DEREK WALCOTT: CRUSOE’S JOURNAL (1965/1970)
I looked now upon the world as a thing remote, which Ihad nothing to do with, no expectation from, and, indeed,no desires about. In a word, I had nothing indeedto do with it, nor was ever like to have; so I thoughtit looked as we may perhaps look upon it hereafter,viz., as a place I had lived in but was come outof it; and well might I say, as Father Abrahamto Dives, "Between me and there is a great gulf fixed." ROBINSON CRUSOE
Once we have driven past Mundo Nuevo trace
safely to this beat house
perched between ocean and green, churning forest
the intellect appraises
objects surely, even the bare necessities
of style are turned to use,
like those plain iron tools he salvages
from shipwreck, hewing a prose
as odorous as raw wood to the adze;
out of such timbers
came our first book, our profane Genesis
whose Adam speaks that prose
which, blessing some sea-rock, startles itself
with poetry's surprise,
in a green world, one without metaphors:
like Christofer he bears
in speech mnemonic as a missionary's
the Word to savages,
its shape an earthen, water-bearing vessel's
whose sprinkling alters us
into good Fridays who recite His praise,
parroting our master's
style and voice, we make his language ours
converted cannibals
we learn with him to eat the flesh of Christ.
All shapes, all objects multiplied from his,
our ocean's Proteus;
in childhood, his derelict's old age
was like a god's. (Now pass
in memory, I serene parenthesis,
the cliff-deep leeward coast
of my own island filing past the noise
of stuttering canvas,
some noon-struck village, Choiseul, Canaries,
crouched crocodile canoes,
a savage settlement from Henty's novels,
Marryat or R.L.S.,
with one boy signalling at the sea's edge,
though what he cried is lost.)
So time, that makes us objects, multiplies
our natural loneliness.
For the hermetic skill, that from earth's clays
shapes something without use,
and, separate from itself, lives somewhere else,
sharing with every beach
a longing for those gulls that cloud the cays
with raw, mimetic cries,
never surrenders wholly, for it knows
it needs another's praise
like hoary, half-cracked Ben Gunn, until it cries
at last, "O happy desert!"and learns again the self-creating peace
of islands. So from this house
that faces nothing but the sea, his journals
assume a household use;
we learn to shape from them, where nothing was
the language of a race,
and since the intellect demands its mask
that sun-cracked, bearded face
provides us with the wish to dramatize
ourselves at nature's cost,
to attempt a beard, to squint through the sea-haze,
exposing as naturalists,
drunks, castaways, beachcombers, all of us
yearn for those fantasies
of innocence, for our faith's arrested phase
when the clear voice
startled itself saying "water, heaven, Christ,"
hoarding such heresies as
God's loneliness moves in His smallest creatures.
Child bride horrors last a lifetime
By Mohammed Jamjoom, CNN, October 1, 2010 -- Updated 0742 GMT (1542 HKT)
Sana'a, Yemen (CNN) -- Reem al Numeri is 14-years-old and recently divorced. She was 11 when she says her father forced her to marry a cousin more than twice her age.
Reem says she has been stigmatized by her divorce and now lives the life of an outcast. Without a husband or father to support her, she cannot attend school.
Her story has echoes of Nujood Ali -- the Yemeni girl whose story sparked an international outrage that many thought would force change in the country.
But a bill to outlaw child marriages got blocked and the practice continues. On Saturday, Yemen's parliament will look again at child marriage.
Reem's desperate pleas to stay a child fell on deaf ears as her father forced her to marry a 32-year-old cousin. "He said you need to go into the room where the judge is and tell him you agree to the marriage," Reem said. "I said I won't go in there - he took out his dagger and said he'd cut me in half if I didn't go in there and agree."
For Reem, the terror and the trauma were just beginning. She said she was told to sleep with her husband, but refused. She locked herself in a bedroom every night to ensure her safety but, according to Reem, he managed to sneak in and raped her.
Reem said members of her family first ordered her to submit, then expected her to celebrate. "They chose not to buy me any bridal dresses until they were sure I'd had sex with him because they didn't want their money to go to waste," she said. "Once they were sure, they bought me the bridal clothes and threw me a party. After that, I burned the white bridal dress I was given and then I used a razor to try to kill myself." Reem's father and ex-husband did not return CNN's calls.
In Yemen, a deeply tribal society, the issue of child marriages is a complicated one.
Two years ago, 10-year-old Nujood Ali shocked the world when she took herself to court in Yemen's capital city of Sana'a and asked a judge for a divorce.
