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TAGORE NERUDA CÉSAIREfor a reconciled universal

United NationsEducational, Scientific and

Cultural Organization

FOR A RECONCI LED UN IVERSAL

Published in 2011 byOrganisation of the United Nationsfor Education, Science and Culture7, place Fontenoy 75352 Paris 07 sp, France

Under the direction ofFrancesco Bandarin,Assistant Director-General for Culture

Assisted by Edmond Moukala,Programme Specialist

unesco1, rue Miollis 75732 Paris Cedex 15, France

Editorial CoordinatorEdmond Moukala

Content contributionsAnnick Thébia-Melsan,Uma Das Gupta,Alain Sicard,René Henane

Editorial coordinationFrançoise Rivière,Annick Thébia-Melsan,cipsh,Enzo Fazzino,Jacques Plouin,Naïma Boumaiza,Noëlle Aboya-Chevanne,Lamia Somai-Lasa,Chris Sacarabany

Graphic design, cover and illustrationAude Perrier

Printingunesco

isbn :© unesco, 2011Printed in France

DiffusionThe publication “Rabindrânâth Tagore, Pablo Neruda, Aimé Césaire, pour un universel réconcilié”is available in English, French and Spanish.

Any reproduction even partial of this publication is forbidden.

Legal ResponsibilityThe authors of the articles are responsible for the choice and the presentation of the facts contained in the texts they sign, as well as opinions expressed in these texts; these do not necessarily reflect unesco’s and do not engage in any way the responsibility of the Organisation.

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rabindrânâth tagore

“As I look around I see the crumbling ruins of a proud civilization strewn like a vast heap of futility. And yet I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in Man. I would rather look forward to the opening of a new chapter in his history after the cataclysm is over and the atmosphere rendered clean with the spirit of service and sacrifice. Perhaps that dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the sun rises. A day will come when unvanquished Man will retrace his path of conquest, despite all barriers, to win back his lost human heritage.”

Excerpt of the speech on "the crisis of civilization", delivered on 7 August 1940 at Santiniketan.

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pablo neruda

“I want to live in a world with no excommunicates.I want to live in a world in which beings are only human, with no other title than that, no obsession with a rule, a word, a label (…) I want the huge majority, the only majority: everyone, to be able to speak, to read, to listen, to blossom.”

Excerpt from “I confess I have lived”, 1974 (English translation 1977).

aimé césaire

“There are two ways of losing yourself: by a walled segregation within the particular, or by dilution within the universal. My concept of the Universal is that it is a universal enriched by all that is particular, by all particulars combined, the coexistence and deepening of all things particular.”

Excerpt from the “Letter to Maurice Thorez”, written on 24 October 1956.

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contents

1 message from ms irina bokova, director-general of unesco three unifying messages for a new humanism p 13

2 introduction an innovative and viable project p 17

3 across the centuries, lives, literary works: poetics, humanism and action p 26 tagore p 28 neruda p 52 césaire p 70

4 five themes of convergence: p 92 1 poetry and art: a life force p 94 2 for a new pact of meaning between humanity and nature p 110 3 emancipation from oppression, in reciprocity and rights p 128 4 knowledge, science and ethics p 148 5 the educational issues p 164

5 conclusion p 182

6 resolution of the general conference p 186

7 acknowledgements p 188

8 credits p 190

1MESSAGE FROM MS IRINA BOKOVADIRECTOR-GENERAL OF UNESCO

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three unifying messages for a new humanism The twenty-first century began with a collective obligation to reconsider means of development and to initiate new paths for peace.

Globalization has developed many gateways between regions of the world that were once isolated, which has enhanced the experience of diversity for everyone. Unprecedented at this level, this situation opens up new opportunities for the consideration of what is communal, and the expression of the universal that we all share.

But society has also made notable errors of judgment, especially those related to ethno-centricity and social injustice, which constitute the origins of intolerance and inequality. These tensions appear at the very moment when global development issues and global warming require us to reinforce our sense of unity and strengthen the reconciliation of all the world’s peoples.

Among so many diverse cultures, how can we coordinate a ‘living-together’ ideal that is both tolerant and humanist? On what basis can we build a united human community that is able to develop common responses to global issues that concern us all?

The United Nations Millennium Declaration for development called for a humanity dedicated to tackling today’s challenges. This international cooperation cannot however succeed solely by political or economic means. We must all strengthen our humanist values and our sense of ethics, and we must focus more on the power of resilience provided by quality education, science and culture at the service of the people.

Rabindrânâth Tagore, Pablo Neruda and Aimé Césaire have left us a collective legacy whose vast reach is a major contribution to the reflection and action of this ‘new humanism’.

message from ms irina bokova, director-general of unesco

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While evolving individually in separate cultural spheres, though having barely met, these three giants of thought and poetry developed converging visions of extraordinary resonance with a potential for contemporary politics and peoples.

Built on a foundation of deep cultural importance, their lifeworks are a strong plea for every culture’s right to participate in universal development. Their united struggle against rationales of dehumanization and oppression thrives on the understanding that no geographic area, no cultural sphere can grant itself the exclusive right to define what is common for all of us. By the power of proposition and dialogue, men and women of the world can contribute towards identifying that which calls upon all humanity, elevating the united, authentic universal.

Everyone can contemplate the convergences that emerge from the texts of Tagore, Neruda and Césaire, like powerful guides that illuminate current questions and nourish the contemporary humanist project.

By putting these issues in perspective, unesco is revising its mission of ‘intellectual vigilance’ and, more than ever, embraces the intercultural dialogue among all humanist voices, by expressing the most of the human spirit.

Irina Bokova Director-general of unesco

message from ms irina bokova, director-general of unesco

2INTRODUCTIONAN INNOVATIVE AND VIABLE PROJECT

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the concept behind the programmeAt the very centre of contemporary constellations of thought, experience, reflection and creation, Rabindrânâth Tagore (1861–1941), Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) and Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) offered us a glimpse of a possible reconciled universal, freed at last from the domination, exploitation, manipulation and exclusion that confined the processes of universalization to a single and unique path. For a long time, this uni-directional process made the universal incompatible with the world’s expectations and needs, exacerbated by the undeniable demands of globalization.

Convinced of the need to bring shared responses to collective thinking, as required by a rapidly changing context, the Member States of unesco expressed their wish that the living legacy of Tagore, Neruda and Césaire help ‘to refound the intellectual and moral solidarity required by the challenges facing humanity’. At the 35th session of unesco’s General Conference, the Member States adopted resolution 46, proposed by the Executive Council, to launch the programme entitled Rabindrânâth Tagore, Pablo Neruda and Aimé Césaire: For a reconciled universal, and to include it in the Organization’s medium-term revisable strategy for 2010–2013, ‘in an interdisciplinary operational framework appropriate for sustainable action.’

Indeed Tagore, Neruda and Césaire, though coming from different geographical and cultural backgrounds, had in common the fact that they positioned themselves as men speaking and acting from the ‘South’, but with a desire to engage in dialogue with an obligation towards responsibility. Their profoundly distinctive and original works were nourished with sources emanating from Asia, Africa, America, the Caribbean and Europe. Their anti-colonial struggle for the dawning of a new world order had anticipated the major global geopolitical upheavals. They extended and even redefined the reach of modern humanism, and their works illustrate and bring together authors, creators, decision-makers and scientists, whose messages enrich and enlarge the themes of their respective involvement still further, as they traversed the complexity of the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Because the humanism they offer conceives a relationship with the other, the self, and nature in a radical and concrete way, the three poets provided clues that shed light on the roots of the principal contradictions currently found in the difficult construction of a universal, which according to Aimé Césaire in his Letter to Maurice Thorez, ‘enriched by all that is particular, by all particulars combined, the coexistence and deepening of all things particular.’

an innovative and viable project

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The three poets embody in their lifeworks the pillars of a living solidarity, which inspired the creation of unesco, entrusted by the international community to ‘building peace in the minds of men’– lest we forget – a mission that is increasingly crucial in a world confronted by economic, social and financial divisions, global issues of food and energy, as well as environmental, humanitarian and ethical conflicts. Many people throughtout the world are questioning the conditions of human fulfilment and are adjusting the balance of knowledge and wealth for the benefit of all, beyond the simple accumulation of material goods. It appears that the time has come to learn some lessons from history.

Far more than a cyclical occurrence, the crisis appears to be global, and is above all a crisis of meaning, reminding us of the essential nature of humanism and its values, and which calls for concrete ways and means to improve or even rethink governance and global dialogue. In the end it is a crisis that places the role of culture, education and science firmly at the heart of sustainable development and the building of peace. In other words, the very essence of unesco’s mission of intellectual vigilance at the centre of the international community, contributing to the indisputable pillars of reference by sharing a new humanism that conveys the experience of peoples and speaks to all.

For all these reasons ‘the central, pioneering, and current example of the messages by Tagore, Neruda and Césaire’ has led Member States to unanimously agree to take inspiration from their commitment as poets of action, because it is emblematic of the issues in the world today, and because it unifies multiple committments. The implementation of this programme, rooted in their message and actions, is a leading innovative mission that is likely to bring together the cross-cultural attributes of reflection and creation of the North and the South in order to ‘consolidate linkages between cultures and civilizations’.

an innovative and viable project

focal points of constellations for the culture of peaceAs declared by the Director-General of unesco, Ms Irina Bokova, linking the three lifeworks of Tagore, Neruda and Césaire projects their message beyond their singular meaning towards a greater resonance than even their individual legacy provides. They are the focal points for constellations of thought and action by which it is possible to explore and better understand – on the five continents – the mechanisms that have structured the relationships between the universal and the individual, from the middle of colonial ninteenth century to the present day. That historical process, resulting today in globalization, was the colonial adventure and its variations running alongside the expansion of industrial civilization, whose complex, contrasted articulations Tagore, Neruda and Césaire evaluated – articulations that foreshadowed the present day world context defined by the recurrence of mechanisms of hegemony and exclusion, but also by the emergence of undeniable opportunities and new paradigms.

In condensing the last two centuries, Tagore, Neruda and Césaire succeeded in taking on the best of the traditions and achievements from the civilizations that preceded them. Although they were confronted with the struggles of their era, which suffered under colonialism, fascism, racism and fundamentalism, they accepted the choices imposed by the complex construction of the historical changes taking place in their particular context, which was in constant complementarity with their fundamental contemporaries: Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Franz Fanon, Pablo Picasso, Rafael Alberti, Wifredo Lam, Cheikh Anta Diop, André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Federico García Lorca, Yasunari Kawabata, Satyajit Ray, and many others. Pivotal figures, they gave rise to the wealth of filiations that give meaning to the notion of ‘constellation’, which brought together men and women from the North and South, who contributed towards its long evolution, on the five continents, and the proposition of a new humanism and a Culture of Peace.

Mobilizing these constellations is not only an intellectual exercise, distant from the realities of development. At the juncture of past and present, and with a concrete and compelling urgency, we are dealing with a humanistic dialogue that the world crucially needs today in order to ‘humanize’ development. In initiating the project Tagore, Neruda and Césaire: For a reconciled universal, unesco aims to link this dynamic with the widest possible range of actors working to activate practices of reflection and dialogue between cultures and civilizations: writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, athletes, human rights activists, journalists, film-makers, educators of all kinds, students of all ages, whether these practices are economic, political, social, scientific, educational, cultural, environmental or recollections.

20an innovative and viable project

poetics of active solidarity in order to comprehend the issues of peace and development Thanks to Tagore, Neruda, Césaire and these constellations, at this stage of human history we are able to decipher the frames of reference and thus the very structure of political and cultural development of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and even understand the strategic dimension of the economics of post-colonial modernity.

Each one of them acted in the domain of economic and social development, transforming the poetics of action into a practice of solidarity and humility – a laboratory of methods and means of cultural, social and political reconciliation from the highest pinnacles of thought and creation to the grassroots level.

From inventing microcredit or a new form of education in a decolonizing India, like Tagore, or standing up for the saltpeter miners in Chile, like Neruda, or promoting social and cultural development in the Carribbean, like Césaire, their example demonstrates how through innovative and authentically responsible action on behalf of a pragmatic, tangible humanism, it is possible to unite the respective cultural horizons towards a Culture of Peace. As pioneers of responsibility and sharing, they showed how to link action to spirit, practice to ethics, and material to immaterial. On that basis, this project offers a vast body of material for interdisciplinary and inter-cultural dialogue.


mobilizing initiatives and meansThe goal set by unesco is to launch a dynamic with the support of national and local governments, civil society, cultural and intellectual actors, private foundations and community groups, in order to create an original framework for a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary action around these plural and meaningful messages, making use of human talents, political projects, technological resources, and operational and financial cooperation. The objective is to promote an intellectual, artistic and institutional partnership that responds to the needs of co-responsibility on a global scale.

On the one hand, politics of active solidarity confers a crucial role to the arts and humanities, while on the other hand, by highlighting the legacy of these three humanists, who together embraced the great geocultural regions of Asia, Africa, America, the Caribbean and Europe, our ambition is to encourage international initiatives in the publication, translation, creation and research of their lifeworks, in order to:


Restore to poetry and art, whose works are visionary and raise awareness, their role as mediators between humanity and the world, and as a link between cultures for a peaceful co-existence.

Reformulate the human relationship to nature so as to nourish our shared existence in the world with meaning and values, as well as the sustainability of our development needs.

Consolidate the processes of emancipation against all forms of oppression in order to progress towards the eradication of political, economical, social and cultural exclusion, and to fight racism and intolerance at its source.

Strengthen the ethical challenge to science and technologies whose achievements and shared horizons are organic vectors of the diversity of peoples and civilizations, who together in mutual respect are required to assume the issues of peace and development.

Promote greater awareness of education as a method of transmission of knowledge and respect in the shaping of conscience, and the evolution of societies towards social justice, the fight against the erosion of values and the fragmentation of knowledge and identity, and for the sharing of benefits of development.


unesco’s action areas to promotethe project’s diffusion unesco has identified a number of operational directions on how best to disseminate the project by encouraging and supporting actions that have strong potential for creating greater visibility of the project’s many objectives. Programme implementation will involve the establishment of partnerships with various political, economical, financial, social and media actors of Member States so as to encourage interest and the mobilization of institutional partners and civil society. This will include setting up diversified projects, satisfying particular national, regional or global objectives, on the basis of financial and strategic cooperation with national public institutions and the private sector to promote education, interdisciplinary research, and the artistic and cultural aspects of the programme. The actions areas are outlined below:

1. Communication and information: An interactive framework of communication and information is proposed by unesco, in particular, making available appropriate digital tools (website, blogs, social networks, wikis, and so on). These will be supported by regular contact with the press and opinion-formers (from personalized contacts, a variety of events), so as to widely disseminate the information required to present and launch the programme; interactive digital media is to become accessible in the greatest number of languages possible in order to capture a wider audience, in particular, young people, artists, researchers and students.

2. Organizing awareness-raising events in partnership and in close cooperation with international and intergovernmental organizations, unesco’s multilateral partners (un, eu, African Union, Mercosur, Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, the Commonwealth and so on) so as to consolidate the problematic of the new humanism and the Culture of Peace, with respect to the Millennium Development Goals, as well as provide solutions to pressing international issues. This inter-agency and inter-institutional dimension is consistent with unesco’s mandate of intellectual vigilance entrusted to it within the un system, and is needed more than ever in the current context, where the question of humanism is urgent and central. This broader multilateral framework will likely leverage unesco’s initiative, making a valuable contribution towards the realization of this unique moral mission to which it has been assigned on the world stage.

3. Publication and translation: A special effort will be devoted to promoting ventures with public and private entities in the sector to publish and translate the three bodies of work with a view to making the works available in translated works outside their original languages, and thus making them accessible to a wider and more diverse audience. In this way, the project aims to firstly ensure that the messages are known and understood in the national languages, and secondly, to deepen the rich tangible and intangible heritage of these works, in full respect of copyright and rights-holders. In the first instance, unesco will compile an anthology of texts by the three authors, available in the six official un languages, while a special effort will be made to ensure that the texts are available in other native languages.


4. Carrying out awareness-raising actions directed at cultural institutions and artists, performers, and other creative individuals so that they can take ownership of the project, using all the languages of art and theatre, in order to reach the widest possible audience in the North and South, ensuring in particular that young audiences are reached in order to promote the programme’s inter-generational and interfaith significance.

5. Launching calls for projects to promote local or national initiatives, depending on resources and expectations on the ground. Projects benefitting from a unesco label would also have promotional and awareness-raising tools available to them, which would be presented on the unesco website.

6. Creating links between the programme and the major cultural meetings or events held worldwide (Year of Culture, festivals, international exibitions, cultural and sporting events worldwide, and so on), which would effectively disseminate the project in all social and geographical contexts, and thus integrate it into people’s lives.

7. This is followed by the project’s audiovisual dimension, which should be given special attention by initiating and supporting the design, realization and dissemination of audiovisual documentaries or fiction-inspired programmes of the lifeworks of the three poets and their constellations. Transforming the texts into images would allow for broadcast on television, projections in public spaces and educational settings, and for use to support a variety of technological presentations.

His Excellency Ambassador Olabiyi Babalola Joseph Yai Permanent Delegate of Benin to unesco Chairperson of the Executive Board of unesco (2007-2009)


3TAGORE NERUDA CÉSAIRE POETICS, HUMANISM AND ACTIONACROSS THE CENTURIES, LIVES, LITERARY WORKS

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rabindrânâth tagore 1861-1941oh what a relief it is to be away from narrow domestic walls and to behold the universe. Gitanjali (Song offerings), 1910.

Rabindrânâth Tagore was a poet of spiritual, protean genius, a philosopher, a farsighted anti-colonial activist, an initiator of social change, an innovative educator, an outstanding messenger of dialogue between cultures and civilizations, a defender and enlightened propagator of scientific rigour, but also an exceptional musician, a prolific playwright, a fascinating actor and singer, a very talented artist, and many more things that made the ‘bard of Bengal’ an awakener of consciousness and who is now timeless thanks to the force of his message and the relevance of his vision.In modern history, few men can match his achievements; through his political and humanist commitment and the spread of his ideas and inspiration, he incarnated, in particularly emblematic fashion, the human ideal

or Uomo universale as imagined by Leonardo da Vinci. Tagore was one of the major world players of the industrial age that stretched from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. His lifework was animated by a tireless wish to share knowledge and the pursuit of morality. Adopting a pan-Asian as well as an Indian perspective, he tirelessly devoted himself to his people’s struggle for liberation, and beyond to include all colonized peoples. He sought to achieve this through education and the acceptance of responsibility so as to build a world of cooperation between peoples, a world freed from alienation, oppression, humiliation and regression, so that civilizations and talents could blossom into mutual respect at the service of the human universal.


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THE YOUNG RABIRabindrânâth Tagore was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on Monday 25 Baishakh 1268 (Bengali era) or Tuesday 7 May 1861 in an India ruled by the British Raj. Originating from the Pirali Brahmin caste, he was known by the name Takur and the sobriquet Gurudev, and as a child was nicknamed Rabi by his family.

Tagore was the youngest of thirteen surviving children of Debendranath Tagore, one of the founders of the reform movement Brahmo Sama and the patriarch of a family of well-respected large property owners in Bengal. This background was privileged materially and intellectually; his family was composed of artists, and social and religious reformers opposed to the caste system and in favour of improving the situation of Indian women.

The young Rabi, a worthy scion of this enlightened lineage, studied history, astronomy, modern science and Sanskrit. He plunged into the classical poems of Kalidasa, and from an early age learned about the Mughal heritage and Western and Muslim cultures. His education at home as well as journeys around India transformed the teenage Tagore into a non-conformist and pragmatist who devoted himself to observing nature and analysing the workings of society and colonial domination, as well as intellectual reflection. At sixteen he published his first poems and became known for composing Bhikharini ( The beggarwoman ) in 1877 – his first short story in Bengali – and Sandhya Sangit in 1882, which contains the famous poem Nirjharer Swapnabhanga or ‘The rousing of the waterfall’. The young Tagore spent much of his time sailing or camping by the riverside in places that today form part of Bangladesh. He kept his eyes and his ears open, and was touched by the beauty of the nature and people in Bangladesh. Coming from an aristocratic background, he was inspired by the poor and their simple existence in Shilaidika, Shajadpur and Patisar, where he became aware of the reality of poverty and discrimination. His poetry and short stories often depict this reality.

Planning to become a barrister, Tagore enrolled at a private secondary school in Brighton, England in 1878 from where he discovered the contradictions and dysfunctions of the western world.

There are grave questions that Western civilization has presented before the worldbut not completely answered. The conflict between the individual and the state, labour and capital, the man and the woman; the conflict between the greed of material gain and the spiritual life of man, the organized selfishness of nations and the higher ideals of humanity; the conflict between all the ugly complexities inseparable from giant organizations of commerce and state and the natural instincts of man crying for simplicity and beauty and fullness of leisure - all these have to be brought to a harmony in a manner not yet dreamt of.

tagore, neruda, césaire, poetics, humanism and action

31rabindrânâth tagore

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He studied law at University College London, but decided to return to Bengal before finishing his degree. Returning to Calcutta in 1880, he published the volume Dawn Songs in 1883 and married at his home a young woman from his caste, Mrinalini Devi (1873-1902). They had five children, two of whom died before adulthood; his wife also died prematurely.

zamindar babuBowing to his father’s wish, in 1890 Tagore began to administer the family estate in Shilaidaha (an area that is now part of Bangladesh). Nicknamed ‘Zamindar Babu’, Tagore lived on the family barge, the Padma, and travelled around the estate to collect the peasants’ dues. And it was from this country that he drew his detailed observation of the internal contradictions in Bengali society, understanding the burden of alienation imposed by the British colonial yoke.

Dreaming of emancipation for his country and for humanity as a whole, he was vehemently opposed to the blinkered traditionalism that was paralysing India’s transition towards an endogenous modernism. He placed the education of both women and men at the centre of national reconstruction and in 1901 founded an ashram on his family estate at Santiniketan in west Bengal, which subsequently contained an experimental school, plant nurseries, gardens and a library containing sources of knowledge from everywhere, including the West. His work as an educator in Santiniketan and his prolific literary production earned him wide support in India as well as abroad. He published Naivedya in 1901 and Kheya in 1906, and translated his poems in free verse into English.

Against Bengal’s socioeconomic decline in the towns and villages where endemic poverty was rife, Tagore developed concrete understanding of knowledge and scientific procedures, while respecting cultural and linguistic identity, using schooling as the method of ‘liberating villages from the shackles of impotence and ignorance by revitalizing knowledge’.

His interest in the sciences made Visva-Parichay a centre for exploratory work in biology, physics and astronomy, which influenced his poetry as it set aside an important place for naturalism and the respect for scientific laws. The university complexes of Santiniketan and Visha-Baraty are still operating today with the support of the Indian government.


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a rich body of work Profoundly influenced and inspired by spirituality, Tagore was an anti-conventional cultural reformer who modernized Bengali art, while rejecting the restrictions that bound it to classical Indian forms. He experimented with theatre for the first time when, at the age of sixteen, he took the principal role, Mr Jourdain, in an adaptation by his brother, Jyotirindranath, of Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. At twenty, he wrote his first ‘play set to tune’ called Valmiki Pratibha (The genius of Valmiki), which was followed by plays that explored philosophical and allegorical themes based on ancient Buddhist and Hindu legends, except he chose ordinary people as heroes so as to destroy symbols of subjugation. His thoughts on the environment, his modern ideas and his interest in the life of the poor were exceptional in Indian literature at that time.

A prolific musician as well as a talented painter, Tagore composed a large body of music whose emotive power was inseparable from his poetry, drama and painting. The lyrics of his songs explored the whole range of human emotions, from his first songs on death to passionate pieces on love and sexual relations written in innovative forms.

Outside the realm of fiction, Tagore wrote on subjects as varied as the history of India or linguistics. Together with his autobiographical works, his travel journals, essays and lectures have been compiled into many volumes, which include Iurop Jatrir Patro (Letters from Europe) and Manusher Dhormo (Man’s religion).

His literary and musical legacy is inseparable from all fields of modern Indian cultural creation, and several of his novels and short stories, such as Chaturanga, Shesher Kobita, Char Odhay, Noukadubi (The wreck), Charulata and Ghare Baire (The home and the world), have been adapted for cinema by directors such as Satyajit Ray.


36tagore, neruda, césaire, poetics, humanism and action

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anti-colonial commitment and the pan-asian ideal Curious about the world, Tagore very early on chose anti-colonial activism, having understood the complex nature of the challenges independent India would face as part of the continent: how to become a great nation. He knew that taking part in the peaceful awakening of Asia meant avoiding the snares of nationalism, religious extremism and political totalitarianism, whatever their origins.

At the dawn of the century, new and worrying nationalist issues were appearing which pointed to future significant transformations on the global geopolitical map. Spain’s defeat in Cuba in 1898 confirmed the arrival of the United States as a major player on the world stage, which just preceded the Russo-Japanese war (1904–1905) between imperial Russia, whose aim was to have a coastal opening on the Pacific, and the post-Meiji Japanese empire, which was determined to be recognized as an important regional power to develop its own imperial and colonial strategy in Asia, and in so doing, applied the most aggressive methods from the Western system to serve national domination.

In widening his anti-colonial vision, Tagore fully supported the peaceful pan-Asia ideal advocated by the Japanese intellectual Kakuzô Okakura, who in his book Asia’s Awakening, written in India in 1902, affirmed his solidarity with the colonized countries, and in particular, with Indian intellectuals. He followed the progress of cultural nationalism and militarism in Japan with critical vigilance, where the authorities were carrying out violent repression of democratic movements and protest with the almost unanimous support of the population, which Tagore deplored, ‘From Japan there have come no protests, not even from her poets.’ During his trip to Tokyo in October 1916, he strongly condemned ultranationalist, colonialist expansionism in an anti-nationalist, universalist speech at Tokyo Imperial University, which Romain Rolland recalled as a ‘turning point in world history’.

I, for myself, cannot believe that Japan has become what she is by imitating the West. I do not for a moment suggest that Japan should be unmindful of acquiring modern weapons of self-protection. But this should never be allowed to go beyond her instinct of self-preservation. She must know that the real power is not in the weapons themselves, but in the man who wields these weapons; and when he, in his eagerness for power, multiplies his weapons at the cost of his own soul, then it is he who is in even greater danger than his enemies…What is dangerous for Japan is not the imitation of the outer features of the West, but the acceptance of the motive force of Western nationalism as her own. I earnestly hope that Japan may never lose her faith in her own soul, in the mere pride of her own foreign acquisition.

The Japanese example played a decisive part in Tagore’s thinking for it enabled him to better perceive the intrinsic origins of colonialism and imperialism, as well as the structural violence of their hegemonic principle.


