Ethiopia's Harar casts spell

Taken from Globalpost.com Article:

Ethiopia's Harar casts spell
Ancient walled city bewitches with mix of Arab, African cultures, riot of colors, scents and spices.
By Mercedes Sayagues — Special to GlobalPost
Published: February 8, 2010 08:23 ET

HARAR, Ethiopia — In his teens, Arthur Rimbaud wrote a hundred pages of perfect poems and fascinated Paris with his talent and debauchery. In 1874, aged 20, he stopped writing.

Arthur Rimbaud French Cultural Center in Djibouti
Credit: Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa

Wanderlust took him to East Africa, where he became a coffee trader, an arms dealer, a photographer and an explorer. For the last 10 years of his life, home was in the walled city of Harar, in eastern Ethiopia.
The only portraits of Rimbaud in Harar — three self-portraits taken with a self-timer — show a gaunt man in loose local clothes, gazing stonily into the camera.
The haunting images are displayed at the Arthur Rimbaud Cultural Center, the exquisitely renovated 100-year-old mansion of an Indian merchant in the midst of Harar’s maze of alleys, along a collection of wonderful 19th century photographs of the town where, perhaps, the poet found peace.
"His was a tormented soul and Harar, a drug for his pain,” says museum curator Shekib Ahmed.
Harar must have blown Rimbaud’s senses away. It still bewitches travelers with a riot of color, scents and unique lifestyles, where Islam meets Christianity, Arabia and Asia join Africa, and trade between regions and cultures flourished over 1,000 years of uninterrupted urban life.
Around 1550, Harar's ruler, Emir Nur ibn al-Mujahid, built the ramparts, known as Jegol, with five gates that are still standing today. The Jegol has kept Harar intact and authentic while the modern city grew north and west. Some 20,000 Hadaris live in the 118 acres within the Jegol.
Trade and religion shape Harar’s life. Ethiopian Muslims consider it the fourth most sacred Islamic city, with 80 mosques and 200 holy graves of saints.
It was closed to non-Muslims until, in 1855, the British explorer Richard Burton, a fluent Arabic speaker, donned Arab dress and snuck into the city for 10 days. He left a lively account of his trip.
For centuries, trade in incense, livestock, Arabica coffee, basil and baskets fed the bustling markets at each of the five gates.
Harar’s trading power declined after the French built the Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway bypassing Harar’s mountain range. The military regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam (1974-1991) repressed Harari culture, language and trade. The democratic regime returned autonomy to Harar, and it is thriving again.
Four of the gate markets still trade briskly. Oromo peasants trek daily into town, their donkey taxis laden with firewood, sugar cane, potatoes and all kinds of goods smuggled from neighboring lawless Somalia.
These days, the main cash crop around Harar is khat (pronounced “chat”), a mild stimulant. Chewing the tender leaves of the khat bush is popular, and legal, in most of East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Harar khat is considered top quality and traded up to the Red Sea.
The best khat is freshly picked at dawn and must be consumed within 48 hours. Early morning, Harar’s khat markets are abuzz, and the buzz remains in people long after the bundles of leaves are sold.
This is a city on narcotics. Tailors, coffee roasters and jewellers work with khat bunches by their sides, chewing away. In the evenings, families gather in the elaborate lounges of their homes to chew khat, sip ginger tea and coffee, and chat for hours.
The sad side of khat is addiction: old and young men, teeth stained green and rotten to the point they can’t chew any more and must mash the leaves in a wooden pot. They beg, hallucinate and sleep on the streets. Harar is full of crazies, tormented by mouth cancer and psychosis.
“Chewing khat is not bad until khat starts chewing your mind,” say Birinyam Mengistu.
Tall and dreadlocked, Mengistu works as a tourist guide. He has travelled to Ethiopia’s main cities but would not live anywhere other than Harar.
“Where else can you find hyenas roaming the streets at night?” he asks. “If only they would eat plastic bags and clean up the city.”
Hyenas have a special place in Harar mythology. Besides garbage, they get rid of bad spirits or djinns and bring good luck.
Every evening at Argo Beri gate, a man feeds scraps of donkey and camel meat to a pack of 20-30 wild hyenas. He does it with his hands, or a 30-centimeter-long twig, or directly from his mouth.
The job passes from father to son among one Harari family. The nightly feeding is a tourist attraction. Once fed, the hyenas scavenge the streets. They don’t attack humans and humans don’t mind them.
Before dawn the hyenas return to the bush where they live, nine miles away. The muezzin calls out for first prayers. The markets come to life.
Women in typical Harari and Oromo dress — red, purple and gold robes over trousers and headscarves — sidle among narrow alleys, high white-washed walls and colorful portals in turquoise and green, blue, yellow, pink and grey.
In April 1891, with cancer gnawing his leg, Rimbaud sought care in France. His leg was amputated in Marseille but he longed for Harar and planned to return. His last letter, dictated from his deathbed and addressed to the Messageries Maritimes, says: “Kindly inform me when I will be taken aboard the ship.” He died on Nov. 10, aged 37.
Fittingly, his best known poem is "The Drunken Boat."
A blown up facsimile of the handwritten poem hangs at the museum in Harar. Through the windows, one sees the alleys, the people and the khat-growing countryside Rimbaud loved so much.

