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The Second Wellington International Poetry Festival took place in October 7-11 2004. The book is the official festival anthology and features all 28 of the poets appearing at the festival. The theme of the festival is human rights. The Second Wellington International Poetry Festival Anthology edited by Mark Pirie, Ron Riddell and Saray Torres.
Antonieta Villamil's poems on pages 87 to 91. The poems are unfinished versions of poems originally written in English:
A poem
is the last frontier of resistance. Letter to the brother errased without trace, The sweatlodge, Tunka Tipi or the stone people’s house, Cumbia dance
of freedom.
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A POEM:
A FINGERPRINT
December 31, 2001
A digital
instant taken
of human experience
The DNA of memory
A poem: the power to
show us in a fraction
of the present
the future embedded in the
mirror image of its past
A poem: the last
frontier
of resistance.
Includes: B R Dionysius, Brentley Frazer, Melissa Ashley and Paul Hardacre from Australia; Antonieta Villamil (Colombia), Cecilia Guridi (Chile), Karin Bellman (Sweden), Frank Pervan (Croatia), Cristina Galeata (Romania), Peter Cooley (USA), Louise Warren (Canada), Fleur Adcock (UK), Michael Harlow, Apirana Taylor, CK Stead, Alistair Paterson, Richard von Sturmer, John O'Connor, Leonard Lambert, Brian Potiki, Keith Thorsen, and David Chan (New Zealand).
|
Title |
The Second Wellington International Poetry Festival Anthology |
|
Editors |
Mark Pirie, Ron Riddell and Saray Torres |
|
Category |
New Zealand Poetry |
|
Format |
Paperback |
|
Extent |
114 pages |
|
ISBN |
0-476-00886-7 |
|
Price |
NZ$24.95 |
|
Release |
October 2004 |
The basis for this rant stems from a single event. I attended a poetry reading at the recent international poetry festival held in Wellington. Antonieta Villamil from Colombia was our draw card; the program indicated that her poetry was fuelled by the oppression and victimization of people opposing the Colombian regime. There were four other poets, a guest poet from India and three from NZ. The session began and the compeer announced that this festival had an underlying theme of human rights. Villamil delivered a strong, impassioned, and engaging recitation, utilizing song and second voice to add dynamics.
Villamil's reading regarding human rights presents a socially connected voice. I love poems that can stir emotion, artistic endeavor and linguistic acomplishment...
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In the early 80's, within the field of music, there were a few performers that included elements of social commentary and analysis into their work. Songs such as ‘Riot Squad', ‘There is no depression in NZ', and ‘Don't go' were all grounded in some local context. However, since the mid 80's and the redirection of the economy, artistic content has lost that focus.
To my thinking, artists and creative workers have a responsibility to take the situations which surround our environment, complex or otherwise, and reinterpret them back via poems, song, painting, theatre, or any other form of media available. Globally, and historically, artists and entertainers are a central part of a community rather than a perceived segregated elite. And it has not always been a safe career option. Poets have been murdered by various states for publicly presenting opposing or dissenting views, musicians have been banished and outcast, and dance and theatre groups have travelled and engaged local communities, placing themselves at personal risk, to inform, educate, and present alternatives in the days before the internet.
It seems that the greatest social statement of recent days is Dobbyn's tune ‘Loyal'. The national psyche was fed into the groupthink sheep wringer, branding loyalty and indicating patriotic enthusiasm as only being expressible by supporting a rich man’s boring boat race. Globally, when Gulf War II started, many mainstream American artists united to oppose the Bush regime across the artistic spectrum. The same cannot be said for here. Don McGlashen from the Muttonbirds is the only prominent NZ musician who has been actively visible in the anti-war movement. Where are the rest? Why has it taken two years for artists to mobilize for Zaoui?
What are artists responses to the foreshore and seabed confiscation, G.E., civil unions, NZ involvement in Iraq, gender politics, Steven Wallace, or any other situations that need exploration in one form or another? Without these conscious actions, provoking discussion, we become prone to forgetting. Shallow, consumer driven art does not make for deep, evolving, and inspirational cultures. It is a continuation of the disposable mindset that pervades current thinking.
I may have missed others involved in working with social campaigns and my criticism is not intended to attack people's actual efforts. When I mention McGlashen's effort I'm talking about the most mainstream of NZ performers. I have not seen such involvement from others such as Dobbyn, the Finn brothers, Shihad etc in social causes. I also acknowledge that there are areas of creative exploration where issues are explored in depth such as Hip Hop artists like Upper Hutt Posse, labels such as Dawn Raid, painters such as James Robinson and Robyn Kahukiwa, the Skate Board poets, satirical writing like the now defunct Babylon Express, and a number of other independent practitioners within NZ.
The combination of creative aesthetic and social commentary does not equate to loss of artistic integrity or quality, more so the opposite. It broadens the scope of the audience, links history with today, delivers critique and information in accessible formats other that academic tomes. And by this critique I am not suggesting that art needs to only be overtly political in content, the subtlety and nuances of personal exploration are as important as the broad social analysis. Art can be informative and entertaining at the same time. It requires commitment, a perception outside the self and ability to interpret wider issues with personal responses, and a willingness to engage others in dialogue.
