Budapest '56, Prague '68, Beijing '89, Tehran '09
Crushed: The word on the wrist spells "change" (etehraz / via Flickr )
After Soviet tanks crushed the brief student uprising against communist rule in Hungary in November 1956, Jacques Brel, the great Belgian singer and song-writer, wrote one of his most moving songs in tribute to the uprising, "Quand on a que l'amour"--"When Love Is All We Have." In Brel's inimitable style, the song, in rhythms and lyrics, builds from ballad to anthem, from serenade to defiance. It is in song what "Tank Man" became, in image, during the Tiananmen Square crushing in 1989.
Visiting a friend in Budapest in 1984, I had Brel's song with me on tape. One morning we opened the windows of the apartment and blared the song for the neighborhood. Of course nobody cared.
None of us knew it at the time, but the end of the Soviet era, an end none of us had imagined possible in our own lives, was just five years away. Retrospective hope is as good as any when hope for the present is leaking away by the minute.
So as we watch the crushing of the protests in Tehran today, out here from our comfortably unengaged distances, we could take to our armchair-keyboards and analyze again what we've been analyzing for a week (as I'm sure we'll continue to do, inevitably and, for the most part, hopelessly). Or we could open the windows and blare Brel again, at least for three minutes. That nobody will care or hear isn't the point. In Tehran every night at 10, they open their windows and blare chants of "Allahu Akbar" ("God is Great") in defiance of the regime. That's essentially what Brel's song was about, though he substituted love for god. Which brings it back to the same thing anyway.
So here he is, singing the song in French in a great, full-orchestra version (audio only), or in a quaint video version of a young Brel in concert (he died of lung cancer in 1979).
Below are the lyrics translated hastily in English. The Persian translation is pending.
When love is all we have
When love is all we have
When love is all we have
When love is all we have
When love is all we have
To clothe at dawn
When love is all we have
When love is all we have
When love is all we have
When love is all we have
Then without having anything
to give and to take
At the dawn of the great journey
That is our great love
My love, you and I
To burst with joy
Every hour of every day
To live our promises
Without need of riches
Other than our eternal faith
To cover in wonders
And bathe in sunshine
The blight of the streets
As the only purpose
the only song
the only recourse
When love is all we have
Destitutes and miscreants
In mantles of velvet
To offer in prayer
For the suffering world
As a modest troubadour
To give to those
Whose only battle
Is to search for hope
To forge a path
And compel fate
At every crossroad
To face down cannons
And nothing but a song
To persuade a drummer
But the power to love
We'll hold in our palms
My friend, the entire world.
Comments
Power to the people of Iran!
Not to take away any from the message of this article: although Jacques Brel was singing mostly in French, he was Belgian, as from Belgium: small country known for chocolates, fries, beer, waffles, Waterloo, Bruges, European Parliament…
Thank you.
Bob, did I call him French? Shame on me. I must have been soused on Lambic. I just fixed it. Thanks for catching that error before the Belgian Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice caught wind of it (you know how them Walloons can be about their Brel, just about the only memorable thing to come out of Belgium since Tintin).