Freedom

The need for freedom , you tell me, is vital
for the poor, the erstwhile downtrodden
who carry a burden of the past
on their backs as well a on the minds.
You came here to exploit
and sublimated your acts and deeds
under the blanket term:
"a civilizing mission".
Like a drug we swallowed the sugar-coated pill
and the sluggish laggards that we were,
we lay asleep for more than a century. The amnesia worked.
And now after one more century has elapsed,
racism, xenophobia still active, on one side a history of the past regimes
of high culture and imperialism,
on the other side a drunkenness of newly acquired taste for power,
it's a precarious balance between the need for peace and the hunger for a retribution.
The one-time winners talk about the need for the other
to forget the slavery of the past,
because the pursuit of civilized life requires, they say,
that we forget the past.
And that is true even if both have reasons of their own for that.
For the colonized minds, unless they learn to forget
life will turn into an endless quest for revenge.
Civilization cannot be built just on forgetting.
Not only must we learn to forget,
we must also not forget to learn