Cuban Dies on Hunger Strike
A debate has raged on many websites in relation to the death in a Cuban prison of a hunger striker on February 23rd last. Here is one example from the website of The World Association of International Studies (WAIS).
JOHN HEELAN: The Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo has died in hospital as a result of his 85-day hunger strike. He started his strike as a protest against Cuban prison authorities refusing to allow him to wear white–a symbol of Cuban resistance.
Nearly 30 years ago, Bobby Sands, a Republican Irish dissident and member of the IRA, died from his hunger strike. He started his strike as a protest against Northern Irish prison authorities who insisted that he and his colleagues wear prison uniforms even though the latter claimed to be political prisoners (and Sands was an elected MP until Thatcher changed the law).
In December 2001, a memorial to Bobby Sands was unveiled in Havana, Cuba by the the IRA President, Gerry Adams, who was later greeted by Fidel Castro. Can we expect to see a similar memorial in Havana to Orlando Zapata Tomayo? If not, why not?
ALAIN de BENOIST replies: If I follow John’s reasoning, the memorial to Bobby Sands having been unveiled in Havana, Orlando Zapata Tomayo’s memorial should be erected in Ireland, not in Cuba! But I am afraid the comparison is not very significant. The great Bobby Sands was jailed for political reasons (I was extremely sad when he died). But, to my best knowledge, Orlando Zapata Tomayo, while being described since 2004 as a “prisoner of conscience” by Amnesty International, never had any political activities before his arrest. He was arrested several times for crimes without any political content. He mainly started his hunger strike to obtain a television and a cellular phone in his jail.
Anyway, Zapata Tamayo’s death has been publicized all around the world as the death of a “victim of the Cuban dictatorship.” The media does not give the same publicity to everything. The murder of Claudia Larissa Brizuela, member of the National Front of People’s Resistance (FNRP), who was killed in Honduras on 24 February (one day after Zapata Tamayo’s death), has not been publicized anywhere. The discovery, in last December, in a mass grave located in La Macarena (Colombia), of 2,000 bodies of trade unionists and peasant leaders murdered by paramilitary and special forces of the Colombian army was not publicised much either.
JOHN EIPPER (editor of WAIS) comments: Alain’s last point is unsettling for someone about to board a plane for Colombia. By the by, there won’t be many WAIS postings tomorrow morning, as we must leave for the airport at 4:30 AM. When we’re in Colombia (Cartagena, Santa Marta and Medellín), I’ll see what I can find out about the murders at La Macarena.
3,000 Weekly Visitors
A study of the statistics to this site shows that from across the world it receives an average of 3,000 visitors per week. There were over 700 visitors last Monday, March 1st, the date in 1981 when Bobby Sands commenced his hunger strike. In the last week of 2009 we had 8,457 visitors and the busiest day since the site was upgraded in September 2008 was on Wednesday, 16th December, 2009, when we received 3,886 visitors. The busiest month was March 2009 when there were 21,407 views.
Wikepedia is the largest daily referrer and the most popular pages after the Home Page and the writings of Bobby Sands are the biographies of the hunger strikers, photographs, songs and lyrics, and book reviews.
Rocking The Kesh
‘Belfast’ is an alternative rock band based in Bergamo, Italy, and among the songs on their new CD is one called ‘Long Kesh’. Information about the band and this song (and a live YouTube performance) can be found here. Paolo Ghidini of the band, writing about the destruction of the H-Blocks, says in a message to the Bobby Sands Trust: “We are essentially pacifist, and we don’t have any political approach to the history, but we modestly tried to express our feeling about it with a song, named ‘Long Kesh’… How sad was seeing the maze destroyed during our last trip in Ulster… I think that in another country, it would become an historic museum.”
History – A Great Punisher
The award winning journalist, Robert Fisk, visited Belfast over the holiday period and wrote a feature for the London ‘Independent’, making historical comparisons between the Plantation of Ulster and Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians. His article is titled: ‘Walls never work: in the Middle East or in Ireland - Israel’s illegal claim to West Bank Arab land is based on holy texts, not on a king’s fiat.’ Here is the article in full:
We were walking round Milltown Cemetery last week, me and David McKittrick – Our Man in Belfast and among my oldest friends – and the wind came biting down from Cave Hill.
“Cloaked in ice and snow,” was how the Belfast Telegraph described Northern Ireland when I took the train back to Dublin the next day, but I think the bitterness of the Ardoyne, the Falls, the Shankill, the old Markets, made up for the exaggeration. “Peace” lines they may be, but just east of Andersonstown, that frozen, implacable wall of iron, stone and wire reminded me of an even more permanent “security fence” more than 3,000km away.
In Milltown Cemetery, in the Republican “plot” – yes, Bobby Sands lies there, also memorialised, of course, in the street next to the British embassy in Tehran – was the shared grave of Maire and Jimmy Drumm of Sinn Fein. Her picture showed a younger woman than I used to know, all smiles and curled hair rather than fury and cynicism (though she’d met me cheerfully when I went to say farewell more than 34 years ago, a whiskey bottle on the table and the commanders of the IRA’s Andersonstown Brigade on the sofas around her to say goodbye to the young “fella” setting off for Beirut).
