Saturday, October 23, 2010

Due to recent developments and discussions

I will not be tempted to write two lines in rhymes and go to bed. Happy to have done something. Said something. Maybe touched a reader's heart in a near or far off future. I will not be tempted by that kind of rhyme. Politricks howl and whine.




When a dear friend sent me the link to democracy now!'s report on Germany's far right propaganda in the eager fangs of the so called people's parties in the so called centre of the political stage, followed by an interview with Slavoj Zizek, I was amazed. Obviously their perspective from the outside was not able to see all the people in this country that do not want to "tolerate" foreigners, migrants and asylum seekers but are happy to live in the pulsing streams of translation and encounters where everyone can be as much foreignized as 'naturalized'. To tolerate would mean to look down on someone. Mutual respect and a caring attitude is what we live instead. Good old 'love thy neighbour' - conviviality at it's best. 

During an anti atom energy protest in Munich, Germany


Nevertheless Zizek is right. The voice has got to go back to the streets. Good, strong, positive inspirations have to break the insane barking of the media hunting dogs and the ever winding Newspeak of governments and multinationals. Yes, there are people who project their abstract fears and very lively disappointments onto the Other. There always were and always will be. What has to come back is a confident, measured, unagitated way of discussing the problems of living together, of sharing this little island, our planet. Positive vibrations, respect for every form and way of life would be the Propa Propaganda just the way Benjamin Zephaniah rhymes it. But you may ask yourself: What has that got to do with me?

Nothing and everything.


Generation in-between

We live between different myths of different nations
our passports carry a question mark
and we surf the currents of entangled migrations

We live between the margins and the centres
our homes are many - our spirit our bones
We invent new lives and become self inventors

We live in the live streams, uploads and digital dreams
our profiles share many tongues and more locations
We are constant translation, movement and beams

of light into the heart of darkness
right there in Central Europe
where some want to care less

We meet sisters and brothers in settledness
those who greet, laugh and bond with us to bless
a handshake that shatters rigid walls of separation

No space without some forms of migration
ever changing process - unstable translation
Let's have ovations for flotation in negotiation relation

and show some love for the fearful ones full of temptation
Shadows of separation, distortion, might, extortion and foul power
Send them love and bless their light in fragmentation

but tell them of a world in movement
tell them not to be afraid