i Silence is explicit Silence is complicit Complicity is violence So in the violence of our silence Let us take stock of our complicity ii Our complicity silences truth Muffles honour, rapes innocence The same innocence we plead Confronted by shattered delusion “We didn’t know” iii We wished to not know Blinded, deafened, deadened We turned away Bedecked ourselves in laurel Which now turns to rue iv Our silence - yours and mine - is explicit It is complicit It is violent And in its complicit explicit violence We too have bloodied our souls About Ayesha Kajee Ayesha Kajee, a South African human rights activist and political analyst, has written poems and stories since childhood, but rarely publishes them due to ingrained perfectionism. She was runner up for the Babishaiku haiku prize in 2016.

It is with great pleasure to announce the winners of this year’s poetry competition arranged by UN-aligned. This year, we have received 17 poems that creatively portrayed the values that UN-aligned’s Manifesto campaigns for. The first place goes to Dean Gessie from Canada for his poem “Terra Australis Incognita”.

Read Dean Gessie’s winning submission to the 2021 UN-aligned poetry competition.

In the last issue we saw how some 20th century writers envisioned a dystopian future in reaction to the two world wars and to the dwindling human values. Protesting against society and the situation of man, but in a different way, were the giants of the Theatre of the Absurd Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.

Discover the story of the Veiled Christ, a sculpture by Giuseppe Sanmartino housed in the Sansevero Chapel in Naples.

If talking about what you don’t know well is frightening, trying to convey to others what you have studied for a long time with enthusiasm and passion is disorienting, because you proceed with the constant feeling of not saying everything or at least not saying enough. Years ago, when I was still a university student, I was deeply impressed by Christian archeology not only as a matter of faith, but because when art is placed at the service of any kind of religion or religious thought, it generates artistic phenomena that involve social edification.

The dystopian novel developed during the 20th century when the reality of humanity’s volatile condition became evident after both the first and second world wars. The word, dystopia, refers to Utopia, the fictitious name of an ideal country, coined by Thomas More in his famous book Libellus … de optimo reipublicae statu deque nova Insula Utopia (1516).