“Murdered by pro-British elements” her gravestone said – that was the nearest an Irish Catholic Republican movement might come to saying “Protestants” – and I remembered how they’d shot Maire in her bed at the Mater Hospital in 1976, how she’d fallen from the bloody sheets and tried to crawl across the floor; where they shot her again.
They could not have known that Belfast would today be a Catholic majority city. Nor could the Protestant settlers of the 16th and 17th century – the Jacobean planters and the Cromwellian veterans – have known that their lands would almost all be Catholic 400 years later. The story of the Protestant “settlements” in Ireland provides a ghostly narrative of those modern-day “settlements” in the West Bank, where the Israelis insist on fighting the world’s last colonial war with the assistance of that great anti-colonial nation known as the United States.
The differences, of course, are legion. Protestantism, in its various Irish forms, aimed to convert or ethnically cleanse the Catholic Gaels. Judaism does not attempt to proselytise – quite the contrary – and Israel’s illegal claim to West Bank Arab land is based on holy texts, not on a king’s fiat.
Robert Kee, still one of the finest popular expositors of 16th-17th Irish history, puts in concisely: “The four counties of Donegal, Tyrone, Derry and Armagh … together with the two counties of Cavan and Fermanagh became subject to the most systematic attempt yet to plant or settle in Ireland strangers from England and Scotland. This was the so-called Plantation of Ulster, worked out on a government drawing board between 1608 and 1610.”
There had been previous efforts to colonise barbarous Ireland, when Catholic sovereigns had settled families in Leix and Offaly (whose landowners found they now lived in King’s and Queen’s Counties, just as West Bank Palestinians are supposed to believe that, since 1967, they have lived in Judea and Samaria). “But all such previous plantations had in the end been failures,” writes Kee. “Collapsing for lack of human support or capital, or else being physically wiped out by the rebellion of those who had been dispossesed to make room for them.”
This remains Israel’s fear: that those Palestinians dispossesed in 1948 will return to take their former lands in what is now the State of Israel, or at least those lands stolen from them in the West Bank after 1967. The Catholic massacres of Protestants in 1641, a period of civil war vividly captured in the 20,000 pages of witness depositions now held by my own alma mater of Trinity College, Dublin, is a bleak precursor of the Hebron massacre of Jews during the Arab rebellion of 1929; albeit that up to 1,300 Protestants were hanged and put to the sword in 1641, 64 Jews in Hebron. William Baxter, a gentleman from Co. Fermanagh “swore that Ross McArt McGuire seized his lands at Rathmoran … on the grounds that they ‘belonged to his father before the said plantation,’” Trinity’s modern history professor Jane Ohlmeyer, recalled in a recent article.
But the Elizabethan settlers came as soldiers who settled. Later Scots Protestants came, like Israelis to the West Bank, as settlers prepared to be soldiers. “The idea of the settlement of underpopulated lands caught the imagination of men in both countries” – I am quoting Perceval-Maxwell’s work on Scottish migration, but “making the desert bloom” and “a land without people for a people without land” echoes in the future distance.
Cromwell was to inject a new form of violence into Ireland, whose ultimate victims can still be found in Milltown Cemetery and, just down the Falls Road, in Belfast’s largely Protestant City Cemetery. The slaughter at Drogheda and Wexford acted as a catalyst of mass fear, much as the killings at Deir Yassin and many other Arab villages in 1948 led to the abandonment or capitulation of hundreds of other Arab towns in the land that was to become Israel. Most of the best land of Ireland, at least three-quarters of it, was confiscated from its Catholic owners, its original inhabitants expelled to the cold, wild lands of Connaught. By 1688, Catholics held only 22 per cent of the original Gaelic Ireland, precisely the same percentage of mandate Palestinian land – 22 per cent – for which Yassir Arafat was required to negotiate in the hopeless Oslo “agreement”. Arab-owned land in “Palestine” is now smaller still, heading inexorably to the mere 14 per cent that the Catholics still clung on to in 1703.
Again, these are not parallel narratives; but unborn ghosts are there. English rulers in the 17th century suspected – quite rightly – that Spain was lending spiritual and material support to Irish insurgents, just as Israel today believes, correctly, that Iran is giving spiritual and material support to Hamas and, outside “Palestine”, to Hizballah. For the Pope of Rome, read Pope Khamenei of Tehran. On many occasions, acts of “terrorism” against the Protestants emerged from landless Catholic tenants who were allowed to work for those who had seized their property. So, later Protestant “settlements” were surrounded by vast defensive walls, angled with watch-towers and ramparts and gun positions. The city of Derry has walls above the Catholic Bogside every bit as ferocious as the Israeli wall that now cuts into yet more Arab land.
