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Aurora Levins Morales

Aurora Levins Morales Biography

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“Now listen to me. I will not walk on one-way streets any longer. Your wound is my wound, (though you don't know that mine is yours), and I do what I can, but the well will run dry. You will use us up. There are women whose first stretching across borders was into your lives. When they discover how you make use of their compassion, they will turn away heartsick, stricken, withering in the freshness of their hope. There are women who were leaders, who worked night and day, defeated not by foreign policy, but by the sexual politics of solidarity, bitter now, unable to work anywhere near you. How dare you speak of the New Woman! We are your richest resource besides your endurance, and you use us like rags to wrap around your pain.”

MenWomenSolidarity
Book:Getting Home Alive
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“Piri Thomas' book Down These Mean Streets followed me around for years, in the corner of my eye on bus terminal bookracks. Finally, in a gritted teeth desperation I faced the damn thing and said "OK, tell me." I sweated my way through it in two nights: Gang fights, knifings, robberies, smack, prison. It's the standard Puerto Rican street story, except he lived. The junkies could be my younger brothers. The prisoners could be them. I could be the prostitute, the welfare mother, the sister and lover of junkies, the child of alcoholics. There is nothing but circumstance and good English, nothing but my mother marrying into the middle class, between me and that life.”

Middle ClassPuerto Rican
Author:Aurora Levins Morales
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“I want to see a flowering of Arab and Jewish cultures in a country without racism or anti-Semitism, without rich or poor or spat-upon: everyone beneath the vine and fig tree living in peace and unafraid. A homeland for each and every one of us between the mountains and the sea. A multilingual, multireligious, many-colored and -peopled land where the orange tree blooms for all. I will not surrender this vision for any lesser compromise.”

CultureIsraelPalestineHomelandJewishMulticulturalArabMultilingualMultireligious
Book:Getting Home Alive
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“Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.”

KnowsHeartSelfMatterInterestPlanetsIntegrityBoundsActiveOppressionRecognitionLiberationCollaborationToleratePassiveSolidarityAltruismInabilitySelf InterestInterconnectednessTolerationCommonalityAffrontCooperation And CollaborationSelfish Interest
Book:Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity
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“The whole point of anti-Semitism has been to create a vulnerable buffer group that can be bribed with some privileges into managing the exploitation of others, and then, when social pressure builds, be blamed and scapegoated, distracting those at the bottom from the crimes of those at the top. Peasants who go on pogrom against their Jewish neighbors won't make it to the nobleman's palace to burn him out and seize the fields. This was the role of Jews in Europe. This has been the role of Jews in the United States, and this is the role of Jews in the Middle East.”

Has BeensStatesWholeSocialUnitedRolesUnited StatesGroupsMiddleCrimeFieldsGoes OnEuropePressureBottomPrivilegeJewEastNeighborVulnerableMiddle EastExploitationPalacesPeasantsAnti SemitismSocial PressureNoblemen
Author:Aurora Levins Morales
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“What is required to face trauma is the ability to mourn, fully and deeply, all that has been taken from us. Only through mourning everything we have lost can we discover that we have in fact survived; that our spirits are indestructible.”

Has BeensFactsFacesSpiritLostAbilityTakenTraumaMourningSurvivedMournIndestructible
Book:Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity
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“Right here in our bodies, in our defense of our right to experience joy, in the refusal to abandon the place where we have been most completely invaded & colonized, in our determination to make the bombed & defoliated lands flower again and bear fruit, here where we have been most shamed is one of the most radical & sacred places from which to transform the world.”

WorldHas BeensBodyJoyLandFlowerBearsDeterminationSacredFruitDefenseRadicalAbandonRefusalSacred Places
Book:Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity
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