Do you sleep, are you exiled in those bottomless nights,
Million golden birds, O Life Force of the future? —
But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter:
Sharp love has swollen me up with heady langours.
O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!
If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the
Black cold pool where into the scented twilight
A child squatting full of sadness, launches
A boat as fragile as a butterfly in May.
I can no more, bathed in your langours, O waves,
Sail in the wake of the carriers of cottons,
Nor undergo the pride of the flags and pennants,
Nor pull past the horrible eyes of the hulks.

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Rimbaud: Teenage Dirtbag by Edmund White

Taken from Guardian.co.uk Article:

Teenage dirtbag
He smashed the china, soiled the sheets, sunbathed nude and was either drunk or stoned - Arthur Rimbaud was an impossible house guest, but he liberated the true poet in his lover Verlaine, writes Edmund White

Arthur Rimbaud, one of the most revolutionary poets of 19th-century France, grew up in a small town, Charleville, in the north-east corner of the country near the Belgian border. As a child he'd been obedient to his strict mother (his father was a soldier who'd vanished after rapidly siring four children) and he'd been the best student in the region, excelling in the classics and French. But Rimbaud's real interest was poetry. He haunted the local bookstore and read all the latest poetry coming out of Paris. So attracted was Rimbaud to the capital that he ran away from home, arrived in Paris on 30 August 1870 - and was instantly arrested for not paying the correct fare on his train ticket. He was put in prison, and only his favourite teacher from back home was able to get him out. Despite this ignominious beginning, Rimbaud - who was 16 going on 17 - made several other attempts to reach the capital, even though the Prussians had invaded and Paris had declared itself a commune between 26 March and 30 May 1871.

The penniless and friendless Rimbaud could never survive for long away from home during these chaotic times. But in the early autumn in 1871 he fired off a letter to Paul Verlaine, his favourite poet. Without waiting for a response, Rimbaud sent off a few more poems to Verlaine two days later. Then came the fateful response from Paris: "Come, dear great soul, we call you, we await you." Verlaine enclosed the train fare.

Verlaine was a homicidal alcoholic. He was also an extremely gentle, sensitive poet with a distinctive tone and a remarkable musicality. These two aspects of his character had set up a pitched battle over his anguished destiny; he would always be susceptible to one impulse or the other. Like Rimbaud, Verlaine had been a brilliant student in classical languages and written dazzling verses in Latin. But there the resemblance ended. Verlaine was a lazy, always dirty boy who barely squeaked by in most of his classes. Whereas Rimbaud was striking if strange in his looks, Verlaine was indisputably ugly, resembling the popular idea of Socrates while possessing none of the philosopher's equanimity. His skull was too large, his face pushed in, his eyes oblique, his pug nose too small and tipped up. He'd lost most of his hair at an early age and compensated for it by growing sparse, wispy whiskers. The mother of Verlaine's best friend said after meeting him, "My God, your friend made me think of an orangutan escaped from the zoo!"