And, of course, Irish Catholics fled abroad – just as the Israeli foreign minister would like to “transfer” Palestinians to the east. And where did the Irish Catholics go? As many as 100,000 fled to the continent, mostly to Spanish Hapsburg territories, in many cases to the Spanish lands from which the Moriscos – the Muslims of Spain and the remainder of the nation’s Jews – had just been “cleansed” by their Catholic Christian overlords. The final crushing of the Spanish Muslims (who had failed to convert) occurred in 1609, when Philip of Spain forced 300,000 souls to leave the Iberian peninsula for Ottoman north Africa. And the very Spanish “cleansers” who had “ethnocided” the Moriscos – Garcia Sarmiento de Sotomayor and Count Caracena were among them – now advocated resources for the Irish arriving in Galicia.
Irish Catholic publications of the time – according to research undertaken by Igor Pérez Tostado – compared Irish Catholics with Spanish Muslims; “both were presented not only as disloyal but as a mortal threat to the very survival of the political community.” Both, in effect, were thrown into the sea.
But the English and Scots “settlements” failed in Ireland. Protestant hopes of eternal support from London eventually proved false. And so, what of Israeli hopes of eternal support from Washington? I still don’t believe in a one-state solution – which the Protestant minority will one day have to accept in Ireland, if they have not, subconsciously, already done so – but colonisation leads only to the graveyard. Walls don’t work. Nor “superior” religions. Nor ethnic cleansing. History, which should be studied as eternally as false hopes, is a great punisher.
Hunger Strike in India
Indian journalist, Bhaskar Roy, in an article published in ‘The Times Of India’ (11 December), writes about recent political disturbances over the creation of a separate Telangana state and how a hunger strike is being used to advance the cause of one side. References to ‘the Centre’ are about the national government.
“I’ve read all the papers, they’ve told me of your tears” - the line from a moving song about the brave death of Bobby Sands and nine fellow Irish activists after 66 days of hunger strike in a British prison in 1981, still reverberates.
When Telangana Rashtra Samithi leader K Chandrasekhar Rao began to sink after 11 days of fasting in a Hyderabad hospital on Wednesday, the power of hunger strike as a weapon of protest got underscored yet again.
The midnight announcement by the Centre conceding a separate Telangana state was a throwback to many intense moments of history when dour men chose to fast to bring their mighty opponents down to their knees.
Mahatma Gandhi was the first to recognise the power of fast as a political tool, and used it frequently to have his way. Protesting the ‘communal award’ of 1932 by the colonial rulers to give separate representation to the ‘untouchables’ in provincial legislatures, he undertook a fast that led to the Poona Pact by which untouchable leaders renounced separate representation. He took the same route again in 1943 and fasted for 21 days as a “penance for deadlock” between the Viceroy and Indian leaders. This was a turning point in the freedom struggle.
Lodged in Lahore jail, revolutionary Jatin Das began his hunger strike on July 13, 1929 and died on September 13. His death fired the imagination of the Indian youth, unleashing a new wave of protests.
After Independence, the first leader to succumb to hunger strike was Potti Sriramulu, a Gandhian who protested the Centre’s indifference to the demand for a separate Andhra Pradesh. He began his fast on October 19, 1952 and died on December 15. His death threw the Andhra region into turmoil, triggering off violent protests that finally led to the creation of Andhra Pradesh.
Another martyr to the cause of statehood in free India was Darshan Singh Pheruman, the Sikh leader who began his fast on August 15, 1969 on issues like Chandigarh and Bhakra Nangal water and died on October 27 — the 74th day of his hunger strike.
At the height of the movement for a separate Punjabi-speaking state, Sant Fateh Singh began his fast on December 18, 1960 and ended it on January 9, 1961 after an assurance from the Centre.
Some of the leaders were successful in getting their demands conceded while many failed. Handed down by the Mahatma, fast is still considered an effective weapon of protest by leaders of such movements.
At the height of the movement against forcible land acquisition in West Bengal, Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee was on hunger strike for 25 days. Her ‘act of courage’ radically changed the complexion of the state’s politics pushing the ruling Left to a corner.
Ras goffa Bobby Sands
Bu Bobby Sands farw ym1981 tra’n ymprydio yng ngharchar Long Kesh yn Belfast. Ei nod oedd adennill statws gwleidyddol i’r carcharorion gweriniaethol. Serch hyn, ymddengys ei enw ar safleoedd rhedeg ar y we. Wedi chwilio ymhellach daw i glawr ei fod wedi bod yn aelod o Redwyr Dirwest Willowfield yn Belfast ac iddo fod os nad yn rhedwr penigamp, yn un brwdfrydig a llawn hwyl. Ysgrifennodd am redeg tra yn y carchar a’r ysgrif The Loneliness of a Long-distance Cripple yw man cychwyn y darn dawns hwn gan Eddie Ladd. Sail y coreograffi yw rhedeg ac mae’r rhediad hwn, ar beiriant rhedeg mawr, yn olrhain y chwe deg chwe diwrnod y bûm ymprydio. Comisiynwyd sgôr electro acwstig arbennig i’r darn gan y cyfansoddwr Guto Puw.
