The Verso Book of Dissent

Revolutionary Words from Three Millennia of Rebellion and Resistance

Andrew Hsiao, Audrea Lim, Andrew Hsiao, Audrea Lim

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781844674480
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784783099
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Throughout the ages and across every continent, people have struggled against those in power and raised their voices in protest-rallying others around them or, sometimes, inspiring uprisings many years later. This anthology, global in scope, presents voices of dissent from every era of human history: speeches and pamphlets, poems and songs, plays and manifestos. Every age has its iconoclasts, and yet the greatest among them build on the words and actions of their forerunners. The Verso Book of Dissent should be in the arsenal of every rebel who understands that words and ideas are the ultimate weapons.

ca. 1800 BCE

ANONYMOUS

“The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant”

Your heart is greedy, it does not become you. You despoil: this is not praiseworthy for you … The officers, who are set as a protection against injustice—a curse to the shameless are these officers, who are set as a bulwark against lies. Fear of you has not deterred me from supplicating you; if you think so, you have not known my heart. The Silent one, who turns to report to you his difficulties, is not afraid to present them to you … Do the truth for the sake of the Lord of Truth …

Does it then happen that the scales stand aslant? Or is it thinkable that the scales incline to one side? Behold, if I come not, if another comes, then you host opportunity to speak as one who answers, as one who addresses the silent, as one who responds to him who has not spoken to you … You have not fled, you have not departed. But you have not yet granted me any reply to this beautiful word which comes from the mouth of the sun-god himself: “Speak the truth; do the truth: for it is great, it is mighty, it is everlasting. It will obtain for you merit, and will lead you to veneration.” For does the scale stand aslant? It is their scale-pans that bear the objects, and in just scales there is no … wanting.

“The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant” tells of an Egyptian who was tricked into letting his donkey eat a noble’s grain, after which the overseer of the noble’s land took the donkey and beat the peasant. The peasant’s subsequent appeals were so persuasive that his case was eventually brought to the Pharoah, who asked that his petition be put into writing. This is his petition. The Pharaoh ordered the noble to transfer all of his property to the peasant; the peasant’s donkey was also returned.

ca. 700 BCE

HESIOD

Works and Days

For the gods keep hidden from men the means of life [crops]. Else you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working; soon would you put away your rudder over the smoke, and the fields worked by ox and sturdy mule would run to waste. But Zeus in the anger of his heart hid it, because Prometheus the crafty deceived him; therefore he planned sorrow and mischief against men. He hid fire; but that the noble son of Iapetos stole again for men from Zeus the counselor in a hollow fennel-stalk, so that Zeus who delights in thunder did not see it. But afterwards Zeus who gathers the clouds said to him in anger: “Son of Iapetos, surpassing all in cunning, you are glad that you have outwitted me and stolen fire—a great plague to you yourself and to men that shall be. But I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.” So said the father of men and gods, and laughed aloud.

Hesiod’s Works and Days is a didactic poem on the necessity of human labor. While Hesiod’s early account of the Prometheus myth portrays him as a harmful figure for invoking Zeus’s wrath, in modern times Prometheus has become a symbol of human ambition and defiance in the face of the gods.

ca. 590 BCE

SAPPHO

“Supreme Sight on the Black Earth”

Some say cavalry and others claim

infantry or a fleet of long oars

is the supreme sight on the black earth.

I say it is

the one you love. And easily proved.

Didn’t Helen, who far surpassed all

mortals in beauty, desert the best

of men, her king,

and sail off to Troy and forget

her daughter and her dear parents? Merely

Aphrodite’s gaze made her readily bend

and led her far

from her path. These tales remind me now

of Anaktoria who isn’t here,

yet I

for one

would rather see her warm supple step

and the sparkle in her face than watch all

the chariots in Lydia and foot soldiers armored

in glittering bronze.

Sappho hailed from the Greek island of Lesbos. The lack of information about her life, coupled with the romantic and homoerotic subject matter of her surviving work, has led to much speculation about whether her poetry was autobiographical in nature.

ca. 522 BCE

HERODOTUS

Otanes’s Speech

Then Otanes, whose proposal to give the Persians equality was defeated, spoke thus among them all: “Fellow partisans, it is plain that one of us must be made king (whether by lot, or entrusted with the office by the choice of the Persians, or in some other way), but I shall not compete with you; I desire neither to rule nor to be ruled; but if I waive my claim to be king, I make this condition, that neither I nor any of my descendants shall be subject to any one of you.” To these terms the six others agreed; Otanes took no part in the contest but stood aside; and to this day his house (and no other in Persia) remains free, and is ruled only so far as it is willing to be, so long as it does not transgress Persian law.

