Mona Eltahawy Instagram – Love is not the opposite of hate. It is the opposite of indifference. We who demand a better world act out of love, not hate. We risk it all with the obsession of Majnun for Layla.
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality,” Che Guevara said.
Despite his critics, including anarchists such as myself, Che understood that we agitate not because we hate the world, but because we so desperately love it.
A revolution is a dare to the future as much as it is a reckoning with the past. It is a message in a bottle flung at our future selves that challenges us to remember. “Your imagination brought you to the streets. Your disobedience kept you there,” the message from the revolution insists.
And love is the verb, as Liz Fraser sings in Massive Attack’s Teardrop. “Love is a doing word,” that infuses our breath with a fearlessness that is temptation and salvation at once.
“As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible,” Toni Cade Bambera said.
We who cannot resist revolution, hand over our hearts as fuel, ready to have them smashed again and again, because as Maya Angelou said, “I don’t trust any revolution where love is not allowed.”
Read:
https://www.feministgiant.com/p/essay-tender-is-the-fight?r=50le&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true | Posted on 13/Feb/2025 20:55:18
