Oppression is an ancestral, compelling, almost ontological malediction.

the fictional Caribbean island of Queimada, whose autochthonous population has been smashed by the colonisers

Burn! depicts two parallel trajectories: on the one hand, the moral abyss into which neocolonialism pushes its agents and, on the other, the progressive development of a political consciousness among the ruled people. When Walker meets Dolores, he believes in civilisation and progress, with the illusion that anticolonialism and British trade merge into a common cause. Ten years later - a period condensing the contradictions of a century [...] - he has lost his illusions and his Western culture is reduced to pure instrumental reason: he likes to do his work well and is interested exclusively in 'how', not in 'why', to do it. Dolores, on the contrary, knows he fights for liberation even if he still does not know 'how' to realise his goal. [...]

it is through such a 'Manichean' violence, symmetrical to the enemy's violence, that the oppressed achieve the awareness of their own strength.

The vision of history subjacent to both films is a kind of revolutionary historicism that posits guerilla onflict and revolution as ineluctable.

It was as if his own feeling of impotence were writ large on the political scene everywhere.

It can only be conserved, in a reliquary form, as a testimony of an experience related to history by an emotional link.

[...] Like Dionysus in Greek mythology, Lenin could reborn. This is not an announcement of victory; it is a socialist wager, based on the recognition that all has to be rebuilt.

[...] she had retreated into a prison of fear and suffering whereas her sons had chosen the struggle: 'they looked for life, and their reasons were stronger than mine.' They did not look for sacrifice or martyrdom and their political choice was rooted in a vital desire of freedom. 'What survives is desire; they cannot kill this desire. [...]' [...]

describes the abnegation of unknown people

[...] Paul Celan distinguished between u-topia and utopia. U-topia, literally 'no-place,' is a nonexisting locus, whereas utopia meas a hope, an expectation, a vision of the future, something not existing yet. According to Ernst Bloch, utopia is a prefiguration, the realm of the 'not yet' (noch nicht). This is also the meaning of Celan's utopia, 'something open and free' to which poetry could give a form. Today, after the collapse of twentieth-century revolutions, utopia does not appear as a 'not yet', but rather as u-topia, a no-longer-existing place, a destroyed utopia that is the object of melancholy art. Realms of memory are places (topoi) created in order to remember hopes turned into no-places, something that no longer exists. The utopias of the twenty-first century still have to be invented.