A prisoner of my class and some clothing, I walk,
dressed in white along the gray street.
Melancholy and merchandise harass me.
Must I keep going until I collapse?
Can I rebel without arms?
Filthy eyes in the tower clock
No, the time of complete justice hasn’t come.
It’s still the time for dung, bad poetry, phantasms and hope.
A poor time and a poor poet
Melt together in the same impasse.
In vain I try to explain myself, but the walls are deaf.
Beneath the skin of the words there are ciphers and codes.
The sun consoles the sick but does not renew them.
Things. How sad things are, considered without emphasis. A flower bloomed in the street!
To vomit this ennui on the city.
Forty years and no problem solved, not even stated.
No letter written or received.
The men all return home.
They are less free but carry newspapers and spell out the world, knowing they are losing it.
Crimes of the earth, how to pardon them?
I took part in many, others I hid.
Some I thought clever, they were published.
Smooth crimes, that help one to live.
The daily ration of error, home-delivered.
The fierce bakers of wrong.
The fierce milkmen of wrong.
To set fire to everything, me included.
They called the boy of 1918 an anarchist.
But my hate is the best part of me.
With it I save myself
and give to a few a small hope.
Let the trolleys, busses, the steel river of traffic, keep their distance.
A flower still in bud
Eludes the police, pierces the asphalt.
Observe complete silence, stop all business,
I swear a flower grew.
You can’t see its color.
Its petals aren’t open
Its name isn’t in the books.
It’s ugly, but really–it’s a flower.
I sit on the ground of the capital of the country at five in the afternoon
and slowly pass my hand on this insecure form.
Beside the mountains, massive clouds pile up.
Little white dots move on the sea, chickens in panic.
It’s ugly. But it’s a flower. It breached the asphalt, the ennui, the nausea and the hate.
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, The Flower and the Nausea
In Brazil, we are witnessing this intensification of violence, repression, and electronic surveillance not as an interruption of the rule of law, but as an extension of its logic. Today this is called the “austerity policy”—the similarities with Greece are evident, especially in Rio de Janeiro. These austerity measures are only the latest reallocation of resources in a centuries-ongoing series of colonial robberies channeling resources from the public purse into the pockets of the powerful, a process that precedes democracy yet has been stabilized by it. What is disappearing now is the illusory promise of isonomy (self-rule and equality under the law) that supposedly qualified Brazil as a modern democracy.
From the Crimethinc Collective, reflections on the “exceptional” politics of Brazil …
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Finding our way in the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes with the words of Miguel Amorós
A March 2018 interview in which Miguel Amorós discusses his anti-development concepts, the global trend towards mega-urbanization, the destructive tendencies of capitalist development, Latin American populist governments and their social basis, the civil society movement, and perspectives for a movement to create a better world. (Libcom.org 17/04/2018)
If Amorós does not speak directly to the ZAD in the interview, his radical politics points to de-industrialisation, de-urbanisation, de-centralisation … what could be taken as the proliferation of ZADs.
An earlier text by Amorós however does, written after the french government’s decision to abandon the airport project for the ZAD; a text that retains all of its relevance. (Libcom.org 17/04/2018)
We close with a video-interview with Miguel Amorós, in spanish.
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