International Socialists

Meena

Meena (1957-1987) was born in Kabul. During her school days, students in Kabul and other Afghan cities were deeply engaged in social activism and rising mass movements. She left the university to devote herself as a social activist to organising and educating women.

 

In pursuit of her cause for gaining the right of freedom of expression and conducting political activities, Meena laid the foundation of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) in 1977. This organisation was meant to give voice to the deprived and silenced women of Afghanistan.

 

She started a campaign against the Russian forces and their puppet regime in 1979 and organised numerous processions and meetings to mobilise the public. Her active social work and effective advocacy against the views of the fundamentalists and the puppet regime provoked the wrath of the Russians and the fundamentalist forces alike and she was assassinated by agents of KHAD (Afghanistan branch of KGB) and their fundamentalist accomplices in Quetta, Pakistan, on February 4,1987.

 

Find out more at  http://rawa.fancymarketing.net/meena.html

 

 

I'll never return

 

I'm the woman who has awoken

I've arisen and become a tempest through the ashes of my burnt children

I've arisen from the rivulets of my brother's blood

My nation's wrath has empowered me

My ruined and burnt villages fill me with hatred against the enemy,

I'm the woman who has awoken,

I've found my path and will never return.

I've opened closed doors of ignorance

I've said farewell to all golden bracelets

Oh compatriot, I'm not what I was

I'm the woman who has awoken

I've found my path and will never return.

I've seen barefoot, wandering and homeless children

I've seen henna-handed brides with mourning clothes

I've seen giant walls of the prisons swallow freedom in their ravenous stomach

I've been reborn amidst epics of resistance and courage

I've learned the song of freedom in the last breaths, in the waves of blood and in victory

Oh compatriot, Oh brother, no longer regard me as weak and incapable

With all my strength I'm with you on the path of my land's liberation.

My voice has mingled with thousands of arisen women

My fists are clenched with the fists of thousands compatriots

Along with you I've stepped up to the path of my nation,

To break all these sufferings all these fetters of slavery,

Oh compatriot, Oh brother, I'm not what I was

I'm the woman who has awoken

I've found my path and will never return.

 

 

---

 

R.A.K. Mason

R.A.K. Mason (1905  1971) is one of New Zealand's most celebrated poets. As well as publishing over six volumes of poetry, he worked as a teacher, public works officer, secretary, trade union official and landscape gardener. Mason was a lifelong opponent of imperialism and a member of the New Zealand Communist Party. We can easily imagine what his response to America's "war on terror" would have been.

 

 

Sonnet to MacArthur's Eyes

General MacArthur looked down on the bodies of four young Korean soldiers. "That's a good sight for my old eyes," he said.

     - Newspaper Report

 

 

I have known old eyes that had seen many more

          aspects of war than this man has seen

          eyes that had looked on Gallipoli or the keen

          edge of battle with the Boer or in even older war

          had known Balaclava and the Mutiny's evil score:

          such eyes as I've known them old have always been

          eager to see spring flowers and the youth who mean

          mankind's spring after war's winter. Never before

 

Have I known of anyone whose old eyes rejoice

          to see young men lying dead in their own land,

          never have I known one who of his own choice

          follows up the machines of death to take his stand

          over the slain and in a quavering voice

          declaim his joy at youth dead beneath his hand

 

 

September, 1950.

 

 

---

 

In the Blue House

In the Blue House

by Meaghan Delahunt

Bloomsbury, 2001

Reviewed by Andrew Cooper

 

 

"When the Party rejected him, he had no alternative but to create something new - a new international party: The Fourth International. To challenge Stalin from outside. And people often asked why he wasted his energy on this small grouping, ineffectual, beset by divisions from the beginning. And my only answer, the answer I always give: He was a revolutionary: He knew no other way."

 

 

In her ambitious first novel, the Australian writer Meaghan Delahunt covers the last days of Leon Trotsky's epic and tragic life, before his death at the hands of the Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader.

 

In the Blue House presents in mostly brief snatches the voices of over a dozen people - both great and ordinary - who were touched by Trotsky's life.

 

We hear the voice of Jordi Marr, Trotsky's 23 year old bodyguard, haunted by the suicide of his anarchist father and his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, longing for the approval that Trotsky can never give him, and still reeling from his affair with the artist Frida Kahlo, Marr is thus fatally distracted and unworried by the gradually building presence of Mercader in Trotsky's household.

 

Stalin - Trotsky and the Revolution's nemesis - appears at the height of the Great Terror in 1932, on his deathbed in 1953 and during his brutal Georgian childhood.

 

Perhaps the novel's most accomplished section, "The Other Moscow," describes life for the millions of ordinary people living in that city at the height of Stalin's Terror. Mikhail Kosarev, a construction supervisor on the Metro, returns each evening to a tiny home on one floor of an apartment building, a meagre space rationed off by flimsy curtains for himself, his mother and sister. He despairs that each family cooks and cleans for itself  that there is no pooling of resources. But this is not a city embarked on any great socialist "experiment" but a smashed, terrorised and defeated proletariat of atomised individuals struggling for survival.

 

It is the voices of the lesser known in Blue House that seem to ring truest: the impoverished artist Rosita Moreno, whose Communist husband celebrates Trotsky's murder; Stalin's tragic wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva; and Trotsky's own partner Natalia.

 

Drawing heavily on Issac Deutscher's brilliant Prophet trilogy for its historical detail, the Blue House shows Trotsky beginning to question himself for the first time. Traumatised by the dual murders of the world revolution and his own children by the Stalinists, he appears vulnerable for the first time in his life. As this vulnerability becomes more apparent, so the novel builds to a climax no less shocking for its obviousness.

 

If I have one complaint about Blue House, it is that most of the characters seem to speak with much the same voice. You would expect, for instance, that Rosita Morena would think and write rather differently to Lavrenti Beria or Ramón Mercader.

 

When Delahunt does give a voice individuality, she does so wonderfully. The most enjoyable chapter, quite ironically, was the poet Mayakovsky's suicide note. Lenin wasn't noted for his sense of humour, but the description of the poet explaining to him at the Smolney Institute in Petrograd, days before the Revolution, why it was imperative that he paint Lenin's forehead with red paint, was quite surrealistically brilliant.

 

This is a book full of some of the millions of personal tragedies that the misery of Stalinism created. Whether it is the daily struggle for survival in 1930s Moscow, or the "Old Bolshevik" Adolf Joffe writing in his suicide note that "after 27 years in responsible Party posts, I have been forced into a situation where I have no alternative but to blow my brains out," the pain of the counter-revolutionary terror spares no one.

 

If I have any criticisms of this book they are minor ones. In the Blue House is an exceptional first novel which I would quite unreservedly recommend.

 

Apparently Meaghan Delahunt is at work on her next novel. If the first is anything to go by, it will certainly be something to look forward to.