What do these people want, who knock on my door at dawn?

[Xipe Totec]

At dawn they knocked,
from the top of the stairs;
a mother comes to the door
still wearing her evening robes.

What do these people want,
who knock on my door at dawn?

- Is your son still here?
- He is still in his bed.
What do you want with my son?
As the son rises from his bed.

What do these people want,
who knock on my door at dawn?

Little does the mother realize
of all the hopes and dreams
of her student son
already engaged to be married.

What do these people want,
who knock on my door at dawn?

For days he has been quiet,
and agitated at night.
trembling in fright,
waiting for a knock on the door at dawn.

What do these people want,
who knock on my door at dawn?

Not fully awake,
he clearly hears the call
and jumps out the window
to the street at full run.

What do these people want,
who knock on my door at dawn?

The ones who call are stunned,
except one, perhaps the leader,
who looks out through the window,
the mother screaming behind him.

What do these people want,
who knock on my door at dawn?

At dawn they knocked,
The law has marked the hour.
Now the student is dead,
dead from a knock at dawn.

What do these people want,
who knock on my door at dawn?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb96aGdw3wU&NR=1


In the Original Catalan:

De matinada han trucat,
són al replà de l'escala;
la mare quan surt a obrir
porta la bata posada.

Què volen aquesta gent
que truquen de matinada?

"El seu fill, que no és aquí?"
"N'és adormit a la cambra.
Què li volen al meu fill?"
El fill mig es desvetllava.

La mare ben poc en sap,
de totes les esperances
del seu fill estudiant,
que ben compromès n'estava.

Dies fa que parla poc
i cada nit s'agitava.
Li venia un tremolor
tement un truc a trenc d'alba.

Encara no ben despert
ja sent viva la trucada,
i es llença pel finestral,
a l'asfalt d'una volada.

Els que truquen resten muts,
menys un d'ells, potser el que mana,
que s'inclina pel finestral.
Darrere xiscla la mare.

De matinada han trucat,
la llei una hora assenyala.
Ara l'estudiant és mort,
n'és mort d'un truc a trenc d'alba.

[Judi Lynn]

1. Never heard of this courageous singer before. Maria del Mar Bonet.

The song represents life under Franco?

Thank you very much for giving us flashes of light about whole worlds of artists/activists of whom some of us have never heard.

Also didn't know a thing about the Catalan language. This is very interesting.

[Braulio]

2. Could be about life under Stalin

or Hitler, or Castro.

[Xipe Totec]

3. It is about life under Franco, yes

The author of the lyrics is Luis Serrahima, Catalan.

But as others have pointed out, it could just as well have been Chile under Pinochet, or Russia under Stalin.

My hasty translation has some mistakes. I translated the word compromès as engagement, but it may actually mean compromised, as in betrayed or blown cover. But I'm still not sure.

[Downwinder]

4. I think you could extend it to any police state.

Mexico, Iraq or Afghanistan under US domination, the US for undocumented immigrants. Any place where you have lesser individuals.


As pointed out in similar poems from the WWII period, there is a mission creep to eventually include all of society.

[rabs]

5. Made my hair stand on end

When I heard Quilapayun with Maria del Mar Bonet. It transported me back to Santiago during the long, dark night of the Pinochet and his DINA era.

I had not been aware that it was a Franco-era song.

Where did you learn Catalan? And think "compromised" may be correct, as in "compromised" in the student's resistance to the dictatorship.

Btw, have you heard the best damn marachi band -------------- in Croatia? If not, here are Los Caballeros at a concert in Zagreb. Pretty good for Eastern European "marachis," although they are somewhat skinny, blond and have a problemita with the "r" in "Jalisco no te rajes."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69dYgbb9TCo&feature=related

Enjoy :hi:

[Judi Lynn]

8. Gotta see it to believe it! Thanks for the Los Caballeros link.

Speaking of Chile, saw a documentary recently on cable (can't remember which network) and the author, who was forced to leave the country as a VERY young man, went from the U.S. back to Chile to confront the people who imprisoned and tortured him and the other young men from his town.

He had grown up in a smaller town, and he and his young (high school) friends had heard the miliary commanding officer in their town had a cache of dynamite stored in a cave in the hills. They went up and located it and took it. He and one of his friends he met upon his trip home discussed one young friend of theirs who had them all screaming with laughter as he took one of the tubes of dynamite and clenched it in his teeth like a cigar. That young friend of theirs was killed by the Pinochistas.