After a well publicized trial, she was granted one -- and became a heroine to those trying to shine a spotlight on the issue of child brides in Yemen, where more than half of all young girls are married before age 18, mostly to older men.
In 2009, Yemen's parliament passed legislation raising the minimum age of marriage to 17. But conservative parliamentarians argued the bill violated Sharia, or Islamic law, which does not stipulate a minimum age of marriage.
And because of a parliamentary maneuver the bill was never signed into law.
More than 100 leading religious clerics called the attempt to restrict the age of marriage "un-Islamic".
Mohammed Aboulahoum, who advises Yemen's president, said the law should be passed, but he added the fight against child marriage restrictions were a distraction -- a way for the parliament to avoid bigger, more sensitive, political issues.
"I think there should be an age limit," Aboulahoum said. "And if you sit even with the religious people and you ask them, would you let your daughter marry at the age of 12 or 13, they would tell you no. So it is something, we use it more for politics."
Reem's attorney, Shada Nasser, is one of Yemen's most well known advocates for children's rights.
Nasser has represented several child brides seeking divorce, including Ali. She doesn't even think the practice should be called marriage. "I think it is rape," she said.
But Nasser also has hope that Reem's generation will help build a new Yemen, free of child marriages.
"Who can build this Yemen?" asked Nasser. "Me? No - all these small girls -- they must build Yemen. But all these girls need a good law - a family law." Nasser begs the clerics standing in the way: "I ask them to give these girls mercy."
A prominent Yemeni human rights activist, Amal Albasha, is also outraged the practice continues. Her organization, Sisters Arab Forum, tries to intervene on behalf of child brides, to stop the marriages from taking place. Albasha added that nothing will change until people in Yemen try to fully understand the horror a child bride goes through.
"You know, just two days ago, a 9-year-old girl got married in Taiz." she said. "Just think about the pain, the fear -- just think about a 9-year-old with a 50-year-old in a closed room," said Albasha. "The experience remains until the day of death."
Source:
Child marriages persist in rural India
By Subash Mohapatra, Asian Tribune, Last Updated August 28, 2006 7:55 PM
Geeta (all names have been changed to protect the victims) was married at the age of 10 and widowed at the age of 14. Her husband, whom she barely knew, had died while working as a migrant worker having to repay a loan to his father. This loan, incidentally, was for the child?s marriage expenses. Now, due to her status as a widow, Geeta has been shunned by all members of her family and is considered unlucky and useless by all of society.
Rita was married off by her family at age 12, became a mother at age 14, and was divorced at age 16. Although hardly cognizant of her first marriage, Rita is considered undesirable and will most likely remain alone and unmarried, having to raise her child completely on her own.
Meanwhile, the author recently met Chetram, a 56-year-old man residing in a rural village of the Surguja district of Chhattisgarh, who gleefully boasted of marrying six girls to date, all between the ages of eight and 16 years when he was 10, 14, 17, 23, 25, and finally 47 years old.
Chetram was not the only villager in the district of Surguja to have married young girls multiple times. The author interviewed 10 other men whose ages ranged between 40 and 50 years old, all of whom had been married at least four times.
These stories illustrate the crime of child marriage. Although illegal, the practice of child marriage is widespread and accepted by the majority of Indian society, especially in the many rural areas of the country.
Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, affirmed an obscure maxim: "Women should be 18 and men 37 years old when they get married." Today 6.4 million Indians under the age of 18 are married and 130,000 girls under 18 have become widows.
In India, children are forced everyday into a relationship, of which they have only the faintest knowledge and for which they are not at all prepared. To push two physiologically and emotionally ill-prepared individuals into marriage is a compassionless way of looking at relationships. India's Parliament adopted the Child Marriage Restraint Act in 1978 (a revision of the British Child Marriage Prevention Act of 1929 and the following amendment of 1949) setting 18 as the minimum age for women to get married and 21 for men. Nevertheless, like in many other Indian social spheres, the law seems inconsequential when it comes to protecting the rights of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society.
Women and girls are the main victims of child marriages. Sati is a Hindu practice which consists of the widow?s immolation on her dead husband?s funeral pyre. Women are seen as property with ownership rights to someone else, her parents, her husband or her in-laws. In some cases, husbands sell their wives, even their unmarried daughters, as sexual partners to other men.
Religion plays a key role in such harmful traditions and practices. Akhai Teej is an annual festival and an auspicious day for marriage in India. It is not uncommon for political leaders and government officials to attend these ceremonies to bless newly- married children and impart legitimacy to the practice. The society in turn, instead of playing a watchdog role, is an enthusiastic participant in a deliberate perpetuation of entrenched interests, including property and social considerations, all which make child marriages so common.
