Sunday, May 24, 2015

COPLA CIMARRÓN
















por Quincy Saúl
24 Mayo, 2015

Cantan las montañas
Silvestre en canción
Leyendas ancianas
Por un futuro cimarrón.

Cantan rios y vientos
Silvestre en corazón
Futuros hambrientos
Por el pasado cimarrón.

Canta el mundo entero
Esférico en oración
El pasado y el futuro
Por un presente cimarrón.

Cantan los ancestros
¡Pensamiento y acción,
Amor y rebeldía,
Poesia cimarrón!

Cantan los pueblos del mundo
Por la séptima generación,
Por el pueblo que no ha nacido
Silvestre y cimarrón.

Canta maestro pueblo,
Un nuevo modo de producción,
Comunas en éxodo,
Economía cimarrón.

Canta el encanto
De la prefiguración
De la agroecología:
¡Vivir despierto y cimarrón! 

Cantan las semillas
En contra de la traición
De la muerte transgénica
Y por la vida cimarrón.

Cantan conuqueros
Con semillero cimarrón
¡Profecías y destinos
De la revolución!

Canta el Pachakuti
Una nueva iluminación,
¡Y guerreros del arco iris
En horizonte cimarrón!

Canta toda la clima
Por la organización
De paz ecosocialista
Y un cumbre cimarrón.


















Dedicado humildemente a los Guardianes de Semillas, y a los conuqueros y conuqueras de Monte Carmelo, con altas esperanzas cimarrónes y cronopios, por el lanzamiento del Primer Internacional Ecosocialista.

Friday, May 22, 2015

Viento y Pueblo


by QMS, May 16, 2015

¿De donde viene el viento?
¿De donde viene la lluvia?
El viento viene del sol
Del cielo negro y rubia,
La lluvia viene de tierra
De suelo arena y mármol.

¿De donde viene el pueblo?
¿Y hacia donde va?
El pueblo es como el viento
Tiene origen y mamá:
Va por el horizonte
Alrededor y adentro.

El mundo es tan sencillo
Como una semilla:
Pequeña y ardiente
Con vida infinita,
Compleja enormamente
Libre y candente.


Monday, May 18, 2015

A Surregionalist Schema of Revolutionary Experiences


What do the most inspiring revolutionary experiences have in common?
By QMS, as inspired by Max Cafard, 2015/Year 2 Pachakuti


 (For example...)
What do the Zapatistas have in common with the Sarvodaya movement?
The Havana malecon with the anarchist side-streets of Thessaloniki?
The NYC revolutionary arts scene with the Vermont Bread and Puppet Theater?
The Venezuelan ecosocialists with the South African shack-dweller movement?
Intentional communities/ecovillages with the radical labor movement?
International solidarity organizations with the prison abolition movement?
Radical environmentalists with the alternative/complementary currency movements?
Squatter movements with hacker collectives?


(An aspiringly surregionalistic schema of revolutionary qualities observed/derived in/from a little over a decade of searching for revolutionary movements on five continents... Sometimes these qualities appear only “in vanishing moments”... To the degree that they are magnified, extended, and elaborated, we are all better off... These can be manifest among “the masses” or among small collectives of individuals...)




