Right here in our bodies, in our defense of our right to experience joy, in the refusal to abandon the place where we have been most completely invaded & colonized, in our determination to make the bombed & defoliated lands flower again and bear fruit, here where we have been most shamed is one of the most radical & sacred places from which to transform the world.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the power of reclaiming joy and healing in the face of oppression and destruction.
Aurora Levins Morales highlights the importance of reclaiming joy and beauty even in the aftermath of trauma and colonization. It suggests that the wounds we carry can serve as a foundation for radical transformation and healing, encouraging individuals to cultivate life and vibrancy in places that have been damaged, both physically and emotionally. By embracing our experiences and the rights to all feelings, we actively contribute to changing the world for the better.
In practice
A speaker at a social justice rally may use this quote to inspire activists to find empowerment in their experiences.
Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.
What is required to face trauma is the ability to mourn, fully and deeply, all that has been taken from us. Only through mourning everything we have lost can we discover that we have in fact survived; that our spirits are indestructible.
What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
By changing the way you do routine things you allow a new man to grow inside you.
We have defeated Jim Crow, but now we have to deal with his son, James Crow Jr., esquire.
Know that transformation sometimes begins with a fall. So never curse the fall. The ground is where humility lives. Take it. Learn it. Breathe it in. And then come back stronger, humbler and more aware of your need for Him. Come back having seen your own nothingness and His greatness.
There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress. It doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress I the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-ending retrieving what it lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.
And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization a simply a question of relative strength.
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