Landless Voices -> Sights & Voices -> By media -> Music (CDs)

English | Português

The Sights and Voices of Dispossession: The Fight for the Land and the Emerging Culture of the MST (The Movement of the Landless Rural Workers of Brazil)

Language:

English (mude para Português)

This page:

Emerging culture by media type -> Music (CDs) 11 resources (Compiled by Else R P Vieira.)

PreviousPrevious    resource: 11 of 11    

Author:

MST (Translated by Jane Kerrigan)

Title:

Letter of thanks to the friends who made the CD A Song for Peace

'We sing ...
because our dead and our survivors want us to sing.'
Mário Benedetti

A Song for Peace resounds at a moment when the empire is declaring war on the poor of Afghanistan, as a retaliation against the attack on the twin towers of New York and the Pentagon, those symbols of the capitalist might and belligerent authority of the twenty-first century’s new Rome, currently undergoing an existential crisis.
Amongst the victims of the 'war on terror' are children, blamed for being the softer target of American missiles seeking the sons of Mohammed?  Blessed by the fury of Western public opinion, which seems to have forgotten more than a million dead, are nephews and nieces of Uncle Ho in Vietnam.  The hundreds of thousands of innocent people who disappeared in the atomic flowering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Yankee support of the Indonesian genocide against our brothers in East Timor.  Of the cowardly actions of the bombings which annihilated/wiped out 130 thousand Iraqi children.  The same empire which inflicts on our continent the death of hundreds and thousands of children, victims of malnutrition and hunger.
We from this corner of the world, cut off by five hundred years of violence of the LATIFUNDIUM which bleeds our history and condemns us to make our way in obscurity in a society which fails to keep account of its past of slavery, colony, dependence.  The Brazil of Eldorado dos Carajás and of so many other massacres of the poor, of black people, the Indians, the street children, the shanty town dwellers, Cabanos, Canudos, Palmares ... the Brazil of silence and anonymous pain, of torture, of the underground war against its people.
The Brazil of this corner.  The lungs of the world.  Of the Araguaia, the Amazon, the Tocatins, the Madeira rivers, of the lea.  Of Tapajós, of  Carajás ... Which like a furious volcano spews out its sorrow in the form of music.  The songs of Cláudio, Pedrinho, Adilson, Zeca, Munhoz, Ricardo, Mário, Melônio, Curuperé, Gaya, César, Uchoa, Martin, Ray, Manos da Baixada, Afonso, Eduardo, Arcano, Rafael, Carlos, Otávio, Demilson, Edmilson and so many other workers and voices.
Brothers, other stages summon us: the streets, the encampments, schools, strikes, marches, land occupations.  A new intifada is arising at every street corner because, as Leminsk said; 'All forms of weapons are valid in the struggle: stones, nights and poems.'
Thank you, comrades, for having helped us, in these times of war, to bombard this world with  A Song for Peace!
Free homeland.  We shall conquer!

State Direction of the Landless Movement - Pará
Marabá, November 2001

Date:

November 2002

Resource ID:

LETTEROF312

		to Queen Mary University Of London welcome page

Landless Voices hosted by the
School of Languages, Linguistics and Film
Queen Mary University Of London, UK

Project Director & Academic Editor: Else R P Vieira
Web Site Producer: John Walsh
Web Site created: January 2003
Last updated: July 5th 2016

www.landless-voices.org