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File - Louise 'Miss Lou' Bennett-Coverley
The Editor, Sir:
About seven years ago, while working for a prominent newspaper, a noted Jamaican poet called me with a very sensitive issue. He was distressed at the reality that one of our cultural icons, the Honourable Louise Bennett-Coverley was living abroad in a nursing homealong with her husband, Eric Coverley. It was his opinion that Miss Lou was living there as she had no other option and should instead be rewarded with the best this country had to offer. He thought I was a writer of touching human interest articles and enlisted my support for his cause. But I failed miserably.
When I called Miss Lou for the interview, what followed was an entertaining story from a bubbly, sweet-tempered lady, who held no grudges against anyone.
Miss Lou never allowed me to probe sensitive issues, including the couple's many struggles with the major demands of the senior citizenyears. The pleasant piece was not even an eyebrow raiser and never made it to the main paper but on a least prominent page of a now defunct entertainment magazine. The poet loved Miss Lou dearly. I could detect it in his voice as he spoke glowingly about her. He used to call her on a regular basis and when he gave me her phone number, without even asking permission, I was elated. He was very deep and emotional about his mission. I remember his words vividly. "We should wash that woman's foot and drink the water for what she has done for this nation." But Miss Lou had kept our conversation at the level which I could not press past. I tried my best to ignore her bubbly gush of greeting and love for everyone, but could not. She asked me about her Jamaican people and at the end ofthe conversationshe chirped, "tell them to walk good and good duppy walk with them."
Ever since her homecoming celebrations a few years ago, I have never been able to enjoy the radio and television interviews she gave, for I was convinced that she was masking her pain. Even the excitement which followed her recent passing, I turned a blindeye to, for I was much too grieved.
Miss Lou's case was not much the desperate picture of poverty and degradation, but it is a sort of superior image of the circumstances of our elderly poor, several of whom choose to live in squalor, and others who are carted off to almshouses, because they are either penniless, childless, friendless or neglected. Being institutionalised is not usually a welcome option for most of them.
In Bayshore Park, St. Andrew, I think of an elderly widow who still has the strength to live on her own and refuses to go to an almshouse or burden her daughter who is struggling to support her family. She has her landbut cannot get a house and is drenched and falls ill whenever it rains. Her old house might soon fall down and I am afraid that she will die if this happens. There are many who are living in sub-human conditions on meagre pensions but have refused to be admitted to almshouse. Another elderly woman, who shares the comfort of a rat-infested old van on Cockburn Avenue Kingston 11, is one such senior citizen. This lady has no income but the meagre subsistence she gets from PATH. She cannot visit the doctor and she will die in that van because somehow I cannot persuade her enough to leave it. Dragging her off would be a violation of her human rights I am told. She has flatly refused to be institutionalised.
I mourn for others in the depressed communities and even in so-called upscale communities, loneliness and boredom being their only freedom. I have studied the features of some who try to remain calm and composed on entering an institution for the elderly, but give up their will to live
File - Louise 'Miss Lou' Bennett-Coverley
The Editor, Sir:
About seven years ago, while working for a prominent newspaper, a noted Jamaican poet called me with a very sensitive issue. He was distressed at the reality that one of our cultural icons, the Honourable Louise Bennett-Coverley was living abroad in a nursing homealong with her husband, Eric Coverley. It was his opinion that Miss Lou was living there as she had no other option and should instead be rewarded with the best this country had to offer. He thought I was a writer of touching human interest articles and enlisted my support for his cause. But I failed miserably.
When I called Miss Lou for the interview, what followed was an entertaining story from a bubbly, sweet-tempered lady, who held no grudges against anyone.
Miss Lou never allowed me to probe sensitive issues, including the couple's many struggles with the major demands of the senior citizenyears. The pleasant piece was not even an eyebrow raiser and never made it to the main paper but on a least prominent page of a now defunct entertainment magazine. The poet loved Miss Lou dearly. I could detect it in his voice as he spoke glowingly about her. He used to call her on a regular basis and when he gave me her phone number, without even asking permission, I was elated. He was very deep and emotional about his mission. I remember his words vividly. "We should wash that woman's foot and drink the water for what she has done for this nation." But Miss Lou had kept our conversation at the level which I could not press past. I tried my best to ignore her bubbly gush of greeting and love for everyone, but could not. She asked me about her Jamaican people and at the end ofthe conversationshe chirped, "tell them to walk good and good duppy walk with them."
Ever since her homecoming celebrations a few years ago, I have never been able to enjoy the radio and television interviews she gave, for I was convinced that she was masking her pain. Even the excitement which followed her recent passing, I turned a blindeye to, for I was much too grieved.
Miss Lou's case was not much the desperate picture of poverty and degradation, but it is a sort of superior image of the circumstances of our elderly poor, several of whom choose to live in squalor, and others who are carted off to almshouses, because they are either penniless, childless, friendless or neglected. Being institutionalised is not usually a welcome option for most of them.
In Bayshore Park, St. Andrew, I think of an elderly widow who still has the strength to live on her own and refuses to go to an almshouse or burden her daughter who is struggling to support her family. She has her landbut cannot get a house and is drenched and falls ill whenever it rains. Her old house might soon fall down and I am afraid that she will die if this happens. There are many who are living in sub-human conditions on meagre pensions but have refused to be admitted to almshouse. Another elderly woman, who shares the comfort of a rat-infested old van on Cockburn Avenue Kingston 11, is one such senior citizen. This lady has no income but the meagre subsistence she gets from PATH. She cannot visit the doctor and she will die in that van because somehow I cannot persuade her enough to leave it. Dragging her off would be a violation of her human rights I am told. She has flatly refused to be institutionalised.
I mourn for others in the depressed communities and even in so-called upscale communities, loneliness and boredom being their only freedom. I have studied the features of some who try to remain calm and composed on entering an institution for the elderly, but give up their will to live
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