O lançamento e apresentação do livro de Clara Queiroz, «Se Não Puder Dançar, Esta Não é a Minha Revolução — Aspectos da Vida de Emma Goldman» vai realizar-se amanhã ( dia 23 de Junho) na livraria Assírio & Alvim, em Lisboa. A apresentação vai estar a cargo da historiadora Irene Pimentel.
Dia 23 de Junho (segunda-feira), pelas 19 horas, na Livraria Assírio & Alvim
(Rua Passos Manuel, 67 B — Lisboa)
Excerto da obra:
«Emma Goldman é um mulher pequena, um pouco entroncada, com cabelo ondeado bem arranjado, um olho azul claro, uma boca sensível ainda que não de linhas clássicas. Não é bonita, mas quando a sua face se ilumina com o brilho e o colorido do seu entusiasmo interior é extraordinariamente atraente. Tem gestos delicados, acessível e sem arrogância, livre sem um traço de grosseria e o seu riso é francamente sedutor. No que respeita à conversação é um deleite. A sua informação é vasta, a sua experiência abrangente, a sua leitura, em pelo menos três línguas, não tem praticamente limites. Ela tem perspicácia e humor também e uma sinceridade convincente. De que fala? De arte, literatura, ciência, economia, viagens, filosofia, de homens e de mulheres. Pintura, poesia, dramaturgia, personalidades – o melhor assunto para conversa e tudo do ponto de vista de alguém que olha em frente para a revolução. Ela tem a percepção do interlocutor e o dom da expressão sucinta. É simples e não violenta. É afirmativa sem truculência. É gentil e até, por vezes, terna. Toda a sua personalidade vibra com um fervor contagioso. É uma mulher que acredita na sua causa e sente-a com uma intensidade concentrada. É o padrão com que mede todos os valores. Não vê no mundo mais nada que não seja o que deve ser remodelado em qualquer forma próxima do seu desejo profundo. E o que é esse desejo? Liberdade – liberdade absoluta, incondicional, não agressiva. Isso é Anarquia... [...]
Esta pequena mulher nega a lei, mas não a invoca. Vive com outro homem à margem do casamento legal; mas não exige que a considerem respeitável. Vive livre e está disposta a pagar o preço da deturpação, da injúria, da pobreza, da perseguição. E, entre tudo isto, é serena. Está segura da sua sanidade num mundo louco.»
William Marion Reedy, 1908
«I Want Freedom, the Right to Self-Expression, Everybody's Right to Beautiful Radiant Things» Emma Goldman
«Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony» Emma Goldman
«Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. »
Emma Goldman, in "Marriage and Love" in Anarchism and Other Essays (1911)
Emma Goldman (27 de Junho, 1869 – 14 de Maio, 1940) foi uma anarquista de origem lituana que ficou conhecida pelos seus textos e discursos feministas e pelos seus testemunhos acerca da Revolução Russa. Após emigrar para os Estados Unidos em 1886, é expulsa em 1919 em razão da sua intensa atividade política. Volta então para a Rússia, mas volta a abandonar o país por discordar do rumo autoritário tomado pelo governo bolchevique. Viveu em vários países, participou da guerra civil espanhola e veio a falecer no Canadá. Emma Goldman é, até hoje, a anarquista mais famosa da história dos Estados Unidos, país no qual viveu a maior parte de sua vida, mesmo se comparada com os homens anarquistas.
É dela a famosa frase: "Se não posso dançar, esta não é minha revolução", que define de maneira simples a idéia anarquista de liberdade.
É dela a famosa frase: "Se não posso dançar, esta não é minha revolução", que define de maneira simples a idéia anarquista de liberdade.
Com 17 anos Emma Goldman emigrou com sua irmã mais velha, Helene, para Rochester, Nova Iorque, para morar com sua irmã, Lena. Lá trabalhou muitos anos na indústria têxtil e em 1887 casou-se com um colega de trabalho, Jacob Kersner.
O enforcamento de quatro anarquistas depois da Revolta de Haymarket levou Goldman à militância e a conhecer outra proeminente figura do anarca-feminismo, Voltairine de Cleyre. Com vinte anos ela torna-se uma revolucionária. Abriu mão de seu casamento e família, viajou para New Haven, CT, e depois para a cidade de Nova Iorque.