Bobby Sands died in 1981 on hunger strike in Long Kesh prison in Belfast. His aim was to win back political status for its republican prisoners. However, his name also crops up on running websites. It turns out that he was a member of a running club, the Willowfield Temperance Harriers, in Belfast as a young teenager. He wrote about running during his time in prison and his short essay, The Loneliness of a Longdistance Cripple, is the starting point for this dance piece by Eddie Ladd. The choreography is based on running and this run, on a large scale machine follows the sixty-six days of his hunger strike. The piece is performed to a specially commissioned electro-acoustic score by Welsh composer Guto Puw.
£8 (£7) CC £7.50 (£6.50)
“You Keep Me In Jail”
“You keep me in jail and you lock me in prison” form part of the lyrics of the Woody Guthrie song, ‘I’ve Got To Know’. The actor Tim Robbins recommended this song to the Trust which is used at the end of his brilliant political satire, ‘Bob Roberts’ (1992).
Woodrow Wilson ‘Woody’ Guthrie (July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) is best known as an American singer-songwriter and folk musician, whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, traditional and children’s songs, ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists displayed on his guitar.
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(CHORUS)
I’ve got to know, yes
I’ve got to know, friend,
Hungry lips ask me wherever I go
Comrades and friends are falling around me
I’ve got to know, yes,
I’ve got to know
Why do your war boats ride on my waters?
Why do your death bombs fall down from our skies?
Why do you burn my farm and my farm down?
I’ve got to know, friend
I’ve got to know
(CHORUS)
What makes your boats haul death to my people
Nitro blockbusters, big cannons and guns
Why doesn’t your ship bring food and some clothing?
I’ve got to know, folks
I’ve got to know
Why can’t my two hands get a good paid job
I can still plough, plant, I can still sew
Why did your law book chase me off my good land
I’d sure like to know friend, I’ve just got to know!
(CHORUS)
What good work did you do, I’d like to ask you
Give you my money right out of my hands?
I built your big house, here to hide from my people
Why did you hide so, I’d like to know!
(CHORUS)
You keep me in jail and you lock me in prison
Your hospitals jammed and your crazyhouse full,
What made your cop kill my trade union worker?
You’ll have to talk plain ’cause I sure got to know!
(CHORUS)
Why can’t I get work and cash a big paycheck?
Why can’t I buy things in your place and your store?
Why do you close my plant down and starve all my buddies?
I’m asking you, now, ’cause I’ve sure got to know!
I’ve got to know yes
I’ve got to know friend
Hungry lips ask me wherever I go
Comrades and friends are falling around me
I’ve got to know, yes
I’ve got to know…
Premiere of ‘Hungry’
A new play about the life and death of Bobby Sands will be performed as part of the 13th annual New York International Fringe Festival. Adapted and written by George Kehoe, ‘Hungry’ blends original writing with excerpts from Bobby Sands’ prison writings. “It is an episode in a timeless story, self-sacrifice for a greater cause,” Kehoe said. “How does a 27-year-old man come to believe that his only choice is to hunger strike and see it through to the end? What is his justification? His motivation?”
“His story dramatizes the lengths to which humanity will go to justify, inflict, and endure suffering for political goals – as well as the hopeful possibilities of that suffering,” said Christopher Schager, director of the 90-minute show.
The play features the young actor Alex Mauney as Sands. A recent graduate of the University of Mississippi with a B.F.A. degree in Theatre Arts, Mauney employs music, mime, and poetry in bringing Sands’ vision of a united Ireland to life.
The play will have five performances Aug. 21-25 at the Manhattan Theater Source at 177 MacDougal St. For more information see here.
Nâzım Hikmet, Communist Poet
Nâzım Hikmet was once declared by the Turkish state as a traitor. But almost fifty years after his death, this year the Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Cicek announced that “Turkey is restoring the citizenship of its most famous 20th century poet Nâzım Hikmet”. Mick Hall, in a feature solicited by the Bobby Sands Trust, examines the life of this great poet.
Nâzım Hikmet, Communist Poet
By Mick Hall
Nâzım Hikmet was truly a man of his age, and when reading his work it is easy to see why it enraged the bureaucrats who oversaw the Turkish State. For the more his jailers turned the screw the more he rebelled against their brutality and proclaimed for all to see the beauty in the world and that within his fellow man.
Born in 1901 into a wealthy bourgeois family which had strong connection within the Ottoman Court, his grandfather belonged to the liberal Mevlevi order of Islam (Sufi), whose religious rituals included expressing their faith through dance. Throughout the Ottoman period the Mevlevi order was famous for its poets and musicians. They also helped man the upper echelons of the bureaucracy of the Ottoman Empire and Caliphate.
Nâzım Hikmet was educated in the tradition of an upper class Turkish child of his day. His schooling was in French and at 16 he entered a prestigious naval academy, graduating in 1918. However, after being posted to a war ship he became ill and having spent a year in hospital he was discharge from the Navy in 1920 for health reasons.
At the end of WW1, the Ottoman Empire, which had sided with Germany in that needless, bloody conflagration, crumbled into dust and its capital, Istanbul, and much of modern day Turkey were occupied by the armies of the victorious Allies, who planned to carve up these lands between the UK, France, Italy and Greece, leaving the Turks only a small piece of land in central Anatolia.
