Scots steel tempered with Irish fire
Is the only weapon I desire.
- Hugh MacDiarmid
JACK MITCHELL, political activist, poet, literary critic, teacher, is dead. Born in Glasgow in 1932 into a staunchly militant working class family, Jack had both Scottish and Irish roots of which he was equally proud.
In the 1950s, when the international communist movement was under great threat, Jack nailed his own colours firmly to the mast. They were then, and remained, deepest red. He went to the German Democratic Republic, where he worked as a teacher in Humboldt University; and also spent some time in Tanzania.
Jack saw the importance of the cultural dimension to the workers' struggle. It was the vision of a better way of life that could give workers the courage to face the future, and strive to make it better. It was no accident that Jack linked folksong (always a strong part of the Scottish labour and Irish national traditions) with drama and poetry.
Jack was particularly involved in the political song movement in the GDR, cent red on the Berlin Oktoberklub. He sang and wrote songs for this movement, and over the years the Oktoberklub hosted an international political song festival, with Jack introducing groups from Ireland and Scotland to an international audience in Berlin.
Jack was not just an onlooker or commentator on other people's work. He was also a creative contributor. Apart from writing songs, his poetry, with its ironic cuts and brilliant wit, always contained a clear political message - but very enjoyably presented and received.
His epic poem, written in response to the Gibraltar killings, GiB: A Modest Exposure (Connolly Books, Dublin), is a fine example of how poetry can with heightened language make incisive political points that really awaken the listener's interest and understanding.
But for many years Jack's health was not the best. Worsening sight and heart problems were compounded for Jack by the tragedy of the collapse of his political home, the German Democratic Republic.
Jack and his wife, Renate, spent more and more of their time in the West of Ireland where his daughter Jenny was living with her family. It is a tribute to Jack's ability to adapt to new situations and creatively develop aspects of his interests that he made his last years in Galway a productive new stage in his life.
He will be sorely missed, especially by his wife Renate, children, family and friends. But his voice will not be silenced, for he has left behind a corpus of memories and work that will endure so long as human beings strive for a better, more humane world.
As Jack himself put it in the last lines of his poem on Gibraltar:
Ah, Yeats, you were wrong;
Climbing and climbing in a widening gyre,
The falcon still obeys the falconer
Things fall apart, but still the centre holds,
And still will hold while your lamented pact
Of master and minion stays intact.
Break this. tear these apart, and then
We'll make our martyred planet whole again.