Μετά την κατάληψη του αμαξοστάσιου του Μετρό στις 4 το πρωί από τα ΜΑΤ, στο μυαλό μου στριφογυρνά η φράση "Αν αυτοί έρθουν την αυγή..." Αν και έχω κάποιες ενστάσεις για τον τρόπο που κινητοποιήθηκαν οι εργαζόμενοι στο Μετρό, σε καμία περίπτωση δεν δικαιολογείται η πολιτική της Κυβέρνησης, που αφού κακοποίησε την αλήθεια με τον άθλιο προπαγανδιστικό της μηχανισμό, συνεχίζοντας τη διολίσθηση της στον ακροδεξιό αυταρχισμό προχώρησε σε παράνομη επιστράτευση των απεργών...
Αυτή η νυχτερινή επιχείρηση προκαλεί απέχθεια -ελπίζω- σε κάθε στοιχειωδώς δημοκρατικό πολίτη. Όσοι χειροκροτούν θα πρέπει επιτέλους να καταλάβουν πως αύριο θα έρθει η σειρά τους...
"Αν αυτοί έρθουν την αυγή για σένα, το σούρουπο θα έρθουν για μας", έγραφε ο συγγραφέας
Τζέιμς Μπόλντουιν, στην
Άντζελα Ντέιβις όταν ήταν έγκλειστη στις φυλακές. Το "Αν αυτοί έρθουν την αυγή" έγινε και ο τίτλος της αυτοβιογραφίας της...
Όπως γράφει η
Εποχή
"...Το όνομα Άντζελα Ντέιβις έγινε γνωστό σε όλον τον κόσμο το 1970. Τότε έπαιρνε ενεργό μέρος στους Μαύρους Πάνθηρες, ήταν μέλος του Κομμουνιστικού Κόμματος Αμερικής από το 1968. Η Άντζελα βρέθηκε στη λίστα των δέκα πιο καταζητούμενων προσώπων, του FBI. Το «έγκλημά» της ήταν ότι συμμετείχε μαχητικά στον αγώνα για την κατάργηση των ρατσιστικών διακρίσεων. Συνελήφθη τον Αύγουστο του 1970, διέτρεχε τον κίνδυνο να καταδικαστεί στην ποινή του θανάτου. Τότε πραγματοποιήθηκαν σχεδόν σε όλον τον κόσμο διαδηλώσεις απαιτώντας την απελευθέρωσή της. Έτσι έγινε το σύμβολο του αγώνα των μαύρων και των γυναικών.
Η Άντζελα Ντέιβις δικάστηκε τον Ιούνιο του 1972 από δικαστήριο που στη σύνθεσή του ήταν όλοι λευκοί..."
Η ίδια παραμένει πάντοτε ενεργή και δήλωσε για τους αγώνες των Ελλήνων (την εποχή των πλατειών):
"Έχοντας συμμετάσχει στους αγώνες για την κοινωνική δικαιοσύνη για πολλά χρόνια και με ένα παγκόσμιο κίνημα αλληλεγγύης στο πλευρό μου όταν υπήρξε ανάγκη, με πολλούς ανθρώπους στην Ελλάδα να έχουν εμπλακεί στην καμπάνια για την απελευθέρωσή μου πολλές δεκαετίες πριν, τώρα όταν βλέπω το ελληνικό κίνημα να παλεύει με τέτοιο πάθος ενάντια στα μέτρα λιτότητας που προσπαθούν να του επιβάλλουν, θεωρώ ότι βρίσκεται στην πρωτοπορία της παγκόσμιας αλλαγής. Σε όλο τον κόσμο, από την Αίγυπτο μέχρι το Ουισκόνσιν κι άπ’ τη νότια Αμερική μέχρι την Ελλαδα και τη Νέα Υόρκη οι λαοί ξεσηκώνονται και παλεύουν. Είναι μια πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα στιγμή και θα ήθελα να σας μεταφέρω εξ ονόματος όλων όσων παλεύουν εδώ στις ΗΠΑ τη βαθύτατη αλληλεγγύη μας στο λαό της Ελλάδας."