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nobel prize for literatureOn 14 November 1913, following the publication of his self translated works in English, Tagore learnt that he was to become the first non-Westerner to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to him for the idealistic character – and accessibility to Western readers – of a small portion of his translated work, including Gitanjali (The lyrical offering) published in 1912 with the English title Song Offering, and the first French edition translated by André Gide and Hélène du Pasquier. Through his writing, Tagore had transformed Bengali from a provincial language to a rich, sophisticated and vibrant one, capable of dealing with intricate matters of science, philosophy, and other disciplines. The language written and spoken today in Bangladesh is largely as a result of Tagore’s contribution, having nurtured the culture and traditions of the Bengali people.

Once it had discovered him, early twentieth century Europe was fascinated by Tagore. Romain Rolland wrote in his journal, ‘He is very handsome, perhaps excessively so. His whole face shines with a calm and abundant joy which carries over into all his words.’ His exchanges with the period’s most eminent Europeans, such as André Gide, William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound, taught him about the cultural and political debates of the time, in which growing awareness of the West’s responsibility, its hegemonic control of non-Western peoples, and its extremist or fascist tendencies were becoming increasingly apparent. Tagore discovered the new cultural and artistic trends that were revolutionizing science, the arts and literature such as cubism, surrealism, and psychoanalysis. On the eve of the First World War, with the backdrop of colonialism, these factors seemed to him to form a crossroads to the greatest period of transition in history.

In 1915, aware that the orientalist reading of his message by a Western elite was being integrated into a European vision that reflected the ‘civilizing’ mission of the West, even aware – in Romain Rolland’s words – of ‘la dégénérescence de l’Europe’, Tagore hesitatingly agreed to be knighted by the British crown – a title he ended up renouncing in order to condemn the inhumane methods of colonial repression. A tireless worker for dialogue, his commitment to the affirmation of Indian identity, and that of the colonized peoples of Asia and elsewhere, is inseparable from the growing awareness of the need for a rational modernization of Indian social and cultural practices.


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against the ‘iron shackles’ and united with mahatma gandhi for india’s independenceWhen he published a political essay in 1904 in favour of Indian independence, Tagore was one of the very first anti-colonial voices. He became convinced early on that imperialism and colonialism, which up until the nineteenth century were European phenomena, were becoming worldwide realities.

For this reason, the foundations of his vision were laid down, where social and educational action and literaure were inseparable, dedicated to the dual conquest of political liberty and the emancipation of people through struggle against oppression, and through education. For Tagore, these objectives were inextricably linked to encounters with other peoples and cultures in the construction of the human universal, freed not only from domination but also from nationalism. Tagore adhered to this dual paradigm with exceptional constancy and an indestructible ethical conviction, even at the price of incomprehension of his own people as well as Western critics. This anti-colonialist and anti-nationalist attitude was sometimes misunderstood by several countries, even his compatriots.

Although he was not a purely political player, the poet’s strength of conviction and humanistic commitment was rooted in the Indian reality, and as an informed analyst of the world, he nourished both culturally and philosophically the Indian independence movement and anti-colonialist action against the ‘iron shackles’ of the British Raj.

Tagore’s influence was particularly evident on the most emblematic of his fellow-countrymen, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1861–1944); apostle of civil disobedience, of satyagrahâ, on whom Tagore bestowed, for the first time publicly, the respected title Mahâtmâ (great soul) with affection and esteem. In the service of their common ideal – resistance to oppression, conquest of independence, peace between peoples – their friendship bequeathed to India a twin legacy inseparable from its national identity and its international projection. Tagore was fully supportive of Gandhi’s action against British domination, particularly the civil disobedience campaigns carried out in India, although he disapproved of certain dogmatic archaism. For Gandhi he was a model, a point of reference that was especially precious because of their indissociable presence. Gandhi also acknowledged in Tagore the inestimable privilege of a great poet.

Having welcomed them one after the other to Paris, Romain Rolland wrote in February 1923, ‘One does not know which to admire the most, the saint or the wise genius. India enjoys the unique fortune of possessing these two great men at the same time, each of whom is the expression of one of the faces of the most high truth!’


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routes around the world Fired by an insatiable thirst for travel, Tagore travelled the world and visited more than thirty countries between 1878 and 1932, where he met non-Indian audiences, thus deepening his experience of the world’s diversity while observing other cultures. In the course of his study trips to Europe (France, Britain, Italy, Germany, Russia, Romania, Hungary, Greece), the Americas (United States, Argentina), the Middle East (Iran, Iraq), Asia (China, Japan), and Africa (Egypt), he took up many invitations. Enjoying worldwide celebrity, he gave many lectures in which he condemned the realities of colonial oppression and the perilous risks of nationalism, highlighting Western contradictions. Whereever he went, he initiated a dialogue on an equal footing with the colonial powers, sharing his views on Indian civilization, nationalism, war and peace, cross-cultural education, freedom of thought, the importance of critical rationalism, the mission of science, and the need for the universal.

The profound intellectual exchanges he enjoyed with a number of his important contemporaries, including William Butler Yeats, Graham Greene, Romain Rolland, Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, enriched his opinions of the world’s geopolitical context, and the growing materialism and spiritual failings of the industrial and consumer revolution occurring in the West.

There was a time when we were fascinated by Europe. She had inspired us with a new hope. We believed that her chief mission was to preach the gospel of liberty in the world. We had come then to know only her ideal side through her literature and art. But slowly, Asia and Africa, have become the main spheres of Europe’s secular activities, where her chief preoccupations have been the earning of dividends, the administration of empires, and the extension of commerce.

He saw the danger of fascism, which he condemned, especially in his published article of 20 July 1926 following his meeting with Mussolini. These opinions sometimes disagreeably surprised Western audiences who were inclined to see in the ‘monstrous flux of boundless India’ only the mystico-religious expressions of an ancestral Asian heritage – as it was perceived by Western minds – and looked at him solely as the perfect incarnation of the wise man of the East to satisfy ‘l’étroite coupe,’ in André Gide’s words, within the principles of the European orientalist tradition.

These journeys were also an opportunity for Tagore to familiarize himself with advances in Western science for the benefit of Indian society. Convinced that the true pulse of India was in the villages, in 1921 Tagore and the agricultural economist Leonard Elmhirst – whom he had met on a trip to the USA – founded in Surul, a village near the Sriniketan ashram, the Sriniketan Institute for Rural Reconstruction, which was subsequently renamed ‘House of Peace’ by Tagore. He recruited specialists, donors and official supporters from many countries to introduce new scientific knowledge into India.

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freeing india from the caste system and religious sectarianismIn the early 1930s, convinced of ‘the abnormal caste consciousness’ in India, and the inhumanity of the untouchables' fate beyond colonial domination, and which formed an obstacle to the building of the Indian nation, Tagore did everything in his power to ensure that the humanity and rights of the Dalits, or the untouchables, was recognized, calling on the authorities and the people to accept them.

In a similar vein, in the constant struggle against prejudices that were the cause of social and religious exclusion, Tagore became involved in the opposition to the mounting sectarian violence between Muslims and Hindus, and the emergence of an Indian nationalism committed to a future state that was hegemonically Hindu; he foresaw the political and human risks of the clash between Hindu and Muslim fundamentalism.

These fratricidal aberrations, which claim to be the acme of spiritual sectarian observance, (which) like a voracious parasite, feeds on the religion whose appearance it takes on and sucks it dry in such a way that one does not notice that it is dead [...] turn it into a fortress into which retreats its demonic instinct to fight, its pious vanityand its violent scorn for the credo of its neighbour.

Anticipating the consequences that would ensue on both sides as a result of definitive borders established solely on religious difference, he took a stance against all forms of religious extremism so that a multi-ethnic and multi-faith India could play the full role to which it was assigned in terms of modernity and the universal, not least because of the infinite wealth of its human resources and the depth of its spiritual values and civilization.


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a truly living legacyIn his penetrating, objective approach to the contradictions of his time in India, Asia and the West, Tagore was one of the most luminous analysts at the beginning of the industrial era. He gives us a dynamic reading of India and the world that denounced and fought against colonial domination, and one that anticipated the geopolitical development of modernity, postulating the humanistic responsibility of all peoples in eradicating social, ethnic, religious and cultural divisions.

An indispensable worker for his country’s accession to political and national independence, and cultural maturity, his committed struggle throughout his lifetime to enable the Indian people – once freed from the iron-grip of colonialism – to accept themselves in their ethnic, cultural and religious diversity is expressive of a lucid approach to history. Tagore neither feared the risk of incomprehension and solitude by his family nor ostracism by the other in affirming his convictions.

I know my voice is too feeble to raise itself above the uproar of this bustling time, and it is easy for any street urchin to fling against me the epithet of “unpractical”. It will stick to my coat-tail, never to be washed away, effectively excluding me from the consideration of all respectable persons. I know what a risk one runs from the vigorously athletic crowds in being styled an idealist in these days, when thrones have lost their dignity and prophets have become an anachronism, when the sound that drowns all voices is the noise of the market-place.

Rabindrânâth Tagore passed away in the house where he was born on 7 August 1941, 22 Shravan 1348 in the Bengali calendar, six years before India’s accession to independence. He did not witness the moment when the British government, having emerged from the Second World War with little or no means to face a new colonial war, ended up conceding independence to India in August 1947, not without having assessed the long lasting impact that the centre of instability and tensions on the Indian sub-continent would experience in open conflict since its establishment in 1950.


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The admiration inspired by his words on such themes as responsibility and dialogue, and the spiritual musings of the one Indians so respectfully call Gurudev are forever present. During the difficult period preceding independence, the works of Tagore were banned by the central government. The people of Bangladesh protested and Tagore became a symbol of both its cultural identity and the political struggle of the people. A patriotic song Amar Shona Bangla composed and set to tune by Tagore, inspired the people and was spontaneously sung time and again. Later, it was chosen as the national anthem of Bangladesh when it became independent in 1971. Moreover, Jana Gana Mana, one of his compositions, was chosen as India’s national anthem by the constituent assembly on 24 January 1950.

With an active and still present consciousness, Rabindrânâth Tagore bequeaths to us philosophical poetics that deal with issues connected with the political responsibility of societies to whom he proposes ‘internal’ ideals and practices of mutual tolerance and dialogue, which are proving to be more necessary than ever.

That blazing red glow on the horizon is not the light of your dawn of pain,O motherland,Your dawn awaits, gentle and silent, veiled by the East’s patient darkness,India, keep watch!Bring your worship offerings to this sacred dawn.May the first hymn to welcome it spring from your voice.



selection of works by rabindrânâth tagore

1900 - La Petite Mariée and Nuage et soleil, (French edition of novels from Galpaguchchha)

1909 - Santiniketan (La Demeure de la Paix, published in France 1998)

1910 - Gitanjali (Song offerings), (French translation: L’Offrande lyrique by André Gide, 1913)

1910 - Gora (Fair-faced)

1912 - Jivansmriti (My reminiscences)

1916 - Stray Birds

1916 - Sâdhanâ (The realization of life)

1916 - Ghare Baire (The home and the world)

1921 - The Wreck

1921 – Le vagabond et autres histoires, (French edition of Tagore’s short stories)

1925 - Mashi

1931 - Manusher Dhormo (The religion of man)

1934 - Four Chapters

1940 - Chhelebela (My boyhood days)

2006 - French edition of Histoires de fantômes indiens

pablo neruda1904-1973My life is made of all lives, the lives of a poet.

Pablo Neruda has revealed many aspects of his life in diverse autobiographic writings, wether in prose or in verse, essentially in his Memorial de la isla negra and in his autobiographical volume ‘Confieso que he vivido’ (I confess that I have lived). Although the manuscript was interrupted by his death on 23 September 1973, the book was published in March 1974, a few months after his death, giving us valuable information that sheds light on the life and work of the Chilean poet, diplomat, politican, playwright and essayist who was, one of the most emblematic intellectual symbols of the twentieth century in Latin American. He was a fervent activist for social justice and democracy and he actively opposed imperialism, concerned about the defence and recognition of Amerindian civilizations and dialogue between civilizations. A man of his time and place, Pablo Neruda adhered to the communist ideal during the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939). This conviction was

reinforced by his adhesion to the Communist Party which seemed to him – under the imminent threat of the Cold War and the division of the world between East and West – to be the only bulwark capable of defending his country, his region and the world against imperialist domination. Confronted with the dramatic urgency of Cold War geopolitics, and despite the facts and revelations about the abuses suffered by that ideal, Neruda never abandoned his stance. Unlike Aimé Césaire, he did notquestion his acceptance of the communist ideology, even if some of his texts expressed disagreement. Like a breath tinged with romantism, it impregnated his eventful life as a traveller of the world, and so determined the political action that ran through his work, which was recognized very early on, and which brought together, under the sign of poetry and passion and with extraordinary generosity, the characters of the Epicurean and the militant, the diplomat and the exile, the thinker and the man of action.

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I confess that I have lived (Confieso que he vivido), 1974.

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childhood in araucaniaHe was born Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto on 12 July 1904 in Parral, ‘in the centre of Chile, a place where the vine grows and there is wine in abundance.’ His mother, Rosa Basoalto, died scarcely a month after his birth, and his father, José del Carmen Reyes Morales, abandoned the land in order to survive, leaving the country first for Argentina and finally finding work as a mechanic in Temuco where he settled and later remarried Doña Trinidad Candia Marverde in 1906. The young boy developed a profound attachment towards her and later on dedicated the affectionate poem “La mamadre” to the woman who loved the child as her own.

The poet’s childhood was spent ‘...under the volcanoes, near the glaciers, among the great lakes, the perfume, silence, interwoven foliage of the Chilean forest ...’, in close proximity to nature with the backdrop of Temuco – a small town in south-central Chile and the regional capital of Araucania – an area bordering on Patagonia, the land of volcanoes and vast open spaces interspersed with huge lakes sculpted into ‘multitudes of bays and inlets, volcanoes topped with their cones of snow, glaciers with their icy brows’, occasionally emerging from the forest, which was surprising in these extreme latitudes and was an extraordinary haven for plant and animal life on the south Pacific coast, periodically threatened by the cataclysmic violence of earthquakes.

The geological grandeur of the granite ranges provided an almost illusory landscape, which mirrored, in the mind of the future poet, the wounded grandeur of Amerindian history. Araucania is the ancient ancestral land of the Mapuche or Araucanians, proud Amerindian warrior peoples who for a long time resisted invasion attempts by the Inca, Spanish attempts at genocide, and even the Chilean government’s brutality before falling victim to the violence of ‘Araucania pacification’ operations in 1880.

The young Pablo, imbued with the ‘din of a huge heart, the palpitation of the universe’, attended Temuco boys’ school until 1920; source of communication between his ‘poetry and the most lonely land on the planet’ where he was soothed by the music of Araucanian names. Passionate about reading, he wanted to affirm his ‘poet’s nature’ from childhood and ‘went forward alone into the world of knowledge, lone sailor on the tumbling river of books’. Author of Never-ending Love Letters, he wrote that his first poems were fed by ‘that communication, that revelation, that pact with space’, which he later said, ‘have never ceased to exist in my life.’

the young poet In 1917 his first text Enthusiasm and Perseverance appeared in the Temuco newspaper, La mañana. In October 1920, having used various pseudonyms and with his head ‘stuffed with books, dreams and poems that buzzed about like bees’, he finally chose ‘Neruda’, baptizing himself by adopting the pseudonym from the Czech writer and romantic poet, Jan Nepomuk Neruda, one of the most famous


members of the School of May and author of the renowned novel collection “The stories of Mala Strana”. Another theory claims he has chosen this pseudonym inspiring himself from the musician couple formed by the violinist Norman Neruda and her companion and musical partner Pablo de Sarasate. He won first prize at the Spring Festival, became president of Temuco’s literary club, and at the same time wrote two unpublished works, The Strange Islands and The Pointless Fatigues. In 1921, while attending classes at Santiago’s Teaching Institute in preparation of a professorship in French, he won first prize in a competition of the Chilean Students Federation for his poem, The Festival Song, and began to give public readings of his work under the name, Pablo Neruda, which was now being recognized in flourishing poetry circles, an activity he undertook with passion throughout his life.

In August 1923 his first collection Crepusculario was published, followed by Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada in 1924 , appearing in the newspaper La nación together with a letter in which he explained his creative process, under the title “Exegisis y soledad”, responding to two of his critics. In 1926 he published Galop mort in Claridad, followed by Residencia en la tierra, Quelques pages choisies d’Anatole France and texts by Rainer Maria Rilke that he translated into Spanish.

honorary consul in asiaLike any young Latin American intellectual, the young Neruda sought to discover the world. In fact 1927 was a great turning point in his life as he was appointed to a diplomatic mission ad honorem to Rangoon in Burma as ‘Chilean consul in the hollow of a map’, as he said with humour, referring to the curved part of the globe on which the civil servant first presented his destination to Neruda. Following a voyage of several months that took him for the first time to Buenos Aires, then to Europe, Lisbon, Madrid and Paris – where he met César Vallejo the young Peruvian poet – Neruda boarded ship in Marseille and crossed the Mediterranean en route for the Red Sea, Djibouti, Shanghai and Tokyo.

Rangoon was the first port of call in a series of postings in Asia in the course of his honorary consular work. Appointed consul in Colombo in 1928, he attended the Pan-Indian Congress in Calcutta in 1929 in which Gandhi took part, in an India he saw as ‘a nation plunged into a struggle for its liberation’. During this period of solitary exploration of Asian horizons that were unknown to him, he experienced the grievance of British and European colonization in Asia.

[…] This terrible gulf separating the English colonizers from the vast Asian world has never been bridged. It has always been protected by an anti-human isolation, a total ignorance of local values and life.

Neruda, then working on Residencia en la Tierra, confirmed his vocation as a poet of love and women, as a cultivated, passionate and liberated lover. He married for the first time and transferred to Ceylon where he discovered the ravages wrought by cultural colonialism and its methods of deculturation.

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Those long periods in Asia inspired his solidarity with the people’s struggle against alienation and domination, but he was not touched by the beliefs and spirituality of eastern civilizations.

The east impresses me as a large unfortunate human family, but I had no room in my consciousness for its rituals and gods.

the meeting with federico garcía lorca and spain in my heartPolitical changes in Chile gave Neruda the chance to become consul in Buenos Aires, where, on 13 October 1933, he had his first encounter with Federico García Lorca, the Spanish poet, playwright, painter, pianist and composer, and the emblematic founder of the Generation of 1927 with among others Miguel Hernández, Rafael Alberti, Manual Altolaguirre, Pedro Salinas, Vicente Alexandre, Luis Cernuda who are joined by Maruja Mallo as well as painters from the School of Valleca and surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. Meeting Lorca, whose poetic genius is so special in Spanish and world literature, was crucial for Pablo Neruda as it drew him closer to Spain and love of the Spanish language, transcending the old colonial conflict.

It was with great enthusiasm that in 1934 Neruda settled in Barcelona as Chilean consul, then in Madrid where Lorca’s brotherly friendship opened every door to him. He immersed himself in the cultural, political and social ferment of Madrid life and he shared in the progressive ideals of the Republicans’ political project that supported the fight against ignorance and underdevelopment, the social and economic inclusion of women, and agrarian reform. Persuaded of poetry’s essential role as a catalyst for change and consciousness-raising, he founded and directed the journal Caballo verde para la poesía.

In Europe between the wars, peace was directly threatened in Spain where there was a political head-on clash between General Franco’s conservative Nationalists and the socialist Republicans. Following the Republican and Popular Front electoral victory on 18 July 1936, Franco’s military and civil revolt triggered the long, deadly civil war whose brutality foreshadowed the worldwide conflagration of the Second World War.

In August of that year, Federico García Lorca was one of the first to be shot at his home near Granada. His body was thrown into a common grave and his work became entirely banned. Pablo Neruda was devastated and he joined the republican side, despite his obligation of neutrality linked to his diplomatic mission. He then began to write España en el corazón (Spain in my Heart), an extensive poem which was published by various editions and finally incorporated to the book Tercera Residencia.


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the militant anti-fascistHis anti-fascist activism was unwavering. He campaigned for the support of the Spanish Republic, and in 1939, when he was appointed consul in Paris in charge of Spanish refugee immigration to Chile, he took steps to get more than 2,000 Spanish refugees accepted. They arrived in Chile on board the Winnipeg provided with a brochure entitled ‘Chile os acoge’ (Chile welcomes you), written by Neruda and designed by Mauricio Amster, describing the country to the refugees and assuring them of the solidarity of the Chilean people.

In 1940 Neruda arrived in Mexico City as consul general and worked on the composition of the Canto general de Chile, conceived as an epic fresco to the glory of Chile’s peoples, nature, landscapes, natural catastrophes, arts and poets. In 1941 he wrote A Song for Bolívar in which he confirmed his political commitment against oppression. Neruda the poet sought to embrace his continent, travel and explore it, and sing its praises. His Latin American identity was rooted in pre-Columbian history and was stirred by the Soviet Union’s heroic resistance to Nazi barbarity at Stalingrad. In parallel with his anti-fascist commitment, his admiration for Stalin and the USSR was strengthened at that time; for him they symbolized the sole guarantors of freedom. In 1942 his Love Song for Stalingrad, reproduced in poster form, was pasted on the walls of Mexico City; the New Love Song for Stalingrad was published in Mexico City in 1943 by the Society of Friends of the ussr.

On his way back to Chile he discovered the Pacific coast countries: Panama and Colombia. In Peru he went to Machu Picchu where he visited the grand ruins of the Inca Empire – the sacred city, a jewel of Incan architecture and supreme expression of human achievement in harmony with the environment. He wrote, ‘Machu Picchu is a journey to the serenity of the soul, to eternal merging with the cosmos, up there we sense our own frailty.’ From that journey to the indigenous and pre-Columbian roots of Hispano-American history came Alturas de Machu Picchu in 1945. Neruda decided to undertake the epic project of extending the Canto general de Chile into a Canto general that would embrace the whole of Latin America.

communist allegianceFrom the onset of the Cold War, Neruda was forced to make an ideological choice. As he became progressively closer to the Chilean Communist Party, he was elected senator of the republic for the mining provinces of Tarapacá and Antofagasta, devoting himself to improving the harsh living conditions of the workers in the saltpeter mines. On 8 July 1945 he joined the Chilean Communist Party. As the Second World War drew to a close, Neruda strengthened his position as a politically committed poet whose influence radiated over the entire continent. On 28 December 1946 an administrative decision bestowed on him the legal name, Pablo Neruda.


At the start of the Cold War, the world was plunged into two separate antagonistic East-West blocs, with Latin America in the West’s camp; Chile was directly threatened with American domination and was rapidly caught up in the Cold War as an experimental ground for the hardening ideological confrontation.

comrade neruda’s political exile On 4 September 1946 Gabriel González Videla is elected president of Chile, with the support of the Communist Party and with Pablo Neruda as director of the electoral campaign. In April 1947, González Videla, that Neruda, disappointed, will describe as an “equilibrist” adept of “political tricks” breaks ties with the Communist party and declares it illegal. Neruda the militant communist took a stance, publishing in El nacional de Caracas a provocative article, Carta íntima a millones de hombres (Personal letter to millions of people). President González Videla took advantage of the situation to launch political action against the poet, who had made a strongly worded speech in the senate, later published with the title Yo acuso in the tradition of Zola’s J’accuse. The Supreme Court approved the decision to remove Neruda from the list of senators, while the courts ordered his arrest, making Neruda an international symbol supported by the communist bloc.

On 24 February 1949 he covertly left Chile, crossing the Andes on horseback through the southern region he knew from his childhood. Thus began a life of political exile, with support from his dual commitment as poet and Communist Party member. On 25 April he attended the First Congress of the Supporters of Peace in Paris where he was elected member of the World Council of Supporters of Peace. During his first trip to the Soviet Union, he attended the celebrations commemorating the 150th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth and, together with Paul Éluard, received tributes from the Writers Union in Moscow.

Comrade Neruda visited Poland, Hungary and Finland, and returned to Mexico City where he took part in the Latin American Congress of Supporters of Peace. With a delegation from the World Council of Supporters of Peace, he undertook the mission bestowed on him by Joliot-Curie to meet Jawahardal Nehru in New Delhi in order to win support for the Peace Movement of India, which had recently been decolonized, and where his poems were translated into Hindu, Urdu and Bengali. He continued on to China to present the International Peace Prize to Sun Yat Sen.

So all through my life I came and went, changing clothes and planets.

His prestige grew and he became one of the prominent worldwide figures of the communist intelligentsia, travelling all over Latin America and the world, giving recitals and lectures. With Picasso and other artists, he received the International Peace Prize for his poem Que despierte el leñador (Let the Woodcutter Awake). Popular editions of the Canto general were published in large numbers and in many countries: Mexico, USA, China, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Soviet Union, Sweden, Romania, India and Palestine. Neruda travelled on the Trans-Siberian as far as the People’s Republic of Mongolia. In 1951 he gave recitals in Italy where he decided to settle, until he learned that he could return to Chile following the fall of González Videla.

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a committed poet among his peoples He returned to the land of his birth where the Society of Chilean Writers and the Writers Union hailed the Canto general, and in 1953 Neruda continued his commitment to the continent by organizing the Continental Congress of Culture, notably attended by Diego Rivera, Nicolás Guillén and Jorge Amado, among other eminent figures of the American culture.

On 20 December he received the Stalin Peace Prize, and in July 1954 Odas elementales and Las uvas y el viento were published. The poet Neruda’s voice was heard in opposition to dictatorship and oppression, social and racial exclusion, and the destruction of the heritage of civilizations and communities by imperalism, whether it was the painful traces left by the genocides of the European conquest in the fifteenth century or twentieth century social exploitation, neo-colonialism or imperialism.

An indefatigable lover, he settled with his companion Matilde Urrutia at La Chascona in 1955 – one of his two residences, which can still be visited today, as it was converted into a museum and opened to the public. Political activism and poetic creation were inseparable in the life of the poet and activist who was dedicated to writing lectures such as How I see my work, working on the ever important Memorial de Isla Negra published in 1964, and translating Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into Spanish. He also took active part in political life by travelling throughout Chile.

In 1960 he travelled around the Soviet Union, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. On 14 December the edition of Cien sonetos de amor (A hundred love poems) was published by Editorial Losada. Appointed corresponding member of the Yale University Institute of Romance Languages, he learnt of the publication of the millionth copy of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. While in Paris, Roger Caillois translated and wrote the preface for Alturas de Machu Picchu, which preceded the publication of Louis Aragon’s Elégie à Pablo Neruda.