Having become radicalized by ‘Ataturk’s’ (Mustafa Kemal’s) call to liberate Turkey from the foreign invaders, Hikmet wrote a poem called Gençlik, (Youth) which was a call to the younger generation to fight for the liberation of their country.
On 1 January 1921, Hikmet was able to make his way covertly from Istanbul to central Turkey with the help of an illegal organization which provided weapons to Mustafa Kemal’s emerging army, who were then based, along with the command of the resistance movement, at a small town called Ankara, which then was famous for sheep that produced angora wool; and today is the capital of the Turkish Republic.
The publication of Gençlik caused a stir amongst tens of thousands of young Turks, who were enthused by it to join the struggle to liberate Turkey from its foreign occupiers. When he arrived in Ankara, Nâzım Hikmet was summoned to meet Mustafa Kemal, who advised him, “In order to be modern, some young poets write theme-less poems. I advise you to write poetry with an aim.” Ataturk then arranged for Hikmet to work at the fledgling ‘Ministry of Education,’ probably realizing that he would be out of harm’s way and more valuable there than at the front, especially given that at the time Kemal had more men than he had arms to supply them with.
It was during this time that Nâzım Hikmet came into contact with people who spoke favourably about the Russian Revolution. That Lenin’s government had been the first to recognize Kemal’s provisional government must have further endeared the Bolsheviks to Hikmet.
Nevertheless, it was not only the town Ankara that was a backward and conservative place, so too were many senior members of Ataturk’s army, staffed as it was by men like Kemal who were former officers in the Ottoman armies, many of whom had been trained in staff colleges manned by teachers seconded from the Kaiser’s army. Thus word soon reached Ziya Hilmi, a senior official in the provisional government, about a group of young men who refused to attend the mosque and argued about left-wing radical ideas. It was one thing for Ataturk and his immediate entourage to push the political envelope wide, but quite another thing to allow all and sundry.
Whilst not unsympathetic to radical ideas himself, Hilmi knew that for Ataturk winning the war of liberation took precedent; and, he concluded, Hikmet would be safer abroad. Thus Hikmet and a fellow poet Vâlâ Nureddin went to Moscow to study and experience the Russian revolution at first hand. It was here he came under the influence of Vladimir Mayakovski, Meyerhold and other Soviet poets, musicians and artists who belonged to the Left Art Front.
Hikmet returned to Turkey in 1924, not long after the Turkish War of Independence had ended in a victory for Ataturk’s forces and the foundation of the Turkish Republic. But he was soon arrested for working on a leftist magazine. In 1926 he managed to avoid a police round-up of leftists by again going to Russia, where he continued writing poetry and plays.
A general amnesty allowed him to return to Turkey in 1928. By then he had joined the Turkish Communist Party, which had been outlawed, and he found himself under constant surveillance by the new Republic’s secret police and spent five of the next ten years in prison, on a variety of trumped-up charges. In 1933, for example, he was remanded in jail for putting illegal posters in a public place, but when his case came to trial it was thrown out of court for lack of evidence.
Meanwhile, between 1929 and 1936 he published nine books, five collections and four long poems that revolutionized Turkish poetry, flouting Ottoman literary conventions and introducing free verse and colloquial diction. While these poems established him as a major poet, he also published several plays and novels and to keep the wolf from the door he also worked as a bookbinder, proof-reader, journalist, translator, and screenwriter to support an extended family that included his second wife, her two children, and his widowed mother.
With Mustafa Kemal ‘Atatürk’ dead, the Turkish State, having failed to break Nâzım Hikmet’s political will, then decided to lock him away for good, by placing him before a drumhead court and on the night of 17 January 1938, he was arrested by the police. He was sent to the Military Court of the Military College Headquarters in Ankara to be tried for “provoking military personnel to rebel against their superiors.” He was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years, although the State was not done with Nâzım as it was determined to place a double lock on his cell door.
To ensure this happened he was then brought before the Military Court of the Naval Headquarters, charged with having “provoking naval soldiers to rebellion.” For this imaginary ‘crime’ the gallant admirals sentenced Nâzım Hikmet to a further 25 years.
Although feeling victorious they pared the 35 years down to 28 years and 4 months in total prison time. This sentence was approved by the Military Supreme Court on 29 December 1938 and Hikmet disappeared into the dark vault that was, and still is, the Turkish penal system.
Far from being silenced Nâzım Hikmet wrote ferociously for the next 12 years, smuggling new poems out of the jails on scraps of paper. On completing a poem he would read it to his friends amongst his fellow inmates who looked forward to these readings as they took them beyond the prison walls.
After WW2 ended a campaign to free Hikmet gradually built up steam, both within Turkey and abroad, where a committee was set up in 1949 to campaign for his release. It included the leading artist and writers of the day including the poet Pablo Neruda, Picasso, the singer Paul Robeson and intellectuals like Jean Paul Sarte and Bertrand Russell.
