'You must not sleep!'.

The tragic race incidents in the US in recent weeks, which began with the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and now the campaign, Black Lives Matter, make us all reflect on what we can do. I will today draw attention to a Norwegian poet, Arnulf Overland (1889-1968), who was the country's topmost political poet before and during WWII. In 1941, he was sent to a German concentration camp till the end of the war in 1945. After the war, his books became the most sold poetry books ever in the country. From 1946, he lived in the State Honorary Residence, 'The Cave', on the outskirts of the Royal Palace Gardens, originally having been built by the eminent writer Henrik Wergeland (1808-1845), who was so important in creating a Norwegian national identity when the country was young in the first half of the 19th century, having been part of Denmark for four hundred years, and a junior partner in a union with Sweden for another close to one hundred years.

Arnulf Overland's poems 'You must not sleep!' (In Norwegian, Du ma ikke sove), which had first been published in 1936, became one of the most relevant resistance movement poems and a major cause for his imprisonment. Many of his poems had biblical and prophetic symbols, warnings about war and injustice, and tall orders to people to see and do what is right. The mentioned poem is a warning against racism, discrimination, and inequality. That is again on the public agenda at the present time, in every nation and globally, following the police murder of the Afro-American George Floyd in USA just a few weeks ago in 2020, and other police violence and a heavy-handed culture in other fields in that country - and also elsewhere.

One verse in Overland's poem 'You must not sleep' reads like this: 'You must not endure so very well the injustice that does not affect yourself. Crying out with my very last breath; you must not sleep. You must not forgive!' (The whole poem is available on Internet in English, and, of course, in the original Norwegian version, even read by the poet himself in his conservative standard Norwegian language with distinct Bergen accent. But Overland was not a conservative; he was actually a declared communist and he was radical in so many fields of politics, social and religious issues, and he was always with his weapon of words on the side of the oppressed so that they could gain independence from foreign rules and oppression, and reach justice and respect. That means that...