In the communist nucleus, Neruda divided his time: he wrote Eating in Hungary (Comiendo en Hungaria) in Hungary with Miguel Angel Asturias, published simultaneously in five languages; he attended meetings and conferences of the Penn Club of New York; and recorded his poems at the Library of Congress in Washington. In the ussr he was a member of the jury for the Lenin Prize awarded to Rafael Alberti; he talked about his memories and read his poems on radio broadcasts; and then he wrote his only play Splendour and death of Joaquín Murieta, performed in 1967 by the University of Chile Theatre Institute in Santiago.


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nobel prize for literature and journey’s endOn 30 September 1969 the central committee of the Chilean Communist Party nominated him as candidate for president of the republic. However, as Salvador Allende had been nominated as sole candidate, Neruda withdrew his candidature and took an active part in the presidential campaign for Salvador Allende who managed to unite the left. After Popular Unity’s victory in 1970, Allende became president, and Neruda was appointed ambassador to Paris, while La espada encendida and Las piedras del cielo were published. On 21 October 1971 Neruda received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and on 28 October he was elected to membership of the Executive

unesco General Conference for a four-year term. In May 1972 he began the final version of his memoirs.

At the height of the Cold War, the ideological stranglehold was tightening around Salvador Allende’s democratic regime, which was exposed to the twin obstacles of the big Chilean and international trust funds that together were financing the right-wing opposition, supported by the cia. Neruda fought against the economic embargo imposed by the us in response to Allende’s nationalization of the copper multinationals. He renounced his post as Chilean ambassador to France and returned home. In 1973 he published Encouragement to Nixonicide and In Praise of the Chilean Revolution, a book of political poetry that he contributed to the parliamentary elections campaign in March. He launched an appeal to intellectuals in Latin American and Europe to prevent civil war in Chile.

On 11 September 1973 General Pinochet’s military putsch overthrew the Popular Unity government. President Salvador Allende and a dictatorship and violent repression were installed. On 23 September 1973 Pablo Neruda, ill, exhausted and saddened by the recent events, passed away in the Santa María Clinic in Santiago de Chile. His funeral took place with the army in attendance: the crowds sang, witnesses to the subversive power of poetry, transcending death.International public opinion was outraged to discover that his houses in Valparaíso and Santiago, where his body had lain, were looted and damaged. On 28 December 1973 the first posthumous collection was published, The Sea and the Bells, and on 23 March 1974 his memoirs, collated by his widow Matilde Urrutia and Miguel Otero Silva, appeared with the title Confieso que he vivido (I confess I have lived).

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selection of works by pablo neruda

1923 - Crepusculario (Book of Twilights)

1924 - Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair)

1926 - Tentativa del hombre infinito El habitante y su esperanza

1933 - Residencia en la tierra (1925-1931) (Residence on Earth) El hondero entusiasta

1935 - Residencia en la tierra (1931-1935) (Residence on Earth, volume two)

1947 - Tercera residencia

1950 - Canto general (General Song)

1952 - Los versos del capitán (The Captain’s Verses)

1954 - Las uvas y el viento (Grapes and Wind) Odas elementales (Elemental Odes)

1955 - Viajes

1956 - Nuevas odas elementales

1957 - Tercer libro de las odas

1958 - Estravagario

1959 - Navegaciones y regresos Cien sonetos de amor (One Hundred Love Sonnets)

1960 - Canción de gesta

1961 - Las piedras de Chile Cantos ceremoniales


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1962 - Plenos poderes

1964 - Memorial de Isla Negra

1966 - Una Casa en la arena Arte de pájaro

1967 - Fulgor y muerte de Joaquim Murieta, bandido chileno injusticiado en California, el 23 de julio de 1853

1967 - La Barcarola

1968 - Las manos del día

1969 - Fin de mundo

1970 - La espada encendida Las piedras del cielo

1972 - Geografia infructuosa La rosa separada (The Separate Rose)

1973 - Incitación al nixonicidio y Alabanza de la revolución chilena

1973-1974 - Publication of the posthumous works: El mar y las campanas, (The Sea and the Bells), Jardín de invierno (Winter Garden), El libro de las preguntas (The Book of Questions), El corazón amarillo (The Yellow Heart), Elegía, Defectos escogidos.

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Poet, playwright, essayist, politician, pedagogue, Aimé Césaire – who passed away only recently – made his lifework part of the assault on the citadels of power and exclusion, which he sought so that humanity in the twenty-first century could become emancipated and responsible, as a man with a transboundary vision of the human condition. If Tagore provided the key to the universal based on Indian civilization and the pan-Asia project, and Neruda opened the routes of the immense Andes and southern geology, Aimé Césaire situated at the epicentre of the re-humanization of the world, met the huge challenge of the African-European-American triangulate. ‘If I call this enterprise revolutionary, it is because until this point it was understood definitively that the black world did not exist and had nothing to say. From Herder to Hegel up to Spengler and Toynbee there have been many attempts, many tries, at an overview of world history. And everywhere I find one constant: the African page remains empty.’This was a colossal task not least because

the voice of Aimé Césaire, which arose from the precarious confines of a volcanic Caribbean island, would take on one of the most complex challenges: to bring about reconciliation and the achievement of the universal. Césaire was a descendant of slaves torn from the soil of Africa and a product of colonial history, but he was also trained in the Greek and Latin humanities and was imbued with the most fertile elements of Western logic, and a supporter of innovative cultural trends that sought to refound a universal where still open wounds of the slave trade and colonial oppression abounded. ‘Aimé Césaire’s words are beautiful, as fresh oxygen,’ said André Breton in 1943, adding, ‘For me his appearance, and I do not mean only that day, in his own particular guise, has the value of a sign of the times, challenging on his own a period when we think we are witnessing the general abdication of the mind, […] a first breath of fresh air, giving life again that speaks for all of Humanity, which expresses all its questioning, all its anguish, all its hopes, and all its joys, and which would increasingly impress me as the prototype of dignity.’

aimé césaire 1913-2008[…] we know that the sun turns around our earth lighting the parcel designated by our will alone and that every star falls from sky to earth at our omnipotent command. Notebook of a return to the native land, 1939.

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unanswered questions in the ‘homeland’Aimé Césaire was born on 26 June 1913 as the youngest in a family of six children in Basse-Pointe on an old sugar plantation in the north of Martinique. His mother was a seamstress and his father was a tax official. He attended the primary school in Basse-Pointe, a small town situated between the still burning lava of the Montagne Pelé – the majestic volcano that a few years earlier (1902) had completely destroyed the town of Saint-Pierre – and the untamed Atlantic Ocean, which attacked the rocks in northern Martinique ‘with the sea’s great hysterical lick’.

The young Aimé very early on demonstrated a flair for study and a liking for writing and solitude. He possessed a character marked by an independence of spirit, and he soon sharpened his focus on colonial society built on the prejudice of colour; he resented the sense of uneasiness and alienation that this procured, especially as his grandmother Maman Nini – one of the tutelary figures from his childhood – still retained recent memories of slavery, and it was she who taught him to read and instilled in him the virus of memory. Césaire won a scholarship to the Victor Schoelcher high school in Fort-de-France where he completed his secondary education, while seeking answers to the questions that arose from life in Martinique.

In September 1931, as holder of a French government scholarship, he arrived in Paris with a letter of recommendation from his history teacher, introducing him to the administrator of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand with the purpose of getting him accepted into the school’s hypokhâgne class to prepare for the entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure situated on the rue d’Ulm. On the very first day in the course of enrolment, Aimé Césaire would meet a young man from Senegal – a few years older than himself – called Léopold Sédar Senghor with whom he would form a lifelong fraternal friendship. He also met Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana, whom he knew from Martinique. The three founders of the Négritude movement were thus united.


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studying in paris between the warsIn Paris between the wars, contradictory realities coexisted. A ferment for literature was building up with dadaism and surrealism, whose Manifeste exposed the universal structures of creation in order to propose an appreciation of the world devoid of naturalist and racist prejudice, while questioning the basis of truth, previously considered in the West as eternal. René Maran, author of Batouala, véritable roman nègre, won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1921. The narrow-mindedness of the dominant aesthetic vision had been exposed by the appearance of cubism inspired by African and Oceanic art and in contrast to the ‘white man’s mission of civilizing’, which European ethnocentrism exhibited in Vincennes at the 1931 Exposition Coloniale.

France and Europe were discovering the first jazz rhythms imported by African-American soldiers under segregation in the US, as well as Josephine Baker’s explosive beauty and nights at the Bal Nègre where the first West Indian and African musicians were daring to play the rhythms of ‘savages’ and ‘coloured people’. Paris in the 1930s – where exoticism brought profits and negromania was fashionable – did not begin to answer the questions about identity that the young Césaire was intent on discovering faced with the rise of fascist and racist ideologies that denied African civilization’s contribution to world history. Soon Mussolini would invade Ethiopia – the mythical African land – and Emperor Haile Selassie would not receive any help from the League of Nations against colonialist aggression, while Hitler and the German Reich were refining their military and racist objectives, and the war in Spain foreshadowed the conflagration of the Second World War, most notably the Guernica bombing of the civilian population in 1937.

In his contact with young African, American and Madagasgan students, and in his daily friendship with Senghor and Damas, Césaire discovered the messages of W. E. B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, and the Harlem Renaissance. Coming from the other side of the Atlantic, the young Claude MacKay, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright brought over the manifesto-anthology The New Negro, stimulating the pan-African movement, which brought together students of different origins. The debate gave rise to magazines such as La Revue du monde noir, founded by the Nardal sisters, and the surrealist and communist Légitime défense, which advocated revolution. In September 1934 Césaire, together with other students from the French Antilles and Africa, among them Léon Gontran Damas and Birago Diop, founded the magazine L’Étudiant noir, where the word ‘négritude’ appeared for the first time - a word invented by Césaire as a reaction to cultural oppression, and to reject cultural assimilation and promote Africa and its culture, devalued by racism that was part of the colonial ideology.


75aimé césaire

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‘négritude’Aimé Césaire understood that the key to the unease that had haunted him from his childhood in Martinique was the African component – victim of the dehumanization and racism dominating Africa and all its colonial societies. He also understood that colonialism excluded whole sectors of humanity and comprised a system of slavery, originating from and ideologically justified by the sovereign principle of the Western world’s superiority, combined with an arbitrary hierarchy of races and the omnipotence of the West’s economic and strategic interests and civilization.

His neologism ‘négritude’ was neither based on ‘the determinism of biology […] plasma, soma, but measured by suffering’ nor rooted in the erroneous scientific concept of ‘race’, even though he was forced to use the word ‘race’ for reasons of historicity and understanding. In fact Césaire declared, ‘I belong to the race of those who are oppressed.’ Born with the conviction to overturn the oppression experienced by coloured people, ‘négritude’ was defined as ‘any colour whatsoever’ solidary with all people. It was first and foremost conceived in opposition to the colonial ideology of the time, as a project aiming to humanize the world without exclusivity because it spoke of a person’s awareness of their identity and not its negation by another. Denial that was expressed as contempt and, this was encapsulated in the pejorative use of the term ‘negro’, which stripped the coloured person of any humanity.

The existential challenge to reject insult was an expression of a humanization reconciled with the universal. It denounced the sectarian, racialized worldview and, together with those that were colonized and exploited, proposed an active and concrete humanism for all oppressed peoples on Earth. Aimé Césaire’s principal aim was to restitute the exclusion and alienation imposed on the ‘negro’ in the colonization process and thus acknowledge its cause and effect so that coloured people could reclaim their place in history, redefining from within their dignity as human beings. Accepted at the École Normale Supérieure, Césaire was invited by his friend Petar Guberina to spend the summer of 1934 in his home village of Chibenik on the Dalmatian coast. There, facing the neighbouring island of Martinska, he began to write Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, a long prose poem he did not complete until 1938, and at the same time he wrote a thesis Le thème du Sud dans la littérature noire américaine des usa.

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return home and the journal tropiquesIn September 1939, by way of a teacher, the journal Volontés published the first edition of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Césaire’s first masterpiece whose fiery power and orphic quest make it a major work.

In 1937 Aimé Césaire married Suzanne Roussi, a literature student and compatriot who, according to André Breton, was ‘as beautiful as the flame from punch’, and whose works had recently been published. He became the father of two children, and failed the agrégation exam in literature. The Second World War had begun and the Césaire family returned to their homeland.

In Martinique he taught at the Lycée Schoelcher, but the combined effects of the embargo introduced by the us and the Vichy regime further depressed living conditions on the colony, subjected to a repressive regime. Vichy’s special envoy, Admiral Robert, even installed detention camps. In reaction to the alienation and repression, Césaire and his wife Suzanne, together with other French Antilles intellectuals, founded the journal Tropiques, which defied the Vichy government’s censorship.

The young teacher, Césaire, would soon influence an entire generation of young intellectuals that included Frantz Fanon, Joseph Zobel and Edouard Glissant. The journal Tropiques, directed by Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, and supported by young intellectuals from the Caribbean, such as René Ménil, Georges Gratiant, Aristide Maugée, and the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, was determined to expose the reality in the region, and enquire, through research in botany, geography, sociology or history, to create effective solidarity among Carribean peoples and thus encourage the reappropriation of knowledge and identity. Despite difficulties, Tropiques was published until 1943.

In April 1941 the transatlantic routes – perilous, as a result of the war – brought a number of luminaries to Martinique, namely Claude Lévi-Strauss, the painter Wilfredo Lam, and most notably, the father of surrealism, André Breton who recounted his trip in a short book Martinique, charmeuse de serpents. When he chanced upon Cahier d’un retour au pays natal on a haberdasher’s counter, Breton was stupefied and dazzled to discover Césaire’s voice. A deep friendship grew between the two poets. In Un grand poète noir, which Breton wrote in 1943 in New York as a preface to the bilingual edition of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, and in 1944 for the collection Les Armes miraculeuses, he evokes how, in the darkest of the dramatic days of the war and the depths of despair, he was touched by the regenerative power of Aimé Césaire’s poetry and the profound respect that immediately inspired him through the poetic voice of the man who wanted to ‘utter the great negro cry so direct that the earth’s foundations will be shaken by it.’


During a long trip to Haiti in 1944, Césaire delivered a lecture at Port-au-Prince University entitled ‘Poetry and Knowledge’, which was addressed to a generation of young Haitian intellectuals, such as Jacques Stephen Alexis and René Depestre who were ‘climbing the Césaire Tree’, finding within the key to their struggle against colonization and acculturation. Césaire understood the immense debt that humanity owed to Haiti. ‘Haiti where négritude first stood tall and said it believed in its humanity’ was henceforth to play a crucial role in his commitment towards the effective universality of human rights. In 1981 he devoted an historic essay to the pioneering sacrifice of Toussaint Louverture, an emblematic figure among the heroes who freed themselves from the ignominy of slavery, and who opened up the universal to all of humanity.

political involvement and acceptance of the communist utopiaSeeing in him a symbol of renewal, the communist elites co-opted Aimé Césaire, who, in 1945, was elected mayor of Fort-de-France, then deputy for Martinique – he held uninterrupted office until 1993. As with many intellectuals from the South, he shared the belief that the anti-racist and anti-capitalist legitimacy of communist ideology appeared to be the sole response in tackling the deplorable economic and social conditions of the post-war era. In 1946 Césaire joined the French Communist Party, and in 1947 he created the journal Présence africaine with Alioune Diop.

In 1948 the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache by Léopold Sédar Senghor was published prefaced with an important text by Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Orphée noir, in which Sartre acknowledged the ‘white world’s’ responsibility in the alienation of peoples suffering from colonial ethnocentrism. At a time when the United Nations was adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in strong solidarity with the struggle of colonized peoples, Sartre became the spokesman for the stance by Western intellectuals in condemning the crime of humanity’s hierarchization of ethno-cultural components.

In the context of the start of the Cold War, like many intellectuals from the South, Césaire was active in the mobilization of the communist cause. In complete fraternity with Pablo Picasso, Paul Éluard and Jorge Amado, he took part in the 1st Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in 1948 in Wroclaw (Poland), and travelled to East bloc countries where he witnessed the relations between state authorities and the working class in democracies of the people. However, very quickly he began to wonder about the contradictions he saw between the communist ideal and the social and political reality of the people who were subjected to soviet ‘fraternalism’. In 1950 he published the Discours sur le colonialisme in which he deconstructs the logic of the colonial system, denounces repression of national liberation movements, and the colonial wars in Indochina and Madagascar, and stresses what he believed to be a close relationship between Nazism and colonialism, questioning the recurrence of hegemony in the birth of nations. The response received by the

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Discours was unsurprising, and it became the founding text for an anti-colonialist humanism, turning Césaire, whose power was evident, into the bête noire of conservative authorities and colonialist thinking.

In 1950 Corps perdu was published, which Pablo Picasso illustrated. The thirty engraved plates by the founder of cubism revealed the profound convergence that connected the painter of ‘Guernica’ with Césaire in ‘creating a new politics based on respect for peoples and cultures’, and in which the specific contribution of Africa and the black world would finally find its place.

In his militant political action and in the French parliament, Césaire acquired the firm belief that the dysfunctions between the communist utopia and soviet imperialism were increasing. He accepted the fact that the struggle of colonized peoples against colonialism, and that of people ‘of colour’ against racism, were unique, and that discriminatory practices could not be tolerated, especially between ‘advanced peoples’ and ‘backward peoples’. Even before Stalin’s crimes were exposed and confirmed by Khrushchev, it became painfully clear to Césaire that communist ideology and its practice were turning out to be as imperialist and alienating as its colonialist, neo-colonialist and imperialist versions because they betrayed the founding ideal and joined in ‘all the old paths that have led to deceit, tyranny and crime.’

Opposed to the French Communist Party on the issue of de-Stalinization, Aimé Césaire resigned from the party in October 1956, writing a letter to Maurice Thorez, which in itself was a contribution to the progress made by decolonization movements in Africa. Moreover, setting ideology aside, it raised the question of emancipation and human rights, which were at the centre of the historic initiative by colonized peoples in their determination to construct a national identity. As a result, Césaire was forced to endure ostracism from both sides – the communist intelligentsia and the colonial authorities.


the man of culture and his responsibilities The cardinal principle in the long fight for the political and cultural liberation of colonized peoples was political decolonization, but especially cultural, which was for Césaire the starting point towards ‘the reconciled universal’ and the emancipation of peoples. Indeed Césaire understood that ‘the colonial enterprise is to the modern world what Roman imperialism was to the ancient world: a preparation for Disaster and forerunner of Catastrophe’. A meticulous analyst of the logic of history, he assessed the damage that was an inevitable consequence of colonization: disputes on geographical borders, unstable boundaries and territories, the lust for natural resources, competing ideological and geopolitical pressures, manipulation and irresponsibility on the part of national politicians, and so on. Although Césaire knew that national independence was an essential path yet fraught with pitfalls, he analysed the limits of the only political independence that could be prepared by ‘the Man of Culture and his responsibilities’, for only cultural emancipation based on shared belonging to the universal was able to protect both colonized and colonizers against the recurrence of neo-colonialism, the evils of imperialism, the flaws of power and the ensnarement of nationalism.

Faithful to this analysis, in 1956 Césaire became a member of the organizing committee of the 1st International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, which took place at the Sorbonne and was in direct line with the early twentieth century pan-African conferences in London, New York, Brussels and Manchester. This first congress was followed by the 2nd International Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Rome in 1959, and two Festivals mondiaux des arts nègres in Dakar (1966), where his friendship with Senghor was further strengthened – in the meantime he had become the president of independent Senegal – and then in Lagos (1977).

The challenge of decolonization was then taken up by many European intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Roger Bastide, Basil Davidson and Michel Leiris, who gave their unwavering support. The African Society of Culture was founded following the first congress to ‘unite in bonds of solidarity and friendship people of culture from the black world and the world, to help create the necessary conditions for the flowering of national cultures and to cooperate in developing and cleansing universal culture.’

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the lessons of historyFinally, the 1960s was to be the decade of liberation and the end of colonialism throughout the world. Having followed the struggle for civil rights in the us, many had hoped that the movement that demolished the legal basis for racial segregation – led by the complementary action of Malcolm X’s combat and Martin Luther King’s non-violent resistance – would allow American democracy to open up to include the men and women whose ancestors had been slaves; those who had created the nation’s prosperity, yet had been denied their right to civic and political citizenship.

Césaire resumed his political commitment and founded the Martinique Progressive Party (ppm) under which he would prepare and claim autonomy for Martinique; he believed that the conditions were not yet ripe for political and economic independence. Moreover, the particularly explosive context of the 1962 Cuban nuclear missile crisis, which diverted the East-West conflict to the Caribbean, was threatening peaceful coexistence, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war.

The 1960s were the years of ‘the Sun of Independence’ for the people of the African continent, who were now confronted with planning their own destiny. Césaire made use of the polyphony of theatrical work to lend support – and his fervent solidarity – to the first steps taken by the African nations and their leaders. By 1946 he had already explored the mechanism of theatre in Et les chiens se taisaient to express the revolt of his first tragic hero, Le Rebelle, an allegory of redemption and a rejection of hate. Attentive to the pitfalls threatening political regimes in Africa as they emerged from colonization, Césaire turned to history, took the pulse of the present, revisited myth, and analysed the deep origins of catharsis – as if he were in the agora where the cities of ancient Greece were freeing themselves from Persian domination – so that he could teach African peoples on the lessons of history.

Thus his theatrical work was born, bearing a philosophy of history that introduced the African-European-American triangulate, which embodied a verbal vision in which humour presented the reverse side of life. Césaire pursued the ideal of transforming the real through consciousness and reaffirmed his faith in Africa, as well as his lucid vision of the equal presence of all people in the world, regardless of colour. These dramas, or rather tragi-comedies, were staged by Jean-Marie Serreau – director, friend and accomplice. It began with La Tragédie du roi Christophe in 1963, which recounted the Haitian epic and was inaugurated at the Festival mondial des arts nègres in Dakar in 1966, followed by Une saison au Congo, the story of the birth of the Congo around the figure of Patrice Lumumba, then finally in 1969, Une tempête adapted from The Tempest by William Shakespeare.


sonia sekula

andré breton

esteban frances

susane césaire

jackie matisse

denis de rougemont

elisa breton

madame nicolas calas

yves tanguy

nicolas calas

marcel duchamp

patricia m.

matta

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poet and patriarch From 1958 to 1978 Césaire took up a seat in the French National Assembly as an independent deputy, then aligned himself with the socialist group from 1978 to 1993. In 1980 he published the collection Moi, Laminaire, followed in 1992 by Configurations and Comme un malentendu de salut in 1994.

He was mayor of Fort-de-France up until 2001, where he introduced a cultural policy to bring culture to the people, because ‘poetry may arise from visiting a nursery or inspecting a sewer, building a road can just as well lead to the birth of a poem.’

Withdrawing from political life and receiving warm international tributes – though he did not seek them – Césaire the poet remained above all a simple man, open to dialogue and a fervent supporter of the re-founding of humanism in the context of globalization. Having lived through the century, ever-ready to accompany human progress, Aimé Césaire stayed true to his island rock, where he assumed the obvious disproportion between his worldwide fame and the narrow reality of the place where he lived, the île veilleuse (the island that observes) with which he maintained an indestructible and umbilical connection. His loyalty to that speck of an island ‘borne from the spew of the volcanoes’, and his unfailing simplicity are the legacies he bequeaths to humanity, to ‘look the century in the eyes’.

Many visitors, intellectuals, artists, and politicians journeyed in pilgrimage to meet him. With warmth and emotion he accepted the tribute made by unesco on its fiftieth anniversary. The loss of Césaire on 20 April 2008 at 93 years of age brought immense emotion to those close to him and the world over.


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selection of works by aimé césaire

1939 - Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, journal Volontés

1946 - Les Armes miraculeuses

1947 - Soleil cou coupé

1950 - Corps perdu, illustrated by Pablo Picasso

1960 - Ferrements

1961 - Cadastre

1976 - Œuvres complètes (complete works, 3 volumes)

1982 - Moi, laminaire

1990 - Configurations

Theatre

1958 - Et les chiens se taisaient

1963 - La Tragédie du roi Christophe

1966 - Une saison au Congo

1969 - Une tempête d’après La Tempête de William Shakespeare: adaptation pour un théâtre nègre

Speeches and essays

1948 - Esclavage et colonisation, Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition de l’esclavage

1950 - Discours sur le colonialisme

1962 - Toussaint Louverture, La révolution Française et le problème colonial


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4FIVE CONVERGENT THEMES

among the works by tagore, neruda and césaire we can identify at least five great convergent themes that resonate their message and help to shed light on current issues.

1poetry and art: a life forceTagore, Neruda and Césaire defined themselves above all as poets. But do we hear the voice of poets in the triumph of materialism and consumerism that are typical of our age, and which today appears to have lessened the attention of poets’ words?Yet poetry comes to us intact from the depths of time as a primordial communion through which the most profound human aspirations to spiritual elevation are expressed and shared, an interpretation of chaos and the quest for meaning. Since the appearance of poetry, which was often linked to the great founding myths, and throughout human history in all civilizations, poetry has expressed an individual aesthetic message and an aspiration for the cohesion of societies, but it also expressed a radical critique, a humour and a resistance to domination. Poetry and art alone can speak of the repressed, the buried, which they unearth from the magma of consciousness, from the labyrinth of memory or sensibility, and they proffer contagious, regenerated, vibrant everyday language and the human spirit. Its etymology can be traced to the Greek word �� (poiein), meaning ‘create’

and ‘do’; like other languages of art, it is a life force that can withstand the iron of barbed wire and the suffocation caused by restrictions, solitude and servitude. Well aware of this ability, the first reflex of dictators is often to silence poets or to force them into their service.Art and poetry remain the irreplaceable bearers of mediation between human beings and the world. Reinventing humanism might allow for a better interpretation of poetry so that it is better understood in all its forms, seeking to encounter new accents of orality that reflects the dreams and revolts of youth. It could allow for poetic and artistic creation to nourish other sources of knowledge that are concerned with the quality of life on Earth and its spiritual dimension so that it might make material development compatible with lifecycles, the mysteries of the sacred, the brotherhood of humanity, or the rhythm of nature’s forces.How can we instill a new love of poetry? To rediscover the poetic quality of life and its disturbances; was it not said that there was little need for a poet who did not throw one into confusion.

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tagore: where experience finds a poetical formRabindrânâth Tagore was first and foremost a poet.

Consciously or unconsciously, I may have done many things that were untrue, but I have never uttered anything false in my poetry – that is the sanctuary where the deepest truths of my life find refuge.

Whether it was his closeness to the rural world of the village, or the lessons learnt from national politics, every experience became the foundation of Tagore’s creative writing in its poetical form and sense.