It was during this period that Hikmet engaged in an 18-day hunger strike to further pressure the Turkish authorities. On 15 July 1950, shortly after Turkey’s first ‘democratically’ elected government came to power, he was told by his lawyer that he was free at last.
However, the security services had not given up on him and within a short time of being released their persecution of him began again. Reluctantly Nâzım Hikmet was once again forced into exile. Given a house outside of Moscow, he travelled widely in Europe, Asia, Cuba and Africa, promoting his work and the causes he believed in. He died of a heart attack in 1963.
Whilst persecuted by the Turkish State in his own lifetime and his books and poems banned, Nâzım Hikmet is today revered by the overwhelming majority of the Turkish people. At the turn of the 21st century over 500,000 Turks signed a petition demanding that the government restore Hikmet’s citizenship. Ask any Turk who their nation’s greatest poet is and resoundingly they will reply Nâzım Hikmet, often quoting a verse of one of his poems to prove their love.
Sensing the public’s great love for the man and his work, Turkey’s political elite do likewise. Whether they be on the political left, centre or right, they now all sing the praise of this radical communist internationalist.
The current Islamic AKP government is no exception. Over 50 years after the Turkish State branded Hikmet a traitor and withdrew his citizenship, Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Cicek recently announced that “Turkey is restoring the citizenship of its most famous 20th century poet Nâzım Hikmet.”
Myself, I have absolutely no doubt that 50 years on, the Irish political elite will be glorifying Bobby Sands and, as with the aforementioned Turkish political elite, they will be doing so, for all the wrong reasons.
SOME ADVICE TO THOSE WHO WILL SERVE TIME IN PRISON
If instead of being hanged by the neck
You’re thrown inside
for not giving up hope
in the world, your country, your people,
if you do ten or fifteen years
apart from the time you have left,
you won’t say,
“Better I had swung from the end of a rope
like a flag” -
You’ll put your foot down and live.
It may not be a pleasure exactly,
but it’s your solemn duty
to live one more day
to spite the enemy.
Part of you may live alone inside,
like a tone at the bottom of a well.
But the other part
must be so caught up
in the flurry of the world
that you shiver there inside
when outside, at forty days’ distance, a leaf moves.
To wait for letters inside,
to sing sad songs,
or to lie awake all night staring at the ceiling
is sweet but dangerous.
Look at your face from shave to shave,
forget your age,
watch out for lice
and for spring nights,
and always remember
to eat every last piece of bread-
also, don’t forget to laugh heartily.
And who knows,
the woman you love may stop loving you.
Don’t say it’s no big thing:
it’s like the snapping of a green branch
to the man inside.
To think of roses and gardens inside is bad,
to think of seas and mountains is good.
Read and write without rest,
and I also advise weaving
and making mirrors.
I mean, it’s not that you can’t pass
ten or fifteen years inside
and more -
you can,
as long as the jewel
on the left side of your chest doesn’t lose it’s luster!
Nazim Hikmet - May 1949. Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)
——————————————-
PLEA
This country shaped like the head of a mare
Coming full gallop from far off Asia
To stretch into the Mediterranean
THIS COUNTRY IS OURS.
Bloody wrists, clenched teeth
bare feet,
Land like a precious silk carpet
THIS HELL, THIS PARADISE IS OURS.
Let the doors be shut that belong to others
Let them never open again
Do away with the enslaving of man by man
THIS PLEA IS OURS.
To live! Like a tree alone and free
Like a forest in brotherhood
THIS YEARNING IS OURS.
—————————————
LETTERS FROM A MAN IN SOLITARY
1
I carved your name on my watchband
with my fingernail.
Where I am, you know,
I don’t have a pearl-handled jackknife
(they won’t give me anything sharp)
or a plane tree with its head in the clouds.
Trees may grow in the yard,
but I’m not allowed
to see the sky overhead…..
How many others are in this place?
I don’t know.
I’m alone far from them,
they’re all together far from me.
To talk anyone besides myself
is forbidden.
So I talk to myself.
But I find my conversation so boring,
my dear wife, that I sing songs.
And what do you know,
that awful, always off-key voice of mine
touches me so
that my heart breaks.
And just like the barefoot orphan
lost in the snow
in those old sad stories, my heart
- with moist blue eyes
and a little red runny rose-
wants to snuggle up in your arms.
It doesn’t make me blush
that right now
I’m this weak,
this selfish,
this human simply.
No doubt my state can be explained
physiologically, psychologically, etc.
Or maybe it’s
this barred window,
this earthen jug,
these four walls,
which for months have kept me from hearing
another human voice.
It’s five o’clock, my dear.
Outside,
with its dryness,
eerie whispers,
mud roof,
and lame, skinny horse
standing motionless in infinity
-I mean, it’s enough to drive the man inside crazy with grief-
outside, with all its machinery and all its art,
a plains night comes down red on treeless space.
Again today, night will fall in no time.
A light will circle the lame, skinny horse.
And the treeless space, in this hopeless landscape
stretched out before me like the body of a hard man,
will suddenly be filled with stars.
We’ll reach the inevitable end once more,
which is to say the stage is set
again today for an elaborate nostalgia.
