Conversations with History

A poem by Hassen Lorgat

 

The young ones, sitting on sidewalk

Started to play quote a revolutionary

Call and response of a special type

Malcolm X

Brother Malcolm once said

Do nothing unto anyone / that you would not like/

to have done unto yourself/

Seek peace

and never be the aggressor

— but if anyone attacks you

we do not teach you to turn the other cheek

Young Attallah added another from our father Malcolm

We’re nonviolent with people/ who are nonviolent with us/

But we are not nonviolent/ with anyone who is violent with us/

 

And in Berkeley 1963,  Malcolm X responded to a moderator like this:

So to accuse us of being violent

is like accusing a man who is being lynched

who is being hung on a tree

simply because he struggles vigorously against his lyncher.

The victim is accused of violence,

but the lyncher is never accused of violence.

 

Along came the Palestinian solidarity freedom marches chanting

We insist

We must resist

When we resist

We exist –

Is today’s rallying call

But its roots  are long  as they are deep

 

As they join the march

as they continued in their revolutionary banter

The street is now the school of solidarity

 

Ghassan Kanafani and that Australian journalist

I remember ….

The journalist told Ghassan that the Palestinians resistance

must talk to their violent and hated oppressor

 

Talk to whom?

Ghassan retorted

“That’s the kind of conversation

between the sword and the neck.”

 

I also remember

that our revolutionary angel Angela Davis

Who chastised the ignorant American journalist who dared to ask her about violence:

When someone asks me about violence/ it’s incredible/

because the person asking that question/

has absolutely no idea what Black people have gone through/

what Black people have experienced in this country/

since the time the first Black person/

was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.

 

What about Paolo Freire?

Those of us who read his Pedagogy of the Oppressed learned that

Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit,

 who fail to recognize others as persons

— not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognised.

It is not the unloved who initiate disaffection,

but those who cannot love

because they love only themselves.

 

Let us talk about Frederick Douglas and his philosophy of reform

Way back in 1857 the freedom fighter proclaimed

Power concedes nothing

without a demand.

 It never did and it never will.

We resist (ed) with words or blows, or with both…

 

Who would dare forget Sojourner Truth, who in 1851 proclaimed “Ain’t I a Woman?”

From the womb of slavery spoke of equality, against the violence of racism and sexism

There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights,

but not a word about the colored women;

and if colored men get their rights,

 and not colored women theirs,

you see, the colored men will be masters over the women,

and it will be just as bad as it was before.

 

Radical sister and feminist Bell Hooks immediately picked up her spear

“The first act of violence

… patriarchy demands of males

is not violence toward women.

Instead it demands that all males

engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation,

that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.

If an individual is not successful

in emotionally crippling himself,

he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”

 

Far way Rolihlahla sought to pull racism out of its roots,

Facing the apartheid judge, who accused his resistance as Treasonous

. . . I do not… deny that I planned sabotage.

I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness,

 nor because I have any love of violence.

 I planned it

 as a result of a calm and sober assessment

….after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people by the Whites.

 

This is not to diss the teachings of Gandhi

“It is no non-violence

if we merely love those that love us.

It is non-violence

 only when we love those that hate us.”

 

We do love those who hate us

But we hate their ideas and actions

All we ask is for them give back what they have stolen from us

And Gandhi knew that and through arduous struggle

the sun begun to set on Empire

 

So, I beg of you, Tyrant

take your foot off  my neck

so we can be non-violent to each other

 

Hassen Lorgat, 18.9.24