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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)

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Cultural categories by media type: The media specificity of landless cultural expression.

Cultural category:

 Culture: Mission of art

  7 resources

Media type:

 Poems

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Poems

Author:

Pedro Tierra

Title:

The earth speaks

The freedom of the land is not about workers.
The freedom of the Land is about everyone who
Feeds on its fruit.
About everyone who lives, survives, on wages.
About the homeless. About those who live under bridges.
About those who dispute with the rats
The big cities' scraps.
About those who can't go to school.
About girls and boys of the street.
About the prostitutes. About those threatened by cholera.
About those embittered by unemployment.
About those who refuse the death of dream.

Freedom of the Land and peace in the fields have a name:
Agrarian Reform.
Today we've come to the city's heart to sing.
For the city to hear our songs and to sing.
And to light up again tonight the star of everyone.
And to teach the organisers of death
and to teach the wage earners of death
that a people can't be killed
just as the sea can't be killed
dreams can't be killed
just as the sea can't be killed
joy can't be killed
just as the sea can't be killed
hope can't be killed
just as the sea can't be killed
nor its dance.

Poems : Edited by Else R P Vieira. Translation © Bernard McGuirk.

Date:

November 2002

Resource ID:

EARTHSPE688

Anthology of poems
A first-hand selection, unpublished in Brazil and elsewhere. A militant poetics; the social and political importance of the poet-singer (cantador), the construction of a canon of exclusion; the landless woman; the theme of death as life's horizon; the pedagogic project.
Else R P Vieira

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