  • Revolution of everyday life – where the meaning of politics is constantly reborn and reinvigorated and reinvented in every-day life, not just in planned or spontaneous events.
  • Challenging modernity – where people are challenging/reinventing/transforming not only the status quo/the powers that be, but on a more profound level are developing new practices and imaginations beyond the whole matrix of modernity, beyond its conditions of production and its forms of knowledge (including its foundational concepts like jobs, “progress” etc).
  • Like water (this is Oscar Olivera's criteria): social movements should be like water; in motion, transparent and happy.
  • Resistance and prefiguration – where politics encompasses both a rejection and an embrace; where practice is negative and positive, obstructive and constructive; where negation and affirmation complement each other and spur each other on, especially when the dialectics between these aspects are so tight that you can't say where one begins and the other ends. Where sacrifice and celebration share common cause and creed.
  • Evolution – where the possibilities of humanity are unlocked, for individuals and for collectives, where people are doing qualitatively new things which would not otherwise be possible, and there is the genuine sense that humanity is evolving; where human nature is freed from the captivity of capital/patriarchy, to be and to become beyond what we already know...
  • Revolutionary ontology – where there is attention and focus on Being, deeper than struggling for concessions, or resisting something, but where the struggle is for a new human being, and people are conscious of themselves as a site of that struggle and celebration.
  • Revolutionary epistemology – where there is attention and focus on Knowing, deeper than reciting a political line or an ideology, but where the struggle is for a new way of understanding, and people are conscious of their own minds as a site of that struggle and celebration.
  • Ancient and futuristic – where people have a reference or a rootedness in the ancient and the ancestral, both in terms of their daily practices and in their philosophies, but for whom tradition is not a shackle but a launch pad, which carries them toward bold, innovative, daring, even outlandish and otherworldly futures.
  • Spirit Movements/collectives which are “more than meets the eye” – which acknowledge and focus a dimension of politics beyond the strictly economic... With individuals who think and behave beyond the ego form of the self.
  • International/IntergalacticIn two senses; both in terms of having concrete reference/relation to others who are far away, and also in the shared sense of both humility and responsibility of knowing that we all are connected and interrelated and interdependent; an openness, an anti-provincialism, which is not abstract but rooted in self awareness/self-consciousness.
  • Matriarchy where women are leading the way, and self-consciously taking control of affairs in concrete ways (control of resources, development of new theory, making decisions, recruiting and taking responsibility for training/development of new members, etc).
  • Holistic – No distinction between means and ends. A simplicity of theory and practice that is comprehensive even as it tackles and engages in all the complexities of the world.
  • Back to the basics – Human labor. Seeds. Land. Water. Shelter. Food. Movements that cut through the complexity and obfuscation of the information age... who remind us what it means to be human, and give us an angle to join in that struggle and celebration.
  • The wildA sense of surprise, the unexpected, a break from routine and routinization... not to be confused with randomness, but the way a garden surprises even a veteran gardener, social movements should surprise their practitioners.... a readiness for the unknown and unexpected and uncontrolled and uncontrollable.




Can you deduce it all to program? Probably a terrible idea... Never seems to work... But just in case:



RED BLACK AND GREEN:
A PROGRAM FOR (R)EVOLUTION

RED: For the sovereignty of the First Nations: For the original peoples of the world, the indigenous and aboriginal and tribal peoples on every continent. For the original communists, who lived in egalitarian and harmonious balance with all nature. For all struggles to reclaim the commons, past present and future. For the heroic revolutionary anti-capitalist traditions all over the world. Free the land.

BLACK: For the liberation of oppressed nations everywhere. For Black Power and Black Consciousness: For self-determination and for decolonization. For the emancipation of internal colonies and occupied territories. For Panafrican and Afrocentric ubuntu and ujamaa. Free the people.

GREEN: For Mother Earth, the Pachamama. For all our relations and ancestors and the next seven generations. For wind, water, fire and soil. For seeds and their guardians. For Earth Democracy. For agroecology and the production of integral ecosystems. For the preservation of biodiversity, and the struggle against desertification. For healing people and the planet. For the young and the new. Free life.




Monday, May 4, 2015

JAFFNA POEMS

















by Kanya D'Almeida and Quincy Saul, January 2015 

Yalpanam, land of music on the lyre
Like ficus vines that find a bark and cling,
Jaffna, burning on the nation's pyre,
A desperate, wise and determined thing.


To color the soil this crimson-red clay –
Where deep red earth is deep as deep blue sea –
Just how many lives did they have to slay
Where crickets sing beneath the banyan tree?


Where recent history has disappeared,
Buried, flattened, scattered, whispered, feared,
The present has passed, the future is now,
Answered in the eyes of a branded cow.


When a jute rope connects your neck to your hoofs
Even the act of escape is a noose.
Where ruins old and new with flowers bloom,
Where causes false and true in shadows loom.


Where every scene was witness to a death,
Where heat and breeze and beauty catch your breath, 
In a bottomless well, echoing sobs,
In a single temple, a hundred gods.


Silences heavy, expectant and still,
Where gods have danced for aeons in the skies,
Lush grapevines bend to a bent farmer's will
Where trees have stood for centuries and grown wise.


