SocialistStories حكايات اشتراكية

Utopias
by Mario Benedetti

How can I believe / said the guy
that there are no utopias left

how can I believe
that hope is a memory
or pleasure just something sad

how can I believe / said the guy
that the universe is in ruins
even though it's true
or that death is silence
even though it's true

how can I believe
that the horizon is the border
that the sea is nobody
that the night is nothing

how can I believe / said the guy
that your body / girl
is nothing more than what I can touch
or that your love

A Red Flag of Hope
by Maina wa Kinyatti

Aloneness
The cold chill of this life
But you have been in my mind
Throughout the season

How long this night?
The chains on my wrists and ankles
Whisper horror in my ears

The food half-cooked
Thrown on the dirty cement floor
The water contaminated
My cellmates lice and bedbugs

I have no other way to tell you
How they mutilate my soul
Every morning before the sun is awake
Do you hear my cry?
Can you feel my pain?

The guards
Have turned the prison
Into a charnel house

Third Poem of Love
by Roque Dalton

Whoever tells you our love is extraordinary
because it was born of extraordinary circumstances
tell them we're struggling precisely
so that a love like ours
(a love among comrades in combat)
becomes
the most ordinary and common
almost the only
love in El Salvador.

Liberation:

Third Poem of Love - Roque Dalton.pdf

This short story (2pg) by German Marxist Bertolt Brecht is an attack on the system of marriage, and how it has been at base an economic institution with little or no concern for the rights of women, and how it has built itself, not on mutual feelings of love and respect between two partners, but rather on an exploitative and callous economic base. At the same time it is celebrating true love between two people, which is beyond economic justifications, and which doesn't cease in the face of tradgedy, but if anything becomes stronger. Enjoy comrades:

Liberation:

The Foolish Wife - Brecht.pdf

I never had the privilege of being aware of the world when Tupac was alive, seeing as how his first album was released when I was two years old and he was killed when I was six. Yet despite this, he is the first person I can ever remember listening to as a small child. And I have been listening to him for my entire life since. And in that time I have never heard another rapper, another rhyming poet who could come close to his mastery of language, twisting and turning it around on his tongue, and who exposed the world to me as it is. I can honestly credit Tupac with my first moves toward socialism, and to say anything less is a lie. Now we have the privilege to live in a time where Tupac's spirit has been resurrected in the form of Felipe Coronel, Immortal Tech. Now this may sound dramatic, but for this to be so you would need to underestimate the power of language and misunderstand what a rapper is.

This is one of the most beautiful poems I have ever read, although I haven't read it in it's original language, Spanish. This poem was written by Uruguayan leftist writer and poet Mario Benedetti (1920-2009) and the translation is thanks to comrade Nabil 'Abdou who posted it on his blog when Benedetti recently died (17 May 2009). Enjoy!