Mike Marqusee || Azfar Hussain

Our comrade Mike Marqusee--writer, journalist, left political activist--died today (January 13, 2015) at 61 after a long and fearless struggle against cancer about which he wrote a beautiful, oppositional, life-affirming book _The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer_. It was just last month when I talked to Mike and enthusiastically told him how much my students and I enjoyed, and benefited from, his book on Dylan that I used in my class on Bob Marley and Bob Dylan last semester, a book that I even wrote about in my mother tongue. But Mike is surely more than his work on Dylan. In fact, his work on health issues (in defense of the National Health Service), on politics, on different aspects of popular culture, on the Indian subcontinent, and on cricket remains an inspiration to us. It's not for nothing that our comrade Mike Davis once described him thus: "Both in the eloquence of his writing and the deep humanism of his vision, Mike Marqusee stands shoulder to shoulder with the spirits of Isaac Deutscher and Edward Said."
Indeed, his principled, dignified indignation at the arrogance of power and his consistent anticapitalist-antiimperialist-antiracist voice continue to echo near and far with apt resonance. In other words, although Mike Marqusee is no longer with us physically, he'll continue to remain alive in his words and works--and in our words and works--as well as in our struggles against all forms and forces of oppression and injustice.

A few months back I had the pleasure of sharing with him a poem by the Salvadoran communist poet Roque Dalton--a poem that he loved. I think I'd do well to post that poem in his memory here:

Like You
by Roque Dalton
[Translated by Jack Hirschman]

Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky blue
landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.

I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don't end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.