Not curiosity shining in the eyes
Where bulletholes and beauty strangely swirl,
More a quick sizing up of deceit and lies,
Where freedom's hands around a kathi curl.


Seas and trees they preserved, but dreams they stole
Where cultures grow from land in fields of grain,
Holy and haunted, sacred and profane,
Ravaged yet untouched, destroyed yet whole.


































Echoes of Jaffna

by Quincy Saul, January 2015

1.
A distant drum, and a rooster, in the night,
The deep raindrop of a tabla, and a buzzing beetle,
Sing together a vision of Jaffna.
The wide skies over elephant pass
Resonate with thousands of years
Of bondage and bravery,
Migration and invasion,
War and counter-war,
Peace and counter-peace.
Villages of survival,
Full of crows and pockmarked empty buildings
Dance together a vision of Jaffna
Which the wide world will never see.
Empty lands – flat, vacant, crying their erasure to the empty skies,
They too resonate, they echo, they resound
With stories the wide world will never hear.
Yet their emptiness outweighs all the concrete:
Vacuum becomes plenum
And emptiness outweighs extinction.

2.
The music in a passing car,
Passing on a road that is also just passing through
Sings of modernity and progress and development,
While packs of dogs howl to the stars
With the echoes of forsaken dreams,
With the echoes of betrayed causes,
With the echoes of unfulfilled faith.
There is a silence in the Jaffna night
Which is full of ghosts.
The distant drum whispers, or it echoes,
A foreboding promise:
That the ghosts are more alive than the concrete,
That unseen visions
And unheard stories
Will always,
In merciless anonymity,
Prevail.




















Neduntuvu

by Quincy Saul, January 2015

Temple of the growing rock!
Kingdom of dead coral!
As beautiful as its breeze,
As the mane over the eyes of its wild ponies.
Where on a small dirt lane
I met the eyes of an old man, with a cloth around his waist and a wooden stick in his hands.
Flabby in my hat and clothes and trishaw, I felt like a disgrace and a fraud.
On that same dirt lane, later on,
We saw a living corpse,
Beaten, broken, scarred, but standing, looking at us:
This pony seared a symbol in my mind forever:
The horror and the reality of war.

Hundreds of haunted houses.
Coral walls that are taken down for parties
And rebuilt again after.
Beaches that flare the flames of dead coral into the bottomless blue.

Here is a beauty which humans made bleak,
Yet bleakness and beauty become each other:
Almost everything is in ruins, but
The remains are showered with flowers --
Bright pink blossoms are scattered like so much sand,
Splashed with abandon
On beds of green, draped over
The coral and concrete skeletons,
Which stand like garlanded sentinels to the unknown.

A lone baobob stares out to sea,
Older than everything else except the rock,
Bearing with massive magnanimity the scars of human contact,
Home to thousands of generations of creatures.

And the growing rock –
What if it were the most sacred site on all six continents?
Its anonymity suggests to me that this is the case.
Is it a cocoon, or a chrysalis?
Does its nature reveal ours?

The growing rock and its temple, called Delft,
As flat as its great plains of thin green grass
As gnarled as the roots of its ficus forests,
As beautiful as all the blues of its many-striped sea,
As pitiful as the branded cow which wanders,
Neck tied to its foreleg,
As tragic as the dead cormorant on the side of the road
Outside the airy, empty hospital,
In front of the ruins of a Dutch fort, and somewhere
In the mix of incredible coal and indelible colonialism,
Between flowers and war,
There is something to be rediscovered:

In the superior eyes of an old man,
In the mystery of a wild pony,
In slow strangling swarms of ficus,
In the wary innocence of children born after the war,
In the new words for tree and for spider
Which we were taught by one such child,
On the remains of an ancient temple,
In the shade of a giant tree,
In the wind of a saphire ocean,
Among the dance and play of butterflies,
Whose flight seems clumsy
Because our eyes are too slow to see such elegance,
Beneath the solitary soaring
Of Brahminy kites,
And in the bright and constant singing
Of a small bird flying at great height,
In the exuberance, the full bodied expression
Of its song and dance
It is there!
Find it for yourself in the growing rock,
In the blossoming ruins.