Scream and make these crimes known around the world

Enjoy listening to this song by Paul Robeson, “Chee Lai” (“Rise Up”) or “March of the Volunteers,” recorded in 1941.

Smash the iron gates of the concessions!
Smash the pious doors of the mission houses!
Smash the revolving doors of the Jim Crow YMCAs.
Destroy the enemies of land, bread and freedom!
Stand up and shout, China!
You know what you want!
The only way to get it is
To take it!
Roar, China!
-Excerpt from “Roar, China!” (1937) by Langston Hughes

In September 1937, African-American poet Langston Hughes published a poem in Madrid entitled “Roar, China!”, just two months after the Japanese imperialist occupation of China, which claimed 20 million Chinese lives by the time it ended in 1945. One might wonder what connection Hughes saw between the struggle against racial segregation in the United States, Francisco Franco's nationalist forces in Spain, and the full-scale invasion of China.

His poem appeared in Volunteer for Freedoman English-language weekly newspaper of the International Brigades, consisting of fighters from all over the world who defended the Spanish Republic against Franco's fascism. Hughes had been sent to Spain as a correspondent to report on the stories of African-American volunteers who had joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Hughes wrote in his autobiography I wonder as I walk“Why would a Negro come all the way to Spain to help solve Spain's problems – possibly at the risk of his life?” He wanted to find out.

Langston Hughes' registration as a journalist in Spain, July 1937.

Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 (one of the few African countries that had not suffered the ravages of European colonialism) forced African Americans to join the brigades in Spain. They understood that by fighting Franco, they were also weakening Italy's fascist rule under Benito Mussolini. “Yesterday Ethiopia, Czechoslovakia – today Spain – tomorrow perhaps America. Fascism will not stop anywhere – until we stop it,” one volunteer told him. Hughes took this as his model and expanded the theme of the anti-fascist struggle to Asia.

In his poem, Hughes calls on the Chinese people to “roar” while simultaneously smashing the U.S.'s Jim Crow laws and China's concessions – the European-controlled areas of semi-colonial Shanghai. When Hughes visited the city in 1933, he witnessed colonialism drawing “a color line against the Chinese in China itself” by demarcating areas of everything from buildings to parks for Europeans only – a parallel to racial segregation in his own country. It was clear that racism against the “darker peoples of the world” was inextricably linked to colonialism and fascism.

Living among the international brigadiers, Spanish avant-garde writers and artists, communists and anarchists, Hughes deepened his anti-fascist solidarity in both his poetry and his politics, which crossed racial, national and linguistic boundaries. Like Hughes, countless writers and artists joined the battle of ideas and the fight in the trenches.

Don't miss it! (“They won’t get through!”) Poster from the Spanish Civil War, 1930s. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The Popular Front's strategy, expressed at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935, was to unite the world's anti-fascist forces, from progressive liberals to communists. This included material support, such as Soviet aid and the organization of international brigades in Spain, and the promotion of anti-fascist culture and intellectual networks, of which Hughes was one of the outstanding figures.

That same year, the International Writers' Association for the Defense of Culture was founded in Paris to bring together intellectuals who wanted to advocate the use of culture in the international anti-fascist struggle. At the association's meeting in 1938, Hughes affirmed that the best poems should “combine music, meaning and clarity in a pattern of social force.” His poem “Roar, China!” embodies the unique ability of culture to change people's hearts and minds and mobilize them into a social force. But he was not the first to express China's roar in an artistic production.

Poster by Sergei Tretyakov Roar, China!1930. Source: State Publishing House of the RSFSR.

In the mid-1920s, the Russian avant-garde journalist and playwright Sergei Tretyakov spent two years in China, where he taught Russian literature at Peking University and wrote reports for Pravdathe newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. When he heard of two Chinese boatmen being executed by the British after a US businessman was found dead in China, Tretyakov wrote the piece: Roar, China!by applying his method of “factography” to factually represent reality in a work of art. Tretyakov was, according to cultural critic Walter Benjamin, a model of an “operating writer” whose “mission is not to report but to fight; not to play the spectator but to actively intervene.” As a socialist, Tretyakov wrote not just to tell a story but to show the world the brutality of the British “gunboat policy” and the semi-colonial reality of China. He wrote to intervene in history.

