Category: Dissidents

No Time for Literary Criticism

You are the voice of people with adhesive tape across their mouths This is no time for literary criticism. Nor for attacking the gorillas with surrealistic poems. And what use are metaphors if slavery is…

Correspondence/1197

Dear Yehudit So, this month, in addition to reading Dorothee Sölle (superb!) I am also reading a lot of Nawal El-Saadawi Egyptian novelist, physician Thorn in the side of patriarchy She reminds me of you You…

Chomsky on Central America, 1985

Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America& the Struggle for Peace, South End Press, 1985 The real victims of “America’s agony” are millions of suffering and tormented people throughout much of the Third…

Weiwei-isms

Later I became very involved in writing. I really enjoyed that moment of writing. People would pass around my sentences. That was a feeling I never had before.  It was like a bullet out of…

For K. L.

After his own New York show in 1988, his work dried up. He moved many times and every time he moved he dumped what little work he had produced. But he didn’t stop thinking of…

Courage

Mrs. Mười was devoted to the Revolution Mostly away for nine years, her husband was assisting the Revolution All of her sons and daughters eventually contributed to the Revolution In vain the South Vietnamese military…

The Judge and the Jesuit

Judge:  “Father Berrigan, regardless of the outcome of these hearings, will you promise the court that you will refrain from such acts in the future?” Berrigan:  ”Your honor, it seems to me that you are…

A Poem by Dom Pedro

for Claire At the end of the road they will ask me –Have you lived? Have you loved? And not saying a word I Will open my heart full of names. –Pedro Casaldáliga, Brazil