It was in early 1986 that I first encountered Ivan Shadr’s bronze sculpture of 1927 titled ‘The Cobblestone is a Weapon of the Proletariat.’ It was on the front page of a newspaper whose name I cannot remember now.
Some unknown Trotskyite, either a student or a lecturer at the Dumbara Campus of the University of Peradeniya, must have subscribed to a periodical published by one of the many shards of the Fourth International. This was probably in early 1985. I can’t remember the name of the paper, but I remember picking it up a few days after it was placed in the letter board along with what were probably less political missives from loved ones to students.
There must have been a name on it, but not one that belonged to any student or lecturer as far as I could tell. No one ever claimed those newspapers so they were mine for all intents and purposes. I read them and was duly informed about what was happening in the world. Battles. Ideological debates. Informed and well argued articles about capitalism, imperialism and class struggle. Things conspicuously absent in mainstream newspapers. It was an integral part of my undergraduate education.
I found the sculpture and the caption intriguing. I remember cutting it out and pinning it to one of the notice boards where such things were put up.
To me, at that age, it was all about ‘by any means necessary,’ although I didn’t think of those words which had been uttered by Malcolm X a couple of decades before. I knew enough to know about power differentials, especially with regard to the complement of weapons at the disposal of warring parties, especially when people take on the state or rather those who operate from the commanding heights of that preeminent coercive apparatus.
Yes, we know that Shadr (or Ivan Dmitriyevich Ivanov) became a full time propagandist and that revolutionary idealism was buried after Lenin died, in the name of the proletariat no less. That’s an aside though.
I’ve returned to cobblestones many times since then. I came to see them differently, This is why, almost twenty years later, I asked the following question: ‘Did you know that pavement stones are agitating to be turned into poetry that can be flung at the oppressor?’
And this afternoon, I found that some cobblestones had indeed been transformed into a poetic avatar. Around 50 people were standing at a street corner, protesting the attacks on Gaza. There was an old lady who said she came out whenever she could. She was holding a placard with the following legend attributed to Raji Sourani, a human rights lawyer in Gaza: ‘Like the olive trees we are here.’ Next to her was a young man. A poet, he said. His was a quote too, from the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: ‘Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.’
Coincidentally, a ‘memory’ popped up on Facebook. A poem. I had titled it, ‘A petition to stones.’
So let there be stones
beautiful ones
cut by hand or time
with edges that can wait
for moonquake and anarchy
those necessary preconditions
for bloomage and bleeding
mirrors that fracture desolate skies
and trigger
the eruption of rainbows,
stones gathered
from every stoning
that turned broken bodies
into words
to re-cleanse
our desecrated hearts.
A poem. A cobblestone, if you will. One day, perhaps, someone will polish its rough edges and make it beautiful. Then, it would be an act of resistance.
One thing was certain, to me at least. It was poetry and cobblestones that I saw in that street. I couldn’t help thinking that there was beautiful poetry being written, recited and listened to all over the world, at that very moment and is being written as I write now. Word-rain is falling like arrows on a thick blanket of lies. They reach a scarred earth that has not been abandoned by love’s primordial nutrients. The elements will resist all efforts to subvert life.
One thing is certain, to me at least. Those who drop bombs are not stone masons. When schools, hospitals and homes are bombed, the broken pieces of concrete don’t come out in neat and uniform sizes with edges perfectly polished so that interlocking is possible.
One thing is certain, to me at least. Each broken piece of concrete, each broken heart, every tear, every cry of anguish interrupted by fresh fears and sorrows, is a word. There are innumerable grains of dust, love, despair, indignation and hope waiting for poets and poetry.
One thing is certain, to me at least. Ivan Shadr sculpted a poet and it is a word that he is arming himself with.
People are writing beautiful poetry. And they are just not going to stop.
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www.malindawords.blogspot.com.
