Chiquet Mawet | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Michelle Beaujean 23 January 1937 Verviers, Belgium |
| Died | 4 July 2000 (aged 63) Liège, Belgium |
| Occupation(s) | playwright, columnist, activist |
Chiquet Mawet (born Michelle Beaujean; 23 January 1937 – 4 July 2000) was a playwright, storyteller, poet, social activist and professor of ethics.[1] Part of the generation between Stalingrad in 1942 and May 1968, Beaujean was fascinated at the age of 20 by the hope of self-managed socialism (Titoism) in Yugoslavia.[2] At 30, she became a pioneer of the anti-nuclear movement in Belgium.
A playwright, in addition to her texts and articles,[3] Mawet was the author of numerous plays[4] including La Pomme des hommes,[5] Le prince-serpent,[6] Le Pape et la putain,[7] Caïus et Umbrella, and Nuinottenakt.
In 1989, she was a founding member of the association Silence, les Dunes! which brought together around ten artists from the Verviers region.[10]
On 19 June 1975, during a press conference in Brussels announcing the creation of a Common Anti-Nuclear Front (FAAN), Michèle Beaujean represented the APRI (Association for the Protection against Ionizing Radiation).
On 12 March 1976, in Namur, during the constitutive general assembly of Friends of the Earth (Belgian section), she was elected member of the board of directors of the new association.
A radical activist in the anti-nuclear movement, she coordinated the departures from Belgium for the demonstration of 31 July 1977 against Superphénix in Creys-Malville: A protester dies following violent clashes with the police. She then distanced herself from the political ecology which she perceived as a political recuperation of the "executives" of the anti-nuclear social movement.
Mawet's time in the anti-nuclear and green movements brought her into the French anarchist movement, in which she joined Alternative libertaire.[11]
At the end of the 1990s, she contributed to the creation of the Collectif Chômeur, Pas Chien! in the Liège Region.
Composed of unemployed people and various associations, the Collective proposes "to implement concrete actions to denounce discriminatory practices" that the new regulations (of the 1990s) install against the unemployed. For the Collective, deprived of employment, the individual is driven out of the democratic space and is confined to the status of sub-citizen.
The demands of Collectif Chômeur, Pas Chien! are not pre-established according to a political program, they emerge from the experience of unemployed citizens and from a collective reflection that the association wishes to extend to the entire social body, workers and unemployed alike. Collectif Chômeur, Pas Chien! refuses material and moral penalization, linked to the criterion of employment. Every person, worker or not, has the right to a means of existence consistent with human dignity. For the Collective, wealth is no longer the fruit of human labor as much as that of modern technologies, automation and the financial games they allow, thus leading a growing number of people to no longer have a place in the system. production or even in services.
In 1998, Mawet gave a good account of the anti-political spirit of this period: “Except ideological autism, we can understand the motivations of those who strive to constitute a force of political opposition (…) However, it is difficult not to note that 'from the moment when individuals come together in an organization aiming for power – even a very small piece – they cease to be in phase with those they claim to represent and inevitably end up instrumentalizing them: in their head, voters, grassroots activists, union members are quickly reduced to fuel for their race.”.
In the 1990s she regularly collaborated with the monthly Alternative Libertaire.[11] She published dozens of texts there. In 1997, she recalls her atypical career in the collective work Le Hasard et la necessity: how I became a libertarian.
After a long illness, Mawet committed suicide [citation needed] on 4 July 2000, at the age of 62.
