Ota Benga Alliance For Peace, Healing and Dignity

Where are you when we most needed you?
Had you been in Copenhagen
You might have been able to remind those present that there once had been there, in Copenhagen, one of those forests like the one where you were born.

You would have told them how great it felt growing in the forest living
in harmony with nature that despite all the bad talking
about romanticizing the past golden ages,
you were not a fan of a return to the Stone Age.

Thinking of you is also about thinking of those who have been swallowed by a system that thrives on erasing humanity and its memory. Remember those Inuit you were sitting next to in Saint Louis in 1904? Well, their forest is the snow and ice of the Arctic Circle. It is melting so fast that the polar bears have lost their bearings and are dying fast. Yes, in those months when you felt too cold, for them it was quite warm, but you both had to suffer because the event was about demonstrating the superiority of the ones who sent for you, the same ones who tried to re-instate slavery in Santo Domingo, the same ones who were celebrating 100 years of the Louisiana Purchase.

Remembering you is to remember all of those who have tried as hard as they could to make the believers and fundamentalists of western superiority aware that they are not better or worse than any other member of humanity. For trying so hard, many of them have been punished in all kinds of ways: say, like Mumia Abu Jamal

Mumia Abu Jamal and Pierre-Antoine Lovinsky

These two have been jailed because they could not keep quiet about what was wrong about terrorizing blacks and native Americans into “staying in their place”. Like many others whose names we do not even remember because their particular cause has been painted with taboo colors, they asserted a truth too loudly, too unflinchingly. A truth so simple that most children of the terrorizing-superior-fundamentalists would understand it and repeat it to their frowning parents. So simple is the truth that left on their own they played without any problems with their black friends and their native American friends, and love to hear each other stories.

Now and then one hears about “American Values”. But the problem with MAJ is that his spelling of these values is precisely about the unity of humanity and not the superiority of one group or the other. Long before it became a political fashion, they were calling for a multi-polar world.

What MAJ did was trespass over the invisible line, which says that certain truths can only be articulated by those with financial and political power, and/or approved by them. The line is guarded by a police force, which does not even have to be visible. Centuries of predation without limit have led its high priests to make predators of those who were not made to become so. No wonder it is easier to submit and lie down than stand up and be eaten..

Like Makandal, most people have forgotten who was Pierre-Antoine. Makandal fought in Santo Domingo in the 1750s. He was renowned for killing (through poison) the slave and plantation owners. In particular those, one may surmise, who violated one of the articles of the Black Code prohibiting the torture of slaves. Eventually, he was caught and killed with the kind of vengeance one has learned to expect from those whose truths are contradicted by the simple affirmation of the dignity of humanity. He was tortured to death, something specifically forbidden by article 42 of Le Code Noir.

Pierre-Antoine Lovinsky’s problem was to keep calling for the return of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to Haiti. He kept at it until those who could not longer hear his calling, decided to silence him, kidnap him and put him away. That was in August 2007. No one seems to know for sure whether he is alive or not. One would have thought that the International Red Cross might have been moved to request to see him, but those who did the kidnapping do not operate according to the rules of International Law, since they are convinced that they are a law on to themselves. To the ears of those who wanted Aristide out of their hair, Lovinsky’s relentlessness must have been felt like poison.

Never to let go.
Keep going, against the odds.
So go the lessons.
Still they keep coming
from all corners of the Planet.
But often times history gets filtered
and/or refined to the point of losing
all its most crucial nutrients.
As it goes with the food processing industry,
so it goes with the industrialization of history.
The history gets so refined as to lose
all the ingredients which keep it alive.
So also with humanity.
Integrity is missing.
Humanity means respecting every tiny
member
every baby.

In Copenhagen, there was the possibility
of remembering all of those who fought wars meant to save humanity,
meant to make humanity one,
meant to heal from competitiveness,
starting with the violence against Mother Earth.
Therein seems to lie the difficulty,
it is not just about the violence against Mother Earth,
it is about violence against all the mothers, mothers to be,
from the most tender age.

Copenhagen brought members of humanity from all corners of the Planet, but the Planet does not have corners in which those without shame could hide and present their arrogance under the cloak of false piety, false humility.

Copenhagen sounds like a bad dream.
Could it be that the battle was not won precisely
because humanity
has been so fragmented by all kinds of weaponry
that it has the greatest of difficulty
re-membering its dis-membered parts.

Recovering from learning to split the atom
Looks more and more
Like an impossibility
Because from Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Survivors never included
the pulverized or their ashes
just an occasional imprint on a wall --
the remnant of the power of a thousand suns.

Let re-membering the dis-membered
Become the mantra never to be forgotten
From the ones we have tended to forget.

J.Depelchin 5-Jan-2010