Darcus Howe: Iconic in life and immortal in death!

By Stanley Collymore

Farewell! And not goodbye my black brother, commendable

friend and exemplary mentor whose death is deeply felt

and profoundly regretted just as you’ll be sorely missed.

But although you’ll no longer unhappily be physically

here in the flesh with us Darcus Howe, persons like

me nevertheless want for your living and vibrant

spirit together with the entire world to firmly

know that you’ll never be forgotten by us,

and what’s more that your remarkable legacy accumulated

around the complicated and at times painfully traumatic

aspects of us as Black people striving to regain, and

also reassessing and dependably consolidating our

dignity, humanity and Black solidarity harshly,

disparagingly and remorselessly trampled on

and so unsympathetically and barbarically

taken from us by others that together in

their sick, cruelly twisted, delusional

and demented minds saw our Black

people, both individually and collectively, not

even as the human beings we are but rather

as brute and wholly uncivilized elements

of an ill-defined species that’s entirely

out of sync with, totally incapable of

understanding far less so endowed

with the required competence of

ever being able to adapt to their

inflexibly skewed, engrained

racist and compulsively embedded notions

generally, and themselves hazardously

blended with predisposed and quite

barbarous agendas as to how we

must be effectually, ruthlessly

and likewise in definite and

precisely straightforward

terms be dealt with both

reliably and efficiently.

But you not merely

Firmly challenged

their cold-hearted

and demeaning

precepts of us,

you comparably in the

process and naturally

your unique way,

Darcus Howe,

thwarted it!

© Stanley V. Collymore

6 April 2017.

Author’s tribute and remarks:

Death is an inevitability in everyone’s earthly existence because even from the moment of our conception and eventual birth we were never meant to be here permanently, since being on Earth was always a temporary location and transient phase in the evitable transitional process of our finally going elsewhere, Heaven or Hell, when our time here on this earth has reached its end.

And naturally, as is the human perspective on these sorts of things, there are those among us and possibly a majority I suspect who fear and are even I dare say thoroughly petrified of death by virtue of the awful, loathsome and even barbarous to others lives that they’ve consciously, even premeditatedly but all the same despicably conducted with disdainful satisfaction during their respective sojourn on earth and therefore are predictably terrified as the end draws near for them of what will finally happen to them once they die and wholly incapable of stopping that process.

Furthermore, being unable as well to do anything to either circumvent or abrogate that occurrence and knowing perfectly well throughout their impassioned distress regarding this upcoming event that they can’t take their obsessively, graspingly avaricious and financially as well as exploitatively acquired wealth and ill-gotten gains with them.

No such worries though or disquieting fears are engendered however among those who see this earthly life they’ve been accorded for what it was always meant to be and who themselves have accordingly worked tirelessly and most assiduously to achieve that result. Principled and conscionable individuals all of them and like you Darcus Howe not only prioritized but also earnestly and instinctively put the welfare and wellbeing of others well before those of your own; and did so altruistically because intellectually and in the most endearing and committed fashion, as was your natural wont, and commensurately with the best interests and most laudable aspects of humanity you instinctively knew it was what was indispensably required and needed to be done.

So with your commendable sojourn here on earth satisfactorily done Darcus Howe and as you start your personal journey onwards to your heavenly and eternal home, we who will always admire and love you immensely, although we’ll undoubtedly and understandably miss you tremendously, are not only completely grateful for your presence among us these past 74 years but are likewise tremendously indebted to you for the legacy that you’ve so wonderfully left us. Rest in eternal peace my Caribbean brother, mentor and friend; and thank you for everything!