Painting by Vann Nath, cambodia genocide (https://thesentinelproject.org/)
By Hassen Lorgat
A
Never again
for ALL not for some
This has been the law of nature, long before Nuremberg
Our movements spoke it in tongues differently but always the same tune
An injury to one is an injury to all
All for one and one for all
Never again means
Never again for ANYONE
B
It’s a crying shame that leaders,
resort to the deadly blame game
Talk of final solutions
Breed new revolutions
Dread and red drapes our sacred landscape
In frozen horizons of our minds
holocaust, shoah, nakba, genocide
massacres, ethnocides,
C
They come and go in many names and tongues
Inyezi (cockroach)
Jarad (Cockroaches)
Ungeziefer (vermin/pests)
Ratten (rats)
One limb of the human body calls the other
a parasite
a cancer (or a rare disease)
After insulting the fauna, not even the flora is spared:
“Exterminate the weeds,” they scream
with machetes
This is the mantra of the haters
you are told you are not the same: you do not belong
but you are like them, the same, and they are wrong
D
We cannot unpause Ubuntu
Because it is who we are
Others from below
have taken the labels beyond their sell-by-dates
And as they rise from below
From the underground
From the rubble and the rubbish
Remake our world
Youth from one part of our world, shared some love with the insulted cockroach
Giving it new life
To fight the faith of hate
E
Nakba, Shoah, Holocaust – all are Genocides
all crimes against humanity
for those who brag that our suffering is worse than yours
engage in the contest of the ignorants
We are compassionate human beings
we must continue to walk in each others shoes
to re-learn the sufferings of all of humanity
We remember them, all
From times before slavery, and colonialism
And then, the wage poverty whilst toiling the land and workplaces
The holocausts of slavery, the Native Americans, the Herero and Nama, the Jews, Gypsies, disabled, homosexuals and all the other undesirables
And (fill in the name of an ignored genocide here ….. and here….and here…….)
We remember and embrace all those who have fallen at the hands of tyranny
And one thing is clear
Justice must not flow only from the mouth of the victors
For it is in the wisdom of the downtrodden that all our civilisations are renewed
F
There is no hierarchy or league of those who have suffered
- the miserable and downtrodden
We are on the same train journey away from all this ….
We must be the praise poets of our people who have not lost hope
And say to them Yu, U Nobuntu…*
End
(hey, he or she has ubuntu, the essence of humanity)
Hassen Lorgat