Goldman e Kersner mantiveram-se legalmente casados garantindo a ela sua cidadania estado unidense.
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman
http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/Goldman/
http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/Goldman/links.html
Citações de Emma Goldman
• A society gets all the criminals it deserves.
• After all, that is what laws are for, to be made and unmade.
• All wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight and therefore induce the young manhood of the whole world to do the fighting for them.
• Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man.
• Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.
• Corruption of politics has nothing to do with the morals, or the laxity of morals, of various political personalities. Its cause is altogether a material one.
• Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
• Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.
• Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass.
• Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.
• How long would authority and private property exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen.
• I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.
• Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds. They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
Variant: Idealists...foolish enough to throw caution to the winds...have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.
• If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.
• I may be arrested, I may be tried and thrown in jail, but I will never be silent. I will never acquiesce or submit to authority, nor will I make peace with a system that degrades women to a mere incubator. I now and here declare war upon this system and will not rest until a path has been cleared for a free motherhood and a healthy, joyous and happy childhood.
• If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
• In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, woman's premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, "until death doth part."
• In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.
• It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent, the other is grafted on.
• It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice, which drives the political offender to act.
• It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.
• "It is significant that whenever the public mind is to be diverted from great social wrong, a crusade is inaugurated against indecency."
• Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one's self-respect. For jealous people, like dope-fiends, stoop to the lowest level and in the end inspire only disgust and loathing.
• Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.
• Methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim.
• No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
• No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
o Variant: No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
• No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution... Revolution is but thought carried into action.
• On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.
• Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested — for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day.
• Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.
• Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.
• Public school — where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression.
• Rather would I have the love songs of romantic ages, rather Don Juan and Madame Venus, rather an elopement by ladder and rope on a moonlight night, followed by the father's curse, mother's moans, and the moral comments of neighbors, than correctness and propriety measured by yardsticks.
• Resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal.
• Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.
• Social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass.
• The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.
• The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, with the result that peace is maintained.
• The higher mental development of woman, the less possible it is for her to meet a congenial male who will see in her, not only sex, but also the human being, the friend, the comrade and strong individuality, who cannot and ought not lose a single trait of her character.
• The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.
• The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land.
• The majority cannot reason; it has no judgement. It has always placed its destiny in the hands of others; it has followed its leaders even into destruction. The mass has always opposed, condemned, and hounded the innovator, the pioneer of a new truth.
• The majority cares little for ideals and integrity. What it craves is display.
• The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.
• The most violent element in society is ignorance.
• The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather, Understand one another.
• The people are urged to be patriotic ... by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegiance to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister.
• The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.
• The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.
• The powers know that the people at large are like children whose despair, sorrow, and tears can be turned into joy with a little toy. ... An army and navy represents the people's toys.
• The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
• The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being.
• Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage: "Ye who enter here leave all hope behind."
• To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.
• We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all human beings, irrespective of race, color, or sex, are born with the equal right to share at the table of life.
• When we can't dream any longer we die.
• Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of women is responsible for prostitution.
Living My Life (1931)
• The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.
• At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal. (p. 56)
This incident was the source of a statement commonly attributed to Goldman that occurs in several variants:
If I can't dance, it's not my revolution!
If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution!
If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.
If I can't dance, it's not my revolution!
If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution!
If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.
• No sacrifice is lost for a great ideal! (p. 135)
• I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years past been working to undo the botched job your God has made. (p. 207)
• As to killing rulers, it depends entirely on the position of the ruler. If it is the Russian tsar, I most certainly believe in dispatching him to where he belongs. If the ruler is as ineffectual as an American president, it is hardly worth the effort. There are, however, some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry — the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth. (p. 207)
• America had declared war with Spain.... It did not require much political wisdom to see that America's concern was a matter of sugar and had nothing to do with humanitarian feelings. Of course there were plenty of credulous people, not only in the country at large, but even in liberal ranks, who believed in America's claim. I could not join them. I was sure that no one, be it individual or government, engaged in enslaving and exploiting at home, could have the integrity or the desire to free people in other lands. (p. 226)
• The people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs. (p. 304)
• Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions. (p. 402)
Fonte:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman
Fonte:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman
Emma Goldman
Parte 1
Parte 2
