So, when he suggested that I read that article in The Marginalian by Maria Popova, I did. It offered some sage advice on addressing the mental problems I was experiencing at the time, and I immediately subscribed to The Marginalian and have been receiving it by email on a weekly basis.
This morning’s edition had an article under the heading, LOVE ANYWAY, that was profoundly erudite, so I decided to share it with readers of my Washington, D.C. – based online publication, BAHAMAS CHRONICLE, which has a huge following among the Bahamian diaspora across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom as well as in The Bahamas and the wider Caribbean. Here is that article:
LOVE ANYWAY
You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal.
I think about this and a passage from Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum (public library) flits across the sky of my mind:
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
This, of course, is what life evolved to be — an aria of affirmation rising like luminous steam from the cold dark silence of an indifferent cosmos that will one day swallow all of it. Every living thing is its singer and its steward — something the poetic paleontologist Loren Eiseley captures with uncommon poignancy in his 1957 essay “The Judgment of the Birds,” found in his altogether magnificent posthumous collection The Star Thrower (public library).
Raven by Jackie Morris from The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane
Eiseley recounts resting beneath a tree after a day of trekking through fern and pine needles collecting fossils, dozing off in the warm sunlight, then being suddenly awakened by a great commotion to see “an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak” perching on a crooked branch above. He writes:
Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents. No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death. And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable. The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.
Couple with Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss, then revisit Loren Eiseley on the warblers and the wonder of being.