He and friends and acquaintances he located for the film all wept with grief trying to talk about their experiences.

He located the people resposible, highest officer, even the judge, and others, and they revealed different ways of trying to cope with their fear of being confronted, from stolid refusal to discuss, to denial, and the judge in trying to be sweet and sympathetic until he learned he couldn't worm his way out of it, and he threw the former prisoner out of his house.

The author said that in their small town, many of the local young men and women were taken and tortured by the naval installation, many young men and women were killed, and eventually all the young people actually fled from the town, going into exile.

Of course this kind of story is already very familiar to people who have lived in Chile, but I'm sure you'd find this program interesting, nevertheless. It's remarkable that it was likely the first time a lot of the people who saw the show actually heard about any of it since it was so well concealed here for so long. Most likely this would have been either on PBS or the Sundance channel, which has also run video on Chile, including a hideous program on Osvaldo Romo, Pinochet and Manuel Contreras' infamous head torturer.

Had no idea one would ever find a mariachi band in Europe!

[Xipe Totec]

9. Very nice Mariachi music

The flubs were minor and almost imperceptible.

Thanks for the link!

:hi:


I don't actually speak Catalan. I studied French in college and Castillian is my first language. Between the two, I am able to puzzle out the meaning of written Catalan.

[Peace Patriot]

6. Just viewed a movie last night about El Salvador called "Innocent Voices."

This poem seems to be about the movie, or the movie is about the poem--an El Salvadoran mother trying to save her 11 year old son from being 'recruited' (kidnapped), along with other children, as soldiers in the "School of the Americas"-trained El Salvadoran military.

It is a very, very hard movie to watch, knowing what our government and our tax dollars were supporting in El Salvador in the 1980s--and are supporting today in Colombia, and in Honduras, and seem to be revving up to support elsewhere, including, once again, in El Salvador.

The "knock on the door" haunts us and our world.

:grouphug:

[Braulio]

7. Just Read Human Rights Watch about Cuba's human rights

Their latest report about the human rights situation in Cuba is worth reading.

[Peace Patriot]

10. There is nothing, absolutely NOTHING, that has ever happened in revolutionary Cuba

that can even come close to the horrors inflicted by the RIGHTWING FASCISTS and US FASCISTS on the people of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and other Latin American countries. Two hundred thousand Mayan men, women and children were slaughtered in Guatemala by rightwing monsters with Reagan's knowledge and complicity. Tens of thousands of mayors, teachers, union leaders, human rights workers, priests, nuns, journalists, ordinary workers and peasant farmers and many, many children were beaten, tortured, jailed and heinously murdered in these countries, under US direction or with US complicity in every case--and similar atrocities are occurring in Colombia today, right now, with massive US funding and support. And in Honduras, the rightwing bastards are back--at least 26 have been murdered, and thousands have been beaten, tear-gassed, unjustly imprisoned, raped and tortured, as well as threatened, fired, silenced and denied all civil rights.

And nothing, absolutely NOTHING, that has ever happened in revolutionary Cuba that can even come close to what the US just did to Iraq--slaughtering one million innocent people to steal their oil, and torturing thousands of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay--the other end of the island of Cuba--Abu Ghraib and torture dungeons around the world.

Human Rights Watch can go !@#$% itself, picking on Cuba. That is the WRONG TARGET! And if you don't think these things are political, boy, are you naive.

[roody]

12. +1

[Judi Lynn]

13. They try to recycle old whoppers we've heard from right-wingers, and Miami gusanos forever.

Really appreciate your comments on this, and I'm sure any DU'ers who come and go to Cuba, vacation in Cuba, or have friends, relations in Cuba do as well.

[Braulio]

15. Read Human Rights watch report about Cuba

I'm discussing Cuba, not what this or that government did to their citizens in the past. You do need to undergo a certain attitude adjustment. I don't defend ANY GOVERNMENT. You happen to defend what I consider pretty nasty characters. Therefore, if you want to have an honest dialogue, don't respond by saying "well, so and so used to cut off arms".

