Sadri Khiari » The Force of Disobedience:
“The people who disobey. The people who resist in the obscurity of everyday life. The people who, when forgotten too long, remind the world of their existence and break into history without prior notice.
If there is something I have learned from the struggle of the Black American slaves, which I have studied a bit, is that there is no voluntary servitude. There is nothing but the impatient waiting that erodes the machinery of oppression. There is nothing but pressure day by day, minute by minute, to overthrow the oppressor.
From afar they seem like unbearable compromises, and such compromises exist because they must survive; but they are almost always mixed with indiscipline, rebellion; molecular resistances that condense and explode into the view of all when the time comes. To the opacity of despotic power corresponds the opacity of resistances; the shameful forms of loyalty and clientelization walk hand in hand with the construction of popular solidarities; the technologies of control and discipline are accompanied by devices for elusion, camouflage, evasion and transgression that disrupt the established order.
There is no oppression without resistance. There is only time stretching more or less slowly before unexpected—or out of sight—the collective heroism of a people arises.”