Me,
the man inside,
once more I’ll exhibit my customary talent,
and singing an old-fashioned lament
in the reedy voice of my childhood,
once more, by God, it will crush my unhappy heart
to hear you inside my head,
so far
away, as if I were watching you
in a smoky, broken mirror…
2
It’s spring outside, my dear wife, spring.
Outside on the plain, suddenly the smell
of fresh earth, birds singing, etc.
It’s spring, my dear wife,
the plain outside sparkles…
And inside the bed comes alive with bugs,
the water jug no longer freezes,
and in the morning sun floods the concrete…
The sun-
every day till noon now
it comes and goes
from me, flashing off
and on…
And as the day turns to afternoon, shadows climb the walls,
the glass of the barred window catches fire,
and it’s night outside,
a cloudless spring night…
And inside this is spring’s darkest hour.
In short, the demon called freedom,
with its glittering scales and fiery eyes,
possesses the man inside
especially in spring…
I know this from experience, my dear wife,
from experience…
3
Sunday today.
Today they took me out in the sun for the first time.
And I just stood there, struck for the first time in my life
by how far away the sky is,
how blue
and how wide.
Then I respectfully sat down on the earth.
I leaned back against the wall.
For a moment no trap to fall into,
no struggle, no freedom, no wife.
Only earth, sun, and me…
I am happy.
Nazim Hikmet – 1938. Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)
——————————————————————-
A SAD STATE OF FREEDOM
You waste the attention of your eyes,
the glittering labour of your hands,
and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves
of which you’ll taste not a morsel;
you are free to slave for others-
you are free to make the rich richer.
The moment you’re born
they plant around you
mills that grind lies
lies to last you a lifetime.
You keep thinking in your great freedom
a finger on your temple
free to have a free conscience.
Your head bent as if half-cut from the nape,
your arms long, hanging,
your saunter about in your great freedom:
you’re free
with the freedom of being unemployed.
You love your country
as the nearest, most precious thing to you.
But one day, for example,
they may endorse it over to America,
and you, too, with your great freedom-
you have the freedom to become an air-base.
You may proclaim that one must live
not as a tool, a number or a link
but as a human being-
then at once they handcuff your wrists.
You are free to be arrested, imprisoned
and even hanged.
There’s neither an iron, wooden
nor a tulle curtain
in your life;
there’s no need to choose freedom:
you are free.
But this kind of freedom
is a sad affair under the stars.
Nazim Hikmet
————————————————–
THE STRANGEST CREATURE ON EARTH
You’re like a scorpion, my brother,
you live in cowardly darkness
like a scorpion.
You’re like a sparrow, my brother,
always in a sparrow’s flutter.
You’re like a clam, my brother,
closed like a clam, content,
And you’re frightening, my brother,
like the mouth of an extinct volcano.
Not one,
not five-
unfortunately, you number millions.
You’re like a sheep, my brother:
when the cloaked drover raises his stick,
you quickly join the flock
and run, almost proudly, to the slaughterhouse.
I mean you’re strangest creature on earth-
even stranger than the fish
that couldn’t see the ocean for the water.
And the oppression in this world
is thanks to you.
And if we’re hungry, tired, covered with blood,
and still being crushed like grapes for our wine,
the fault is yours-
I can hardly bring myself to say it,
but most of the fault, my dear brother, is yours.
Nazim Hikmet – 1947.Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)
———————————————————–
LETTER TO MY WIFE
11-11-19933
Bursa Prison
My one and only!
Your last letter says:
“My head is throbbing,
my heart is stunned!”
You say:
“If they hang you,
if I lose you,
I’ll die!”
You’ll live, my dear-
my memory will vanish like black smoke in the wind.
Of course you’ll live, red-haired lady of my heart:
in the twentieth century
grief lasts
at most a year.
Death-
a body swinging from a rope.
My heart
can’t accept such a death.
But
you can bet
if some poor gypsy’s hairy black
spidery hand
slips a noose
around my neck,
they’ll look in vain for fear
in Nazim’s
blue eyes!
In the twilight of my last morning
I
will see my friends and you,
and I’ll go
to my grave
regretting nothing but an unfinished song…
My wife!
Good-hearted,
golden,
eyes sweeter than honey-my bee!
Why did I write you
they want to hang me?
The trial has hardly begun,
and they don’t just pluck a man’s head
like a turnip.
Look, forget all this.
If you have any money,
buy me some flannel underwear:
my sciatica is acting up again.
And don’t forget,
a prisoner’s wife
must always think good thoughts.
—————————————————————
LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
Comrades, if I don’t live to see the day
- I mean,if I die before freedom comes -
take me away
and bury me in a village cemetery in Anatolia.
The worker Osman whom Hassan Bey ordered shot
can lie on one side of me, and on the other side
the martyr Aysha, who gave birth in the rye
and died inside of forty days.
Tractors and songs can pass below the cemetery -
in the dawn light, new people, the smell of burnt gasoline,
fields held in common, water in canals,
no drought or fear of the police.
