August has a black memory. One that is indispensable for those who stand their ground and decide to act against domination. In memory, something from the past merges with the present, even more so when memory ceases to be words and manifests itself accurately in insurrectionary action or in a concrete gesture of solidarity. Thus, black memory manages to transcend the censorship of power and advances without temporal or generational boundaries.
There also come moments when those who kept that black memory alive become part of it. And in diffuse temporal spaces, the present, the now, memories, and memory converge once again.
There are moments when life and death, from a binary understanding, vanish, creating an instant in which nothing and everything exists.
How must those who witnessed the cowardly and despicable trial that ended in the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti have felt in August 1927?
Despite the insurrectionary actions of comrades, demonstrations, and petitions of all kinds for their release around the world, they were electrocuted by the United States on August 23, 1927, at midnight.
“We must respond to their violence with our violence: revenge. We must oppose their infamous instrument that burned the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti with our instruments of vengeance,” said Di Giovanni in Culmine, in response to the infamous execution of his comrades. He also made it happen: he blew up the Washington monument and the Ford Motor Company in Buenos Aires…
The physical separation from so many comrades is an experience that weighs heavily on us. Only by breaking free from imposed understandings can we heal the absences and learn to live with them.
Last year, two dear comrades left us physically: Luciano Pitronelo and, a few days later, Belén Navarrete, both close to people we loved very much, comrades in ideas, activists, and supporters of our comrades in prison.
After that blow, after the impact, the actions began. The banners and graffiti with their names, barricades and pamphlets with their faces, incendiary outings and other chem were once again merging the present and the recent past, in violent actions, in fire, in banners, in graffiti.
And just as others remembered and made present their comrades almost a century ago, confronting cowardly and pacifist positions, today’s actions serve the same function.
Belén Navarrete lives in the explosion that blew up the door of the Abbott Recalcine laboratory on the stormy night of May 19 this year. The cells that bear her name made her present in an act of revenge for the distribution of contraceptive pills that forced an as yet undetermined number of women and pregnant bodies into pregnancy.
In every gesture, in every action, memory and action, a mixture that fuses the present and the past, in August when the renewal of the trees reappears, when the buds are about to burst, the black memory opens the portal where we make our comrades present… every gesture… every action.
May actions thin the veil that separates life from death.
Belén Navarrete and Tortuga live in insurrectionary action.
For our comrades who transcended the earthly plane.
La Zarzamora
Black August 2025
Source: Informativo Anarquista
