
PADKOS NO 3
Welcome to the third serving of CLP’s “Padkos – food for the journey”. This one’s a CD of music, a collection that we’ve called “Out of this world” – and the attached PDF-file of song notes and lyrics are in the booklet that accompanies it.
We would like to make sure that all of our Padkos subscribers get their own CD – just make sure we have your postal address (email your details to padkos@churchland.co.za ), and we’ll start sending them to everyone straight away. You can also listen to (and download) the music from our website at:www.churchland.org.za.
In the introduction to the CD notes, we make the point that art expresses and feeds our human spirit on the journey we make struggling for justice. We selected the music on this CD as a companion to CLP’s earlier written piece: Finding our voice in the world.
While finalising the text of Finding our voice in the world, there was a discussion between the contributors about what we meant by locating our politics and praxis ‘at a distance’ from the world as it is. Surely we don’t want to give the idea that we find truth and beauty at some safe distance from the world that is lived by the poor?; so, “how much is a distance?”. In the end we thought perhaps it is simultaneously and paradoxically both zero and infinite:
- zero (in terms of the concreteness and particularity of actual struggles) because it’s right there/here where people make their lives ;
- infinite (for the politics/thinking) because really emancipatory possibilities can only come from a complete fundamental break from what exists/what’s known/what’s expected.
The point is not to imply that ‘struggle’ and its ‘politics’ are separate but to recognise that any emancipatory politics must attempt to hold this distance question in tension. Only by holding that tension (and refusing temptations to resolve it in a decision for one or other) do we properly affirm and strengthen humanity in life and in struggle. As the radical writer Arundhati Roy said in a speech entitled “Come September”: |