21st Edition: Chicks in Metal Cages and Chicks in Conflict Incubators
Reflections on Dependency and Violence in Contemporary Societies
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Introduction
Welcome to the 21st edition of the “Twin Minds: Alba and Anton” series! In this edition, we use Anton’s metaphor of “Chicks in Metal Cages” to reflect on a drug-dependent country whose natural beauties still resist the culture of theft, but for how long?
In his 1972 chronicle, Anton describes the South Vietnamese villagers during the war as chicks confined and dependent on external resources — a picture that applies to many countries today surrounded by internal and external threats. The epigraph in Anton’s piece in this edition is quite fitting:
“There are two things that a democratic people will always have a great difficulty in doing: starting a war and ending it.” — Tocqueville.
Conflicts and Dependency
Unfortunately, in the drug-dependent country that Anton and Alba did not know, the chicks suffer not only from attacks by hyenas and predatory hawks but also from other violations and degenerative conflicts. For example, recently a young mother on the outskirts of the country’s capital saw her son kidnapped by local traffickers. She described to astonished neighbors the despair and helplessness of living in an environment where security is an unattainable luxury.
Several other incidents have turned the drug-dependent country into a real incubator of conflicts, such as:
Kidnapped for extortion, trafficking, or forced into child labour and prostitution, the chicks are victims of a vicious cycle of violence. Imagine an eight-year-old child torn from their home in the middle of the night, their screams stifled by fear while helpless parents watch the terror unfold, powerless to stop it.
To help reflect on the essence of conflict incubators, we invite the reader to read Sebastião Alba’s poem “We Spend Long Hours Talking.”
The poem highlights a routine of superficiality and conformism that resembles the complacent social response of the drug-dependent country that Anton and Alba never knew, faced with successive crises. The long hours of empty conversations, followed by mechanical and purposeless actions, reflect the apathy and complacency that feed and strengthen conflicts.
The combination of Anton’s chronicle “Chicks in Metal Cages” and Alba’s poem “We Spend Long Hours Talking” transports these stories to a contemporary country immersed in recurring military violence, exacerbated by other social disturbances that turn the society into an incubator of conflicts.
Metaphor and Critical Analysis
The metaphor of the chicks underscores the need for solutions that promote self-sufficiency and human dignity. Reflecting on these images, we recall stories of resistance and courage from those who lived through times of war. The exemplary strength of these experiences in the face of chaos and despair should inspire the pursuit of a future where human dignity is not just an ideal but a tangible reality.
This edition illuminates the difficulties faced by the population and the urgency of transforming external dependence into inclusive economic development. The illustration of chicks in metal cages surrounded by hungry hyenas and predatory hawks is not just an image. It is a cry for alert, a call to action that forces us to confront the brutal realities faced by so many communities today.
We invite readers to reflect on the reality of countries that insist on under-development rather than development, using the metaphors as inspiration to question and reject the complacency that feeds conflict incubators.
The Editor of “Twin Minds: Alba & Anton”
CHICKS IN METAL CAGES
There are two things that a democratic people will always have a great difficulty in doing: starting a war and ending it. Tocqueville
1. In a previous comment, we referred to the American strategy in Indochina, taking care to relate it to Nixon’s visit to Beijing.
Later, international agencies reported rumors denouncing the presence of North Vietnamese leaders in China, a circumstance that would confirm indications gathered in Moscow suggesting that Nixon might contact the leaders of various Indochinese resistance movements.
France Press suggested that the long series of secret talks last year between Kissinger (one of the great architects of the visit) and Duke Tho in Paris was less about restarting talks than about preparing the Nixon-Tho meeting somewhere in China.
We believe it is not worth emphasizing the importance of this meeting and how it will reflect on the struggle that has been tormenting the two Vietnams, Laos, and Cambodia for years.
In any case, it seems certain that the major offensives against communist sanctuaries in Cambodia and the latest major offensive in Laos have amply demonstrated the impossibility of carrying out the so-called Vietnamization of the war.
2. Oliver Todd mentioned in “Le Nouvel Observateur” that “the price of withdrawal and turnaround will be higher than the stabilizing stalemate in Korea. 33,000 Americans died for Seoul, 44,000 for Saigon.
To the indifferent heirs of the great European massacres, these numbers seem low, almost obscene, compared to about two million Vietnamese machine-gunned, bombed, napalmed, uprooted, irradiated in ten years, according to American experts.”
On the other hand, American military leaders complain about the increasingly hostile way the growing portion of the population reacts to the war.
An American returning from the great or small battles of World War II was truly a hero; an American returning from Vietnam simply dissolves into the country’s population, and no one notices him.
There is no doubt that, as much as Nixon’s plans for peace, as much as the resistance groups’ plans, the absolute exhaustion of both peoples will be crucial for the war to end at this moment.
3. In Saigon, the “story of the chicks” is circulating, which we transcribe today from the D. Quixote Notebooks (nº. 41), where we read it a few days ago. It goes like this:
“American chicks, confined in metal cages, stretching their necks to peck at prefabricated food, imported and made from American fish meal, Formosan bone meal, and Japanese proteins. Are these chicks the symbol of South Vietnamese villagers? Observe the sad life of American-raised chicks. The owners, standing in front of the metal cage, throw a few milligrams of vitamins into the water they give to their flock and count the days until they take the chicks out of the cage to roast them. Do not laugh yet…
These chicks are quite faithful symbols of us, citizens of South Vietnam today… Like American chicks, we are not capable of producing rice for our subsistence, although agriculture has been the profession of our ancestors since the origins of the nation. We are not, in fact, confined in metal cages, but we are surrounded on all sides by barbed wire whose length could encircle the Earth eight times.”
This story is only important because it was born in Saigon.
(26/2/1972)
In A Escrita de Anton, Carneiro Gonçalves (2021), 2nd Family Edition Publisher: Ciedima Lda., pp. 515–516.
WE SPEND LONG HOURS TALKING
We spend long hours talking
and as soon as night falls
we go up by elevator to the tombs
there we are protected
by the slab of the ceiling
the walls we cohabit with
and the scaffolded floors
sonorously
we pay homage to each other
at each landing
we dine in a circle
with steaming Swiss soups
without grandmother
and nerves like towel fringes
when the breeze does not blow
deeply, close
we sleep
and shapeless moons
once the gondolas are gone!
publicly watch
we fornicate
so someone can replace us.
Alba, Sebastião (2023). Todo o Alba. Plural, p. 46.