I run through time and, O my heart, in your chariot dances the poet who sings while he wanders.

For him, poetry was always connected with transcendence. He believed that the most fundamental need for an individual was to achieve the union of beauty and goodness, as well as an understanding of the mysterious, troubled connections within the fundamental aspects of life.

I am overwhelmed by this awareness of the baffling mystery within me which l can neither understand nor control. I cannot see, nor am I consulted about, what surges in my heart, what flows in my veins, what stirs in my brain.

The poet’s or artist’s mission is to resolve that mystery and, according to Tagore’s concept of infinite love for life and nature, poetry was the way to access ‘the aspect of divinity which has its unique place in the individual life, in contrast to that which belongs to the universe’. His poetry is inhabited by a spiritual quest that tries to achieve the human, and establish the soul’s dialogue with the divine and the infinite in the impalpable and almost amorous ecstasy of a mystical journey whose profound, intuitive meaning is expressed by poetry alone.

Man is not complete; he still has to become so. “Natural” man strives to increase his possessions. We cannot acquire a thing but to the extent of our needs; our function is no longer to acquire but to be. The river can become the sea, but it will never be able to make the sea part of itself. If, by some convergence of circumstances, it comes to surround a vast stretch of water and so claims that it has absorbed the sea, we know immediately that it is not true and that the flow of the river still seeks its rest to which no limits can be assigned.

The profound spiritual dimension of his poetics has its source in eternal India, but also a strong polytheistic inspiration connects it with the most ancient religious traditions, the Rishi and Upanishads, which rise above material life, philosophy and religions, science and art. Beneath the transparent cloak of the poetic word, this message, which is often too great to be expressed solely


by human speech, appears in Tagore’s inspiration through music, drama and dance. This means he had been presented in the West as a ‘powerful poetic wave that draws its strength from the Ganges’ and the quintessence of mystical poetry.

Some Western intellectuals were determined to see – even when Tagore was still alive – only the poet’s allegiance to orthodox Hindu faith and Indian spirituality, as imagined by Western orientalism, or occasionally as caricatured by some young Bengali poets. However, the spirituality of Tagore’s poetry transmits first of all an involvement in his century through an unconventional synthesis of Hindu, Muslim, Mughal or Persian traditions. But Tagore’s poetic quest ‘gives a meaning to the endless activities. […] towards the perfection of “being’’ ’ and ‘gives the imperfection of “becoming” that quality of beauty which finds its expression in poetry, drama and art’. This quest is above all human as for him it is a matter of revealing the visible and the invisible that human beings also carry within themselves, and which radiates their presence in the world, as it illuminated Tagore’s.

I am sure that it was the idea of divine humanity unconsciously working in my mind which compelled me to come out of the seclusion of my literary career and take my part in the world of practical activities.

In the poet Tagore’s spiritual vision, which was opposed to extremist religiosity, the direct relationship between human beings and the divine was without anguish, plunging into the various roots of philosophy. Far from being a simple vision of mystico-religious poetry, it expresses his personal journey through complex experiences – as much religious as metaphysical – of a man seeking friendship with other people in order to discover and share the secret of the vital, universal force.

I have no sleep tonight. Ever and again I open my door and look out on the darkness, my friend!I can see nothing before me.I wonder where lies thy path!By what dim shore of the ink-black river, by what far edge of the frowning forest, through what mazy depth of gloom,art thou threading thy course to come to see me, my friend.

For Tagore poetry has its source in divine love as much as in contemplation of nature and a love of human beings. Although subjected to the abomination of power and poverty, beyond the limits of a painful, suffering ego, he believed humans aspired to a spiritual vision. Poetry unlocks in the human soul the path to the self-fulfilment of love – the purpose of every human relationship with others and the world.

When a man feels life and the soul of the whole world beating in his soul, he is free. […] Then he knows he is part of those sumptuous celebrations of love, he is a respected guest at the festival of immortality.

Letters, short stories, essays, novels and drama allowed him to express his convictions and his responses in various forms, but always with a spiritual and poetic dimension, and through poetry he could express his joy in observing love within nature, whether in pain from witnessing suffering or in protest against wrong doings or in support for a humanitarian cause.


Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust.

Spirituality was embodied in Tagore, and to him, poetry is in and for the world. He believed that the spiritual dimension of poetry nurtured practical views about nationalism, war and peace, cross-cultural education, freedom of the mind, rational criticism, the need for openness, and the aspiration to go deep into other cultures’ vision to improve mutual understanding and overcome alienation and oppression. His patriotic poetry inspired the national struggle and moved it forward. But his poems and songs, remarkably free of chauvinism, were full of his love and concern for the human being, which was more fundamental to his being than his commitment to nationalism or any ideology for that matter.

A poem must be animated by one complete idea. Each phrase of the poem touches on this idea. When the reader grasps this idea which infuses the whole work, his reading becomes full of joy for him. Each aspect of the poem takes on a radiant meaning in the light of the whole. The progress of the soul is like a perfect poem which, once brought into being, lends meaning and gladness to all its movements.

With his deepening sympathy for the suffering of millions in his country, the poet Tagore emerged as a critic of imperialism, militant nationalism, dehumanization and isolationism. He leaned towards a new international liberalism, and became a harbinger of hope through his literary and musical creations and his reformist actions in politics and education.

I have spent my days tuning and untuning my lyre.

In the last years of his life, the Second World War sadly reminded him of the agony of the Great War, which had thrust him into the public arena to preach the message of poetry for peace. This situation made him all the more sad as he was too frail for activism. The sense of helplessness was compounded by his loss of faith in modern civilization of the day.

Today, man’s achievementIs an ugly mockeryAnnouncing itself everywhereThe face of a monster.Must I have to witness this ugly nightmareBy lighting a stormy lampIn the twilight hour of my life?

India’s struggle for freedom, man’s lust for gold, women’s ambition, tragic heroines, romance, frustrated hopes, ghosts, the limitations of human judgement, colonial rulers’ intransigence, inhuman exploitation of the vulnerable, the helplessness and apathy of village society, for Tagore all human experiences are ripe for poetic expression of activist humanism.

When life has lost its grace, come to me in an explosion of song.


nerudathe ‘public service’ poetNeruda tried to turn his labyrinthine life into a concrete expression of his initial vocation: to become a poet in order to express the essential magnetism of the relationships concealed in nature and between beings.

Man is deeply inclined towards poetry, from which liturgy, the psalms and the essence of religion emerged. The poet delved into the ways of nature, and in the earliest ages he became a priest to preserve his inner vocation. Thus, in modern times, the poet acquires the titles handed to him on the streetby the people so that he can defend his poetry. The secular poet of today continues to be a member of an ancient priesthood. Long ago, he made a pact with the darkness, yet today he must interpret the light.

Neruda wanted above all to be the poet of his times, in his country, Chile, and then his continent. A poet among poets; an existential role he assumed from his early youth as a shy adolescent. ‘Dressed in ritual black from my tender youth like the real poets of the last century’, he intended to devote his life towards highlighting the increasing need in the twentieth century for people to use poetry as a vehicle to uncover their history, reach for their destiny, and assume their identity. In his view, it was the poet’s mission, even if he is ‘burnt to a crisp in that secret brazier’, to reconstruct the link between people and their history by reconciling people with poetry without borders. If in his first book he retains an Epicurean image, ‘the poet’s words will arrive transferred into the goblet of other languages like a wine that sings and spreads its bouquet into other places on earth’, it was first of all for his native land that Neruda wished to fulfil his destiny.

My poetry and my light have evolved like a river of America, like a torrent of Chilean waters, born in the secret depths of the southern mountains, ceaselessly guiding the current towards an outfall into the sea. My poetry did not reject anything that the current carried with it; it embraced passion, developed mystery and made its way into the hearts of the people.

For Neruda, because poetry had a wide reach it had to cover all the subjects on Earth, the political chant, the image laden language of metaphor, the simple, day-to-day message, and the love poem. Entire collections such as Veinte poemas de amor y una canción deseperada or Cien sonetos de amor have elevated Neruda as one of the twentieth century’s most authentic love poets, singing of the beloved and, in the purest romantic and lyrical vein in the Iberian tradition, enjoying their body’s material, sensual ecstasy, the felicity of the amorous union of flesh, the polyphony of the thousand emotions in the experience of absence, presence, pain and passion, or tenderness.


The light that from your feet rises to your hair,the swelling that envelops your delicate form,is not of mother of pearl, never of cold silver:you are made of bread, of bread beloved of fire.

Flour raised its harvest with youand it grew encouraged by the fortunate age,when the grains mirrored your breastsmy love was the coal working in the earth.

It is probably down to his choice of ‘poetic materialism’ that we attribute to Pablo Neruda one of the most daring attempts at desacralization that poetry has ever known. Because of his vision of the world, the poet chose to describe the chaos, the tumult of things, the simultaneous emotions, the excessive, the monstrous, and the common everyday occurrences.

To the question: Can poetry be of service to our fellow humans? Can it be part of people’s struggles, I had really looked around enough in the domain of the irrational and the negative. I had to stop and seek the path of humanism, which has been banished from contemporary literature, but is deeply rooted in the human being’s aspirations.

Neruda replies that his poetry is ‘a public service’, that it is defined by the indissociable bonds between writing and commitment, humanism and poetic materialism, and that close bonds connect epic and lyricism. ‘Poetry is always an act of peace. The poem comes out of peace as bread comes from flour.’ For Neruda the poem is a song that is shared – as bread should be shared – like a familiar light that illuminates the most material and earthbound elements of existence with a naked, intense language, for ‘it is above all the ideology of language that creates the gulf.’ His use of metaphor retains a traditional character so that comparisons between parts of the female body and elements in nature can be drawn.

However, this ‘poetic materialism’ carries a sense of immaterial elation originating from nostalgia and personal emotion. Captivated by the grandeur of the epic, his poetry illuminates from within its own words in a manifestation of the imaginary that speaks of:

all the colours of the rainbow. [...] Poetry is not static matter but a fluid current that very often slips through the hands of the creator himself. Its raw material is made of elements that are both real and unreal, existent and non-existent.

Neruda saw the mythology of the ‘poète maudit’ as a bourgeois strategy to insulate poetry from the people in a ritual imposed by a certain class, a certain society that he disapproved of, and thought of as ‘the old backward-looking middle class’ who were incapable of sensing the future and living in the present. All Pablo Neruda’s actions were aimed at the struggle against the destructive, authoritative power of the bourgeois and the capitalist that wanted nothing more than to silence meaningful poetry.


Poor poets whom life and deathpursued with the same gloomy tenacityand are then enshrined with impassive pompbranded by the toothmarks of funerary rite.

That dogmatic dominant and conservative class concerned with maintaining its formality imposed by an unwritten law that, ‘the poet must be tortured, suffer. He must live in despair, he must write tirelessly his song of despair’, which Neruda rejected:

We poets have the right to be happy provided we are one with our peoples in their fight for happiness. As poets we have ordered on the instant the revolt of joy. The writer who is damned, the crucified writer are joining the rite of happiness in this twilight of capitalism.

Neruda fully immersed himself in the communist ideal, opposed to a maudlin vision of a conservative poetry, hostage to the elitist aesthetic, with ‘the rebellion of joy’, and sharing of, ‘the shared song’. He provocatively affirmed:

I cast the black monarchy down,the useless hairpiece of dreams,stepped on the tailof the imaginary reptile,and set out the elements—water and fire—in harmony with man and the earth.I want everything to havea handle,everything to be cup or tool.I want through my poetry’s portal to come the folk to the hardware store.

As far as Neruda’s poetic subject is concerned, he should melt into the collective being, become an ‘invisible man’ whose song combines with the song of all human beings. Neruda confessed in his Memoirs that his greatest pride was helping poetry to become respected by the people,

I have come through an arduous lesson of aesthetics and search, through the labyrinth of thewritten word, to be the poet of my people. That is my reward […]

On the subject of peoples who – like the Chilean and Latin American people – were colonized and whose identity was stolen by domination and imperialism, the poem should aspire to an historical realism, using the methods of revolutionary romanticism. It should restore history’s protagonists, even if they are unknown, with the heroic dimension of their sacrifice, which had been denied by the enemies of yesterday and today, whose crime should be condemned with implacable harshness.


Land, people and poetry are one and the same entity linked by subterranean mysteries.

It is by placing oneself at the service of people that poetry – projected in the light of hope and optimism – will find re-acceptance among human beings.

We are the chroniclers of a delayed birth. Delayed by feudalism, backwardness, hunger. It is not only about preserving our culture, but freeing it with all our strength, nourishing it and allowing it to flower.

Colonization, exploitation, acculturation, Neruda explored all subjects in order to draw them from the shadows, including the most prosaic, the most obscure, the most humble ones.

There is no anti-poetic material having to do with our reality. And we must accomplish this task.The most obscure facts about our peoples must be brandished in full light; our plants and flowers must be written and sung about for the first time. Our volcanoes and rivers have been left in the dry spaces of textbooks; may their fire and their fertility be delivered to the world by our poets.

Flora, fauna, volcanoes, rivers ... nothing is overlooked in the texts written and often recited by Pablo Neruda who cherished the orality of poetic recitation, for instance in the many readings and recitals he gave in Latin America, Europe or the US. The incantatory dimension of the poem is part of the generosity of the word, whose power to awaken is infectious and irreplaceable in the struggles for political liberation:

I was the last one to speak. When my name and that of my poem “New Song to Stalingrad” were announced, something incredible took place: a ceremony I will never be able to forget. No sooner had the immense crowd heard my name and the poem’s title than they fell silent and took off their hats. They removed their hats because after that strident political language, my poetry was to speak, and through it, poetry itself. I witnessed, from the height of the dais, the massive motion of hats: ten thousand hands that descended in unison like an indescribable oceanic surge, a silent tide, a black foam of dignified reverence. And so my poem grew and acquired, like never before, its voice of war and liberation.

The voice of the poet, whose body is destined for the earth, continues beyond the communion of the moment. It opens the window of unreality and the absolute. The poet captures in his flesh, in the fruits of the Earth, the delicate curves of a woman’s body, or the stones of Las alturas de Machu Picchu, the messages that survive the centuries. Beyond life his chant reflects death, in which it is a repository, declaring:

I have been reborn many times, from the depthsof defeated stars, reconstructing the threadof eternities.


césairethe poetry of ‘saying no to the shadows!’

[…] Just as man needs oxygen to survive, he also needs art and poetry. Indeed, he knows that, contrary to the claims of conceptual thought and ideology, it is through art and poetry that the dialectic of man and the world is re-established. Through art, the reified world becomes again the human world, the world of living realities, the world of communication and participation. From a disparate collection of things poetry and art remake the world, a world that is full, complete and harmonious. That is why poetry rhymes with youth. It is that strength which restores to the world its primordial vitality, which restores to each thing its aura of the marvellous by relocating it with the original totality. So much so that saving poetry, saving art, equates absolutely to saving modern man by repersonalizing man and by revitalizing nature.

From his earliest work, poetry was the founding voice for Aimé Césaire. Poetry and art are forms of ‘total communication’, beyond common language, viscerally connected to all who participate in a creative urge, in dialogue and the universalization of values for the liberation of the human and the people’s humanization.

[...] I maintain that poetry, true poetry, is truth, that it is the Truth, fundamental,the truth from the depths of being.

The word, the poetic diction is the first conquest to spring from colonial oppression. ‘More than anyone else the colonized individual feels the incompleteness of humanity.’ Following alienation and faced with the process of dehumanization, the act of rebuilding is like emerging from the depths of history, from the hell of humiliation or misery.

In the bleak early dawn those lands without stelae, those pathswithout memory, those winds that scribe no wax,does it matter?We would speak. Would sing. Would cry aloud.Voice that swells, voice that spreads, you would be our property,our direction marker.Mere words?Oh yes, words!

The first line in Calendrier lagunaire reads, ‘... j’habite une blessure sacrée’ [I inhabit a sacred wound]. The fire of revolt remains unquenched after three centuries of simmering heat during which a people and its memory were excluded from the human race, expelled from world history. After a long night of humiliation only poetry could accompany le Rebelle, the emblematic hero of human dignity, so that he could win freedom and rehabilitate himself by transcending hate.


[...] We are the historical result of all History’s acts of violence, frustrated by our countries, frustrated by our languages, frustrated by our religions, frustrated by ourselves. That is what decided my poetic vocation. My poetry has no other meaning. It is a matter of reconquering, reappropriating...

[...] Here poetry equals insurrection.

The truth is that, for nearly a century now, poetry has been going at a breakneck speed, an explosive speed ... our heritage has been fevers, earthquakes, and poetry must not stop proclaiming it in order to be valid. We intend to remain faithful to poetry, keep it alive: like an ulcer, like a panic, images of catastrophe, falling and deliverance, endlessly devouring the liver of the world.

In this sense art and poetry are political catalysts that open peoples’ consciousness to one another, making minds permeable to the diverse visions of the world, making them ‘porous to all the breaths from the world.’ Albeit from a simple breath, they postulate other civilizations with an equal belonging to humanity.

with a lick of sky on a lump of landprophet of islands lost like loose coinsno sleep no waking no fingers no bait-lineswhen the tornado passes ratting bread from the huts

Poetry is the ‘Arme miraculeuse’ [miraculous weapon] against the deterministic, mechanistic, specialized logic that breaks the springs of being, with its ‘operational value: with its dual face of nostalgia and prophecy, it offers salvation because it recuperates Being and intensifies life’. It is no surprise that other poets, at various moments in history, have asked the same question. Among them Césaire was happy to quote the German romantic poet Hölderlin who said, ‘The poet retains the trace of the gods who have withdrawn, and shows his mortal brothers the way back…’ An art of the depths, poetry occupies the dimension of the sacred for it liberates the human being from the narrow limits of individualization, the degradation of ancient solidarities, the weakening of meaning.

I would recover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would tell of the storm. I would tell of the river. I would tell of the tornado. I would tell of the leaf. I would tell of the tree. I would be drenched by all the rains, dampened by all the dews. I would flow like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words, like mad horses, like fresh children, like clots, like curfew, like remains of temples, like precious stones remote enough to discourage miners. The person who could not understand me would not understand the tiger’s roar any better.

What purpose does the poet serve in a world that seems to distance itself from poetic diction? The question is taking on a fresh relevance in the context of today’s world. For Césaire reification does not only affect colonized people, struggling to reconstitute their fallen humanity. The



process of degradation of the reified human being threatens all people when they find themselves exposed to the yoke of hegemony, imposing its alienating values on cultures – be they the dominated or the dominant. Taking into consideration the efficiency of materialism’s power to contaminate, its arrogance and its messianic character, Césaire the poet understood the seriousness of the threat represented by materialism, controlling and spreading, unimpeded over nations and peoples of both the North and South. Speaking from experience as one who was colonized, he anticipated the reification of the consciousness and its effects on the logic of ‘humanity reduced to monologue.’

At the opening of the first Festival mondial des arts nègres in Dakar in 1966, Césaire lucidly and objectively observed,

Whether we like it or not there is at the present time an eminent, tentacular civilization. Because it is clear that now we have entered the era of the finite world ...Still more, with modern European thought was borne a new process ... a process of reification, that is, the thingification of the world ... The consequence you know, it is the appearance of the mechanized world, the world of efficiency but also the world in which people themselves become things. In short we are facing a gradual devaluation of the world, which leads quite naturally to an inhuman world on whose trajectory lie contempt, war, exploitation of humans by humans.

Because it awakens consciousness and nourishes the mind, the miraculous weapon that is the poem must be heard. For Césaire it is a priority against the spectre of ‘de-culturation’ created by poverty and injustice. Artistic and poetic creativity is the way to reconquering meaning. Today, even though the thread may appear severed, poetry in all its forms – oral and written – still and always will show the ‘way’.

Let’s go down againthe patient path we’ve used deeper than the roots the path of the seedthe arbitrary miracle shuffles the cardsbut no miracle occursonly the strength of the seedsin their obstinacy of dyingto speak is to go where the seed will godeep into the black secret of numbers.

In opposition to the omnipresence of the machine, the hypertrophy of profit, the collapse of hope, it is from art and poetic diction that the essential addition to being emerges.

If we needed proof I would say that we have only to realize that never has the need for poetry been felt so much, never have people given themselves up, never clung to poetry so desperately as a last plank of salvation, as emerging from those periods full o sound and fury called wars, as that war, be it hot or cold, precisely emerging from those periods when non-communication and thingification are exacerbated to an utterly intolerable degree. The salvation of the world depends on its ability to hear and listen to those words.

For Aimé Cesaire the function of the poet and artist is to respond to a duty to illuminate in the midst of the world’s torment.

The poet is that very complex and very simple being, very young and very old, who at the edges of dream and reality, between absence and presence, sees and receives, as internal cataclyms suddenly erupt, the password of complicity and power.

In opposition to silence, their mission is to shed light on ‘the underside of things’, to ‘say no to the shadows’, to pass through the illusory looking-glass of possession, and make accessible ‘ontological fullness reconstituted.’

The poet’s social function is a duty of diction ‘in order to prepare for the coming century.’ For Aimé Césaire, this duty is part of the oral traditions of Africa, which are alive in Caribbean and centro-American expressions. But poetry also emerges from the orality of all cultures, be they rural or urban, from North or South, as an individual and collective challenge that refutes the abdication and disappearance of values. Poetry reveals its multiple facets and the mobilizing, regenerative power of diction all over the world when, in music and rhythm, it speaks of the youth of the world, and responds to the moral insistence not to be silenced, to give voice to resistance and bring hope.

The person with the charge of speech knows instinctively that their speech is universalizing and that beyond individual uniqueness, beyond difference, there is the community of all human beings.

The operative re-humanizing dimension of poetry contributes towards the universal, it is poetry’s mission to occupy the streets, the squares, the walls to stimulate a vast movement for life, bound to an encounter with the other and to necessary reconciliation. Because poetry can revive memory, revolt, joy or myth, it conjures up the fragmentation and denial of human strength.

Poetry is fulfilment. Fulfilment. Of people on a worldwide scale; a dizzying expansion. And we may say that all great poetry, without ever ceasing to be human, at a very mysterious moment stops being strictly human and starts to be truly cosmic.... Big with the world, the poet speaks...


five convergent themes

2for a new pact of meaning between humanity and natureThe need to rethink the representation of humanity, its activities, and its place in the natural environment in which it is an integral part, is the subject of increasing international awareness and debate. By their humanist commitment, Tagore, Neruda and Césaire realized the crucial need to align the material and collective development of humanity with nature – long before the ecological and environmental question had become the serious and pressing issue that it is today. Their pioneering visions remind us that human beings’ respect and love for nature have long united the wisdoms of Western and non-Western civilizations, whether Hindu, African vitalist or traditional Amerindian, from an infinitely large cosmos to an infinitely small drop of water or a leaf. It is true that through their respective homelands, they were confronted with the apocalyptic imminence and power of earthquakes, such that their interpretation of history and their deep understanding of spiritual forces probably provided them with their anticipatory vision with regard to human induced catastrophes. When humanity claims to be able to control natural phenomena and cycles with economic, technological and scientific misjudgment, yet questions the division caused between humans and the environment as a result of the excesses of industrial development. The current ecological mobilization

is a result of environmental dysfunction that is widespread on a global scale. Natural sites have become degraded, ecosystems have become contaminated, and increasingly frequent human errors have caused catastrophes from chemical pollution and deforestation, wreaking havoc and devastation. Given the modest results of political decisions and the market’s cynicism, these controversies seem to denounce this growing awareness as another dogma that only feeds new sources of profits, and sparks scientific rivalries and political hype.Nevertheless, after nearly two centuries of frenetic and irresponsible activity, the consequences of an anthropocentrism based on commerce is there for all to see, and is clearly wrong. We are at the dawn of a new consensus on the environmental issue at the geopolitical level, but not without a good dose of genuine fear, contradictory over-cautiousness and commercial exploitation. It thus appears essential to go beyond the materialist and political approach and sign a new pact with nature that is not restricted to an immediate utilitarianism or a temporary measure to offset a looming disaster. This pact of meaning is pivotal in order to engage in a humanistic, sustainable review on the meaning of development, which Tagore, Neruda and Césaire’s convergent message urges us to do, as soon as possible.

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tagore and maya, mother nature Rabindrânâth Tagore believed that nature and culture were intimately linked. On one level, he considered culture as a physical response to the beauty of nature; and at another, as an emotional or spiritual response. His conception of nature as a permanent creative movement reflected his cultural background.

Necessity seems to be the only thing in nature for which everything moves and works; the bud becomes the flower, the flower becomes the fruit, the fruit becomes the seed, the seed becomes a new plant and so it goes; the chain of activity goes on without interruption.

It was in remaining loyal to the Indian tradition of the Upanishads, while being appropriately informed about the choices and processes being introduced by industrial civilization whose beginnings he had observed in the West, that Tagore analysed the materialistic rupture with living things. He foresaw the gravity of the ecological issues that would one day challenge the world as a result of the Western conception of modernity and progress as an end in itself. ‘Where human beings wish to walk only the tightrope of humanity’, where the arrogance of human beings, who saw themselves as superior to the natural elements and in its frantic search for profit, were propogating a predatory approach, sacrificing communities in the process and contemptuous of nature, which was only nurturing the rupture between humanity and the world in all its destructive facets.

When, through the mental and physical barriers that we erect, we bluntly separate ourselves from the inexhaustible life of nature, when we become just men, and no longer ‘man in the universe’, then we create fearful problems – and when the fount of their solution has run dry, we essay all sorts of artificial processes, each of which brings with it a rich harvest of interminable difficulties.

For Tagore, human society’s progress had to keep alive the intimate relationship between the individual and the universe, while respecting the activity and rhythm of the universe with otherwise irreversible consequences. If humanity ‘can use natural forces for its own ends, it is solely because its power is in harmony with universal power; in the end the aim of its effort can never be in contradiction with the one manifested in nature’. Tagore vigorously denounced material and industrial progress that planned the exploitation of others, which he understood was inseparable from the pride of having destroyed nature. When ‘human beings’ consciousness is limited only to the immediate neighbourhood of their human ego, the deepest roots of their nature do not find the soil natural to them.’


Based on such a clear vision, ecology and the environment enjoy a central place in Tagore’s writing. His discourse is replete with references to the planet Earth and its flora, as well as the vast universe and its stars. His poetry constantly refers to humanity’s bond with the earth. To him, the earth was not a remote and abstract phenomenon.