Of course, we won’t hear those songs:
the dead lie stretched out underground
and rot like black branches,
deaf, dumb, and blind under the earth.
But, I sang those songs
before they were written,
I smelled the burnt gasoline
before the blueprints for the tractors were drawn.
As for my neighbors,
the worker Osman and the martyr Aysha,
they felt the great longing while alive,
maybe without even knowing it.
Comrades, if I die before that day, I mean
- and it’s looking more and more likely -
bury me in a village cemetery in Anatolia,
and if there’s one handy,
a plane tree could stand at my head,
I wouldn’t need a stone or anything.
Nazim Hikmet, 27 April 1953, Moscow, Barviha Hospital
————————————————————
I love my country . . .
I love my country . . .
I swung in its lofty trees, I lay in its prisons.
Nothing relieves my depression
Like the songs and tobacco of my country.
. . . and then my working, honest, brave people.
Ready to accept with the joy of a wondering child,
everything,
progressive, lovely, good,
half hungry, half full.
half slave . . .
(Memleketimi seviyorum [I love my country].
——————————————————————————–
Organized Rage
http://www.organizedrage.com/
Che Guevara and Bobby Sands
The veteran Canadian writer and director Peter Pearson has reviewed ‘Hunger’ on his blog and makes some comparisons between Che Guevara and Bobby Sands. Here is his review in full:
Coming out of last night’s sneak of Hunger, which 26 of us attended thanks to Equinoxe’s Brigitte Tanguay, the overwhelming response of our grim-faced crowd was ‘Tough’. Agreed. At least two members couldn’t take it and quit early in the first act. Hunger is one grueling film to watch, feces smeared over cell walls, pervasive cudgel-beatings, soulless debasements. I cannot recall a movie more grim. Nor more dazzling.
And so while composing my response to our crowd’s response, I dawdled over this morning’s NYT. Here’s a report from today’s paper on interrogation techniques, utilized by the CIA:
In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail — like keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears. The interrogation methods were authorized beginning in 2002, and some were used as late as 2005 in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons. The techniques were among the Bush administration’s most closely guarded secrets, and the documents released Thursday afternoon were the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the program.
Which of course raises the question: do we, public-minded citizens need to know what happened in the Lamaze prison to those IRA prisoners in the 1980s? Similarly, can’t we just gloss over waterboarding, sleep-deprivation, debasement and degradation those Iraqis suffered in Abu Griab? Do we need to know it in such detail? Do we need to see the video? In Hunger, as in Iraq, the prisoners fight for their dignity.
My initial response to Hunger, which I dared not say aloud last night, was: It’s only a movie. Movies are all shot the same - lights, camera, make-up, action. Doesn’t matter whether it’s the Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Sound of Music. Same cumbersome technology, shot by shot, until the movie is done. Of course hardened veterans of my-pov.ca and MILR all know this. But it the entrancing legerdemain of moviemakers that gets us every time. Hunger director, Steve McQueen is a visual artist. This is his first movie and he beguiles us that those sets, costumes, actors are real bed sores, feces-splattered walls, fetid cells. And yet, McQueen’s scenes were for the most part, less grim than any average Hollywood guns-and-fireballs epic. We just believed the bloodied knuckles of Hunger’s prison guards more.
We believed those actors were being put through the real thing, because we saw their real naked bodies, with their real naked genitals, we heard the real steely, patronizing voice of Maggie Thatcher (with the same dispassionate patronizing indifference of Dick Cheney), and we thought, hands-slapped to our cheeks, My gawd? Steve McQueen persuaded us, engaged our eyes, our emotions, our heads, our hearts. This is what happened! Brits behaving like Nazis. They stirred deep thoughts within us. But these weren’t Nazis. They were our own kind with a capacity for behaving like Nazis. McQueen convinced us this movie was not a movie. It was the real thing.
I had a couple of other idle thoughts about Hunger. First, as in The Reader, we are seeing abundant unairbrushed nakedness in movies these days. No longer the cutesy peek-a-boo angles. In The Reader, moviestar Kate Winslett is onscreen for much of the first act without a stitch on, her nakedness worn as an essential costume. Same as in the Hunger, where IRA prisoner brutalization necessitated unrelieved male nakedness, surely disturbing to some moviegoers.
And here’s my last thought: in the last two months, we’ve seen Che and now Hunger, two historical recreations that focussed on the martyrdom deaths of two 20th Century iconic figures: Che Guevara and Bobby Sands. They may not be Roman Catholic Church martyrs, although both were born Roman Catholic. And in both movies, priests play roles in the story. In Hunger is a spectacular 22 minute locked-off wide shot conversation between Bobby Sands and his priest. The camera does not move. Today Che Guevara and Bobby Sands certainly are martyrs for tens of millions, sealing their their commitment to help others with their lives.
Neither however can expect canonization any time soon I suspect. The Catholic Church is otherwise distracted, canonizing Pius the XII, the pope that looked the other way as Jews were deported from Italy, investing yet another silk-swathed Cardinal in New York, and settling tens of thousands of lawsuits, brought by priestly molestations.
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