Transcript

Sisters and Brothers, Comrades and Friends, those I know and those I do not know, all those who are my companions in humanity, I come to you with a considerable demand. You have asked me talk about the leadership we need now.  But what is “now” if not the name for history as catastrophe? Of systemic and structural violence?  

To live, we need to breathe, to be held and to hold, to love and be loved, to make kin and communities. Yes, to love and be loved. We too often forget that we are born helpless, and that this helplessness is not a weakness, but the reminder that interdependency is key to our survival. That interdependency is a source of joy rather than anguish, of comfort rather than despair.

We are made of so many entanglements…

We have been told not only that individualism is the highest step towards human progress, but that we should be suspicious of interdependency, and prepare ourselves to the fight for survival of the fittest.

This means war, nothing else. Indeed, we have been living in a time of endless war, of war against this, war against that, war, war, war. War has been normalized, naturalized. Is not then the word war more fitted to describe our world than peace? War against Indigenous peoples, against women and children in the Global South, against queer, against trans, against non-valid, against gays, war against animals, forests, rivers, seas, oceans. Capitalism is war; Racism is war. Their cries for war are loud and constant. Their laws of extraction and exhaustion impose the use of violence and force. And their wars are joined by patriarchy’s. In their world, treating bodies as waste, as surplus, as garbage, has been banalized.

None of this is natural, they are all the consequences of political choices. And as president, I am calling for other choices.

Against the permanent state of war, I urge you, I urge us, to fight for peace! “Peace?” I hear you saying. When was the last time we spoke of peace as something that is not exceptional, not being a short interlude between two wars, the result of an agreement on a piece of paper on which men who never showed an interest in peace affix their signatures? Peace for them is a word that speaks of naïveté and credulity.

But these are not times for indifference and neutrality. Sisters and Brothers, Comrades and Friends, it will not save us. Rather than celebrating wars in our textbooks, rather than filling our cities with statues of soldiers and generals, I invite us to learn from those who fought for justice and never abandoned their aspiration to humanize the world.

For centuries, communities have imagined ways of protecting those who are vulnerable and fragilized by racism and sexism, ways of protecting land, animals, plants, and knowledge from avid and avaricious hands. In doing so, they left us a vast archive, of poems, songs, arts, manifestos, practices, and knowledge. There were times their messages needed to be invisible to those in power, but their richness and abundance remain impressive: forging signs indicating routes of freedom and shelters, keeping narratives of resistance in memories, weaving messages in hair and on land, building sanctuaries and refuges, forging false papers, learning to avoid the traps of surveillance, teaching how to be underground, to lie to power and to say truth to power, constructing schools where we learn collectively, teaching the power of medical plants, the  diversity of recipes. Though we were told that women, children, Indigenous peoples, trans, queer, migrants, refugees, poor, had nothing to contribute to “civilization,” we know it is a lie.

We know that what is called wealth is nothing else than the result of exploitation and devastation. Our ancestors, who are all the oppressed around the world, never, ever, renounce the dream that one day, they will be free.

Despite the war waged against them, they said, “One day, we will be free! Yes, one day we will be free!”

It is this unwavering love of freedom and equality that must be our song.

Sisters and Brothers, Comrades and Friends, we need to learn from this archive and to exercise our imagination. We need to free ourselves from the shackles of what has been made normal and natural—violence and war—and which threatens the lives of many for the wealth of a few. We need to free our spirits, our bodies, our senses to imagine peace, collectively. Let us unlearn to learn so that we learn again. Let us restore the full meaning of touch, of holding the hand of a stranger.

Let us abolish prisons!

Let us abolish patriarchy!

Let us abolish capitalism!

Let us abolish racism!

End war!

This is not a naïve, stupid, pollyannish call! Peace is not easy. Imagining peace, fighting for peace, is a hard job. It requires collective and horizontal leadership.

Let us cultivate revolutionary love, radical feminist love. There is joy in collective struggle. There is joy in restorative justice. Let us imagine a utopia, one that gives us the force to contest, that is an invitation to emancipatory dreams.

One day we will be free!

Everywhere voices are rising, full of hope and meanings. Let us imagine a space, open and terrestrial, a soaring timeframe. Let us claim the right to be unfinished and contradictory. Let us creatively redefine the writing of our multiple stories. Let us create a permanent state of curiosity. Let us keep in memory the strength, courage, hope, force and energy that have always been there. 

Let us remember the future.

“To live, we need to breathe, to be held and to hold, to love and be loved, to make kin and communities. Yes, to love and be loved.”

In a rousing address to “sisters and brothers, comrades and friends,” Vergès offers a call for peace, love, and joy as pillars in the long struggle towards freedom. Vergès reclaims these traits, articulating their capacity for anti-racist and queer liberation.

Françoise Vergès loves green mangoes with chili and lime, to cook for friends, to swim, to sew, to read, to danse and go to protest marches. She likes hot weather. She grew up in Reunion Island, Indian Ocean, and is forever grateful to have been educated by anticolonial feminist activist parents. She speaks Creole. She is an antiracist decolonial feminist who admires, and is inspired by, the struggles, voices, and strength of Black, Indigenous and brown women.  

ASL Interpretation