LOVE SUBLIME LOVE

Welcome July 14th !! Thank you for the Liberty!! The peasants, the poor people that didn’t have bread, but they had courage for finishing what was wrong to do the correct!! Such a brave people. Thank you, thank you and thank you for putting an end to the Old Regime and leave the world breathes. There was born the Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. We are all brothers and sisters. Nowadays is very easy to make revolutions with bombs and weapons, but I’d like to see them make them as the peasants had done, with agricultural tools, with blood, with heart and mainly – the soul!! One thousand times “Vive la France”!! Even during the World Cup I use white, red and blue to support la France and for singing la Marseillaise!!

Thank you France, because after being a daughter of a man who was removed from the office, after being called by my high school colleagues as subversive, getting spitted on the face, eating only their leftovers, wherever the meal servers are, I hope they are in heaven, If heaven really exists, because they always kept my little plate reserved. Antonia, an Afro-Brazilian measuring 1,80m and in that time it was not common a Brazilian woman measures like that; Zezé who earned a very low salary and when she saw me being mistreated, she cherished me, a thing that my mother didn’t do. Saudades (a feeling when you miss someone or something, in Portuguese). I was blonde and they were all Afro-Brazilians, That’s why I love the Afro-descendants, I have always gotten along with them. I am used to say that many white men got their soul dirtier than our dear Afro-descendants’ colour of skin, still segregated. All my colleagues were Jews or Afro-descendants. Thank you all for respecting me, for cherishing and enlightening me where only there have been darkness and suffering.

Now, a declaration of love to France: since I was a child I loved France, before the Revolution of 1964. After the Revolution, she was my lifeline. I listened to L’amour est bleu (Love is Blue), from Paul Mauriat’s Orchestra, the sexiest bald man that I’ve ever seen, as another song he was used to play with his orchestra, Rain and Tears. I go further, from the conception inside my mother’s womb on, as a foetus, with no idea if I would be girl or boy, my heart was already beating for France. My punishment is not only to be born there, but also to be born in a submissive country to the United States, even it is denied. So you may ask why I have not been to France? Because my mother didn’t like the French people, she thought they were rude and I got angry, saying they were not rude, in fact, they were not hypocrite.  I liked the French painters such as Toulouse Lautrec, Claude Monet and mainly Renoir, my favourite with Pink and Blue (Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers). Despite of Van Gogh’s paintings became very famous nowadays, worth a lot and the fact he isn’t French is, for a child, his paintings are scary, they are like I felt inside and every day thinking about the humiliations of the day that I would suffer, caused by the teacher, only for making me suffer. I was scared because I could feel his pain, his disenchantment about the life, the tyrant starvation, merciless.  I love your songs. How the French people can be called rude with songs like Chanson Pour Anna; F Comme Femme, an anthem to the women. France’s air I know it’s lighter than here. Do you know why I never go? Because I know I’ll have to come back and then I’ll miss there a lot.

Do you know that proverb: “what the eyes can’t see, the heart can’t feel?” To me, what concerns about France it’s wrong, because If I see it, my heart will miss it so much, a strong saudade (feeling of missing someone, some place or something), in Portuguese), that I could die. Thank you France for everything that you have done for the humanity, since the fall of Bastille, where hungry peasants fought the nobility with jewels and full bellies. What people nowadays has the courage of your peasants? For each killed soldier, 10 peasants had been killed, at least. You are blessed my dear France! Not even if I’m dead I’ll quit you. Vive la France!

The worst kind of slavery is the one we have the key of the locker and we do not want to open it, because we got habituated with the weight of the chain.

Kátia Paes