Δυστυχώς δεν βρήκα το γράμμα στα ελληνικά κι έτσι το δημοσιεύω στα αγγλικά. Νομίζω αξίζει να το διαβάσετε...
An Open Letter to My Sister,
Angela Y. Davis
by James Baldwin
Dear Sister:
One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on Black
flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the
American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves
spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But, no, they appear to
glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their safety
in chains and corpses. And so, Newsweek, civilized defender of the
indefensible, attempts to drown you in a sea of crocodile tears ("it
remained to be seen what sort of personal liberation she had achieved")
and puts you on its cover, chained.
You look exceedingly alone—as alone, say,
as the Jewish housewife in the boxcar headed for Dachau, or as any one of our
ancestors, chained together in the name of Jesus, headed for a Christian land.
Well. Since we live in an age which
silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as
I can, here in Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just returned from
a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long
ago. I was asked to speak on the case of Miss Angela Davis, and did so. Very
probably an exerciser in futility, but one must let no opportunity slide.
I am something like twenty years older
than you, of that generation, therefore, of which George Jackson ventures that
"there are no healthy brothers—none at all." I am in no way
equipped to dispute this speculation (not, anyway, without descending into
what, at the moment, would be irrelevant subtleties) for I know too well what
he means. My own state of health is certainly precarious enough. In considering
you, and Huey, and George and (especially) Jonathan Jackson, I began to
apprehend what you may have had in mind when you spoke of the uses to which we
could put the experience of the slave. What has happened, it seems to me, and
to put it far too simply, is that a whole new generation of people have
assessed and absorbed their history, and, in that tremendous action, have freed
themselves of it and will never be victims again. This may seem an odd,
indefensibly pertinent and insensitive thing to say to a sister in prison,
battling for her life—for all our lives. Yet, I dare to say it, for I think you
will perhaps not misunderstand me, and I do not say it, after all, from the
position of spectator.
I am trying to suggest that you—for
example—do not appear to be your father's daughter in the same way that I am my
father's son. At bottom, my father's expectations and mine were the same, the
expectations of his generation and mine were the same; and neither the immense
difference in our ages nor the move from the South to the North could alter
these expectations or make our lives more viable. For, in fact, to use the
brutal parlance of that hour, the interior language of despair, he was just a
n-----—a n----- laborer preacher, and so was I. I jumped the track but that's
of no more importance here, in itself, than the fact that some poor
Spaniards become rich bull fighters, or that some poor Black boys become
rich—boxers, for example. That's rarely, if ever, afforded the people more than
a great emotional catharsis, though I don't mean to be condescending about
that, either. But when Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali and refused to put on
that uniform (and sacrificed all that money!) a very different impact was made
on the people and a very different kind of instruction had begun.
The American triumph—in which the American
tragedy has always been implicit—was to make Black people despise themselves.
When I was little I despised myself; I did not know any better. And this meant,
albeit unconsciously, or against my will, or in great pain, that I also
despised my father. And my mother. And my brothers. And my
sisters. Black people were killing each other every Saturday night out on Lenox
Avenue, when I was growing up; and no one explained to them, or to me, that it
was intended that they should; that they were penned where they were,
like animals, in order that they should consider themselves no better than
animals. Everything supported this sense of reality, nothing denied it: and so
one was ready, when it came time to go to work, to be treated as a slave. So
one was ready, when human terrors came, to bow before a white God and beg Jesus
for salvation—this same white God who was unable to raise a finger to do so
little as to help you pay your rent, unable to be awakened in time to help you
save your child!
There is always, of course, more to any
picture than can speedily be perceived and in all of this—groaning and moaning,
watching, calculating, clowning, surviving, and outwitting, some tremendous
strength was nevertheless being forged, which is part of our legacy today. But
that particular aspect of our journey now begins to be behind us. The secret is
out: we are men!