I feel the tenderness of the grass in my forest walkThe wayside flowers startle meThat the gifts of the infinite are strewn in the dustWakens my song in wonderI have seen, have heard, have lived; in the depth of the knownHave felt the truthThat exceeds all knowledge, which fills my heart with wonderAnd I sing

In the imagery he used to describe nature, he often made reference to a mother, the ‘cosmic Maya’ in Hindu mythology, where motherhood represented the Earth and the guiding force granted to human beings by universal nature. For Tagore, who was a holistic thinker, likening nature to motherhood was a way of stimulating compassion for ecology; he never lost sight of the ‘whole’ even when concentrating on the ‘parts’. He saw human beings as part of the universe, not separate from it, and believed that humans should live in harmony with its natural environment.

Black moonless nightHas imprisoned the world, plunged it into nightmareAnd this is whyWith tears in my eyes, I ask:Those who have poisoned your air, those who have extinguished your light,Can it be that you have forgiven them?

Tagore knew that deforestation was occurring not just in India, but also in the Americas as part of the Western conception of development, which had dominated the industrial revolution.

The West glories, it seems, in thinking it can tame nature – as though we were living in a hostile world, where we have to tear all our necessities from a strange and recalcitrant environment. In the life of the city [...] there results an artificial disjuncture between itself and universal nature within whose womb it reposes.

Aware of the global dimension of the problem, he forewarned of the need to protect forests from human greed everywhere in the world. In the days when global warming was unknown, he was sensitive to the dangers of atmospheric warming in India as a result of deforestation.

for a new pact of meaning between humanity and nature113

O YOU SHAGGY-HEADED BANYAN TREE STANDING ON THE BANK OF THE POND,

HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN THE LITTLE CHILD,LIKE THE BIRDS THAT HAVE NESTED IN YOUR

BRANCHES AND LEFT YOU?DO YOU NOT REMEMBER HOW HE

SAT AT THE WINDOWAND WONDERED AT THE TANGLE OF YOUR ROOTS

THAT PLUNGED UNDERGROUND?THE WOMEN WOULD COME TO FILL

THEIR JARS IN THE POND,AND YOUR HUGE BLACK SHADOW

WOULD WRIGGLEON THE WATER LIKE SLEEP STRUGGLING

TO WAKE UP.SUNLIGHT DANCED ON THE RIPPLE LIKE

RESTLESS TINY SHUTTLES WEAVING GOLDEN TAPESTRY.

TWO DUCKS SWAM BY THE WOODY MARGIN ABOVE THEIR SHADOWS,

AND THE CHILD WOULD SIT STILLAND THINK.

HE LONGED TO BE THE WIND AND BLOW THROUGH YOUR RUSTLING BRANCHES,TO BE YOUR SHADOW AND LENGTHEN

WITH THE DAY ON THE WATER,TO BE A BIRD AND PERCH ON YOUR

TOPMOST TWIG,AND TO FLOAT LIKE THOSE DUCKS AMONG

THE WEEDS AND SHADOWS.

Relying on imagery borrowed from Hindu mythology, he insisted that the atmospheric warming of deforested regions in northern India was exceeding its tolerable limit. ‘In India, the point of view was different; human beings and the world were lumped together in a single great truth.’ Tagore made repeated references to humanity’s rapacity and its exploitation of nature for selfish gain. In an article Palliprakriti (Nature’s nature), he also highlighted the fact that depleting the Earth’s soil and stripping the Earth’s forest cover were the main reasons behind atmospheric warming. In a poem Swargo hothey biday (Farewell from Heaven), written as early as 1895, he wrote:

Ah, mother,pauperized, afflicted, tearful, tarnished earth,after so many days at last today my heartstirs with weeping for your sake, alas!

It was at his school, in the rocky laterite soil of Santiniketan, that he introduced Briksha Ropan, a tree planting festival as well as Halakarsan, a plough ceremony to celebrate the first draw of the plough. These initiatives were borne from Tagore’s organic conception of nature, and which were attempts to draw attention to the damaging effects of industrialism on the planet in the absence of ecological considerations. He voiced this anxiety when he wrote:

Give back those woods, take away these cities.

Together with the practice at Santiniketan of teaching under the trees in the embrace of nature, with the students’ feet touching the soil and their heads under the sky in a training of the senses, these festivals inspired respect for the omnipresence of nature.

How one likes the light dancing from leaf to leaf.

A major genre of Tagore’s poetic output is the song dedicated to the flowers, trees, skies and air quality that characterize Indian seasons. While depicting the changing beauty of Bengali landscapes, such poems encourage respect and an appreciation of the intrinsic values of natural phenomena, in contrast to the capricious and unpredictable limit of humanity’s action, purpose and vital need. In the geographic context of India, Tagore could not forget that tornadoes often occurred during pre-monsoon months and that the Indian subcontinent had a history of devastating earthquakes. He thus considered nature as a potentially explosive environmental structure that could destroy the most vulnerable human existence, like the terrible earthquakes that shook the Shillong Plateau in 1897 and Bihar in 1934.

Then came an angry uproar. Torn-off scraps of cloud hurried up from the west like panting messengers of evil tidings. Finally, lighting and thunder, rain and storm, came jostling together and executed a mad dervish dance; The bamboo clamps howled as the raging wind swept the ground like a giant snake-charmer’s pipe, and to its rhythm swayed hundreds and thousands of crested waves, like so many hooded snakes.


An opportunity arose for him to live in the countryside to supervise Hindu and Muslim farmers living on his family’s agricultural estates in east Bengal. These years brought him into intimate contact with nature and the lives of ordinary folk. During most of that time, he lived and sailed on his boat ‘Padma’, cruising the rivers and observing life through the portholes of his boat, where a whole new world of sights, sounds and sentiments opened up before him. The exterior world of nature fascinated him and it became a source of deep reflection in his works. For example he wrote:

Once again I wake up when the night has wanedWhen the world opens all its petals once more,And this is an endless wonder.

His experiences of a powerful, generous nature inspired Tagore to write a large collection of personal reinterpretations of Indian classical melodies or ragas that evoke – in a spiritual way – the cosmic dimension of nature. Beyond the beauty of his native Bengal, he lived and wrote about the common land that human beings – from East to West – had to share, with the strong sense of a shared humanity and proactive responsibility.

Those who are close to the spirit of the earth, those who are made and shaped by her, and who will find their final rest in her, of them I am the friend, I am the poet.


nerudaand his ‘pact with the earth’In Neruda’s work, nature is not simply a landscape, it is the place of ‘the cohabitation by night of lives and deaths’ – it is the matrix, the material mother. It determined the poet’s song, and beyond that, the relationship between humans and nature became a symbol and model for the rapport between beings.

In the core of his memory, his ‘pact with the earth’ was signed like an initiation rite.[…] my poetry was born between river and hillside, it borrowed the rain’s voice and like wood it was impregnated with the forests. [...] My life is a long winding journey, which returns to the southern forest, the lost forest.

His ‘geological’ poetry speaks of the universe in powerful metaphors, unleashing images and rhythms.

Hold my hand in this rupture of the planetwhile the scar of the purple sky fades to a star.Ah! but I remember, where are they?, where are they?Why does the earth boil, gorging on death?O masks beneath the devastated dwellings, smilesthat have not touched the horror, creatures dismemberedunder the beams, blanketed by night.

The pact on which Neruda’s edifice rests is situated both in the domain of poetic creation and the humanistic consciousness, demonstrating humanity’s acknowledgement of its material origin, and so the dependence on the world of the earth or sea that he transforms.

In chalky, barren landsborderedby the sea, alongthe rocky Chilean coast,at times onlythe radiance of your offeringsreaches the emptytable of the miner.

Neruda is fascinated by the infinite diversity of the world: plants, insects, shellfish, fruits, books and objects of all sorts, animate or inanimate beings – nothing escaped his curiosity. Pablo Neruda’s poetry can marvel before the beauty of an object, but does not stop at its colour or form. The Nerudian poetic subject travels within objects in order to grasp their material essence, as in his Oda a la manzana (Ode to the apple).


You, apple,are the objectof my praise.I want to fillmy mouthwith your name.I want to eat you whole. […]

Compared to you the fruits of the earth are so awkward: bunchy grapes,muted mangos, bony plums, and submergedfigs. You are pure balm,fragrant bread,the cheese of all that flowers.

Exiled from his continent, in Las uvas y el viento Pablo Neruda presented himself as the son of vast solitudes with virgin forests, majestic volcanoes and untamed rivers, in contrast with Europe and its age-old urbanization, its ‘twisted streets’ and ‘solemn libraries’, a deserted world but still populated with injustice and suffering.

Arboreal America,wild bramble between the seas,from pole to pole you pitched and tossed,green treasure, your dense undergrowth.

The night germinatedin cities of sacred pods,in sonorous timbers,outstretched leaves coveringthe germinal stone, the births.Green womb, seminalAmerican savannah, dense storehouse,a branch was born like an island,a leaf was shaped like a sword,a flower was lightning and medusa,a cluster rounded off its resume,a root descended into the darkness.


Against today’s industrialized massacre, humanity is faced with the first great ecological catastrophes in which it contemplates from space the planet it inhabits, becoming conscious of its position as an earthling, and thus taking stock of its life and era in an apocalyptic vision.

Everything breaks and falls. Everything vanishes and passes by.It is the pain that howls like a madman in the woods.The loneliness of night. The loneliness of my soul.The scream, the howling. There is nothing left on earth!

A dream haunts Neruda’s poetry, that of a man whose activity and work would not be antagonistic to his natural origins nor harm the elements of nature in the life before him.

The earth made man its punishment.It deposed beasts, abolished mountains,scrutinized the eggs of death.

The childhood home could be an example or symbol in the heart of the southern forest, from the simple construction of a pioneer’s house, the ‘tree-house’ in Fin de mundo. It is this rootedness to the earth that Neruda the traveller – often uprooted by exile – evoked.

My soul! My soul! Root of my wanderthirst,droplet of light that wards off the attacks of the world.My flower. Flower of my soul. Land of my kisses.Bell-peals of my tears. Whirlpool of my whispers.Live water that runs its complaint through my fingers.Blue and winged like the birds and the smoke.My nostalgia, my thirst, my angst and my fear gave you life.And you burst into my arms like the fruit in the flower.


césaire ‘in the very navel of the world’Aime Césaire was born in the foothills of Mont Pelée, a few years after the violent eruption in 1902 of the volcano that guarded his native island, and which destroyed the neighbouring town of Saint-Pierre.

A Russian writer is marked by the steppes, a Nordic writer is marked by the snow, I am marked by the natural world of Martinique. I am tempted towards pantheism, I would like to be all things! I would like to be all the elements. But it’s true, I have always been fascinated by the tree. All that is part of my image world [...]The Antilles are never just about the mountain, about the water and the mountain first. Very early, for me, the mountain became the volcano. In that as well, you find a precise process of geographical determination [...] We are all children of the volcano...

The island’s geography was, in his opinion, the first point of anchor because people originated from their geography and this would ensure that their corporal condition lay in communion with, and absorbed ‘into the very navel of the world.’ This coming together is that of the individual, the ‘laminaria seaweed’ clinging to its rock in order to whip the ocean still harder, or the fromager-baobab rooted in the still smoking lava to spew its serrated branches towards ‘the immemorial sky’. The fact is ‘every island calls, every island is widowed’, even if for Césaire nature was first and foremost his home island, paradoxical, contradictory, absolute, welcoming, cramped, grandiose and unstable. ‘...And my unfenced island, its clear audacity rising up behind that polynesia’, a geography of suffering, of cosmic risk, ‘of the night’s baleful tongue’, the wound embedded in the flesh of the triangular route across the Atlantic:

… no bit of world that doesn’t bear my fingerprintIsland scar upon the watersIslands traces of past woundsCrumbs of Islands, shapeless Islands.

In the eternity of the elements, catastrophe awaits. Cyclones, tornadoes, eruptions, tsunamis, floods and earthquakes threaten at any moment to obliterate the blue sky, and the palm tree into oblivion. The poet thus perceives nature in its unpredictable, dual dimension. A violent, arid, incendiary, cataclysmic nature that can occasionally destroy people, in contrast to a maternal nature that is nourishing, tender, regenerative, fragile, green and sublime, whose generosity and splendour poets acknowledge and in which they must live, respecting the complex equilibrium they cannot control.

… Things, things, it’s to you that I turnmy limp face of violence torn in the depthsof the whirlwind


my gentle face of frail coves where waters warmI am Terror, it is I who ambrother to the volcano of wordless certitude who ponders the indefinable sure.

Humanity has no other choice than to live in total harmony with its natural source. The animism or vitalism that beats in Césaire’s thought is seeking the path that enables him to marry those living flows, irrigating his communication with his roots, with the nourishing sap of a nature that nourishes humanity, not only healing but regenerating it in the immensity from ‘the infinitely small and the infinitely large’. ‘In us the people of all times. In us all humanity. In us the animal, the vegetable, the mineral. Human beings are not only human. They are a universe ...’

The large-scale nature of the Tropics frees it from the narrowness of his island, that ‘little elliptical trembling nothing’, projecting it towards an infinite elsewhere, ‘porous to all the breaths of the world’. Belonging to nature, understanding it is a capillary immersion in consciousness so as to better emerge and rediscover ‘the living harvests of Memory’.

What are you…You who understand what the islands say…What message do you bring to us in violence and kindlinessBut that, within a voice’s reachWithin reach of hand, of a conch’s callWithin reach of heart and braveryA word afar a word on high raises the sword tree and the hopeSword floating upon the abyss.

Nature is a school of life, or even the school of life, and its observation is within the reach of all of us. Borne from the spewing volcanoes, the poet encounters and observes every leaf, every tree trunk, every sewer, every junction on his territory, particularly each tree because for him ‘A tree is a whole morality’: rooting, shooting up, unfolding, flowering, pollinating, germinating to return to its initial root. That is the cycle of life; a lesson offered to humans.

In us the people of all times. In us all humanity. In us the animal, the vegetable, the mineral. Human beings are not only human. They are a universe ...

It is in the immersion, the knowledge and the experience of belonging to the earth, through proximity or distance and interwoven with daily gestures, that the human race can live in peace with the order of things, with the generosity and empathy of space and time, becoming imbued with the cosmic energy that governs the universe to which it belongs.

According to Aimé Césaire, for millennia ‘at its gentle magical pace’ human history has been advancing. It does not command the elements nor does it attempt to measure the force of the volcano, unleashing of the ocean, or the arrival of the tornado. On the scale of the elements in the cosmos, the wisdom of peoples has for a long time known that it is just a ‘half sleep of an island, so troubled on the sea’. But this cosmic force is also the fertile Mother Earth, frentically


agitating the pollen in a disproportionate coexistence that determines the human dimension in its weakness as much as its greatness.

[...] an astounding mobilization of all human and cosmic forces... the precious whirlwind: the I, the self, the world... Everything has the right to life. Everything is called. Everything waits...

In the twenty-first century, despite advances in science, earthquakes remain the ultimate test for human societies, which they must accept in solidarity and dignity, with courage and stoicism to continue on the road for years and centuries.

[…] towards the place where looms the inexhaustible injunctionmen cast before the knotty jeering of the hurricane,since Elam, since Akkad, since Sumer.

Putting aside this unsurmountable paradigm and its inevitable consequences, the inherent vulnerability of humans is made worse not just by their inability to communicate the celebration of nature’s powers but, more importantly, because of their irresponsible actions – breakdowns and dysfunctions – addung to the cosmic risks of hurricanes or earthquakes that cause predictable catastrophes with real but immeasurable consequences. The inability to coexist with the other species in the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms that share the same climatic cycles is a moral catastrophe awaiting humanity since the begining of time. These combined crimes expose humanity to the implacable wrath of Nemesis as it projects humanity into excess and exposes it to the absurd demonstration that nature remains the ‘inexhaustible sap’ of all material progress.

There are many texts in which Césaire urges us to rediscover the wisdom of a human presence and action that is in harmony with nature, for instance, in the collection Les Armes miraculeuses (1944), in ‘Les Forêts vierges’ he denounces some of the excesses of urban sprawl and evokes, in a bitingly sarcastic tone, the catastrophes invented and caused by humanity, for example, in the concrete jungle of modern megacities:

I am not of those who think that a city should not keep rising till it falls in ruin one more round the waist, the neck. The floor will be the trigger for the headland; I am not of those who fight against the spread of slums; one more shitty job and it will become a real mire. Sure, the power of a city is not in inverse ratio to the dirt that grimes its washerwomen, for me I know well the basket where my head will never roll again.

Césaire denounces the Promethean anthropocentrism expressed in a shortsighted vision of development that is being realized at the expense of the environment, destroying nature’s cycles in all its forms. This materialistic attitude, bordering on blindness, no longer respects living things, and in the guise of knowledge and modernity reveals its needy ignorance. It is felt by the poet as a deviance of a civilization that also colonizes nature to which it applies its self-destructive principles of conquest and destruction, without the realization that this will lead to its own demise.


A civilisation which shows itself incapable of solving the problems caused by the way it works is a decadent civilisation.A civilisation which wilfully shuts its eyes to its most crucial problems is a civilisation already smitten.A civilisation which finds ways to get around its principles is a moribund civilisation.

In this context, human arrogance is threatening individual and collective survival. ‘The weakness of many human beings is that they do not know how to become a stone or a tree.’

Césaire the poet and activist fully understood the reductive effect of this predatory double paradigm, which carries with it a geological anger in the face of this devastation. All the more irresponsible – extending the logic of colonialism at the service of hegemony – that it adds to other political, social and cultural dysfunctions, affecting the global community both in terms of economic and social relations as well as cultural and ontological values. He sees the self-destructive mechanism of a society mirred in an erroneous conception of development, leading to the very heart of the South’s agony and misery because it threatens values, creation and culture in what they possess that is most durable, most essential.

The meteorites’ embracesthe fierce disembowlment of volcanoes from whereeagles playthe thrust of sub-continents straining they tooagainst submarine passionsthe mountain sending its cavalcades of contagiousrocks bounding down at full gallopmy voice that grasps angerssuns to calculate my beingnatal nativecyclones of violet cyclopeswhat matters the insolent emberflint held high to kindle the nightexhausted by doubt about revivingthe strength to see tomorrow dawn.


3 emancipation from oppression: in reciprocity and rightsWorking in conflict or post-conflict areas to build the reconciled universal does not mean forgetting peoples’ struggles for liberty and dignity. Emancipation of peoples, civic peace, social justice and dialogue in reciprocity and rights, these are the goals that have guided several generations of men and women, often at the cost of blood and sacrifice, who have fought to win and share political, social, economic and cultural rights, and participate in the universal.These are the foundations on which Tagore, Neruda and Césaire were committed, as active visionaries, proposing a dialogue based on the integrity of the human being, despite the difficult historical and geocultural contexts and as different as they were in Asia, the Indian sub-continent, Latin America or the Caribbean – at the crossroads between Europe and Africa. Their project was not to put history on trial, but to contribute to the emancipation of peoples by freeing them from political oppression while eradicating the moral or intellectual servitude that threatens us all.The anti-colonial struggle of these three men, who spoke from the South, was a fight by determined humanists, convinced that rule of law would prevail over exclusion, sectarianism, extremism,

racism or intolerance, and that the inalienable values of a responsible universal were not the prerogative of a few people or the monopoly of a few groups within society.These goals are still a long way off in the current global context, which sees the culmination of a process set in place since the birth of industrial civilization, and where a number of factors lead us to the conclusion that the current crisis is global and systemic, because it is the product of contradictions that stem directly from the logic of colonialism and imperialism, multiplied by technological, consumerist and materialist expansion. Economic war, social exclusion, religious and civilizational conflict, environmental risk or the society of vigilance comprise the different facets of a unidirectional universalization, spreading anguish and revolt among hundreds of millions of human beings caught in an iron grip between ‘segregation enclosed in the private sphere’ and ‘dilution in the universal’.The North and the South both seem to raise the same question that Tagore, Neruda and Césaire placed at the heart of their humanistic involvement: how can we build a just global society in which each person commits to sharing with others a Universal of rights, dialogue and meaning?


tagorefrom colonial to global subject lTagore was one of the first voices to promote a modern national consciousness in India in opposition to British colonialism, ‘this prison covering the whole country’. From 1904 he wrote about the repercussions of British colonization that from a Western perspective saw Indian social customs as ‘degenerate and barbaric’ in its ambition to colonize the country and subject India to its dominant interests.

Abhorring Indian culture as a whole, the ‘civilizing mission’ of the British colonial mindset managed to stigmatize this aspect of Indian heritage branded as a sign of ‘the inherently oppressive and unfree nature of the entire cultural tradition of the country’. During the eighty years of Tagore’s life, the confrontation between India and Britain was narrowly averted by the gradual adjustment of Indian life at various levels. British culture dominated the interaction between these cultures within a colonial system that operated according to the rules of domination, exploitation and repression.

The Jallianwallah Bagh massacre took place on 13 April 1919 when British troops opened fire on a peaceful gathering in a garden called Jallianwallah Bagh in Amritsar, killing and wounding hundreds of unarmed Indians who had assembled to protest against the Rowlatt Act. This act of violence deeply shocked Rabindrânâth who arranged for a public protest, writing an historic letter to the viceroy on 31 May 1919 relinquishing the knighthood he had accepted from the government in 1915.

The enormity of the measures taken by the [British] Government in the Punjab for quelling some local disturbances has, with a rude shock, revealed to our minds the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India. The disproportionate severity of the punishments inflicted upon the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced, are without parallel in the history of civilized governments, barring some conspicuous exceptions, recent and remote. Considering that such treatment had been meted out to a population, disarmed and resourceless, by a power which has the most terribly efficient organization for destruction of human lives, we must strongly assert that it can claim no political expediency, far less moral justification. […]

One of the main features of the struggle for emancipation was its dignified resistance to the Westernization of Indian thought and practice to conform with the views of the invading British, who were draining India’s economy through unfair colonial trading, and even went so far as to conscript Indians into the British-Indian army to bolster British influence around the world.


emancipation from oppression: in reciprocity and rights131

The very least I can do for my country is to take all consequences upon myself in giving voice to the protest of millions of my countrymen, surprised into a dumb anguish of terror. The time has come when badges of honour make our shame, glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen, who, for theirso-called insignificance, are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.

Two of Tagore's more politically charged compositions, Chitto Jetha Bhayshunyo (Where the mind is without fear) and Ekla Chalo Re (If they answer not to thy call, walk alone), earned mass appeal. Despite his complex relationships with Gandhi, Tagore was instrumental in the process of emancipation, which finally lead to national independence thanks to struggle and dialogue. This dual strategy overcame colonialism and division between East and West, past and present, tradition and modernity. Tagore captured the world’s colonial history with great clarity:

The first invasion of India is an exact parallel to the invasion of America by European colonizers; the latter also had to cope with the virgin forest and a pitiless struggle against the native peoples.

What strikes us about the genius of Tagore was the way in which he overcame the isolation of a colonial subject by making it a universal subject. All his arguments were drawn directly from his experience of the social and natural environment in which he lived 150 years ago. They explain his stand against colonialism, social and racial discrimination, and dehumanization, and adhere to his firm belief in the relationship linking human beings to their environment.

When we observe the brutalities into which this nationalism of theirs breaks out, instances of which are so numerous the world over - in the late war, in the lynching of negroes, in cowardly outrages allowed to be committed by European soldiers upon helpless Indians, in the rapacity and vandalism practised in Pekin during the Boxer War, by the very nations who are never tired of vulgarly applying barbaric epithets to each other according to the vicissitudes of political expediency and passion.

Thus Tagore's political thought was complex. He opposed imperialism and supported Indian resistance, but he denounced Hindu nationalism. He advocated self-reliance and intellectual edification of the masses as an alternative, stating that British imperialism was a ‘political symptom of our social disease’ and urging Indians to accept that ‘there can be no question of blind revolution, but of steady and purposeful education’. Having lived and experienced the East and West made him all the more convinced of the need to reconcile the values of universal and diversity through dialogue. This led him to seek a more fundamental openness to the ‘other’, to create a form of humanity whose advances in science and technology and economic development could only be understood through dialogue and a respect of values.

It is preferable for the commerce of the mind that variously situated peoples should bring to the great market of humanity different products, each of which complements the others and is needed by them.

This concern is reflected in the relationships Tagore had with other leading contemporary intellectuals of the time, including H. G. Wells, Romain Rolland, Victoria O’Campo and Okakura with whom he discussed the issues of racial pride and superiority between nations, which complemented his condemnation of narrow-minded nationalism wherever it was found in the world. Tagore chose the difficult middle ground between radical modernism and proud traditionalism in the face of scorn and threat from both sides.

It was my conviction that what India needed most was constructive work coming from within herself.

Although he was an outspoken critic of colonialism exercised by the British Empire, he did not want that to interfere with his mission to break away from the isolation imposed by colonial rule and militant nationalism.

Even though from my childhood it has been my conviction that my countrymen will truly gain their India by fighting against the education which teaches them that a country is greater than the ideals of humanity.

Even as the First World War was raging, Tagore condemned the war and militant nationalism in the series of lectures he delivered in Japan and in the us during 1916–17.

The problem of this new age is to help build the world anew. Let us accept this great task. [...] All other things can wait. We must make room for Man, the guest of this age, and let not the Nation obstruct his path.

Protagonist of his time, his embrace of global emancipation and inclusive universalism had a decisive influence on the ideas adopted by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru for India’s future as a liberal, secular democracy. As precursor, Tagore anticipated with great clarity the serious threats that nationalism would bring to the edification of any nation, particularly in India. Protesting against the ‘fascist tendencies’ of the Indian nationalist movement, he repeatedly voiced his opposition to all forms of totalitarianism, whatever their origin. He described it as a manifestation of ‘unreason’, as ‘a fundamental source of all blind powers that drive us against freedom and self-respect’. The construction of a nation on that basis is ‘the worst form of cancer to which humanity is subject’.

But his mind became troubled when he sensed that human character in the modern world was constantly influenced by political concerns and unbridled competition with its neighbours. He realized that mechanization and aggression imposed on the vulnerable and subjugated by the dominant had developed rapidly, not only in the economic domain but also at the heart of human society in nations.

Men do not believe in the wisdom of the soul. Their minds are filled with mutual suspicion and hatred and anger, and yet they try to invent some machinery that will solve the difficulties. They ask for disarmament, but it cannot be had from the outside. They have efficiency, but that alone does not help. Why? Because man is human,



while machinery is impersonal. Men of power have efficiency in outward things;but the personality of man is lost. [...] I have felt it, and I have said to myself, I have repeated that song: ‘Where shall I find him? Not in the machinery of power and wealth shall I find the humanity of the world. If he is not in the heart of a civilization, where is he? The great man, the harvester, the music-maker, the dreamer of dreams, where is he? You fight against evil, and that is a great thing.

Tagore was one of the initiators of the Déclaration pour l’indépendance de l’esprit led by Romain Rolland and other Western intellectuals, which was perhaps the first organized attempt to mobilize intellectual international opinion against war.