Whereas Rimbaud seems to have shown no erotic interest in his own sex before meeting Verlaine, the older poet was notorious at school for groping his classmates. After high school, Verlaine enrolled as a law student in Paris but seldom attended classes. He spent most of his time reading poetry old and new and getting drunk on absinthe.

Verlaine drank so much that he soon succumbed to a special form of crazy and violent alcoholism called absinthisme. Eventually he withdrew from law school and began working a boondoggle his parents had found for him at the city hall, where he showed up at 10 in the morning, took a two-hour sodden lunch, lurched back to the office for an hour or two of shuffling papers, and was ready for aperitifs at the Café de Gaz by five. Notwithstanding his habits, Verlaine remained intensely interested in the arts in general and in poetry in particular. He became the art critic for one journal and defended Baudelaire in print, announcing - in the spirit of Art for Art's Sake - that "the goal of poetry is the Beautiful and the Beautiful alone without any reference to the Useful, the True or the Just". By the mid-1860s Verlaine was one of the 37 Parnassians in good standing and published from time to time in their poetry journal. His work was largely ignored by the general public, but was acclaimed over the next few years by fellow poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Victor Hugo. Curiously, Verlaine, who would be known in his life as a brutal husband and an impious wretch, as a writer became celebrated as the greatest Catholic poet in the French language (for his collection Wisdom), and as an ardent defender of married bliss (The Good Song). Verlaine was full of contradictions - by turns wildly exalted and deeply depressed, leading one friend to remark that he was both a clown and an undertaker.

In the autumn of 1869 he met a 16-year-old girl, Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville, to give her full (and probably invented) poetic name. She was prettily chubby in the approved fashion of the day, and painfully innocent. She saw Verlaine two or three times at a literary salon and a musical evening before he noticed her. By the time they spoke she was used to his ugliness and greeted him with a friendly smile, and he was charmed by her freshness and kindness. She noticed how gentle and radiant he became around her. As she later recalled, "At that moment he ceased to be ugly, and I thought of that pretty fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast, where love transforms the Beast into Prince Charming."

Quite sensibly, Mathilde's father did not want his daughter even to consider the suit of a much older man. He urged her to wait two years, but she was smitten. By carefully regulating his excesses, Verlaine managed to woo and win Mathilde. They lived with her parents in Montmartre and soon enough had a little boy. But this paradise of sobriety and domesticity was interrupted when Rimbaud arrived.

On 24 September 1871, Rimbaud took the train from Charleville to Paris - less than a month before his 17th birthday. All he had with him were his manuscripts ("The Drunken Boat" taking pride of place) and a change of clothes. No one was there to greet him at the station in Paris. Verlaine kept running back and forth between the Gare du Nord and the nearby Gare de L'Est, accompanied by a young comic poet named Charles Cros. At last Verlaine and Cros gave up and went back to Montmartre and Mathilde's parents' house, a 15-minute walk away. There in the small cosseted salon they found the young, belligerent poet with his sunburned face and large hands, his piercing blue eyes, unsmiling mouth, uttering monosyllables in his heavy Ardennes accent.

Twelve years later Verlaine would recall, "The man was tall, well built, almost athletic, with the perfectly oval face of an angel in exile, with unruly light chestnut hair and eyes of a disquieting blue." Elsewhere Verlaine wrote: "He had a real baby's head, plump and fresh on top of a big bony body with the awkwardness of an adolescent who has grown too quickly."

Mathilde and her mother snobbishly ascribed the brutishness to countrified naivety. They were able to put the boy up for the moment only because Monsieur Mauté was away on a hunting party. When Monsieur Mauté returned, young Rimbaud would have to be hidden away as someone unsuitable for respectable company.