The origin of child marriages may be found in the Muslim invasions that began more than 1,000 years ago. Legend says that the invaders raped unmarried Hindu girls or carried them off as booty, prompting Hindu communities to marry off their daughters almost from birth to protect them. Today, these invaders have been replaced by superstition: the local view that any girl reaching puberty without getting married will fall prey to sexual depredations, some from men imbued with the common belief that having sex with a "fresh" girl can cure syphilis, gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS.
Tradition and superstition are further reinforced by necessity. The benefit of child marriages for poor people is that it is cheaper for the family than adult marriages, since a child marriage does not need to be as prestigious and costly as an adult marriage. It is said in Hindi that "chhota chhora dahej kam mangta" ("the younger the groom, the smaller the dowry"). Rural poverty similarly puts pressure on families to transfer the economic cost of a daughter to another family as early as possible.
The practice is particularly rampant in the populous northern belt where child marriages are most deeply rooted: Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal, with a combined population of 420 million, about 40 percent of all India. In Rajasthan alone, 56% of the women have been married before they were 15.
Married girls are generally separated from their immediate families, taken out of school to be "transferred" to her new-husband home, where they are expected to be used as free labor, sex objects and procreative machines. The teenagers? health is put at risk. They are much more vulnerable than mature women when it comes to sexually transmitted diseases.
Since their bodies are often not prepared to bear children, early pregnancy leads to more extreme peril, including death, during delivery and jeopardizing the health of these young mothers as well as their babies. As first-time mothers, girls face high risk in their pregnancies including obstetric fistula. This is a disease usually caused by several days of obstructed labor, without timely medical intervention. The consequences of fistula are life shattering: The baby usually dies and the woman is left with chronic incontinence. Because of her inability to control her flow of urine or faeces, she is often abandoned or neglected by her husband and family and ostracized by her community.
Statistically, it is translated into soaring birth rates, grinding poverty and malnutrition, high illiteracy, a high infant mortality rate, and a low life expectancy, especially among rural women. According to the United Nations, maternal mortality in India (which indicates the number of women dying in childbirth or from pregnant-related causes) is 25 times higher for girls under 15, and two times higher for 15-19-year-olds.
In view of this data, we can consider these marriages crimes not only against the children to bemarried but also against all of humanity.
Ending child marriage is challenging because even parents who are aware of its negative impact may find it too difficult to resist the economic and social pressures as well as the heavy weight of the tradition.
To stop such child marriages, the Indian government is aiming to create stricter and more easily-enforced laws, since the current legal atmosphere is not having a widespread enough effect. Currently, the police cannot arrest the organizers of mass child marriages without applying for a magistrate's order, which may take days. The punishment (maximum three months in prison) and fine are also not severe enough to stop the practice. Proposed changes include stronger punishment, a compulsory registration of all marriages rather than merely religious rites, the appointment of anti-child marriage officers in every state, and making a law requiring anyone who attends a child marriage to report the marriage. A further recent proposal is to administer campaigns to encourage poor families to participate in mass marriages of sons and daughters who are over the legal age to get married, in order to save costs of dowries and wedding arrangements.
However, the law alone cannot curb this harmful social practice. A change in psyche of the backward and illiterate people is required. Education and the empowerment of women are, beyond a doubt, two of the best remedies in a largely male-dominated country.
The Supreme Court, after hearing a petition filed by Forum for Fact-finding, Documentation and Advocacy, recently ordered the compulsory registration of marriages. This comes as a beacon of hope to hundreds and thousands of women and girl who are illiterate, widowed or abandoned and are unable to fight for their rights.
The development of an easily-accessible grass-level network of social workers and centers is necessary for this fight. The centers could provide emergency support for girls who have run away from marriage or from parents who are attempting to force them into unwanted marriages. Such centers were one of the key measures that lead East Asian "miracles" like Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand to successfully eradicate this practice.
We cannot ignore the vital role of the media. Indian newspapers like "The Time of India," "The Telegraph," "The Tribune," or "The Hindu" are aware of their responsibilities regarding this issue.
Governmental negligence on the subject and the publication of cases of child marriages en masse should be visible and transparent to the people. If the Indian society wakes up every morning to articles discussing the fatal consequences of this senseless tradition, the perception of this barbarous practice to a huge percentage of this population will change. Since the act of child marriage is so deeply-rooted in the people?s belief systems, the seed of real knowledge and awareness must be scattered from inside the society.