Barriers of national segregation must be broken through, superstitions of religions and social incompatibility must be relentlessly fought against.

Tagore was never indifferent to the need to bring democratic change and human rights to an unequal and unjust world. Social justice was far more important to him than political freedom.

Those of us in India who have come under the delusion that mere political freedom will make us free have accepted their lessons from the West as the gospel truth and lost their faith in humanity. We must remember that whatever weakness we cherish in our society will become the source of danger in politics. The same inertia that leads us to our idolatry of dead forms in social institutions will create in our politics prison-houses with immovable walls. The narrowness of sympathy which makes it possible for us to impose upon a considerable portion of humanity the galling yoke of inferiority will assert itself in our politics in creating the tyranny of justice.

The poem Gitanjali (An offering of songs) was penned in English (the French version was prefaced and translated by André Gide) and demonstrates, better than anything, his aspirations for universal political and cultural emancipation:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;Where knowledge is free;Where the world has not been broken up into narrow domestic walls;Where the words come out from the depth of truth;Where tireless striving stretches its arms into perfection;Where the clear stream of reasonHas not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and actionInto that heaven of freedom, my FatherLet my country awake.

nerudamaintaining revolutionary consciousnessThough struggles for emancipation are inevitable, Neruda believed that division and disunity could not be humanity’s definitive face. ‘I never understood the struggle except for it to end.’

In the conflicts peoples have engaged in for their freedom or their dignity, whether in America, Europe or Vietnam, Neruda’s poetry conjures up fully the confrontation between colonizers and colonized, exploiters and exploited. ‘I am here to tell the story’, he says in the introductory poem of the Canto general. Neruda recounts the story so as to oppose the silence or manipulation, which is marked by violence and struggle, and no mitigating circumstances can excuse the massacres – from Cholula to Guernica, from Pisagua to Hiroshima – that have sadly manifested in the history of humanity.

We know the Araucanians were conquered, annihilated or forgotten and that history was written by the conquerors or those who profited from the victory.

In condemning the conquest of America as the first stage of its alienation, the poet of España en el corazón and Incitación al nixonicidio y elogio de la revolución chilena knows that dialogue is impossible in the face of repeated barbarism, be it fascist or imperialist.

The butchers razed the islands.Guanahani was firstin this story of martyrdom.The children of clay saw their smileshattered, beatentheir fragile stature of deer,and even in death they did not understand.They were bound and tortured,burned and branded,beaten and buried.And when time finished its waltzing spin,dancing in the palm-stands,the green salon was empty.Nothing remained but bonesrigidly arrangedin the form of a cross, to the greaterglory of God and mankind.


From his experience in Asia of the colonialism suffered by the peoples of the countries where he spent several years, he could only draw one irrevocable conclusion: ‘that terrible gulf separating the colonizers […]’ from the colonized ‘[…] has never been bridged. It has always protected an anti-human isolation, a total ignorance of the local values and life.’ The dominant power ‘on leaving its colonial empire said farewell to its former subjects without bequeathing to them schools or industries, houses or hospitals; nothing but prisons and mountains of empty whisky bottles.’

Historians have already told the story but it is often told to serve the colonizers and their perspective of alienation. The poet on the other hand intends to tell the story from the perspective of its anonymous victims, by replacing its habitually ignored protagonist, ‘the people’, at the centre of the historical process. From the Araucanian warrior to the roto (average joe) from the pampa, from the ruins of Macchu Picchu to the Chuquimata saltpeter mine, an American identity is built which, because it is founded on collective struggles and hopes, unites the Latin American people in dialogue with all peoples on Earth.

[…] as if I rode at anchor here with you,and tell me everything, tell chain by chain,and link by link, and step by step,sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,thrust them into my breast, into my hands,like a torrent of sunbursts,an Amazon of buried jaguars,and leave me to cry, for hours, days and years,blind ages, stellar centuries.

For a long time the loneliness of his southern adolescence, then the solitude he chose in the East, distanced him from the idea of humans as collective beings defined by a number of rights, making them co-reponsible for their fellow beings. Pablo Neruda’s life and poetry were deeply committed to the socialist ideal of human rights, remaining faithful to that ideological idea taken from its humanistic source and pre-Stalinist reality in the ‘profound belief’’ of change brought about by revolutionary consciousness, in solidarity with all peoples ‘[…] attacked by ferocious invasions, surrounded by implacable colonialists, obscurantists from every part of the world and of every stripe […]’.


But for Neruda, in the struggle for the emancipation of the ‘great unfortunate human family’, in which ‘even colonialism has its exceptions’, not everything was confrontational. The necessary struggle also brought about unity. The human and fraternal other, was omnipresent. In his eyes peoples were not guilty of the crimes carried out in their name. From this militant belief and the bonds between the Chilean experience and that of other peoples, other cultures and other struggles, Neruda’s humanism acquires a universal dimension. The fascist aggression against the young Spanish republic deeply wounded Neruda, a wound that would never heal and would definitively seal his destiny as a poet. ‘The world has changed and my poetry has changed’, bordering on a cry of revolt and hope, he wrote in España en el corazón:

And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetryspeak of dreams and leavesand the great volcanoes of his native land?Come and see the blood in the streets.Come and seethe blood in the streets.Come and see the bloodin the streets!

Neruda as poet and man had a hatred of fascism in equal measure. How can we distinguish between poem and act? Strengthened by his communist belief, which he never renounced throughout his entire life, Neruda fought tirelessly against fascism – a brother to racism. On 18 June 1947, senator Pablo Neruda spoke in defence of the Communist Party’s struggle alongside the people. It was during the months preceding the passing of a law that outlawed the party and ordered the prosecution of its activists, among them the poet who was forced into exile; he fled on horseback over the steep roads of the Andean range. In the senate Pablo Neruda proclaimed:

The Communist Party arose out of the people’s guts and has been an essential force for social progress, defence of our country’s sovereignty and the civic education of the masses.... We Chilean communists will carry on with more determination the struggle on our territory for a more dignified life for the Chilean people and we salute all peoples’ struggle for their liberation in the four corners of the earth.


The man and the poet were indivisible and, having created the Chilean section of the Intellectuals Alliance for the Defence of Culture and become its president, he travelled across the entire country to denounce the rise in Hitler’s Germany of the ‘vile beast’. Was it the man or the poet who, surrounded by a few friends, solemnly presented to the Santiago National Library the German books that Nazism had just banned? Was it the man or the poet who one morning in 1942 saw his Canto de Stalingrado covering the walls of Mexico City? In Santiago 100,000 people answered Neruda’s call to protest against the anti-Jewish pogroms that had recommenced in Germany.

Only their resistance was their way, and isolated they were like broken pieces of a star, without mouths and dull. Together in the oneness made silence, were fire, the song indestructible the slow tread of man upon the earth converted to deep places and battlesThey were the dignity that foughtwhat was trampled, and awoke, like a system, the order of the lives that knocked at the door and sat in the central hall with their flags.

Chile still today has its excluded people: the Araucanian Indians. The poet, who celebrated the resistance of the Araucanian people against the Spanish invader in his Canto general, did not miss the chance to protest against the fate imposed by the government on the country’s Indians.

From his gleaming nakedness,his golden breast and pale waist,or from the mineral ornamentsthat brought the dew his skin,they led him by the threads of his rags,gave him lifeless trousers ,and so attired his patched majesty came to parade throughthe air of the world that was once his.


For Pablo Neruda exile was an opportunity for enrichment. He expanded his space, forming bonds between the Chilean experience and those of other peoples, other cultures and other struggles. Space connected with the history of time to honour the fortitude of those like Toussaint Louverture who had a sense of repsonsiblity and the heroic courage to pave the way for Latin American peoples’ to free themselves against colonial domination without having received any distinction, which Neruda tried to make up for two centuries later.

Toussaint Louverture bindsthe vegetal sovereignty,the shackled majesty,the mute voice of the drums,and he attacks, blocks the way, rises,commands, repels, defieslike a natural monarch […]

In the pain of political exile Neruda’s poetic humanism acquired a universal depth that was put to the service of the communist ideal, which he did not disavow despite the factual evidence of the ‘decline of Maoism and Stalinism’, as it remained for him the ‘only force that kept up the resistance and the anti-fascist struggle’ of the Spanish civil war, or the Latin American struggle against imperialist domination and social exploitation.

Come closer, hat-in-the-dust,burnt shoe, plaything,posthumous mountain of eyeglasses,better still, rise from your ashesman, woman, city.

That constistency of his commitment demonstrates the intense participation in the struggle for peace in the eyes of the militant communist that was Neruda, initimatley connected with the struggle against the political and social ills of imperialism and colonialism. Against those who pretended ‘[…] to put up stages where a few delicately white snobs appear in society, gesticulating in front of pure Aryans or sophisticated tourists’, he delighted in his autobiography in the hope of a universal reconciled through emancipation and diversity.

Fortunately it is already only the past, and the United Nations is each day filling up more and more with black and oriental representatives; the foliage of the races of humanity, in which the sap of intelligence is rising, is in the process of revealing all the colours of its leaves.


césaire‘our very hour has struck’In his first work, Cahier du retour au pays natal, the young poet Césaire declared his commitment to the emancipation of all people in the reconstruction of a human community that was wounded by an oppression that first affected its victims, but also ultimately their oppressors. The purpose was objectivization and not objectivity, which was impossible. His tragic hero, ‘King Christopher’, summarized the goal with these words: ‘I’m talking of coming back up from the depths, gentlemen, and woe betide those whose foot stumbles’ an order he addresses first to the Blacks, against inequality of which they were victims, but also to all those who ‘lacking in privilege, their burdens unlifted, have known deportation, slave-ships, servitude, a collective reduction to the state of animals, total exploitation, insult on a vast scale’ and who have ‘borne, slathered on bodies and faces, the all-denying gobs of spit.’

A luminous continuity is expressed in Césaire’s work and life with regard to building and sharing the universal, in memory, reciprocity, dialogue and the respect of rights. From his arrival in France at the age of nineteen in 1932, the young Césaire forged both his distinctive identity and his vision of the universal as a historical quest shared by all people. In the same movement were defined the weapons of his fight against the errors and crimes of history: colonialism, exploitation, discrimination, segregation, racism, and so on.

Black youth wants to be active and creative. They want to have their own poets and novelists who will speak to them directly, who will tell of its griefs and its glories; they want to contribute to the life of the world, to the humanising of humanity; and to do that, once again, it must preserve itself or rediscover itself: that is the very essence of self-being...[…] The clan of the Elders cries: “assimilation”, we reply: “resurrection”.What does Black youth want? To live.For to be a self, one must fight against oneself: we must destroy indifference, root out obscurantism, cut off sentimentalisation at the root.


The struggle against oppression and for humanization is first and foremost to reconstruct black identity, but this fight is unfinished given the permanence of social and legal prejudice and economic exclusion, and because one’s appearance and skin colour are still criteria that reveal intolerance, xenophobia, racism and discrimination. He began by a simple observation: the recurrence of this particular exclusion was typical of the oppression of millions on the five continents, whose humanity was, is and will continue to be trampled.

Is this nothing? People massacred in India, the Muslim world emptied of itself, the Chinese world soiled and distorted for the better part of a century, the Negro world disqualified from dignity; mighty voices stifled for ever; homes and families gone with the wind; all this wreckage, this waste, humanity reduced to a monologue, and you think that there will be no payback for that ?

These words by Aimé Césaire are brusque and greatly displeased conservative authorities, even helping for a long while to demonize their author. Replaced in the actual global context, they connect with the recurrent malfunctions in a world where colonialism is being recycled, where the logic of domination is being reproduced and repeated, where globalization banishes borders and solidarity and where systemic oppression threatens identities, both North and South, which in turn withdraw, clash and worsen. A vicious cycle in which globalization may get mired if we remain simple spectators of this deterioration.

And in coming I would say to myself, addressing my heart as well as my soul: make sure you don’t cross your arms in the sterile stance of the spectator, for life is not a theatrical show, a sea of pain is not a stage, a man who cries out is not a dancing bear.

From 1939 before the Holocaust, and the many crimes committed against humanity throughout the twentieth century, Aime Césaire chose his side, that of suffering humanity, still and forever:

[…] just as there are hyena-men and panther-men,I will be a Jew-man, a Kaffir-mana Hindu-of-Calcutta-mana vote-denied-Harlem-man / famine-maninsult-man, torture-man...

The only struggle for the emancipation of humanity is that of universal solidarity: My mouth will be the mouth of sufferings which have no mouth, my voice the freedom cry of those who languish in the dungeons of despair […] in the world there is no wretched victim of a lynch-mob, no wretched victim of torture in whom I am not murdered and humiliated.


From the emotion of texts written by youth, the humanization of all people guided all Césaire’s poetic and political work. With his friends, Léopold Sédar Senghor at the Lycée Louis le Grand, Léon Gontran Damas, and other young students from Africa and the US, he discussed the evils of colonialism and the rise of fascism with a clear conscience, that the fight was part of all struggles in the history of humanity past, present and future.

This was how Césaire defined ‘négritude’:my negritude is not a stone whose muteness is shoved against the clamour of the day,my negritude is not a cataract over the dead eye of the earth,my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral,it plunges into the crimson flesh of the sky,it plunges into the blazing flesh of the sky,it pierces the opacity of oppression with its patient right hand.

Priority was thus given to the primacy of political, cultural, economic, and social emancipation and dialogue on purely political independence, which was one of the primary means, necessary but insufficient, to rediscover dignity, shared responsibility and reconciliation through the realization of universal human rights according to ‘the great glow that rose from the torch kindled in 1789 and which has not ceased to camp along the horizon of all peoples, because it brought to all, whatever their race or their colour, not only the salvation of a free people, but even more, the great message of brotherhood.’

With regard to Toussaint Louverture, the hero of the Haitian fight for the dignity ‘of Haiti where negritude stood erect for the first time and said it believed in its humanity...’, he represented for Césaire the symbol of rights in his heroic effort of universality.

When Toussaint Louverture came, it was to claim at its face value the letter of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, it was to show that there was no pariah race, that there was no country beyond its bound, that there is no people that is excluded from it. [...] Toussaint Louverture’s struggle was the struggle to transform a right on paper into a real right, a struggle for the recognition of humanity.


More than two centuries following Toussaint Louverture’s most emblematic sacrifice of them all, emancipation, dialogue, liberty and equality still remain a distant ideal. Césaire questioned the unfinished context of democracy and decolonization, reminding the decolonized of the inevitable responsibilities that fell upon them in their own process of emancipation and inherent responsibility.

Men of Africa, and you especially, politicians of Africa because you have the greatest responsibility, make good for us the politics of Africa, make for us an Africa where there is still reason to hope, still ways of achievement, still reasons to be proud.

Purging the memory to remove passion is that not one of the keys to Césaire’s way of effectively obtaining reconciliation and assuming one’s place in the re-humanized universal? Without a doubt. And by what means can the right to participate in the universal be conquered? What about armed struggle? Some chose this route among his companions of uprising and hope, for instance, Frantz Fanon who took part in the Algerian war. We should note that Fanon, the author of Peaux noires et masques blancs and Les Damnés de la terre, submitted his early manuscripts to Césaire. In a poem from the collection Moi, laminaire Césaire pays him a warm tribute:

FanonI salute youyou strip away the prison barsyou strip away the executioner’s sneerflint warriorspat outfrom the maw of the mangrove serpent

Aimé Césaire wanted to believe in democracy and republican dialogue to the end; these were his domains of struggle in the institutional route he chose to take, notably as a parlimentarian. His interventions as a deputy brought fear to the French National Assembly as he openly condemned, without political rhetoric, the unequal treatment of certain ethnic, cultural and faith groups in a biased social and political logic, even in the democratic and republican context.

Violence committed against the least member of the human race damages all humanity. The struggle, the age-old struggle for liberty, equality and fraternity is never wholly won, and everyday it is worth the cost of waging it.


Should we believe in utopia? Why not, if you believe in people, ‘because there is room for everyone where victory is won.’ For Césaire, in the face of reality, utopia gave him the strength of commitment and the amplified force of transformation. This motivated the young intellectual in the post-war period to favour the communist ideal to which he adhered in 1946 with hope, and without accepting its indoctrination, as he explained in La Lettre à Maurice Thorez (1956), a text that explained the reasons behind his later resignation.

The doctrine and the movement should be shaped for the people, and not the people for the doctrine and the movement. Naturally this is not true only for communists.If I were a Christian or a Muslim, I would say the same thing. No doctrine has any value except when rethought by us, converted to meet our needs.[…] That seems to go without saying. And yet in practice it doesn’t.

For Césaire the outcome of ‘the stalinist betrayal’ was bitter. Without a doubt, the lessons learnt from his intransigent conclusion resided in his anticipation of the various ‘pathologies’ that resulted from any totalitarian vision, whether they arose from political, cultural or economic oppression. Confronting the test were peoples and individuals who had indestructible ideals carried by the sacred fire of resistance against all forms of oppression, which was believed to have disappeared but had remained intact under such fire.

There are volcanoes that dieThere are volcanoes that remain […]But we must not forget those who are not the least of themvolcanoes that no ridge has ever marked out,but whose rancour grows great in the depths of the night.There are volcanoes whose vent is the exactdimension of the ancient rent.


This inferno was kept alight by the ‘wounds’ of history or the realization that oppression develops from hegemonic aspects of economic and technological globalization, and identical and implacable logic. Faced with this reoccurrence, hatred of the other remains nonetheless the supreme threat, and whatever the legitimate reason historically, its principle threatens peace, which in turn results in a radicalization of exaggerated and sectarian demands for independance.

my heart, keep me from all hatedon’t make me that man of hate for whom I have but hate,for if I take my stand with that one raceyou know well my tyrant loveyou know it’s not through hate of other racesthat I want to be hewer of that one racethat what I wantis for the hunger of the worldis for the world’s thirst

to declare it free at lastto bring forth from its shut-in intimacythe sweet taste of the fruits.

For the fire of revolt and the experience of oppression do not justify all excesses and all acts of violence. They cannot legitimize the blind abomination of terrorism or aggression. They also require awareness without precluding anything. To understand is not to absolve. By standing up against all forms of actual oppression that undermine the basic human rights of people in Africa, America, Asia, Europe or elsewhere, Césaire urges us to remain vigilant yet human and generous in order to create a ‘new goodness’:

no way must the world be yielded up to the assassins of dawnto death-lifeto life-deaththe slaps in the face that come at duskthe roads hang down from their flayers’ throatsbut don’t believe it’s the long way roundit’s just that the signs were stolen by night[...] trifling with appearancesbut also with the breasts that nourish riversand the sweet calabashes in the palms of open handsa new horizon of goodness is growing.


In Aimé Césaire’s work the principal idea of emancipation from oppression is that the universal cannot at all be attained by the denial of the individual but by deepening and transcending the individual – according to Hegel’s notion – to acknowledge the other and together, through dialogue and sharing, achieve the universal.

It is the journey to the depth of the self that allows us to discover the elsewhere and the whole.

Throughout his long life Césaire remained a tireless fighter in the awakening of consciousness. We should listen to ‘Le Rebelle’ faced with his liberation in his tragedy Et les chiens se taisaient:

Hating is still being dependent; and personally I have refused once for all to be a slave.

The daily challenge of and commitment to emancipation for each and every person is to accept and transcend the conflicting tensions governing the human community.

There are two ways of losing yourself: by a walled segregation within the particular, or by dilution within the universal. My concept of the Universal is that it is a universal enriched by all that is particular, by all particulars combined, the coexistence and deepening of all things particular.


4 knowledge, science and ethicsFrom the life and work of Tagore, Neruda and Césaire there emanates one vision that anticipates links between science, human beings and ethics. A vision that is especially valuable because the poets are not in any way practitioners of science and technology, disciplines that are today making huge advances, and because we are precisely at the moment when all of humanity is questioning the benefits and risks of that dizzying potential on which it increasingly depends. The question goes further than methodological aspects alone, or the means employed. It is a crucial, ethical challenge for humanism in the third millennium, which requires us to reconcile forms of knowledge and rehabilitate the universality of the cognitive approach in order to bring together, on the basis of the liabilities, achievements and immense potential of science and its technological applications, the thousand and one expectations of a common humanity. It is even more crucial because of the radical changes that took place during the second half of the twentieth century in the rapport between the individual and society, and the rise in connectedness between science, technology and economics on the one hand, and between society and the rest of the biosphere, a holistic interdisciplinary concept, on the other; all of which present urgent and inevitable challenges. Tagore, Neruda and Césaire hailed the formidable explosion of knowledge

brought about by the development of scientific thought and technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The three poets believed that it was an essential but not exclusive part of the adventure of human knowledge, which must also be nourished by the imaginary – inseparable as it is from life. Furthermore, their geocultural origins nurtured their interpretations of the great opportunity that advances in science offered the emancipated, cohesive human community that they so wished for. Ethics is its first and ultimate affirmation, and it is through ethics that science manifests the effort of human intelligence so that the methodical understanding of reality may also conciliate members of the human race by spreading knowledge. Because they asked the difficult question about links between ethics, science and freedom, making them inseparable from the foundation of intellectual and moral solidarity, Tagore, Neruda and Césaire illuminate unesco’s action in a pluridisciplinary approach. The ethics of science and technology has become a priority for unesco since the creation of the Programme on the Ethics of Science and Technology and the establishment of the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and of the Technologies (comest) in 1998. Given the upheavals caused by the impact of scientific and technological advances on human development, society and the planet, the individual messages of the three authors reinforces thinking on these international and cross-cultural issues.


tagorefor sharing human knowledge

Science has given man immense power. The golden age will return when it is used in the service of humanity. The call of that supreme age is already heard. Man must be able today to say to it, 'May this power of yours never grow less; may it be victorious in works and in righteousness!’

Fascinated by the rapid proliferation of scientific discoveries, Tagore invited a number of Western scientists to visit the university he had set up in Santiniketan and share their knowledge of fundamental and applied sciences in the development in India, which was on the path to national independence. His intellectual exchange and correspondence with Einstein is extremely rich, and the project should seek to look into it in more depth.

Tagore considered the diversity of humankind as a source of wealth, but did not support the tendency in modern civilization to harmonize the world through a colonized vision of sciences and techniques. As such, he disagreed with any pretension to create a new universal humanity by scientific order that did not sufficiently take into consideration or acknowledge individual morpho-psychology as intrinsically different, but complementary. He did not agree that science could create a unique human civilization from individual peoples and civilizations; individual civilizations could not be merged into a universal whole, even if it seemed to be a natural destiny for humankind to pursue unity as a moral and philosophical goal.

In his vision there was no contradiction between national cultures and scientific development in colonized countries.

Let the mind be universal. The individual should not be sacrificed.

Tagore believed in the development of all sciences, in accordance with the needs of the people, whether for human and social sciences, so as to deepen particular cultural and historical roots, to adjust geographical adaptation to the physical world, and to understand the laws governing the natural elements. Tagore advocated the application of Indian science for the benefit of humanity, and defended the idea that all forms of knowledge could be commonly implemented. He wrote,

We have omitted to do so that our water-courses and pools have run dry; malaria and disease, want and sin and crime stalk the land; a cowardly resignation overwhelms us. Whichever way we turn, there is the picture of defeat, of the penury due to the depression of defeat. Everywhere our countrymen are crying, “We have failed”.


knowledge, science and ethics151

Scientific research is as urgently needed to create new fundamental disciplines in the acquistion of knowledge as to produce appropriate practical applications that can immediately conribute towards reducing and eradicating poverty in cities and villages, as well as improving living conditions throughout society by providing food and health, and meeting all types of concrete needs.

International and national cooperation is a chief asset in the construction of new terms of negotiation between East and West. ‘I believe the unity of human civilization can be better maintained by linking up in fellowship and cooperation of the different civilizations of the world.’ It is crucial not to consider science as a sterile measure imposing on the diversity of humankind.

In his work in favour of rural reconstruction, Tagore experienced the importance of teaching science and applying it in everyday life for the sake of technological progress.

If we can possess the science that gives power to this age, we may yet win, we may yet live.

But Tagore was well aware that the modern era had brought technological progress that multiplied working capacity through the machine, but had likewise increased the scope for profit coupled with the greed for gains. This disrupted the balance, not only between city and village but between different parts of the world. The poor came to be exploited for food and community work, while the powerful enjoyed the benefits that machine-driven progress provided. In a message written for the inauguration of the institute founded by his friend and internationally renowned scientist, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Tagore reiterated his position that science must be used for the good of humanity.

I can only bless this institution from that obscure distance where the multitude of the uncared-for generations of this country have helplessly drifted to the pitiless toil of primitive land-tilling. I offer my salutation to the illustrious founder of this Institute, humbly sitting by those who are deprived of a sufficiency of that knowledge, which only can save them from the desolating menace of scientific devilry and from the continual drainage of the resources of life, and I appeal to this Institute to bring our call to science herself to rescue the world from the clutches of the marauders who betray her noble mission into an unmitigated savagery.

When Tagore began his work on rural reconstruction on his family’s agricultural estates in east Bengal, during which time he lived closely with the peasants, he declared that their miserable economic and social condition would not change unless science and the application of modern agricultural methods were introduced into their lives. In 1906 he arranged to send his eldest son and another student from his Santiniketan School, who was the son of a family friend, to study agriculture and animal husbandry at an agricultural school in the us.

It has been my earnest desire for long that we in this country should deal with the problems of agriculture in a big way. I had sent some of our young men abroad to study agriculture so that on their return home they might tackle this problem and thus serve their motherland.

From his long and deep experience of Indian cognitive and intellectual thought, he was able to establish the limits and differences in the interpretation of natural phenomena, physical experiences, and biological facts. Tagore had a special interest in the progress of the human sciences in fostering society’s ‘inner’ knowledge of cultural, linguistic and historical heritage so as to understand its specific circumstances and thus formulate criteria that would serve a reasoned and appropriate modernization. ‘We have to create the new psychology needed for this age. We have to adjust ourselves to the new necessities and conditions of civilization.’ For Tagore, knowledge and study had no barriers, and the development of scientific knowledge determined the conditions that would respond to the challenges of modernity.

Tagore discussed the issue of tradition and modernity with Gandhi, but he could not accept Gandhi’s radical rejection of Western thought and the benefits of science, which he believed was the condition of building a new India. He was aware of advances in science and was able to adopt them with a deep understanding of their methods and purpose.

Secular knowledge was in possession of the European thinkers and scientists and we in the East who need it must seek their help… If we are biased against Western science only because it belongs to the West, we shall not only deprive ourselves of the principles it has to teach, but pull down our own Eastern spirituality.

