Listening to their voices: a leaflet handed out during an initiative on 20th February 2022
We receive and publish a leaflet handed out during an initiative dedicated to Juan and anarchist prisoners that took place in Genoa on 20th February. The leaflet introduces an exhibition of texts written by our imprisoned comrades Juan Sorroche, Anna Beniamino, Alfredo Cospito, Monica Caballero, Francisco Solar, Ignacio and Luis Avaca and a collective text from anarchists locked up in the prison of Korydallos in Greece.
LISTENING TO THEIR VOICES
This initiative stems from the desire to clear the field of misunderstandings when talking about solidarity and the hypothesis that the latter, if understood inconsistently with intentions, can end up discrediting the paths taken by prisoners.
The idea of solidarity that anarchist prisoners in struggle intend and that emerges from their voices as can be seen from the texts shown here, is very clear: it is not the search for a generic solidarity, human or pietistic, which stems only from a feeling of empathy for the fact of being persecuted by the state, subjected to a despicable yoke of deprivation and daily violence, as indeed are the other people held in Italian prisons.
Here solidarity is intended as complicit and revolutionary, which shares with determination those words and deeds that are the expression of the tension towards the idea of a liberation of all individuals that continually puts itself back into play and is not limited to contingent or personal events.
This small exhibition contains texts and statements of anarchist prisoners from different parts of the world. Voices from inside that we want to bring out because for us they are the best examples of struggles carried out with dignity and courage.
In any progressive, conservative or democratic society, the anarchist ideal is repressed precisely because it is a sworn enemy of authority and because it represents a real threat as proved by the anti-anarchist campaign which prosecutors in many Italian cities have been making in recent years.
Our comrades are not innocent victims of repression: the tension against authority that inflames their hearts makes them sworn enemies of this society. Repression is inevitable for those who are really in conflict with it: in this clash, the state defends its strongholds and shatters any illusion of democratic justice.
This does not mean that this war cannot be fought; on the contrary, it is the war itself that gives meaning to a life that does not want to be made up of mere representations: the idea of freedom, from a beautiful and evanescent chimera, becomes concrete and tangible in all those single moments in which we take back the pleasure of conflict with this intolerable existent.
Our imprisoned comrades fight every day, putting everything they have, their bodies and their very existence, to act as a barricade against the impact of the violence that the state exerts against them: isolation, censorship, psychological and physical violence. They defend tooth and nail the idea and the flame they keep alive in their besieged hearts.
In the light of all this, how can the solidarity we wish to express be? Can we do less?
In our reality, which is an open-air prison, repression moves fast and does not give discounts: one of the weapons we consider effective in facing it is the awareness and dignity of one’s choice, taking care not to discredit the impetus of life that sustains the conflict by taking the hasty solutions that the state so magnanimously offers to get us out of trouble. Accepting compromises is a habit that creeps in slowly, slowly it can contaminate your whole life. For us, the meaning of a struggle, whatever its objective, lies in the totality of the journey.
This initiative is dedicated to all our anarchist comrades who, with lucidity and dignity, continue to struggle against this authoritarian society from behind the walls of the jails they are locked up in. May their courage and resoluteness inspire our paths out here.