The question to you is: why defend a regime we know is rotten inside? Why defend ANY of them if they're not worth defending? Why not start with a white sheet of paper, write your own script, come up with your own ideas of what's good or bad, then stick to it? That's what I did.

[AlphaCentauri]

16. I read the report

I think many of the testimonies there have to do with street crime and are exaggerated, the other point that make it suspicious is that they don't present many cases where there were witnesses only personal accounts. Then they try to make it appear like all those acts were ordered by Castro not carried out by individuals in their own.

If we would apply the same judgment to the US, we would say that Obama is imprisoning dissident students who protest, Obama is condoning the 2007 May day police raid in LA, Obama is letting people die at hospitals without health insurance, Obama is forcing people to live in trailer parks or Obama is persecuting political dissidents who don't want to pay taxes.

So it looks more like right wing propaganda than a serious report but of course Cuba is not the paradise or wonderland we can't expect abuses not to happen by a few rotten apples and individuals there are anti socials everywhere is part of the human mind.

[Xipe Totec]

19. I once heard an NPR report on El Salvador

It was so horrific that I could not listen all the way through and had to shut off the radio.

When the report described how interrogators cut the inguinal tendons of one of their victim, so he could not close his legs while they beat his testicles to the size of melons, I just could not stand to hear any more.

[Judi Lynn]

20. More people need to know about these things. So very few do, even now, in this country.

After seeing your post regarding the NPR program I remembered a particularly evil act perpetrated in El Salvador. I immediately located two references to it:

The Culture of Fear
Noam Chomsky
In Javier Giraldo, Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy, Common Courage Press, July, 1996

~snip~
In the Jesuit journal America, Rev. Daniel Santiago, a priest working in El Salvador, reported in 1990 the story of a peasant woman who returned home one day to find her mother, sister, and three children sitting around a table, the decapitated head of each person placed on the table in front of the body, the hands arranged on top "as if each body was stroking its own head." The assassins, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had found it hard to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so they nailed the hands to it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood stood in the center of the table.

More:
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199607--.htm

~~~~~~~~~

For Iraq, "The Salvador Option" Becomes Reality

By Max Fuller

06/03/05 "Centre for Research on Globalisation"

~snip~
In the context of a country where good information is extremely scarce, disinformation and black propaganda are endemic and independent journalists and monitors are deliberately eliminated, it is vital to be able to model the situation in order to understand it and, hopefully, be effective. There are two principle dimensions to such modelling. In the first, Iraq has frequently been compared to Vietnam. The similarity is that the US has well over 100,000 soldiers on the ground. However, the analogy is misleading in that in Iraq conflict with a populous enemy state, as North Vietnam was, ended quickly. As a model, El Salvador is not wholly accurate either. In El Salvador US ‘advisors’ were few in number and prohibited from taking part in combat. Nevertheless, it is towards this model that the US is attempting to move, hoping to farm out the sordid business of occupation to Iraqi auxiliaries. But, in many ways it is contemporary Colombia that offers the closest analogy: not for the disposition of US forces, but because here the same process of asset-stripping, impoverishment and conquistador-like plundering is both deeply entrenched and ongoing. It is here that is to be found that clearest pattern for the assaults on academics, independent trade unionists and peasant organisations that will increasingly characterise Iraq for those prepared to look beyond the fireworks. This is the second dimension that any model must address, but in essence the pattern is repeated time after time in every imperialist so-called counter-insurgency war; for behind each and every one lurks the reality of exploitation and class war, and, as successive imperialist powers have shown, the bottom line in combating the hopes and dreams of ordinary people is to resort to spreading terror through the application of extreme violence. In Iraq, the Salvador Option may mean returning home to find your entire family seated at table with their own severed heads served to them and a bowl of blood for relish.

More:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12102.htm

[AlphaCentauri]

11. Sometimes I tune Son Galicia Radio

nice music

http://www.crtvg.es/reproductor/inicio.asp?canal=radio&arquivo=0

[Judi Lynn]

14. Thanks for posting this link. I'm going to listen to it tomorrow. What a find! n/t

[Downwinder]

17. From SFGATE.com

Knock on the door - Oakland teen shot to death

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/20/BA861ANSR7.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz0XSLQvK5c

[Xipe Totec]

18. Very sad, very tragic

And bitterly ironic.