Tagore assessed the ethical responsibility of science in the context of global geopolitics. Dominant nineteenth century science undoubtedly created a spirit of race superiority in the West, and he believed that when the East assimilated physical science, the tide might turn and take a normal course.

Those who are deprived of a sufficiency of that knowledge which only can save them from the desolating menace of scientific devilry and from the continual drainage of the resources of life, and I appeal to this Institute to bring our call to science herself to rescue the world from the clutches of the marauders who betray her noble mission into an unmitigated savagery.

Tagore believed that modern science was not just a European and Western privilege. He was aware that successive tests and particular circumstances had prevented some Eastern countries from implementing their own scienctific discoveries, which were later adopted by the West. He anticipated that Japanese, Chinese or Indian scientists would one day receive the recognition they deserve.

What a wonder: an everyday fruit becomes an undiscovered world which all the science in the universe is unable to measure without the humble human senses!


nerudascience, an irevocable hope

[…] a world orbiting around its sun, that scientists still haven’t discovered, they who are surrounded by instruments, yearning for eternity but lacking the sense of taste.

Scientific and technological progress was part of the backdrop against which Neruda constructed his poetic materialism and his wish to describe the world through observation:

The idea of a central poem that would bring together historical effects, geographical conditions, life and our peoples’ struggles came to me as an urgent task.

Pablo Neruda was as an attentive observer of the spectacular geological and topographical structure of the Andes, and thus began his Canto general. And it was while studying the ruins of history and the sociological and anthropological analysis of the Spanish war that Neruda was made aware of humanity’s creative power: what humans had built through their knowledge and effort had been reduced to a pile of ash. By tragic paradox, the ruins were the source of a celebration that they attempted to deny:

Like bud or breastthey raise themselves to the sky, like flower that risesfrom the destroyed bone, so the shapesof the world appeared.

How long until you are clocks! Aluminumof blue proportions, cementstuck to human dreams!

In Neruda’s vision of technological progress and observation there was no rift between the sources of scientific knowledge and the subjects who exploit and express the inspiration of poetry: it is from them that the poet obtains his power to transform the real.

I look at the sea with the utmost indifference: the indifference of oceanography, which knows its surface and depths; without literary pleasure, but with a certain delectation as a connoisseur, the palate of a cetacean.

Indeed it was the sea, the southern ocean and its frozen yet fertile seas, and his observation of the great aquariums in Madras, Naples and Copenhagen, that particularly fascinated Neruda, who mentions them at length in his memoirs: ‘It is plankton that interests me, that nutritious water, molecular and electrified, which gives the sea a colour like purple lightning.’ He knew about all the species, their routes and nutrition.


The home it constructs, the atom isolated by science, and the blossoming flower were all born of the same need. Human beings who are fulfilled in their work, participate in the universal crecimiento (growth) – a keyword in Neruda’s lexicon. And thus they could not break its fundamental laws, as if the frontier of knowledge was also inherent in the search for the secret mystery of life.

But do you know whether death comes from above or below?Where does the rainbow endin your souls or the horizon?

There is no disparity in Neruda’s work in the exploration of biodiversity. Inspired and in awe of nature’s generous gifts, he observed in Maya lands in Mexico the unfathomable mysteries of water that foresaw the very recent experiments in organic chemistry and quantum physics that sought the scientific key to mineral and living matter with advances in the nano-sciences and nano-technologies, toward frontiers of the quantum universe.

So on the sacred wells, over thousands of years, primitive religions believed in the mystery of secret water, unfathomable water.

Neruda is a poet immersed in the breath and diversity of the world: plants, insects, shells, books, objects of all kinds, nothing escaped his curiosity. His home-museum in Isla Negra bears witness to this, as if the poet, discoverer and explorer wished to develop a museographic vision and thus reveal the objective correspondence between the objects. He combed the world’s beaches in search of small examples of empty shells left on the sand with each fresh tide. Over more than twenty years, he accumulated more than 900 shells, with 400 different specimens of rare or lesser known varieties, which were exhibited by the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid in January 2010, showing the collection the poet gave to the University of Chile in 1954.

[…] The best thing I collected in my life is my shells. They have given me the pleasure of their amazing structures, the moonlike purity of their mysterious porcelain […]

His insatiable curisioty for objects was coupled with an obsession for mathematical proportions which appeared in his texts, and was reflected in the shells as a metaphor for the diversity of life within limits of an accessible reality. Pablo Neruda’s poetry can marvel before the beauty of the object, but it does not stop at its form or colour. Converging with scientific investigation, Neruda’s poetic subject travels within the object in order to grasp its material essence:

I asked each thingif it hadanything else,anything more that its structure,and so I learned that nothing was empty:Everything was box, train, boat loadedwith multiplicities […]


knowledge, science and ethics

Not only was he intent on giving a voice to their silence, but he was interested in them as creations, he wondered about their genesis and their workings, and he placed this knowledge at the service of the widest number of people. Whatever sense Neruda saw in his poetic quest, founded on a particular use of language, he did not compare it with the scientist’s quest. In his book Odas elementales he chose to celebrate the lab assistant, and when he wrote of the beauty of a pharmacy, it was not a departure from his fundamental poetic project – the celebration of the totality of human experience. Among the immense library he gave to the University of Chile, including his shells, there were many scientific works.

We know from the Canto general that when he was exiled from his homeland, the poet only took two books with him, the Physical Geography of the Republic of Chile (1875) by Amado Pissis, and the Book of the Birds of Chile (1946) by Johnson and Philippi.

It would be a vain search to look for a trace of rejection or distrust towards scientific and technical progress in Pablo Neruda’s poetry; he who was so enthusiastic about having shared ‘the cosmonauts’ moment’ in Moscow. But for him, true science was one that served life. When he wrote his Ode to the atom it had only been ten years since the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima. The poem reserves a large space on the horror of the event, but nevertheless ends with an exhortation addressed to the atom’s peaceful, fertilizing power.

Atom,overflowingcosmic cup,go back to the peace of the cluster,to the speed of happiness, go back to the womb of nature.

At the origin of his faith in scientific and technical progress, rooted at the heart of his utopian universalism, Neruda’s work reveals his firm belief, despite all the risks, in the scientific mission to include all peoples in its relationship with future generations as members of ‘the human family’ in which humanism will triumph. His conviction was basic and ultimate, and transcended his ideological faith:

I write these lines knowing quite well that over our heads, over all our heads, there hovers the danger of the atomic bomb, nuclear catastrophe that would not leave anyone or anything on the earth. In any case that does not cool my hope. At that critical moment, in that dying blink, we know the ultimate light will shine into our half-open eyes. We shall all understand each other. We shall go forward together. And that hope is irrevocable.


césairethere is room for everyone where victory is won.Aimé Césaire placed science and technology at the epicentre of challenges facing the twenty-first century, which confronted the human family.

A view of the world. Yes. Science offers us a view of the world.But a summary one. A surface one.Physics can classify, can offer explanations, but the essence of things escapes it. The natural sciences classify, but the quid proprium of things escapes them.As for mathematics, the element which escapes its abstract logician’s activity is the real.

It is not at all a matter of refusing the contributions made by science, but of appreciating their greater responsibilities in a world where risk is unavoidable. ‘History is always dangerous, and it is up to us to establish and readjust the hierarchy of risks.’ With regard to the benefits scientific progress may bring, ethics thus becomes a major challenge. For the universal proposed by Césaire, knowledge, including science, is a basic human strategy ever since the appearance of the species. Knowledge has a soul and is embodied. Science is not the entire sum of knowledge. Without ethics all knowledge, however essential and innovative it may be, is not free from threats.

The history of the human, as well as the exact sciences, bear the marks of extremely questionable ideas that weigh heavily on science’s historical role, which seemed to Aimé Césaire to justify – and quite rightly so – in-depth and rigorous inquiry. For example, it is essential not to reproduce, under any pretext, the shock of ‘the great betrayal’ by a number of scientists who, for predatory interests, sold the idea ‘that the West invented science, that only the West can think; that at the frontiers of the Western world begins the shadowy kingdom of primitive thought which is incapable of logic.’

Indeed how can we forget, for example, the state of world divisions and the reoccurrence of racial prejudice, as well as the damage wrought by ‘the objective reach of the bad work’ carried out by very respectable scientific theories that formualted a hierarchy among human beings that justified racism, the destruction of numerous peoples, and their enslavement.


Césaire the young poet replied to the Nazis who used craniometry and anthropometry to distinguish ‘Aryans from non-Aryans’, in his first work:

I defy the craniometer. Homo sum etc.And that they do their jobs, betray themselves and dieSo it must be. So it must be. It was written in the shapeof their pelvis.

Indeed craniometry or craniology is a good illustration of the culpability of the pseudo-sciences. The discipline that in the first half of the twentieth century claimed that anatomical variations existed between human brains from different ethnic origins, legitimizing the creation of a hierarchy of human beings according to race, and the identification of criminal or social temperaments based on cranial measurements. Its disciples also formulated ‘scientific’ hypotheses, which in turn determined characteristics for classifying intelligence and moral behaviour, despite quite inconclusive empirical proof to that end. This did not prevent people making use of the theories over a long period to justify racist policies towards the Irish, who were seen as similar to... black Africans and therefore considered as inferior races, and whose skulls were said to be the same shape as the Cromagnon, recalling those of monkeys, and thus proved their inferiority. Fairly recent theories also insisted on the pointlessness of higher education for women, whose ‘small brains would never be capable.’

The Discours sur le colonialisme harshly recalls the responsibilities of the human sciences when they serve oppression, profit and alienaton in this way: ‘Psychologists, sociologists, etc., their views on “primitivism”, their biased investigations, their partisan generalizations, their tendentious specializations...’. Césaire continues sarcastically, ‘Do I need to say that it is always from far above that the eminent scholar looks down on native populations, who “have not participated at all” in the development of modern science?’

Today ‘vigilance’ is still the watchword, ensuring that deviant attitudes are eradicated, despite the progress of scientific realities and ongoing economic, financial or political pressures. ‘Admirable! everyone wins: the big companies, the colonials, the government, except the Bantu of course.’ Following the justification of erroneous concepts about ‘primitives’, what is the current situation with regard to the fate of human beings in statistics, the various experiments, and the great market of science and technology? The question mark remains.

Shall we find, or not, the secret of a society where science will stop separating humanity from the universe, humans from themselves and their fellows, isolating humans in order to better kill them off, destroy them?


Aimé Césaire deeply admired science, to which he expressed huge gratitude for the positive solutions brought about by scientific and technological progress in alleviating repeated human suffering through the ages. But that knowledge must be reconciled with the intelligence of all people, both North and South, as in his view, ‘The mistake would be to think that knowledge waited for the methodical exercise of thought or experimental scruple to appear.’ Césaire was a forerunner of the cross-disciplinarity that ushered in the contemporary movement of holistic thinking, and the pluri-disciplinarity that brought together a group of poets, philosophers, anthropologists and ethnologists, and scientists from every field. Just like Tagore’s founding initiative in creating Visha Barati, and the universities of Santiniketan and Sriniketan, the journal Tropiques set up by Césaire aimed to initiate a role for scientific method in rehabilitating the accumulation of objective knowledge on local heritage through geography and botany, and to explore ‘the vegetation of the Caribbean environment’, to get to know ‘generic and scientific names’, ‘the role of ecology’, and to give ‘importance to agronomists’, to acquire information about ‘the properties of plants’, ‘the mangrove: that tropical phenomenon’, ‘the pre-Columbian fauna of the French West Indies’ or ‘the history of the Carribean context’.

It would be particularly dangerous to isolate science in an ivory tower. The issue concerns all areas of scientific research and discourse: the human sciences, the physical sciences, and the sciences of living things, as well as fundamental and applied research. Scientific achievements and methods should be explained and made accessible to the greatest possible number of people in order to stimulate and justify the admiring fascination to be found in the rich use of medical and botanical terms in Césaire’s poetry, as a poetical tribute to the solutions science provides to disease, ‘elephantiasis, malaria, smallpox, bedsores, pustules, scales, blemishes, vomito negro…’

words, oh yes, words ! butwords of new blood, words which are which aretidal waves and erysipelasmalarias and lavas and bushfiresand flamboyant fleshand flare-ups in cities...

For the first time in the history of the species, humanity was in a position to intervene scientifically and technically in the fundamental processes of life and death, which once more involves the equation of the individual and humanity confronting the benefits of innovation. But experience of the recent past offers sufficient retrospection to optimize science’s effective contribution towards building humanism and the universal. Thus, the more the fields and branches of science and technology gain in efficiency and sophistication, the more ethical responsibility is essential given the proliferation of discoveries, knowledge and applications that may make science both the end and the means of producing a selfish, disembodied knowledge.


walking across the poor-knit fracture of the continents(no use traversing the length of the Great Rift Valleyinspecting all the cross-breeding, examining the bone bedsfrom ancestors on down, there is always a missing link)

walking and telling oneself that it is impossible that the supercharged atmospheretapped by the lightning-conductor birdshas not been conducted away elsewhereat any rate somewhere a man is awaiting it.

It is in this spirit that Césaire alerts us to the marked trend towards the ‘all-science’, the irresistible expansion of ‘all-technology’, behind which we glimpse implacable modern forms of dehumanization, if scientific knowledge and the lure of technology adopt the aim of overlooking human beings, trapping the human in a mesh of commercial services and truths, sometimes surreptiously serving unjustifiable practices.

Facing the ethical challenge, the big question for Césaire is that of expanding scientific realities conceived first as those of the physical quantifiable world, capable of being broken down, controlled and mechanized by the techno-sciences, backed by mathematics and geometry, but also neutralizing the negative aspects concealed within the scientific and technical instrument to exorcize the disaster of ‘the machine, yes, never seen, the machine, but for flattening, grinding, numbing peoples’. It is crucial to avoid materialistic dogma, transforming into ideology a certain despotism in modern science, for ‘in order to acquire that impersonal knowledge that is scientific knowledge, the human being is depersonalized, deindividualized’.

A complementarity must unite the poet and artist with the scientist because, like the germination of scientific knowledge, poetry is an operational intuitive magic. Césaire thus urges scientists to remain sensitive to the poetic, to the marvellous rapture, before the mystery and profundity of animate or inanimate nature, before which reason bows down.

In a text written in his youth Poésie et connaissance, and delivered in a speech in 1944, Césaire established a relationship between science and poetry with these words:

Poetic knowledge arises in the great silence of scientific knowledge. Through reflection, observation, experience, people confused by the facts end up mastering them. Then they can find their way in the forest of phenomena. They can use the world. But they are not kings of the world for all that.


162five convergent themes

163knowledge, science and ethics

5the educational issues Which form of education is needed to reinvent and to engage once again in the Universal? By transmitting data, conveying values, training the person, rekindling memories, revealing talents, opening up to the other, adapting to innovation? Questioning the relationship between the dominant and the dominated, the legacies of Tagore, Neruda and Césaire are strongly pedagogic and teach us that all knowledge and all cultures are of equal significance in terms of organic symbols depicting the diversity of peoples and civilizations. They help to define the mission that is embodied in education in order to, ‘build in the mind of human beings’ a world order that finally makes compatible the urgent demands of the universal and the individual. If it is true that the turn of the twenty-first century has been called the ‘Knowledge Society’, the era of the Internet and associated web tools has allowed us to become virtual authors, as well as holders and beneficiaries of the most formidable accumulation of knowledge that has ever been made available to humankind in its entire history. Never has the distinction made by Montaigne between ‘une tête bien faite’ (a well made head) and ‘une tête bien pleine’ (a full head) been as applicable as it is today to distinguish the contents of uses by exercising a critical capacity, at a time when formal education, school or university, is no longer the only place of education – far from it. Faced with the new and infinite jungle of data, the challenge is to awaken the conscience and the foundation of humanism and the advance of men and women towards

a human community where there is an awareness of the values of justice and dialogue, resistance to enslavement, but also learning that responsibility is the only safeguard against the many dangers of acculturation, alienation, sectarianism or brainwashing.Every person’s right to education is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the conventions to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Millennium Development Goals. However, the list of obstacles remains a long one: schools that are often lacking in resources, an inadequate public offering, a growing commercialization of education, indoctrination, and so on. Much remains to be done to provide access to a responsible education for all that promotes the development of mental and physical aptitudes, inculcates respect for human rights, cultural values and their diversity in a spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, gender equality, friendship between all peoples and ethnic, national and religious groups, and finally to instill respect for the natural world. For Tagore, Neruda and Césaire education comes from an exchange of knowledge and experiences the need for which transcend particularities in a multipolar world, like a passport to social inclusion, economic integration and cultural dialogue. How, on the basis of their message, can education share, classify, deepen and transmit content, experiences, and values of the inestimable heritage that nourishes the reconciled Universal?


165the educational issues

tagoreeducation across barriers

In every nation, education is intimately connected with the life of the people [...] The age of narrow chauvinism is coming to an end for the sake of the future, the first step towards this great meeting of world humanity will be taken here in these very fields of Bolpur. The task of my last years is to free the world from the coils of national chauvinism.

Tagore believed that all social and individual problems, such as poverty, religious discord and disunity, could be resolved through education. Born in a colonized India, Tagore lived in the tumult of a dynamic world when the so-called ‘unchanging East' had stirred. Even as a patriot, Tagore’s national commitment was inclusive thanks to the highly cosmopolitan environment of his family home where he delighted in obtaining knowledge from a multitude of sources. His political philosophy was universalist as be believed it was essential to drink from the fountain of universal knowledge. From his early works on Bengali and Anglo-Saxon literature, Dante and Béatrice, Pétrarque and his Laure, the lovers of Goethe, he asked:

Should my pleasure of learning stop with Bengali literature because I was born in Bengal? Am I not a citizen of the world? Isn't the creation of the philosopher, the poet, the scientist as much for me as it is for somebody else?

His priority was to rid India of its isolation.India has been cut off from the world's scholarship, treated only to trifles in the name of education and relegated to a perennial primary school. We now want freedom from this spiritual and intellectual humiliation.

He was against an over-attachment to the past. In other words he struggled against those elements of patriotism and nationalism that could spread xenophobia; this made him a universalist. He consistently urged his compatriots to reform their own society and not to expect ‘goodness’ from a foreign government.

I believe that all human problems find their fundamental solution in education… I know that all the evils, almost without exception, from which my land suffers are solely owing to the utter lack of education of the people. Poverty, pestilence, communal fights and industrial backwardness make our path narrow and perilous owing to the meagreness of education… I repeat that our education is the thing we should first of all take into our hands.


Tagore summoned his compatriots to turn to the villages, where the majority of Indians lived, dedicating his efforts on raising awarness among them. He put his faith firmly in education as a way of achieving this. He participated in the edification of the nation in the domain of education. Tagore was opposed to national isolation whether in the name of nationalist causes or social exclusion.

Such idealists I have often met in my travels in the West, unknown persons of no special reputation who suffer and struggle for a cause most often ignored by the clever and the powerful.

Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru regarded Tagore as the ‘conscience’ of India, who stood up against ‘the enemies called Bigotry, Intolerance, Ignorance, Inertia and other members of that brood’.

With Tagore’s unflinching enthusiasm, together with the relationships he cultivated throuughout the world, Visva-Bharati prospered in the first thirty years of its history from 1920–1930 to bring its contribution – as much as possible given its limited resources – to the universal community of knowledge. Tagore’s final years were difficult due to the complicated context of the Second Word War. During his final speech, entitled The Crisis of civilisation, pronounced on 8 May 1941 at his eightieth birthday, he wrote that the flame of his convictions would not be extinguished: As I look around I see the crumbling ruins of a proud civilization strewn like a vast heap of futility. And yet I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in Man. I would rather look forward to the opening of a new chapter in his history after the cataclysm is over and the atmosphere rendered clean with the spirit of service and sacrifice. Perhaps that dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the sun rises. A day will come when unvanquished Man will retrace his path of conquest, despite all barriers, to win back his lost human heritage.

The educational institution he founded in rural southern Bengal still exists today and is known as Santiniketan. Tagore began by founding a school in 1901, later adding an international university and an Institute of Rural Reconstruction in 1921–22. The entire institution – the school, the university and the centre for rural reconstruction – make up what is today’s Visva-Bharati University at Santiniketan and its twin Sriniketan, situated two kilometres away from Santiniketan. They are based on the founder’s conviction that a school and university must be connected with the life of its people in association with a larger humanity.

the educational issues167


This experiment was ‘an indigenous attempt in adapting modern methods of education in a truly Indian cultural environment’. Elucidating his position, Tagore wrote:

If ever a truly Indian school is established it must from the very beginning apply its acquired knowledge of economics, agriculture, health and all other everyday sciences in the villages. Then alone can the school become the centre of the country’s way of living. This school must practise agriculture, dairy-keeping, and weaving by the modern methods. And to obtain its own financial resources it must adopt cooperative methods bringing together students, teachers and the people living around.

There were several principles in Tagore’s commitment to education. One was to keep it free from racial and national prejudice, while ensuring that the children at the Santiniketan school grew up with the knowledge that they belong to a wider humanity comprised of varied peoples, ranging from the local villagers to visiting foreigners from around the globe who were invited by Tagore to teach in his school. Having been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Tagore was able to mix the local and global context, using his international contacts, to present Visva Bharati as a meeting place where scholars of the East and West could share their knowledge and discourse on their respective concepts, particularly in terms of their differences.

In his letter to Thomas More, written in Santiniketan on 1 May 1914, Tagore wrote:All the same, nay, all the more, your literature is precious to us. […] Literature of a country is not chiefly for home consumption. […] The Western literature is doing the same with us, bringing into our life elements some of which supplement and some contradict our tendencies. This is what we need. It is not enough to charm or surprise us – we must receive shocks and be hurt.

This objective also underlined the combination of disciplines studied at his school and university, ranging from the study of Vedic and classical Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, to the study of Europe, China and Japan. The aim of the Santiniketan experiment was to encourage the freedom of thought and reasoning.

The Santiniketan school must be made the thread linking India with the world. We must establish there a centre for humanistic research concerned with the world’s peoples. [...] I have taken courage to invite Europe to our institution. There will be a meeting of truths here.


This spirit of connecting with a larger humanity, and the realization that India was a part of the same humanity as any other country in the world, led to his growing impatience with anachronistic tradition. In his struggle against India’s internal contradictions, Tagore argued that only education could link people and civilizations.

I represent in my institution an ideal of brotherhood, where men of different countries and different languages can come together. I believe in the spiritual unity of man and therefore I ask the world to accept this task from me. Unless it comes and says, “We also recognize this ideal,” I shall know that this mission has failed.

Indians must evolve with the rest of humanity and try to eradicate the injustices and discrimination that exist in orthodox Hindu society. Men were punished for slaughtering a cow, but not for killing a fellow human being. Contact with the lower caste was an offence against society, but destroying a rival’s property was not. A criminal had nothing to fear so long as he married off his daughter according to the social norms. A ceremonial bath in the Ganges nullified all crimes – big and small. Tagore wrote that in such a society, human beings were treated like cogs in a machine, angrily asking: was it God’s intention that we should be Hindu and not human?

We have come to this world, to accept it and not merely to know it. The highest education is that which does not merely give us information, but makes our life in harmony with all existence.

neruda keeping alive dialogue between cultures On the podium at unesco’s Executive Council, Neruda declared, ‘Education will be our epic!’ for he saw education as ‘the noblest task, the best thing humanity has done and can do.’

Although as an elected politician or political leader he never found himself directly in charge of education, Pablo Neruda was nonetheless aware of its urgency in his country and throughout the world, as confirmed in a speech given at unesco a few months prior to his election to the Executive Council.

Was the American struggle, at the heart of his life’s great work, not a way for Neruda to satisfy ‘as a poet’ that educational duty which he understood as important? By giving the broadest meaning to his work, we can refer to it as his epic pedagogy that brought to the American consciousness a continuous revaluation of local knowledge. This pedagogy is part of a poetic approach that – following the terrible ordeal of the Spanish war – no longer placed the author at its heart but its audience – the people. The reader interprets the message and as a consequence expects the practice of simplicity and accessibility.

Indeed, my utmost belief is that the struggle for education and the objectives set by unesco cannot be separated from the duty to combat and extinguish hereditary colonialism, the recently acquired neo-colonialism. There still exist both a colonialism from without and a colonialism from within of social classes who impose their hereditary rights so as to oppress their own peoples. [...] In consequence, the movement for education in Latin America must be considered as a revolutionary phenomenon, linked to the survival of the people, to the national soul still threatened by its old enemies.

For Pablo Neruda, the American poet’s primary task and that of all poets from the South, was that of the pioneer and the educator: to populate with words that vast silent space given to them by the silence of domination.

I am here to tell the story.From the peace of the buffalo to the pummeled sands of the land’s end, in the accumulated spray of the antarctic light, and through precipitous tunnels of shady Venezuelian peacefulness I searched for you, my father, young warrior of darkness and copper,


or you, nuptial plant, indomitable hair,mother cayman, metallic dove.I, Incan of the loam,, touched the stone and said :

Who awaits me? And I closed my handaround a fistful of empty flint.

In its immensity, education is a crossroads where most of the great writers of universal poetry meet. It is not a question of influences but exchanges: a consequence, depending on the scale of a work, of the great figures of the universal dialogue. Land, people and poetry are one entity linked by mysterious underground passages. They embody the mythical power of speech, its ability to keep alive dialogue between people and their cultures.

Whatever the specificity that Neruda acknowledged in the identity of peoples, the fundamental project was to transmit the celebration of the totality of human experiences. The book had a dual and contradictory function because – following in the steps of imperialist acculturation and alienation – he feared the book could enclose the human spirit by ‘the printer’s poison’.

In one of his Odes to the book, he reognized the double material and intellectual existence:Book beautiful book, little forest, leaf after leaf, your paper smells of the elements, you are daily and nocturnal, grain, ocean


He wanted a book that was open to life, to play an integral part of the movement to keep knowledge alive in order to pass it on to future generations, as he wrote in his ‘Second Testament’.

I leave my old books, collectedin corners of the globe, veneratedin their majestic typography,to the new poets of America,to those who'll one dayweave tomorrow's meaningson the raucous interrupted loom.

The need to pass on knowledge and teaching for action is inseparable from self-discovery, experience of the other, knowledge of history, and understanding the reality through books. ‘Book, let me go.’ It is at the heart of the poet’s mission, as an echo of the great movements that form human societies.

Wethe wanderingpoetsexploredthe world,at every doorlife received us,we took partin the earthly struggle.What was our victory?A book,a book full of human touches,of shirts,a bookwithout loneliness, with menand tools,a bookis victory.

