We are the beating heart and nimble hands of our poets

I keep coming back to Roque Dalton. Where Neruda was the poet of the people in all, Dalton is a tangible breath of communists and rebels. He was critical without cynicism, advanced without detachment. As I'm just poetic, I turn to the poets.

FOR A BETTER LOVE
By Roque Dalton
Trans. Richard Schaaf

"Sex is a political category."
—Kate Millet

Everyone agrees that sex
is a category in the world of lovers:
hence tenderness and its wild branches.

Everyone agrees that sex
is a category in the world of lovers:
hence tenderness and its wild branches.

Everyone agrees that sex
is a category within the family:
hence children,
nights together
and days apart
(he, looking for bread in the street,
in offices or factories;
she, in the rearguard of household work,
in the strategy and tactics of the kitchen
allowing them to survive in the common battle
at least until the end of the month).

Everyone agrees that sex
is an economic category:
it's enough to mention prostitution,
fashion,
sections of the newspaper for her only
or only for him.

Where the trouble begins
is the moment a woman says
sex is a political category.

Because when a woman says
sex is a political category
she can cease being woman in itself
and begin being woman for herself,
constituting the woman in woman
starting from her humanity
and not from her sex,
conscious that magical lemon-scented deodorant
and soap that voluptuously caresses her skin
are made by the same corporation that makes napalm
conscious that the tasks belonging to the home
are tasks belonging to the social class
            to which that home belongs,
that the difference between the sexes
shines much brighter in the deep loving night
when all those secrets that kept us
masked and strangers, become known.

Comments

[Mr. Kotter]

Welcome back.

[leftspot]

For those unfamiliar with Roque Dalton, you can check out a beautiful history of his life here: http://www.uhmc.sunysb.edu/surgery/dalton.html

Dalton was a Salvadoran poet, historian and revolutionary. Actually his father was a semi-notorious gringo bankrobber and his mother was Salvadoran; he was raised in El Salvador. Though he was killed in 1975, and though he was an explicit communist that joined a revolutionary guerrilla organization to overthrow the government, he is still acknowledged across the political spectrum to be the best poet El Salvador has produced.

His life was fascinating and his death is one of the greatest tragedies of the highly-charged sectarianism of the 1970s (he was assassinated by leaders of his own guerrilla group who accused him and some like-minded comrades of being CIA spies, since they were critical of the militarist line of the leadership at the time and called for doing more mass work). That horrific action led to yet another split in the Salvadoran left.