Tretyakov's play was performed in Moscow in 1926 and was staged on Broadway four years later by Herbert Biberman, a communist screenwriter from the United States who was later blacklisted and imprisoned under the McCarthy era. Biberman's production Roar, China! consisted primarily of Asian-American immigrants, a similar approach he later used in his acclaimed 1954 film about Mexican-American miners. Salt of the Earth. On his way to Mexico, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein attended the opening performance. Two years later, Langston Hughes, who had also seen the Broadway production, met Tretyakov in person during his visit to the Soviet Union, who gave him “a huge poster showing a giant Chinese coolie breaking his chains,” the poet recalled in his autobiography. The poster was a print by the famous Chinese woodcut artist Li Hua and bore the English title “Roar, China!”

Roar, China! Broadway production, New York, 1930. Source: NY Public Library.

Tretyakov's play found its way to many places, such as the Indian People's Theatre Association. In 1942, the play was adapted to the fight against Japanese fascism in Asia, and the American and English characters were replaced with Japanese ones. As mentioned in the introduction to the publication, this “anti-fascist” play was intended for worker and peasant audiences and was intended to show connections between Chinese and Indian realities. After being translated into nearly a dozen Indian languages, the play toured the country. Outside India, the play was even performed in Yiddish in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland in 1944.

In Roar ChinaIn the final scene of , due to the growing revolt in the background of the story, the Japanese executioner retreats just before pulling the trigger on the innocent Chinese boatmen. In their defense, the watching crowd of workers chants, “Roar, China! Roar in the ears of all the world. Let these crimes be known throughout the world. Roar!” Indeed, in its numerous iterations—from woodcuts to plays, from Broadway shows to poetry—the Roar of China resonated with the oppressed, the colonized, and those fighting fascism around the world.

Li Hua (China), Roar, China!1935.

A century later, as right-wing and neo-fascist forces rear their ugly heads again, the question is where our collective outcry is around the world and how artists are mobilising to resist this growing tide. Our latest dossier, To counter the growing neo-fascism, the Latin American left must reinvent itselftries to address exactly that. For the publication, we included artworks by Latin American and Caribbean artists who portrayed the reality of neo-fascism. We spoke to some of the Brazilian artists to learn more about their work.

Túlio Carapiá and Clara Cerqueira remembered their work in 2020 and said:

We have seen the rise of the extreme right consolidate in our country with the election of Jair Bolsonaro. We have also seen the boycott of the Venezuelan elections by the right, the coup in Bolivia against Evo Morales and the harsh crackdown on protests in Chile against the constitution introduced during the Pinochet dictatorship – clear demonstrations of the rise of conservatism and the extreme right by undemocratic means throughout Latin America.

Carapiás and Cerqueira's immediate response to the “insidious maneuvers of imperialism through fake news, hate speech, evangelical religions and all kinds of deceptive propaganda” was to “speak out” and create art that analyzes reality and places it in dialogue with other perspectives. “We believe that collectivity is the only effective and lasting form of learning, resistance and survival.”

Luciléia da Silva Vieira's work, created the same year, was born “out of deep indignation” after a defendant in Brazil was acquitted of rape charges because the act was deemed “unintentional.” When we asked her about far-right tactics that attack reproductive rights, promote “traditional” heteronormative family structures and spread fear about so-called “gender ideology,” she replied: “This hatred is a project, and fundamentalism is at the core of this oppressive discourse against women.” For her, in the face of this hate project, visual art as a language “has the power to communicate, to provoke thought and to have a profound impact.”

More news…

The red book of the month is the book by the Slovenian sociologist Rastko Močnik Spisi o suvremenom capitalizmu (Writings on modern capitalism). In the artwork inspired by the book, Salvatore Carleo represents historical fascism and contemporary neo-fascism as mirrored kings on playing cards, with their parallels and differences.

Dani Ruggeri with the cover of The other lake.

One final and special note: Dani Ruggeri from our art department has just published her second fantasy adventure comic for children at Maten al Mensajero. The other lake ('The other lake') is set in a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina. For Dani, this comic is about telling stories from marginalized areas that are too often portrayed by poverty and hardship rather than by their poetry and possibilities.

Heartfelt,

Ting's Chak

Artistic Director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research