Rimbaud was an impossible guest. He took to nude sunbathing just outside the house. He turned his room into a squalid den. He mutilated an heirloom crucifix. He was proud of the lice infesting his long mane and even pretended he was encouraging the vermin to jump on to passers-by. Verlaine was delighted with Rimbaud's antisocial antics, which recalled to him his own younger excesses before his marriage. Verlaine introduced Rimbaud to his friends in the cafés where they congregated regularly. After the first encounter, one of Verlaine's friends, Léon Valade, wrote the next day to an absent member, "You missed a great deal by not being there. A most daring poet not yet 18 was introduced by Paul Verlaine, his inventor and in fact his John the Baptist. Big hands, big feet, a wholly babyish face like a child of 13, deep blue eyes! Such is this boy, whose character is more antisocial than timid and whose imagination combines great powers with unheard-of corruption and who has fascinated and terrified all our friends."

The modern reader can't help but smile at the readiness of Parisians of that epoch to be "terrified" by "unheard-of corruption". In fact, these poets would soon form the core group of the Decadents (a "school" that took its name from a line by Verlaine: "I am the Empire at the end of its decadence"). Valade concluded by calling Rimbaud "Satan in the midst of the doctors", as opposed to Christ among the rabbis at the temple. When one of the Goncourt brothers shook Rimbaud's hand, he claimed he felt as if he were touching the most notorious murderer of the day.

When Monsieur Mauté was due to return, Charles Cros took the youngster in briefly - until Rimbaud used as toilet paper a magazine in which Cros had just published some poems. Next the Parnassian poet Théodore de Banville offered to take in the young poet and lodge him in the maid's room above his apartment at 10, rue de Buci - just a few steps from the heart of Left Bank Paris, St Germain-de-Prés. His first night in Banville's maid's room, he stood in the illuminated window stark naked and threw down his lice-laden clothes into the street. Within a week Banville had asked the miscreant to leave, but only after Rimbaud had smashed the china in his room, soiled the bed sheets with his muddy boots and sold some of the furniture.

Within a few short weeks after his arrival he was no longer being described as an angel or a devil but as an obnoxious boor. The only person who couldn't see his faults - or who delighted in them - was Verlaine. In the 14 months since he'd married, Verlaine had written no new poetry, though he had successfully curbed the excesses of his drinking. Now Rimbaud was encouraging him to live like a savage and stay drunk - and to write like the seer he was destined to be. Moreover, Rimbaud represented Verlaine's sexual ideal, a dominant adolescent who appeared to be always available erotically. Soon enough Verlaine had given up his respectable clothes and returned to his slouch hat and dirty muffler, and although he and Rimbaud lived like beggars and Rimbaud was constantly being moved from one guest room to another, together the two managed to spend considerable sums of money. Rimbaud was so belligerent that the two lovers found their circle shrinking - especially since they made no secret of their "vice". They collaborated on a sonnet celebrating the asshole ("Sonnet du trou du cul") - Verlaine wrote the first eight lines and Rimbaud the last six.

Rimbaud became still more difficult in November, when, according to a childhood friend, he tried hashish for the first time. Between hash and absinthe he was well under way in his long, immense and systematic disordering of all the senses, a project he was deliberately cultivating in the name of art.

On 21 October 1871, Verlaine's son Georges was born. The birth seemed only to enrage Verlaine all the more. Mathilde later claimed that Verlaine threatened her life every day between October 1871 and January 1872. One day in January, after Mathilde refused to give Verlaine money for drink, he seized the three-month-old Georges and flung him against the wall. And then he started to choke his wife.

Until now, Mathilde had been successfully concealing her husband's brutality from her parents, even though they were all living under the same roof. But now they could see for themselves the marks on their daughter's throat and, in a flood of tears, she confessed all the horrors visited on her since Rimbaud's arrival four months earlier. Perhaps already foreseeing a separation (divorce would not become legal until 1884), Monsieur Mauté asked a doctor to examine the bruises and to sign a document attesting to what she had suffered. Mauté also decided that the couple must be separated and sent Mathilde and the baby off to a hiding place in Périgueux, where his family lived.

Verlaine decided he needed time to salvage his marriage. He begged Rimbaud to leave town and return to his mother in the Ardennes. Rimbaud saw himself as an archangel descended to earth to liberate Verlaine from his bourgeois temptations as a human being and the tendencies towards prettiness in his poetry. It was Rimbaud who made Verlaine reread the technically brilliant poems of Musset and Leconte de Lisle. It was Rimbaud who convinced him to write in 10-syllable lines (instead of the flowing, automatically eloquent 12 syllables of French tradition or the eight syllables of ballads). And it was Rimbaud who tried to banish human anecdotes, realistic sketches and sentimental portraits from Verlaine's work.