But the blunt, open articulation of this
secret has frightened the nation to death. i wish I could say, "to
life," but that is much to demand of a disparate collection of displaced
people still cowering in their wagon trains and singing "Onward Christian
Soldiers." The nation, if America is a nation, is not in the least
prepared for this day. It is a day which the Americans never expected to see,
however piously they may declare their belief in progress and democracy. Those
words, now, on American lips, have become a kind of universal obscenity: for
this most unhappy people, strong believers in arithmetic, never expected to be
confronted with the algebra of their history.
One way of gauging a nation's health, or
of discerning what it really considers to be its interests—or to what extent it
can be considered as a nation as distinguished from a coalition of special
interests—is to examine those people it elects to represent or protect it. One
glance at the American leaders (or figureheads) conveys that America is on the
edge of absolute chaos, and also suggests the future to which American
interests, if not the bulk of the American people, appear willing to consign
the Blacks. (Indeed, one look at our past conveys that.) It is clear that for
the bulk of our (nominal) countrymen, we are all expendable. And Messrs. Nixon,
Agnew, Mitchell, and Hoover, to say nothing, of course, of the Kings' Row
basket case, the winning Ronnie Reagan, will not hesitate for an instant to
carry out what they insist is the will of the people.
But what, in America, is the will of the
people? And who, for the above-named, are the people? The people,
whoever they may be, know as much about the forces which have placed the
above-named gentlemen in power as they do about the forces responsible for the
slaughter in Vietnam. The will of the people, in America, has always been at
the mercy of an ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly
cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy which democratically
slaughters and victimizes whites and Blacks alike. But most white Americans do
not dare admit this (though they suspect it) and this fact contains mortal
danger for the Blacks and tragedy for the nation.
Or, to
put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their
whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of
traps—they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and
will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think
of—and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness
puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the
experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently
worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their
country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in
our black church) in their sins —that is, in their delusions. And this is
happening, needless to say, already, all around us.
Only a handful of the millions of people
in this vast place are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and
for George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our concentration
camps—for that is what they are—is a fate which is about to engulf them, too,
White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than
Black ones, as many and many a student is discovering, as the white American
corpses in Vietnam prove. If the American people are unable to contend with
their elected leaders for the redemption of their own honor and the loves of
their own children, we the Blacks, the most rejected of the Western children,
can expect very little help at their hands; which, after all, is nothing new.
What the Americans do not realize is that a war between brothers, in the same
cities, on the same soil is not a racial war but a civil war. But
the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that
the whites are all their brothers.
So be it. We cannot awaken this sleeper,
and God knows we have tried. We must do what we can do, and fortify and save
each other—we are not drowning in an apathetic self-contempt, we do
feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to contend even with the inexorable
forces in order to change our fate and the fate of our children and the
condition of the world! We know that a man is not a thing and is not to be
placed at the mercy of things. We know that air and water belong to all mankind
and not merely to industrialists. We know that a baby does not come into the
world merely to be the instrument of someone else's profit. We know that a
democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a deadly—and, finally, wicked—
mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire to the best that is in him, or
that has ever been.
We know that we, the Blacks, and not only
we, the blacks, have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is
greed, whose only god is profit. We know that the fruits of this system have
been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know that the system is doomed
because the world can no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have. And
we know that, for the perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly
brutalized, and have been told nothing but lies, lies about ourselves and our
kinsmen and our past, and about love, life, and death, so that both soul and
body have been bound in hell.
The enormous revolution in black
consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the
beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and Black, know how great a
price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new
people, an unprecendented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than
the murderers hired in our name.
If we know, then we must fight for your
life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our
bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning,
they will be coming for us that night.
Therefore: peace.
Brother James
November 19, 1970
