Farewell Eddie, my friend

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Norman Washington Manley died on September 2, 1969. In the poem The Tightrope Walker, published in the 1969 Christmas edition of Public Opinion, as a tribute to the N.W. Manley, Dennis Scott wrote:

…You measure a man by the space that his going makes; the air, now, is full of his absence …

These lines capture the emptiness the Jamaica population was experiencing at the time. Professor Mervyn Morris quoted these lines when Dennis Scott died, in Dennis Scott, A Remembrance, delivered at the Little Theatre, 10 March, 1991.

Lovers of West Indian Literature find themselves in the same predicament since Professor Edward Baugh passed, December 10, 2023.

Eddie commended me in 1983, when he found out I had written a review of Lorna Goodison’s Tamarind Season which was published in The Daily Gleaner, circa 1982. He subsequently published “Goodison on the Road to Heartease” in the Journal of West Indian Literature, which was an impactful endorsement of Jamaica’s future Poet Laureate. At short notice Eddie accepted my invitation to address a class of second formers, at an urban high school, circa 2007. They wanted to meet a national hero in the flesh. He was humbled by the request, and his oral delivery, I am sure, remains in their minds, to this day. To those like me, who had problems understanding Derek Walcott, Eddie gave good advice: “ Poetry is an experience, follow through the poem as an experience, the experience will take you through to the meaning”.

Edward Baugh supported inter-professionalism. He agreed in 2007 to read some poems to medical professionals attending the annual William Dennis Memorial lecture, at the Main Medical Lecture Theatre, University Hospital of the West Indies.

In his interview, ‘Port Antonio Made Me’ in Jamaica Journal, February-April 1989, Eddie spoke to Leah Rosenberg of “ memories you can never erase, memories so clear that they must mean something”. These memories converge in his capstone poem, “A Rain-washed Town by the Sea”, where Eddie shares a survival tip with readers: memories are our default companions, a sustaining force, as life fades. “ These memories define me. I keep them against that morning when my eyes no longer turn to greet the sun”.

Farewell Eddie, my friend.

May your soul rest in peace.

NEWTON DUNCAN

Professor Emeritus of Paediatric Surgery, UWI