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