Something of the tenor of their relationship can be deduced from "Vagabonds", one of the prose poems included in Illuminations. In it, Verlaine, "the pitiful brother" (but a paragraph later "the satanic doctor"), complains that Rimbaud's peculiar blend of bad luck and innocence has isolated them and led them into poverty and exile. The "poor brother", with his mouth rotten and his eyes starting out of his head, wakes up every night shouting reproaches - his "dream of idiotic grief" - which prompts the offended, misunderstood Rimbaud to think: "Actually in all innocence I had undertaken to return him to his original state of Child of the Sun - and we kept wandering, nourished only by spring water and dry biscuit, as I urgently tried to find the place and the formula."

What was this place and formula Rimbaud was so eager to discover? It undoubtedly had to do with a utopian future that would exclude the deadening effects of conventionality and would usher in a whole new era of love. Again and again he refers to "the new harmony", "the new love" and "the new men". He calls for a "departure" towards "the new affection". Historically, we have entered an era, Rimbaud tells us, that is one of both murderous and pitiless assassins, and of hashish-smokers - le temps des Assassins. (The original "assassins" were a fierce Muslim band of hashish-smokers and bandits who flourished from the eighth to the 14th centuries.) Rimbaud could certainly be as pitiless as a real assassin. He once had Verlaine play a "game" in which Verlaine would stretch out his hand on the table and Rimbaud would stab at his spread fingers. Verlaine thought the point of the game was to show that he wouldn't flinch, that he trusted Rimbaud. But Rimbaud quite simply stabbed him in the wrist.

By the beginning of March 1872, just six months after his arrival in Paris and into Verlaine's life, Rimbaud was heading home to his mother. He knew that he would be back with the older man as soon as Verlaine had straightened out his marriage. Verlaine also knew that the retreat was only temporary. Eventually Mathilde returned to Paris with their son, and for a while everything seemed back on an even keel. Verlaine was even looking for a job again. But soon he was writing Rimbaud passionate letters, asking for instructions about how they would live together.

Edmund White
The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009
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Rimbaud Museum / Musee Rimbaud

Rimbaud Museum

Opening hours:
Tuesday-Sunday from  10:00 to 12:00    from 14:00 to 18:00 

Entrance Fee:Free entry for students / children with ID / first Sundays of the month
Full tariff € 4 (combined Museum of Rimbaud and the Ardenne entry)
Reduced tariff  2 €

Location:
Quai Arthur Rimbaud, Vieux Moulin, 08000 Charleville-Mézière
Tel.: +(33) 3 24 32 44 65
Fax: +(33) 3 24 32 44 69

Musee Rimbaud Official Site

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French booksellers discover first adult Rimbaud picture

Taken from Telegraph.co.uk article:

French booksellers discover first adult Rimbaud picture
Two French booksellers have discovered the only clear image of the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud as an adult, after stumbling across it at a flea market.
Henry Samuel in Paris
Published: 6:35PM BST 15 Apr 2010

Arthur Rimbaud
The image of Arthur Rimbaud in the
newly discovered photograph.
Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Until now the author of Le Bateau Ivre and Illuminations has been best remembered as an angelic adolescent as all other portraits of him were blurred or silhouettes.
But Jacques Desse and Alban Causse made their extraordinary find when they came across a black and white photo taken circa 1880 among postcards and bric-a-brac in a market "somewhere in France".
The photo showed a group of mustachioed bourgeois Frenchmen and one woman in white and was signed Hotel de l'Univers on the back. Rimbaud enthusiasts would know this was the hotel in Aden, Abyssinia, where Rimbaud spent the last years of his life before dying of cancer aged 37.
The self-proclaimed literary "bounty hunters" were convinced the man staring defiantly at the camera was the flamboyant and libertine poet himself.
They showed the photo, for which they paid a "reasonable sum", to a leading Rimbaud expert who was putting together a book of previously unseen posthumous letters from the poet's family and entourage. Jean-Jacques Lefrère confirmed the photo was indeed of Rimbaud, along with his wife and friends.
It is exhibited at the Paris Old books fair in the Grand Palais, which opened yesterday.
Rimbaud, born in 1854, wrote all his most famous poems from his teens until the age of 21, and was described by Victor Hugo as "an infant Shakespeare".
As a youth, he had an affair with Paul Verlaine, another great French poet and a married man, who tried to shoot him during a dispute.
Rimbaud left Europe for Abyssinia where he became an arms and gold trader.
He died in Marseille in 1891.
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The "Brown Rimbaud"

