My personal revenge will be your children's right to schooling and to flowers.
My personal revenge will be this song bursting for you with no more fears.
My personal revenge will be to make you see the goodness in my people's eyes, implacable in combat always generous and firm in victory.
My personal revenge will be to greet you 'Good morning!' in streets with no beggars, when instead of locking you inside they say: 'Don't look so sad!' When you, the torturer, daren't lift your head.
My personal revenge will be to give you these hands you once ill-treated with all their tenderness intact.
Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy You can hear this song on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syszMKtCt5M It is published in bilingual text in Poets of the Nicaraguan Revolution, trans and ed. Dinah Livingstone (Katabasis 1993).
Song based on words by Tomás Borge addressed to his torturers when he was in prison during the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. After the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, Tomás became Interior Minister. He visited his torturers, shook hands and forgave them. With his active support, the Sandinistas abolished the death penalty, one of the ways in which Nicaragua became the ‘threat of a good example’ to President Reagan’s USA. Tomás Borge died on 30th April 2012. he was motivated not just by a desire to understand how the great conflict had arisen between Persia and Greece, a war of the worlds between Asia and Europe, he wanted to understand the human workings that under-pinned them and enabled one to triumph over the other. He was in no doubt about this: that what enabled a handful of small Greek states to defeat a great tyrant was their love of freedom; that collaboration was always stronger than compulsion; that democracy allows for the flourishing of the human spirit and creativity, which will always outwit the despot; that the hubris of the mighty is brought low by an ensnaring fate that works through the humble. These were the timeless lessons that Herodotus discovered and taught. In doing so, he reminded us of something which perhaps even Nietzsche overlooked – and which as a Classicist he should have known better – that there are no new values, nor is there a need for any: what is needed is clarity as to the values that have always made us truly human.
Song based on words by Tomás Borge addressed to his torturers when he was in prison during the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. After the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, Tomás became Interior Minister. He visited his torturers, shook hands and forgave them. With his active support, the Sandinistas abolished the death penalty, one of the ways in which Nicaragua became the 'threat of a good example' to President Reagan's USA. Tomás Borge died on 30th April 2012. You can hear this song on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syszMKtCt5M It is published in bilingual text in Poets of the Nicaraguan Revolution, trans and ed. Dinah Livingstone (Katabasis 1993).