The Song of Tomorrow

Sonia Maria Luce Possentini

Spring of 1944, the hardest year of the war. Oriele, the author’s grandmother, is twenty years old and once again setting off for the rice weeding season. Her difficult life pushes her forward: a husband at war, a son to raise. She and her lifelong friend, Mercede, leave home for a fistful of rice and a few coins. The days ahead will be brutally hard, because the work is backbreaking and the master an exploiter.
But when Mercede falls ill, Oriele realizes she must do something truly forceful to bring about change, so the rice weeders can finally receive fair pay and a dignified life. And so that morning, though bent over the flooded fields, all the women followed her in her protest song, until the echo of their voices spread everywhere: 1,200 women, united against exploitation, demanding recognition of their freedom.

A lifelong friendship binds young Oriele and her dearest friend Mercede, who have gone to the rice fields every spring since they were fourteen. Woven between the lines of this small story is the greater history of the struggle of 1,200 women demanding the reduction of working hours from eight to seven, rice, bicycle tires, clothes – and above all, equal rights. And the story of their victory.

 

Other books by Sonia Maria Luce Possentini