Taken from Bulatlat.com article:

The "Brown Rimbaud"

The tenth of December is marked as International Human Rights Day. The first International Human Rights Day fell on December 10, 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declares all people to be free and to have equal rights and dignity and enumerates all human rights, was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly.
By Alexander Martin Remollin, Bulatlat.com

Eman Lacaba, poet and warrior

The tenth of December is marked as International Human Rights Day. The first International Human Rights Day fell on December 10, 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declares all people to be free and to have equal rights and dignity and enumerates all human rights, was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly.

On International Human Rights Day, it is fitting to remember the late Filipino writer and revolutionary Emmanuel Agapito "Eman" Lacaba. He was born on the very day the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly. He lost his life at the height of martial law--a victim of a human rights violation.

Eman Lacaba was born and raised in Pateros. In an essay he wrote as a high school student, "Personal Statement of Emmanuel Lacaba", which his brother Jose, more popularly known as Pete, believes was written in connection with his application for an American Field Service (AFS) scholarship, he described his family thus: "Our family is neither rich nor very poor. At least we have enough to live on."

Enfant Terrible

Eman Lacaba has often been compared to the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, a fact he himself alluded to in one of his poems, "Open Letters to Filipino Artists", where he told of his being called "the brown Rimbaud." The comparison stems from the fact that he was, like Rimbaud, an enfant terrible, a literary virtuoso at a very young age--he started writing poetry at 14—and did so like a master even then. The similarity between them became all the more striking when he lost his life without reaching his fortieth year--just like Rimbaud.

He began to display vast and varied talents at a very young age. He learned to read early and was a very voracious reader before he was in high school—reading everything, as he said, "from the Bible to Mad, from newspapers to encyclopedias, from physics to law and business books, from mathematics to poetry." From first grade to his last year in high school, he was at the top of his class. A brilliant and prolific writer at a young age, he became editor-in-chief of the high school paper. He was also a versatile athlete; he
played basketball, soccer, and was into track and field. He was an excellent actor on the stage. In recognition of his leadership skills, his schoolmates gave him many of the top positions in school organizations--he was class president from fifth grade to his last year in high school, he became president of the High School Drama Club and the High School Student Council.

He received almost all of his pre-university education from the Pasig Catholic College. While still a student of this school, he applied for and received an AFS scholarship, through which he got to spend an entire school year in the United States.

After high school, he had the chance to choose among no less than three scholarships from the University of the Philippines (UP), the Ateneo de Manila University, and De la Salle University. He chose the Manuel de Leon scholarship at the Ateneo de Manila University, where he took a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities, and maintained it until he completed his course. This, despite the fact that he spent much of his time away from the classroom, writing or doing research.

Writer-Activist

If there is something Eman Lacaba is most noted for, it is for having been a writer-activist. He was a poet, essayist, playwright, fictionist, and scriptwriter who joined the protest movement in his student days and later lost his life as an armed revolutionary.

It was at the Ateneo that he began to be involved in social and political causes. He was part of a group which fought for the Filipinization of the university administration, which was then largely American-led, and the use of Filipino as medium of instruction. His group also called on their schoolmates to immerse themselves in the issues which had begun to galvanize their fellow students at UP.

In his early days as an activist, his poetry began to show signs of the road he was to take for the rest of his life, with his increasingly frequent use of the image of Icarus, a Greek mythological character who burned his wings, fell to the sea, and died because he flew too close to the sun--an often-used symbol for those who perish in the pursuit of lofty causes.