– Mr Sterile & D.S. Lunchbox, speakers who curiously trace the history of globalization back to the Trilateral Commission. Here in New Zealand, I have seen white environmentalists accuse Maori of “reverse racism” for daring to assert their rights to protect indigenous flora and fauna under threat from bioprospectors and the TRIPs agreement. At other international conferences on globalization, activists have dismissed Indigenous Peoples' perspectives on globalization as “narrow” and “nativistic”, arguing that they do not attach enough importance to class analysis.
Naturally we feel outrage at security clampdowns against popular Mobilizations in Auckland, Vancouver, Seattle, Melbourne, Quebec City and Washington DC. But shock and surprise? Colonial governments hav always used police and military as an army of occupation against Indigenous Peoples. State-sanctioned abuses against indigenous communities have long been a dime-a-dozen but have frequently failed to register with many folk.
I have heard the fairy story, told with passion, authority and a touch of nostalgia, by non-indigenous New Zealanders, North Americans and Australians who speak earnestly of the freedoms and democratic rights enjoyed in their countries. Apparently things were pretty good until the neoliberal ideologues and big business seized control, opened up the economy, started hocking everything off to the transnational corporations, and saw Joe and Jill Citizen dispossessed of things that they thought were theirs. So say dozens of activists, academics, politicians as they state their opposition to the neoliberal agenda. This version of history begins when globalization started impacting non-indigenous peoples. The words “democracy” and “sovereignty” crop up time and time again in their talks, and in anti-globalization literature and campaigns in these countries. What do such appeals to democratic traditions, concepts and values mean when they ignore past and present-day realities of colonization in these countries?
While attending the 1997 Peoples Summit on APEC in Vancouver I remember being struck by how speaker after speaker attacked transnational corporations, and identified them as the driving force behind APEC, yet utterly ignored struggles like that of the Lubicon Cree Nation in Northern Alberta – the next province – against gas, oil and timber transnationals invading their unceded territory with the complicity of the Canadian state. Nor did the fact that a “liberal democratic” government of Canada, like the one which through hosting APEC hoped to influence Asian trading partners with “Canadian values”, had sent more armed forces against Mohawk people defending their lands in the 1990 standoff near Oka, Quebec than it sent to the Gulf War rate a mention. But then again, the Vancouver Peoples Summit itself was part-funded by the same NDP British Columbia provincial government which in 1995 initiated a massive military operation at Gustafsen Lake only a few hours’ drive away, against a small group of Indigenous Peoples defending their sacred lands.
Many critics of globalization play down the role and relevance of the nation-state, attributing power almost solely to transnational corporations and international institutions like the Bretton Woods triplets. Yet this takes the focus away from the nature and power of the state and even romanticizes it. Such global campaigns run the risk of distracting people's gaze from long-standing injustices underfoot. In delegitimizing these global actors we must be very aware of the dangers in uncritically legitimizing nation-states which are themselves based on the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples. We cannot ignore the centuries of resistance by many indigenous nations against incorporation into the colonial state. We cannot ignore the colonial foundations of the countries in which we live. To do so is to mask the true nature of our societies, and the extent to which they are built on colonization and exploitation.
How can Indigenous Peoples be expected to validate, affirm and seek incorporation into national or international movements dominated by non-indigenous activists, organizations and agendas which are reluctant to address domestic issues of colonization with the same vigor and commitment that they put into fighting transnational capital or the WTO?
Of course some important alliances have been forged between Indigenous Peoples and non-indigenous organizations confronting globalization. Many (usually small, under-resourced) activist groups struggle hard to draw the connections between corporate globalization and colonization, to support local indigenous sovereignty struggles and educate non-indigenous peoples about these issues.
Movements to expose and oppose corporate globalization have a very real potential to mobilize support from non-indigenous people for meaningfully addressing the issues of colonization in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the USA. We should be challenging the jurisdiction of these colonial settler state governments as they move to sign international trade and investment deals, in the light of their continued denial of Indigenous Peoples' rights, jurisdiction, and title.
The centuries-old culture of colonization holds the key to understanding and defeating the current wave of globalization. If we understand how “democratic” governments like Canada can sanction the ongoing assault on Indigenous lands and communities it isn't hard to understand why such governments subscribe to free market international trade and investment policies.
In determining the values and foundations on which we build alternatives to the neoliberal agenda our movements must be prepared to examine our own propensity to oppress. We cannot build alternatives to globalization on the rotten foundations of the denial of occupying indigenous lands and the ongoing suppression of Indigenous Peoples' rights. “The colonizers are always building rotten foundations and expecting us to step into a completed building” says Sharon Venne.
If anti-globalization activists and organizations do not address these questions with some urgency then I fear that the growing resistance to neoliberalism in the global North risks being as inherently colonialist as the institutions and processes which it opposes. Our usage of the term colonization will be little more than empty rhetoric if our analysis does not acknowledge the context in which corporate globalization – and the worldwide opposition to it – is taking place.
Those of us active in anti-globalization struggles in Canada, the USA, New Zealand and Australia need to examine our role in the colonization and globalization of the earth. Only then can we seriously talk about liberation and real alternatives to the neoliberal agenda.
-- Aziz Choudry #Aotearoa Dissident Voice - New Zealand's most unrespectable revolutionary rag. Aotearoa Dissident Voice is a free volunteer-run magazine that aims to provide an open space for the free flow of anarchist and libertarian left news, analysis and creativity. www.dissidentvoice.org.nz edcollective@dissidentvoice.org.nz
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