by Tila Neguse
What does a Peace Economy mean to me?
I feel like for the first time in years, people are talking about lowering defense spending in this country and this is big! conservatives and progressives, democrats and republicans alike are realizing that this issue is intrinsic in the progression of us as a human race. When I interviewed for the position of Director of the Peace Economy Project, one of the first questions I was asked is what made me want to work with PEP; what made me want to work on the issue of defense and military spending in this country? And my response is and still remains, the human interest in this project. It is so easy to become entrenched in numbers, statistics, and agendas. But we have to look at this inorganic information in correlation with its human component, to understand it fully.
I chose to share my poem, Castle by the Sea, because I believe that the poem, at its core, reflects the elements that are essential to my vision of a peace economy and the human interest in such an environment. I remember distinctly when I was living and studying in Cape Coast, Ghana, touring the slave castle in Elmina and hearing the story of how the gun, brought by the Europeans, was the most alluring thing to the African traders, inciting them to turn over human chattel in exchange for this strange foreign weapon. Little did they know the magnanimous dynamics of such an exchange. The arms trade is a powerful thing and comes wrought with suffering, as it did over 500 years ago and as it does today. Will we ever learn? This narrative poem functions as my imagined historical perspective of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, and by extension of the dangers of foreign arms dealing. I hope to create both a literal and figurative image that represents the fundamental ideas of the human aspect of the arms trade, both past and present. Again, will we ever learn?
My vision of a peace economy is one where we learn from the mistakes of our past and don’t barter with violence as our currency.
“Castle By Sea”
Tila Neguse
1482. The Portuguese landed in Elmina
And built a Castle by the Sea.
Amankwa to the natives.
But the Portuguese tongue
Could not form the sound,
Accustomed to rolling over
R and gliding over S.
So they called it São Jorge da Mina,
This Castle by the Sea
With white mortar walls
And limestone paneling,
Built upon fresh soil
Still burning from the fires
That cleared the land.
And in the Castle by the Sea
There lived not a prince and
His princess, but a governor
And his wife. White.
Like the Castle by the Sea.
They came for gold
But soon remembered
The candied taste of sugar
On the tongue, and the way
The mouth thirsted for these
Lucid crystals extracted from cane,
Swaying on the plantations in Brazil.
The wind is in the cane.
Blown from the shores of Elmina and
Caroling rusty vespers across the Atlantic
To America.
The governor and his crew
Sent men into the Bush
To barter for them.
The mosquitoes kept them
Inside the Castle walls,
Burnt holes into their skin,
Tiny fires printed in copper
Leaking into the blood,
Hot and feverish, Let them
Pour forth their alabaster
Insides onto this black soil.
Let the skin sweat
And the brain turn to liquid.
And they cursed the African flies
That draped sleep over their eyes.
They should have died
In the Castle by the Sea.
In the Bush, the men fought
For gold and slaves.
The Ashanti captured the Fanti
And brought them linked in chains,
A forged iron brotherhood,
To the Castle by the Sea.
And the governor smiled and
Gave the Ashanti guns and sent them
Back into the Bush for more.
And the Ashanti kings marveled over the
Virgin feel of cold metal against hot skin.
The beaches of the African West Coast
Are lined with haunted castles.
And the pillaging ghosts of Samori and Babatu
Stalk along the phantom walls,
searching for human chattel.
The governor placed the captured men
In vaults meant to hold gold
Underneath the Castle by the Sea,
Stripped them naked and
Beat them bloody till the
White mortar walls ran red
With black blood.
I wonder what they must have felt
When they saw those monsters on the horizon,
Those strange ships bobbing up and down
Bearing men carrying the might of God in barrels.
Later, the governor went to his wife
On the veranda, and delicately
Draped an iridescent bracelet of African gold
Around her fragile white wrist
And whispered that they had found
A home in this Castle by the Sea.