He also joined Panday Sining, the cultural arm of the militant Kabataang Makabayan, and is believed to have participated in the First Quarter Storm.

In his college days he frequently commuted between the Bohemian life and activism. It was only after college that he would turn his back on the former.

Before he graduated from college, he won a major literary award for Punch and Judas, a short novel depicting the transformation of an intellectual, Felipe "Philip" Angeles, from Bohemian to activist.

After college, he taught Rizal's Life and Works at UP and got involved in the labor movement. He also became a member of the militant writers' group Panulat para sa Kaunlaran ng Sambayanan. Just two months before the declaration of martial law, he was among a number of picketers at a small factory in Pasig who faced threats and truncheons from the police while the strike was being dispersed. He was arrested and briefly incarcerated.

After that, he became active on the stage, writing and acting in plays. He also assisted in film productions, and among his compiled writings are a number of unfinished film storylines. He wrote the lyrics for the theme song of the Lino Brocka-directed movie Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang, which takes potshots at the hypocrisy of society.

In 1975 he set out for Mindanao to cast his lot with the armed revolutionary movement, to become a "people's warrior", as he later called himself in a poem.

Such was his passion for writing that he wrote even while leading the life of a revolutionary guerilla. It was in the hills, in fact, that he wrote one of the poems he is best remembered for, "Open Letters to Filipino Artists", where he wrote of the armed revolutionary movement thus: "We are tribeless and all tribes are ours./We are homeless and all homes are ours./We are nameless and all names are ours./To the fascists we are the faceless enemy/Who come like thieves in the night, angels of death:/The ever moving, shining, secret eye of the storm."

Death of a People's Warrior

At dawn sometime in March 1976, death came for Eman Lacaba. At this time he was set to go back shortly to the city for a new assignment that would have used his writing skills, and had even agreed to write a script for Lino Brocka once he got back there.

It was not yet six in the morning. Eman and three other companions were having breakfast in a peasant's hut. Outside the house were their wet clothes and shoes, left there to dry.

Elements of an armed team made up of Philippine Constabulary (PC) men and members of the Civilian Home Defense Front (CHDF) were with a certain Martin, a member of Eman's unit who had earlier been captured by the military. They happened to pass by the house where Eman and his companions were having breakfast. Martin recognized the clothes and shoes and pointed out the house to the PC-CHDF team, who immediately opened fire without calling on the occupants to surrender. After a brief gunfight, two of the hut's occupants were killed including the leader of Eman's group, while Eman and Estrieta, a pregnant teenager, were wounded.

The PC-CHDF team headed for Tagum with Eman and Estrieta, with villagers carrying the corpses. However, a few kilometers from the village, the sergeant of the PC-CHDF team decided not to bring back anyone alive. Estrieta was the first to go. The sergeant then handed a .45 to Martin and ordered him to shoot Eman. He did not want to, but in the end Eman himself said to him, "Go ahead, finish me off." A bullet was fired through his mouth, crashing through the back of his skull. As he fell, another bullet was fired at his chest. He was 27. Bulatlat.com

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Jonatan Cerrada to play Rimbaud

Taken from Letssingit Article:

Jonatan Cerrada to play Rimbaud

The singer will be on stage of the Vingtième Théâtre in Paris in July, to play the part of Rimbaud in a musical. He also works on his third album, in Spanish.

Belgian singer Jonatan Cerrada will play the part of Arthur Rimbaud in a musical. By his side, Sophie Delmas (from the musical "L'Ombre D'Un Géant"), Pablo Villafranca (he sang "La Peine Maximum" from the musical "Les Dix Commandements") & Lucie Bernardoni (runner-up from Star Academy 4).

The lyrics are written by Arnaud Kerane & Richard Charest, the latter also composed the music.

The musical is about the story of the poet, from Charleville to Paris & from Brussels to London.

The musical will be played on July 20, 21 & 22 at Paris' Vingtième Théâtre.

Jonatan was also on stage on June 2 at Liège's Forum (Belgium) & is currently working on his third album, only in Spanish.

from ChartsinFrance site





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