ez dut ahorik.

Xabi Otero
1980

Euskal Herria Journal - February 1999



Testimony: JAGI JAGI, 13-1-1934

I Am A Revolutionary

Certain day a friend asked me: "Polixene, are you one of those revolutionaries who with a pistol or a rifle would take up to the mountains in defense of Euzkadi, no?"

A revolutionary... what do I know about revolution! If revolution is about fighting a bloody war in which the innocents and the guilty would suffer equally; if revolution equals destruction, death, misery to make no progress, then I am not a revolutionary.

But there is another revolution which is not fought with arms but it's more terrible: the passive revolution; the one declared by Gandhi in India and that the powerful England will never be able to extinguish with bombs and cannons. India has an apostle, a martyr who, with his example, his holy behavior, is moving the people in a wonderful direction.

Is Gandhi a revolutionary? The people of India never attacked England but always defended itself. Here is the key: Not to move forward but never to back away.

We, members of a family, of a slave nation, should always remember our miserable condition. We are servants but we should keep our dignity. We should not have to blush for being like miserable dogs which when they are kicked, they lick the foot of our master for a crumb of bread.

We are not Spaniards. Why then when the Spanish justice, in the name of Spain, calls us we come to their courts rather than to wait at home for a couple from the Civil Guard to take us by force?

We are not Spaniards. Why then do we apply for jobs with the oppressor state cooperating this way to the destruction of our homeland?

We are not Spaniards. Why then we elect deputies who in the Spanish congress will defend Spanish laws?

We are not Spaniards. Why then when they show us those pieces of papers they call contribution, identification, etc. we bend our heads down and pay as if we were just another one of them? If that is revolution, God bless it!

"Nonsense! - the cowards would say - what are we going to achieve but to get in trouble and fall in distress?"

M de la Sota said in a previous, excellent article: "There are two kinds of liberties: the one that is paid with a few votes and the one that is paid with blood."

The self-indulgent, those who don't want to make sacrifices then should bargain for the former. We should be revolutionaries like Gandhi. Let us buy our freedom without having to bargain; and to give whatever we have to pay for it: well-being, peace, life, everything.

Would the curious friend who asked me if I was a revolutionary be satisfied with my answer...? How terrible it sounds in the mouth of a woman! No? It doesn't matter! All sacrifices are not enough when the homeland suffers; even if it's required, we will lose what embellishes women the most: our femininity, to seize axe or the rifle; but when Euzkadi be free, don't worry, those fumes wrongly called feminists, will disappear. The Basque woman will have enough being the "etxekoandre", the queen and mistress of her children and her home.

Polixene Trabudua was a leader of the Basque Nationalist Party's women organization Emakume Abertzale Batza (EAB). In the 1930s the Spanish government jailed her because of her political activities in support of the Basque nationalist cause.