REVOLUTIONARY

By Thomas Fortenberry

What an indictment of our world
that love of freedom
and the desire of escape
from oppression and hate
has to be called "Revolutionary."

Isn't this normal? Isn't this the way
it should always be? Free
to do what we want, free
to think what we want, free
to be what we want, free
to love who and how we want:
This is basic, bedrock. A foundation
of life. It is true
that life can be tough
and things aren't always what they seem
but this, this insane atrocity
of nature doesn't even deserve mention
in the pages of our bloody history
books, films, and fictions, much less
become reality. But it has
and worse yet, it could again.

This then is the reason
for revolution. We need revolutions
in hearts and minds and souls.
We need a revolution inside
Mother Earth herself, alive
with eternal love and respect
and sacred duty to each other:
she will give birth
to our ever-growing, ever-shining
redeemed and hopeful future.
It is a revolution
against the horrors of death itself.

The poem appeared on http://www.rawa.org/thomas.htm

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The person represented in the cartoon is Fausto Giudice.

Fausto Giudice is an independent journalist, writer, translator and activist living in France. He was born in 1949 in Rome, grew up in Tunisia and has lived in Italy, Belgium, Sweden and Germany. He is Italian by citizenship but French by culture and also speaks Swedish, German, English and Spanish. From 1971 to 1975, he worked first in the French press agency Libération and then in the daily with the same name. In the eighties, he worked with migrants and refugees’ associations in France.

He published two books: Têtes de Turcs en France (1989), an investigation on apartheid « à la française » and Arabicides, une chronique française 1970-1991 (1992), an investigation on the assassination of Arab people in France. In 1989, he organized solidarity campaigns with Chinese students and Romanian rebels and in 1992, he did the same with stowaway African boat passengers.

In 1995, he created the Zapatista Alliance for Social Liberation (mobilization and information about Mexico, Algeria, Bosnia, Tunisia, Colombia, Sri Lanka, French colonies, refugees and migrants). In 2002, he started to contribute to the website quibla..net a multilingual magazine online for the free active Muslims and for their allies. In 2003, he founded the Guantanamo Collective In December 2005, he participated to the creation of Tlaxcala.es the network of translators for linguistic diversity. In June 2006, he created the blog Basta (http://azls.blogspot.com/) a Zapatista March Diary. Next to this, Fausto is a militant in the association Survie and a member of the Association for One Democratic State in Palestine/Israel, founded in 2003 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Fausto considers himself as a “cyber-journalist”, working for independent websites and blogs. His personal motto, borrowed from Antonio Gramsci: « Pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will ».

He can be reached at [email protected].

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