This poem was written as a combination of two slow formations of reluctant
opinion. On the one side, as a persistent but irregular visitor to 'The
Voice
of the Turtle', an inner confusion and concern persists that I don't know
who
this website speaking to, nor upon whom the joke is. Is this socialism for
the
masses? Or just for the book-trained 'scholarship socialists' who write it?
And
what is the level of irony? Are we laughing at old-school socialisms (this
seems pompous)? Or is it a way for post-socialists to laugh at the
terrier-like
persistency of their belief in social justice (this seems more benign)? Or
is
it just showing off? Actually I do want to know the answers here: I'm left,
but
not per se a socialist. Indeed, if I didn't feel that the scholarship
socialists were so patronising (and not just to me), I might even learn to
become a socialist.
Combining both of these two points, and leading to the second
opinion-stream, I
ask - what is so funny about the 'Mao of Pooh'?
In Nepal, where I have been working for six months, there is an active so-
called Maoist movement, interfacing with not only ridiculously complex
politics
(monarchy, 'democratic' parties, goverment machinery), but with the super-
complex and embedded caste and religious system. I feel pretty much as I
understand the average Nepali to feel: something had to challenge the status
quo of very corrupt, paternalistic 'democracy' - and the Maoists are
recognised
to have forced self-assessment on the part of the political players. Whether
the Maoists themselves are any kind of answer was until a while back an open
question, but it is rapidly closing to a 'no' as they fragment and harbour
more
and more free-riders who rip off, and sometimes terrorise, the villages. In
sum, the Maoists have created the opportunity for useful change; but are now
routinely seen as dangerous and crooked as the prevailing governing complex.
At the political level, the poem is a reflection of how the 90% of the
country
working at subsistence farming is probably, in my gathering assessment, just
bewildered by the mainstream of politics (including of course development
interventions) as it is by the ideological motivations of the more educated
Maoists and the Maoist strategy on the ground. 'Children' is used a
designation
of anyone subject to the controlling manias of others; but also implies a
kind
of honesty and innocence that the other actors in this drama lack.
Anyway, after considering how they are defined by countervailing political
forces (and finding those definitions pretty useless), and as both as a
release
from the irrelevant stuff pushed at them from all sides, and as a expression
of
their true interests, the children complete their 'pooja', their ritual
prayers. As for thousands of years, this is a pious act, a psychological
release, a cry for help, a cry of despair, a celebration, a habit, and more.
Book-trained socialists will recognise the voices and tactics of the
Maoists.
In the Maoist voice, however, I wanted to add a range of ambivalences: the
high
claims at variance with actual capacity, the threat and the perversity of
violence against their putative support base, the peasants; and a sense of
the
unreality of the socialist goals in relation to the physical world
(traditional
socialism is generally hard to reconcile to environmental sustainability,
and
ignores the reality of Nepali geography particularly).
If the poem leaves anyone with a sense that whole populations can be
entirely
marginalised by the most intensive political processes (even ones featuring
radical socialism); and/or if it leaves anyone with a sense that Maoism
isn't
just a historical artefact, and that the 'Mao of Pooh' is not funny, and
that
post-socialist websites by scholarship socialists are probably irrelevant to
world's very poor - then I think I've not wasted my or your time.
At the poetical level, I am no poet, so this is hardly a quality item. But I
sometimes enjoy fiddling. Generally, I think that metre is very overrated
for
modern, text-based poetry. Metre is, historically, a device for recited
poetry,
and used by modern poets either writing for work to be recited, or more
usually
to show off to fellow wordsmiths. So (apart from the fact that I don't write
enough poetry to learn any metrical craft), the main sound devices in the
poem
are assonance, half-rhymes, and some alliteration; I rather think assonance
is
the most flexible and rangeful sound device in poetry anyway.
As interesting to me as sound techniques, for poetry designed to be read, is
the visual ambiguity and multiple-readings allowed by punctuation and line-
breaks; and the fact that tone of voice, crucial for precise meaning in
English, is *not* carried in text, which allows more ambiguity. Obviously,
beyond the sound and layout levels, standard devices (metaphor, references,
register) are all important tools.