Herodotus recounts Persian nobleman Otanes’s speech during a debate between the Persian conspirators who overthrew the Magian usurper Gaumata. By asking neither to rule nor to be ruled, Otanes invokes the Greek idea of isonomía—roughly, equality under the law.

ca. 500s BCE

SUMANGALAMATA

The Therigatha

Free, I am free!

How Glad I am to be free

from my pestle.

My cooking pot seems

worthless to me.

And I can’t even bear

to look at his sun-umbrella—

my husband disgusts me!

So I destroy greed and hate

with a sizzle.

And I am the same woman

who goes to the foot of a tree

and says to herself,

“Ah, happiness,”

and meditates with happiness.

The Therigatha (“Verses of the Elder Nuns”), a collection of poems from Buddhist nuns, was finally committed to writing in 80 BCE and is believed to be the earliest collection of women’s writing on the Indian subcontinent.

ca. 415 BCE

THUCYDIDES

The Melian Dialogue

Melians: But we know that the fortune of war is sometimes more impartial than the disproportion of numbers might lead one to suppose; to submit is to give ourselves over to despair, while action still preserves for us a hope that we may stand erect … You may be sure that we are as well aware as you of the difficulty of contending against your power and fortune, unless the terms be equal. But we trust that the gods may grant us fortune as good as yours, since we are just men fighting against unjust.

The twenty-seven-year-long conflict between Athens and Sparta documented by Thucydides drew in other Greek city-states. The people of Melos first wished to remain neutral—but, facing a superior Athenian force and urged to surrender, they refused to yield and took up arms instead. Despite fighting bravely, the Melians finally succumbed, after which their men were put to death and their women and children enslaved.

399 BCE

PLATO

The Apology of Socrates

And now, Athenians, I am not going to argue for my own sake, as you may think, but for yours, that you may not sin against the God, or lightly reject his boon by condemning me. For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the God; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has given the state and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. And as you will not easily find another like me, I would advise you to spare me. I dare say that you may feel irritated at being suddenly awakened when you are caught napping; and you may think that if you were to strike me dead, as Anytus advises, which you easily might, then you would sleep on for the remainder of your lives, unless God in his care of you gives you another gadfly. And that I am given to you by God is proved by this: that if I had been like other men, I should not have neglected all my own concerns, or patiently seen the neglect of them during all these years, and have been doing yours, coming to you individually, like a father or elder brother, exhorting you to regard virtue; this, I say, would not be like human nature. And had I gained anything, or if my exhortations had been paid, there would have been some sense in that: but now, as you will perceive, not even the impudence of my accusers dares to say that I have ever exacted or sought pay of anyone; they have no witness of that. And I have a witness of the truth of what I say; my poverty is a sufficient witness.

After citizens’ charges were brought against Socrates for being a man “who corrupted the young, refused to worship the gods, and created new deities,” he was given the chance to defend himself against the accusations. Found guilty and condemned to death, he drank hemlock.

ca. 300 BCE

QU YUAN

“The Lament”

I marvel at the folly of the king,

So heedless of his people’s suffering.

They envied me my mothlike eyebrows fine,

And so my name his damsels did malign.

Truly to craft alone their praise they paid,

The square in measuring they disobeyed;

The use of common rules they held debased;

With confidence their crooked lines they traced.

In sadness plunged and sunk in deepest gloom,

Alone I drove on to my dreary doom.

In exile rather would I meet my end,

Than to the baseness of their ways descend.

Qu Yuan, scholar and minister in the state of Chu during China’s Warring States Period, is said to have waded into the Miluo River holding a big rock after hearing that the Chu capital had been captured by the state of Qin. The villagers tried to save him but couldn’t find his body, and the act of racing boats to find his body became the Dragon Boat Festival, which remains a Chinese tradition to this day. “The Lament,” one of his most famous poems, was written in exile, after having rebuked the Chu king for his corruption and complicity with the Qin.

ca. 200 BCE

THIRUVALLUVAR

“Thirukkural”

Harsher than a killer’s cruelty is the cruel reign of an oppressive king.

Thiruvalluvar’s “Thirukkural” is a classic of Tamil poetry, and the first work on ethics in Dravidian literature. This is Kural (couplet) 560.

ca. 100 BCE

ANONYMOUS

Pattinappaalai

Like the Tiger cub with its sharp claws and its curved stripes growing (strong) within the cage, his strength came to maturity (like wood in grain) while he was in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface: In Praise of Dissent
• Acknowledgments
• ca. 1800 BCE: Anonymous
• 1917: Randolph Bourne
• 1967: H. Rap Brown
• Sources
• Index
• Permissions