The 12th letter

(Actually, it's just one paragraph)

Last month, I performed my play 20 times. I won an award. I took part in a picket line during the general strike. Time Out magazine wrote a beautiful article about my play. (Have you read this one too?) RTP (our public television station) broadcast a programme entitled People Who Draw Freedom, which was recorded three years ago. I share the first episode with André Carrilho (hi, André!). I watched Nouvelle Vague and then watched À bout de souffle, trying to find continuity errors and jump cuts. I became addicted to Connections. I was in Berlin. It snowed. I finally finished reading a superb treatise on dissonance and the power of ideas: Second-Hand Time. On New Year’s Day, I discovered that Gramsci hated New Year’s Day. I received copies of some foreign editions of my books. I became a member of an energy supply cooperative and now, not only does all my energy consumption come from renewable sources, but also from a truly socialist company with democratic management. I started reading One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. In these lines, Omar perfectly captures the most significant change I have undergone recently (in tune with the events of last night’s early hours): “[I] knew for certain that there were deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing called ‘the free world.’ And yet I believed the cracks could be fixed, that the thing at the core, whatever it was, was salvageable. Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.”

Many thanks to all of you who have read my letters over the past year. And to all the new subscribers. May this be the year we see a Free Palestine.

And let us push forward the working-class Revolution with all our might.

In love and rage,

C.

Photos of the play (you can click on the images to enlarge them) ©Ana Isa Mourinho (thanks, hon!)

Here is a picture of a mother I saw walking at the airport (drawn from memory).

From left to right: Fantasmas, Bananas e Avestruzes, in Korean (Bomnaregom Books) and Brazilian Portuguese (WMF Martins Fontes) and People Are Weird, in French (Versant Sud)

Colagem de registos áudio de ensaios e testes com a equipa técnica que mostram partes do processo de trabalho para criar o espectáculo (SPOILER ALERT: se ainda não viram o Perder, não ouçam)