Revolutionary unburdening ~ Malinda Words

Ernesto Che Guevara's ‘Bolivian Diary' and ‘Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War’ are perennial favourites among those who are convinced that peaceful social transformation is impossible and therefore armed insurrection is inevitable. Guerrilla warfare of course is not the preserve of revolutionaries; it is a strategy that has been employed by the world’s worst terrorists and also counter-revolutionaries of the worst kind.

A lesser known account would be Omar Cabezas’ ‘La montaña es algo mas que una inmensa estepa verde,’ translated into English as ‘Fire from the mountain.’ It is the story of his life with the Sandinistas in the late 1979s. Cabesaz would eventually rise to be a commander in the guerrilla war against the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

I was reminded of Cabezas and ‘Fire from the mountain’ recently when I read a journal entry written by Dennis Welton during a hike across Spain along an old pilgrim trail, the Camino de Santiago.

Welton comments on backpacks that travellers carry with them. He points out that sometimes one has to walk miles and miles with a loaded backpack in order to truly understand what is really important to carry.

Cabezas, I recall, wrote about the same thing. Typically, he wrote, younger or newer recruits would stuff their backpacks with all kinds of things including mementoes that helped them remember people and things they cherish. He mentioned that more senior and seasoned campaigners would watch out for moments when the younger comrades, unable to bear the weight, would discard cans of food. They would pounce on them. They knew enough about what was useful for survival and what was discardable in the larger order of things.

The war or, if you want to be general about traveling and weights, the distance traveled, has a way of unburdening one and all. It’s not always about the weight, Cabezas points out. One by one those precious artefacts from a different lifetime were lost. A handkerchief, a photograph, a love note…such things are inevitable casualties in war just as a human life.

Welton, however, had an interesting take on ‘burdens.’ He claims we tend to pack our fears. Consider the following paragraph from the journal entry:

‘Something I heard along the way has really stuck with me and I was thinking about it today. They say that "We carry our fears in our backpacks". In other words if you are afraid that you will run out of food and go hungry then you carry too much food. If you are afraid of freezing then you carry too many clothes. If you fear not being able to find a place to sleep then you load yourself down with a tent and camping equipment. Of course all this extra stuff is heavy, which makes us tired and sore and often causes injuries. The soreness and pain make us irritable and cranky and often that is what our fellow hikers see. They don't see the real us! They are seeing the result of the pain caused by carrying our fears and too much junk in our backpack.’

Welton extrapolates further. He suggests that much of the excess baggage we carry around with us in life is the product of our fears.

‘We keep lugging around things that we should have dumped long ago. The result is that the people in our lives do not get to see the real us. They don't get the best of us. Many times they are on the receiving end of the pain caused by the useless junk we are carrying around with us. Often, we have been hauling it around for so long that we have started to believe that it is part of who we are.’

And he recommends that we do what backpackers eventually do: ‘unpack the overloaded personal backpacks, examine each item honestly, determine if we actually need it or not and if it is really serving a purpose; if not, then leave it behind and move on.’

Fixations. Security blankets. Comfort zones. All related to some fear. All unnecessary burdens that weigh us down, slow us down, make us cranky and ill-tempered travel companions.

Let us not forget — it is not only revolutionary soldiers, guerrilla fighters and other such clandestine activists inhabiting gruelling landscapes and fighting seemingly endless battles with no end in sight that walk. We all walk. We all carry with us things we think are ‘journey-essentials.’ It wouldn’t hurt to actually walk sometime. Hike. Go into the hills with what we think are ‘bare essentials’ and then, as the hours go by and turn into days, perhaps, stop, unpack the overloaded backpacks and re-assess ‘essentials.’

That, now, would be unburdening of a revolutionary kind.

malindadocs@gmail.com

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

08 July 2023

Revolutionary unburdening

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