He ends his Canto general with these words: ‘Here I’ll stop’ (1949).This book ends here. It was bornof fury like a live coal, like expansesof burned forests, and I hopethat it continues like a red treepropagating its transparent burn.


césaire education to look the century in the eyesFrom the moment his first work Cahier d’un retour au pays natal was published, Aimé Césaire’s poetic brilliance was a lesson in the human. Education was the backbone of societies’ emancipation, serving as a bridge to the ontological, social, cultural and political inclusion of the human being in a world common to us all. The more sombre the period, the more vital education becomes as a lesson in solidarity, humility and generosity. Thus, faced with the horrors of war, Césaire begins his introducution to Tropiques with the following words:

Wherever we look, the shadows vanquish. One after the other homes fade away amidst the cries of men and howls of wild animals. Yet we are among those who say no to darkness. We know that the salvation of the world depends on us too. That the earth needs any of his sons. The most humble. The shadows vanquish...

Ah, all hope is not too much to look across the century! Men of good will will bring a new light to the world.

Indeed educating is not strictly limited to instructing or teaching, for they are merely associated with passing on to future generations a body of knowledge useful to the group or the nation, or even simply for social mobility. Educating also means ensuring that every man and woman can fully develop their physical, intellectual and moral capacities in order to be able to participate as a responsible citizen in the life of humanity and the changes required by a new universal.

and rigor, not to mention the dreams without which mankind would perish.

The ethical conditions of learning determine the acquisition of knowledge. In this process of exercising responsibility, the union formed between the teacher and student constitutes a duality that gives sense to the educational act for all of us, men and women, of all ages and all civilizations.


Each one contributing his own special thing: patience, vitality, love, will-power too,

Thus in Une Tempête, we can hear the dialogue between Prospero, the dominating master, with Caliban, who he wants to maintain in a state of subjugation by perverse and misguided eduction adapted to his condition of slavery:

[…] You could at least thank me for having you taught to speak at all. You savage… a dumb animal, a beast I educated, trained, dragged up from the bestiality that still sticks out all over you![…] You didn’t teach me a thing! Except to jabber in your own language so that I could understand your orders – chop the wood, wash the dishes, fish for food, plant vegetables, all because you’re too lazy to do it yourself. And as for your learning, did you ever impart any of that to me? No, you took care not to. All your science and know-how you keep for yourself alone, shut up in big books like those.

Because of this, and even when knowledge is transmitted effectively, the hegemonic school is a tool of enslavement, like the colonial school, which we should not forget in order to better eradicate its assimilationist, alienating principles:

And neither the teacher in his classroom nor the priest at catechism will be able to get a word out of this sleepy black boy, despite the energetic methods they all apply to drum them into his shaven skull, because his voice of inanition has been mired in the marshes of hunger...

In the twenty-first century, education is no longer compatible with the continuing poverty, exclusion and hunger of millions of human beings. The keyword in all educational systems is responsibility, and states must ensure the public provision of education, not the formal statement of principles that is often betrayed by reality, but a determined, democratic and permanent action. Responsibility is also in the hands of economic authorities, intellectuals, churches and faiths, and the media at a time when the sophistication of information technology eliminates the obstacles of time and space.

The issue is a crucial one. The heavy responsibility inherent in the education of people is personified in the ultimate sacrifice by King Christopher:

And here I stand like a schoolmaster brandishing my rod in front of a nation of sluggards! Gentlemen, please understand the meaning of these sanctions. Either we smash everything down, or we raise everything up. The appeal of smashing down can easily be imagined. Everything knocked down, naked bareness. Indeed, that is one kind of freedom. The land is still there, and the sky; the stars, the night, we Negroes with our freedom, our roots, our wild banana palms. That’s one way of looking at it. Or else, we raise up. And you know what comes next. So, we must bear the burdens, we must carry the load: higher and higher. Further and further. I have made my choice. We must carry. We must march.


Césaire the poet, mayor of Fort-de-France, was a masterly teacher in the educating of consciousness, and an example of openness to self and to the world. This vocation complements that of founder and builder of primary and secondary schools – environments of learning and the exchange of experience and knowledge. Césaire placed education at the heart of the life of the citizen, of the res publica, and the regeneration of the human condition, like a worker intent on his task of building the consciousness of peoples – patiently, humbly. Education and culture will enable each person to question the world and to construct their own place for themselves.

This assumption is the pedagogic mission he assigned to his drama in which his heroes, like King Christopher and Patrice Lumumba, have the hardest task of all, the task of transmitting the elementary facts, the lessons of history, in order to rehabilitate and reconcile knowledge borne of equivalent experiences of life, study, nature, thought and art. Education is a framework for the reconstruction of the diversity of geographical and historical reality, from out of the profound knowledge of each and every person’s particular circumstance and constraints.

But the real accomplishment of the educational mission is meaningful only through the transmission of values, similar to King Christopher’s Herculean and unfinished task of building a state: ‘Do you hear! To be done over again! To be rebuilt! All of it. Earth and water. Putting the road through. Remaking the land.’ The hero of Césaire’s drama accepts the sacrifice of his life, because the educator’s task is never over. It is connected with the future of human history, greater that the life of the poet or his heroes:

Because they have known abduction and contempt, the contempt that comes from a spit in the face, I have striven to give them standing in the world, to instruct them how to build their dwelling-place, to teach them how to stand firm.

The task of education is universal, and educating the people, whether rich or poor, is the first duty to assess the price of sacrifice and liberty, to build in their minds the conviction that the existence of a human community, rich in ethnic and cultural diversity, depends on everyone. Against the fragmentation of the ‘human community into monads’, where every person becomes a prisoner of blindness, ignorance, enslavement, hatred of self and others, education serves as a bridge because it enables consciousness to open up to the reciprocity of knowledge, the achievements of the past, and the dangers of the present. To educate people is above all to prepare them for the most difficult of conquests: the one waged against oneself, the danger of self-confinement, as described in Hors des jours étrangers:

my peoplewhenaway from the days of strangerswill you bud on your rejoined shouldersa head that is yours aloneand your voice


with short shrift given to traitorsto mastersbread restored land cleansedland given[...]people of unhappy broken sleep,people of chasms reclimbedpeople of bad dreams tamedpeople of night, lovers of furious thundertomorrow will be higher sweeter broaderand the torrential swell of the landunder the lifegiving plough of the storm

It is through education that we can build the slow process of reconciliation with the former enemy, tormentor or the former victim, to achieve ‘le rendez-vous du donner et du recevoir’, which L.S. Senghor described. To be operational, the education Césaire dreams of must above all broaden human consciousness, having found in himself the ability to access the deepest sources of the world’s knowledge and beauty. Education transcends the boundaries between generations, just as it builds bridges between peoples, and between fields of knowledge, which are equally reconciled. More than a quantitative transmission of data, exclusively reserved for educational establishments whose norms reproduce those of the social sphere, the type education referred to by Césaire is maieutic, a human re-birth for those prepared to make a contribution towards the Universal.

Being engaged means for the educator being part of a social context, being the people’s flesh, living the problems of one’s country intensely and standing up for it ...

Together, educators and educated, teachers and students are part of the edification of a responsible society that the poet so desires, ‘a society such that there the antimony between order and liberty will be resolved otherwise than verbally’.


Just as Rabindrânâth Tagore was determined to evade the pitfalls of identity in an India in the throes of decolonization, and Neruda who refused the veil of the victim, Césaire did not hide the fact that the responsibility that fell on everyone was immense. Not only at the national policy level of those countries labelled as poor, ‘less advanced’, emerging, rich, developed or powerful, but also within societies, whether rich or poor, on all citizens regardless of social class, generation, ethnic and cultural identity.

[...] I am thinking of an identity that its not archaizing,eating up the self, but eating the world, that is, taking over the whole present to better re-evaluate the past and further to prepare the future. For in the end how should we measure the road already covered if we know neither where we come from nor where we want to go. Our engagement has meaning only if it is a question of re-rooting, granted, but also self-fulfilment, going further and conquering a new and wider brotherhood.

Poetry? Politics? Let’s say that Césaire spoke of a chain of solidarity and fraternity linked to education and all that is human, as expressed in the poem Maillon de la cadène:

with bits of stringwith lumps of woodwith all the left-over bits and pieceswith the underhand blowswith the dead leaves shovelled upwith the shreds of sheetswith the torn lassoswith forced open links of chainswith the scattered bones of moray eelswith conch shellswith flags and tombs stripped of their wreathsthrough cyclone and whirlwindto build you.


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5conclusion

conclusion

an innovative programe at the service of an original and complex mission

Following the longstanding legitimation of unequal relations, today’s generation now knows that there is only one way to share and prolong life in a fragile, finite world, to reinvent modes of participation and responses to change and that it is to build a modernity characterized by processes of universalization whose multiple entry points are united by a common concern for solidarity.

Beyond their individual meanings, the combination of the three works by Rabindrânâth Tagore, Pablo Neruda and Aimé Césaire projects each of their messages in the same space in the rapprochement of cultures. At the confluence of different currents of thought and experience, reflection and creation, Tagore, Neruda and Césaire embody humanism in action, having foreseen the great global upheavals and the introduction of a pragmatic vision of universalization imbued with the diversity of Asian, African, American, Caribbean and European experience without hierarchy or exclusion.

By adopting this programme, the Member States of unesco sought more than a single project of cultural exchanges. The aim is to launch an ambitious and dynamic project that has a broad openness to dialogue and innovation, inscribed at the very heart of the Organization’s multifaceted mandate, combining education, sciences, culture and communication. The programme should therefore embrace all disciplines of knowledge, transmission and artistic creation, which, ‘in the mind of people’, have an irreplaceable part to play in building a ‘reconciled universal’.

To reconcile does not mean to erase collective and individual liabilities or to throw oneself into the future, all the more daunting in an era where human beings are being faced with new daily challenges presented by urban life, work, wealth, poverty, the market, borders, the planet, and so on. But by re-evaluating the heritage of the great geocultural regions of Asia, Africa, America, the Caribbean and Europe, the project has the combined objective of proposing platforms for mediation and convergence where the memories of both North and South can affirm their coherence and complementarity, giving rise to an international, durable dynamic intellectual and ethical response demanded by the global crisis.

On the one hand, this project is structured on the specific corpus represented by the sum of the three works and constellations, offering concrete content that lies beyond the sole normative patterns of domains and sectors of activity, while at the same time nurturing experience and substance and thus fulfilling a mandate of intellectual vigilance, part of unesco’s mission, but is also crucially urgent on the world stage. On the other hand, it gives back to the arts and humanities – expresessions of the wealth of individual creation comprising global cultural diversity – the major role we expect of them in international life.

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conclusion185

looking ahead to accept the challenges of our era

From the moment, Irina Bokova, Director General of unesco, took up her post, she strongly welcomed the reactivation of the ideals that led to the Organization’s creation based on the twofold conviction ‘that a peace founded on the economic and political agreements of governments alone would not be capable of gaining the unanimous, long-lasting and sincere support of peoples, and that consequently that peace must be established on the foundation of the intellectual and moral solidarity of humanity’. At the centre of the threats stated in the preamble of the Constitutive Act, there appears ‘the mutual incomprehension between peoples (which) has always throughout history been at the root of suspicion and mistrust.’

For unesco, the only global organization dedicated to education, science and culture, the priority is to make every effort to ensure that this century is amicable, peaceful and responsible. ‘In each of our actions and thoughts we should reflect on the effects of our actions on the seven generations to come so that compassion and seeds of peace may flower’. Such is the recommendation that closes every meeting of the Iroquois tribal council. Indeed it is for all people to revive the chain of predecessors, contemporaries, brothers in struggle, opponents heirs who, together, determine the dimension and strength of memory, anticipation and reality.

In this vital, unifying commitment, the life and works of Rabindrânâth Tagore, Pablo Neruda and Aimé Césaire show us the way. Magnified by the contagious, regenerative force of poetry, it shows us that no human can live in isolation. Projecting into the future, Member States have recognized the light of the modern ‘passer-by’ whose work, commitment, thoughts and action, appeals to all types of artistic and intellectual expression, which the genius of cultures has developed throughout the ages and which still radiates today.

At a time when emerging polarities expose new geopolitical balances, cultural and intellectual geography, driven by dynamic networks of relationships, connections and fertilization, reveal the complexity of the world, which conceals a treasure trove of experience and potential. Let us make sure that these combined sources of energy enable us to build the reconciled and humanistic universal with the cooperation of all, and that it is worthy of the promises and hopes of the third millennium.

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6 resolution of the general conference

“Rabindrânâth Tagore, Pablo Neruda and Aimé Césaire for a reconciled universal”Resolution adopted on the report of the CLT Commission at the 17th plenary meeting, on 23 October 2009. Having examined document 35 C/53, which highlights the interdisciplinary and intersectoral contents of the works of Rabindrânâth Tagore (1861-1941), Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) and Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), emphasizing the originality of each set of works, while exploring the close relations between them, for the development of a universal which matches the expectations of peoples, in particular through the strengthening of bridges between cultures and civilizations,

1. Recognizes the importance of the works of these three figures and the pivotal, pioneering and topical exemplarity of their message, for enhancing unesco’s efforts towards a reconciled universal;

2. Emphasizes the relevance of this programme, whose innovative character updates unesco’s interdisciplinary action in response to the context of the global crisis, and recommends the attachment to it, in the future, of authors, creative workers and scientists whose message could enrich and expand the envisaged set of themes;

Taking into consideration the celebration of the International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures in 2010, which provides a suitable opportunity for the launch of a programme of activities focusing on the works of Tagore, Neruda and Césaire, and on the constellation around them;

3. Encourages Member States and public and private institutions to implement 180 ex/Decision 58 and, in particular, to initiate publishing, translation and research programmes in national languages, in order to promote the tangible and intangible heritage of these works, in strict observance of the rights of copyright holders and their legal successors, and to act as national, regional and international relays which can give substance to the programme and its theme, in all the requisite dimensions, with special emphasis on youth;

4. Endorses 180 ex/Decision 58 of the Executive Board and approves the launch of this programme in the 2010-2011 biennium and its integration into the efforts to implement the Medium-Term Strategy (C/4) within a particular interdisciplinary operational framework which is appropriate for sustained action;

5. Invites the Director-General to submit to the Executive Board at its 184th session specific proposals for the implementation of interdisciplinary and intersectoral programmes in connection with the work of these three authors, providing them with resources from the regular budget, and to mobilize, with the support of a high-level sponsoring committee, the additional extrabudgetary funds required for major international mobilization.

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7 acknowledgements

To the participants of the expert meetings that took place at unesco in March 2009 and January 2010, Azarie Aroulandom, Tapas Bhatt, Justine Bertheau, Jean Bessière, Lyne Rose Beuze, Patrick Crowley, Bikas C. Sanyal, Uma Dasgupta, Doudou Diène, Michèle Espanet, Jacques Martial, Catherine Mukherjee, Prithwindra Mukherjee, Ernest Pépin, Sharmila Roy Pommot, Gérard Lamoureux, Adama Samassekou, Alain Sicard, Raul Silva-Cáceres, Annick Thébia-Melsan, for their support, commitment, and contribution through their expertise and thought to the intellectual foundations of this pamphlet.

We would also like to thank the Permanent Delegations of Bangladesh, Benin, Chile, France and India to unesco for officially presenting the project at the Executive Board and the General Conference of unesco.

We are also appreciative of the legal claimants of the three authors and their families, as well as the institutional and academic partners which include the Visva Bharati University, the Pablo Neruda Foundation and the Municipal Service of Cultural Action of Fort de France, Martinique, who have all brought their full support in the research and transmission of the iconographic support composing this text.

We thank Mr. René Depestre for his unwavering support, expertise, his cross disciplinary thinking, and precious memories, which we were honored to share.

Our full acknowledgement goes to His Excellency Ambassador Joseph Olabiyi Yaï, Permanent Delegate of Benin to unesco, as well as former President of the Executive Board of unesco (2008-2009) for the inspiration he gave to this initiative with the aim of diffusing and transmitting, at both particular and universal levels, the unifying message of a reconciled universal rendering homage to the three authors Rabindrânâth Tagore, Pablo Neruda, Aimé Césaire, and all of the constellations of authors, thinkers and artists who together instill the convergent, inspiring and renewed path towards new humanism.

Finally, we dedicate these writings to all the past, present and future generations, who carry challenges and continually renewed ideals of progress. We hope that it brings commitment to convictions and hopes of a new humanism rooted in peace, dialogue, and comprehension elevated towards freedom and progress.

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8 crédits

Introductionp. 4 Rabindrânâth Tagore © Permanent Delegation of India to unesco; p.6 Pablo Neruda © All rights reserved; p.8 Aimé Césaire © unesco

Rabindrânâth Tagorep. 28 Portrait of the young Rabindrânâth Tagore © Permanent Delegation of India to unesco ; p. 31 The young “Rabi” © Permanent Delegation of India to unesco ; p. 32 The young poet © Permanent Delegation of India to unesco ; p. 35 The poet Tagore in the Gitanjali years © Permanent Delegation of India to unesco ; p. 36 Rabindrânâth Tagore visiting Japan in 1916 © Permanent Delegation of India to unesco ; p. 38/39 Manuscript signature of Rabindrânâth Tagore in bengali © Permanent Delegation of India to unesco ; p. 42/43 Rabindrânâth Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi in visit to Santiniketan © Permanent Delegation of India to unesco ; p. 45 Meeting between Rabindrânâth Tagore and Albert Einstein © Permanent Delegation of India to unesco ; p. 47 Rabindrânâth Tagore in the United States in 1913 © Permanent Delegation of India to unesco ; p. 48 Rabindrânâth Tagore in the United States © Permanent Delegation of India to unesco.

Pablo Nerudap. 52 The young Pablo Neruda. On the back of the photography with a joint letter: 1927, June, Santiago, Chile, “To my dear father Neftali Ricardo” © Pablo Neruda Foundation/ Bernardo Reyes, personal archives ; p. 55 The young poet Pablo Neruda and his sister Laura Reyes © Pablo Neruda Foundation/ Bernardo Reyes, personal archives ; p. 56 Portrait of Pablo Neruda, in indigenous clothing, in Ceylan, in 1929 (Sri Lanka) © Pablo Neruda Foundation; p. 59 Pablo Neruda on the Machu Picchu © Pablo Neruda Foundation; p. 60/61 Manuscript signature of Pablo Neruda © unesco ; p. 64/65 Continental Congress of Culture in Santiago of Chile, 1953 – Pablo Neruda surrounded of grand figures, notably: on the first row from left to right: René Depestre, Nicolas Guillén / on the second row on the left: Jorge Amado, Zélia Gattaï, Diego Rivera © Bibliothèque francophone de Limoges, Fonds René Depestre.

Aimé Césairep. 70 The young Aimé Césaire © Assemblée nationale-2011 ; p. 73 The student Césaire in Paris © All rights reserved ; p.75 Poster of the Senghor exhibition presented at unesco in 2006 © unesco/ Mr Ravassard ; p.76 The young professor Césaire © Ministère de la Culture/ Médiathèque du Patrimoine/ Denise Colomb / Dist. rmn ; p. 80/81 Group of participants to the first Congrès international écrivains et artistes noirs at the Sorbonne University, 19-22 September 1956 © Éditions Présence Africaine – Communauté africaine de culture. We may distinguish: First row: Andriantsilaniarivo, Jacques Rabemanjara, Alioune diop, J. Price-Mars, L.S. Senghor /Second row: René Depestre, Aimé Césaire / Third row: Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Claude Macquet. Parmi les participants: G. Sekoto (Afrique du Sud), P. Tchibamba (Afrique Équatoriale Française), Abbé Mario P. Andrade, M. Lima (Angola), P. Blackman, G.Lamming (Barbade), Tibério (Brésil), Pasteur T. Ekollo, François Sengat Kuo, Benjamin Matip, Nyunaï, F. Oyono (Cameroun), A.R. Bolamba (Congo Belge), Bernard Dadié (Côte d'Ivoire), W. Carbonel (Cuba), N. Damz, Paulin Joachim, P. Hazoumé (Dahomey), H.M. Bond, M. Cook, J.A. Davis, W., J. Ivy Fontaine, Richard Wright (États-Unis d'Amérique), P. Mathieu, Moune de Rivel (Guadeloupe), J. Alexis, R.P. Bisanthe, René Depestre, A. Mangones, E.C. Paul, R. Piquion, J. Price-Mars, E. Saint- Lot (Haiti), Cédric Dover (Inde), M. James, J. Holness (Jamaïque), Andriantsilaniarivo, Jacques Rabemanjara, F.Ranaivo (Madagascar), L. Achille, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant (Martinique), M. Dos Santos (Mozambique), B. Hama (Niger), B. Enwonwu, L..A. Fabunmi, M. Lasebikan, J. Vaughan (Nigéria), Mamadou Dia, C.A. Diop, David Diop, Diop O. Socé, A. Seck, L.S. Senghor, Bachir Touré, Abdoulaye Wade (Sénégal), D. Nicol (Sierra Leone), H. Bâ, A. Wahal (Soudan), F. Agblemagnon (Togo) © Présence Africaine Éditions, 1956; p. 85 Apéritif chez Pierre Matisse, New York, 1945 © Association André Breton/ ABnew Photographies, photographer: Charles Maze; p.86/87 Manuscript signature of Aimé Césaire © unesco/ Annick Thebia Melsan ; p. 89 The last years at Fort-de-France, 2008 © unesco/ Annick Thebia Melsan.

Five themes of convergence p. 95 Pastel drawing by Rabindrânâth Tagore, inspired from a Malagan masque from New-Ireland, Papua New Guinea © University of Visva-Bharati ; p. 97 Manuscript poem from the book Chitralipi, © Permanent Delegation of India to unesco ; p.102 Portrait of Pablo Neruda © Sara Facio; p.106 “Le poète couronné”, engraving by Pablo Picasso for the book Corps perdu of Aimé Césaire and that served as a poster for the magazine Présence Africaine during the Congress for black writers and artists, at the Sorbonne, Amphithéâtre Descartes, Paris, 19 - 22 September 1956 © All rights reserved ; p.111 Lotus flower, Brazil © unesco/ Bernard Martinez ; p. 144 Poem “The Banyan Tree by Rabindrânâth Tagore © Visva Bharati University ; p.115 Banyan Tree, Everglades National Park, usa © unesco/ Armelle de Crépy ; p.121 Volcanoes in Hawai, usa © unesco / Thorsell, Jim / iucn ; p.126/127 Mangrove forests, Papua New Guinea © unesco / Vanucci, Marta ; p.129 Manuscript Poem “Where the mind is without fear” by Rabindrânâth Tagore, from Gitanjali © Permanent Delegation of India to unesco ; p.136 Pablo Neruda in front of the George Washington Statue © Pablo Neruda Foundation ; p.142 Evocation of Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803) © unesco ; p.149 Plasma Lamp © Luc Viatour ; p.155 The Man of Vitruve, Leonardo da Vinci (1485-1490,

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Venise, Galleria dell' Accademia) © Luc Viatour ; p.158 Collection of shells © unesco ; p.162/163 “La plus grande ouverture sur le cosmos”, mural by Roberto Matta © All rights reserved/Photography: unesco/ G. Nicolas ; p.165 Students at Santiniketan © Visva Bharati University; p.168 Santiniketan, eastern Bangladesh © Visva Bharati University ; p.171 Teaching and learning under Santiniketan trees © Visva Bharati University; p.172 Pablo Neruda with Greek children in Hungary, 1950 © Pablo Neruda Foundation/ Magyar Film Foto ; p.176 Cover of the booklet “Il était une fois Aimé Césaire”, for primary school classes © Mairie de Fort-de-France, 2008.

Authors’ citationsRabindrânâth Tagore ©Visva BharatiPablo Neruda ©Fundación Pablo Neruda

Aimé Césaire p. 71, Discours de Dakar, 1966, in Aimé Césaire, pour regarder le siècle en face, under the editorial direction of A. Thebia-Melsan, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000 ; p. 105, Discours de Dakar, 1966, in Aimé Césaire, pour regarder le siècle en face, under the editorial direction of A. Thebia-Melsan, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000 ; p. 105, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Aimé Césaire © Présence Africaine Éditions, 1956 ; p. 107, Discours de Dakar, 1966, in Aimé Césaire, pour regarder le siècle en face, under the editorial direction of A. Thebia-Melsan, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000 ; p. 107, Soleil cou coupé in Cadastres, Aimé Césaire © Éditions du Seuil, 1982, Points Poésie, 2006 ; p. 107, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Aimé Césaire © Présence Africaine Éditions, 1956 ; p. 108, Discours de Dakar, 1966, in Aimé Césaire, pour regarder le siècle en face, under the editorial direction of A. Thebia-Melsan, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000 ; p.108, Chemin, in Moi Laminaire…, Aimé Césaire © Éditions du Seuil, 1982, Points Poésie, 2006 ; p. 109, Genève et le monde noir in Aimé Césaire, pour regarder le siècle en face, under the editorial direction of A. Thebia-Melsan, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000 ; p. 109, Tropiques, Aimé Césaire © Éditions Jean Michel Place ; p. 122, Aimé Césaire, Reproduit du Courrier de l’unesco ; p. 122, Ferrements, Aimé Césaire © Éditions du Seuil, 1960, n.e., Points poésie, 2008 ; p. 122, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Aimé Césaire © Présence Africaine Éditions, 1956 ; p. 123, “Paroles d’îles”, Comme un malentendu in La Poésie, Aimé Césaire © Éditions du Seuil, 1994, n.e., 2006 ; p. 124, Magique in Cadastres, Aimé Césaire © Éditions du Seuil, 1982, Points Poésie, 2006 ; p. 124, La forêt vierge, Les armes miraculeuses, Aimé Césaire © Éditions Gallimard ; p. 124, Discours sur le colonialisme, Aimé Césaire © Présence Africaine Éditions, 1955 ; p.125, La force de regarder demain, in Moi Laminaire…, Aimé Césaire © Éditions du Seuil, 1982, Points Poésie, 2006 ; p. 141, L’étudiant noir © Droits réservés ; p. 141, Discours sur le colonialisme, Aimé Césaire © Présence Africaine Éditions, 1955 ; p. 143, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Aimé Césaire © Présence Africaine Éditions, 1956 ; p. 144, Toussaint Louverture, Aimé Césaire © Présence Africaine Éditions, 1962 ; p. 144, Discours de Dakar in Aimé Césaire, pour regarder le siècle en face, under the editorial direction of A. Thebia-Melsan, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000 ; p. 144, Par tous mots guerrier-silex, in Moi Laminaire…, Aimé Césaire © Éditions du Seuil, 1982, Points Poésie, 2006 ; p. 145, Lettre à Maurice Thorez © Mairie de Fort-de-France ; p. 145, Dorsale bossale, in Moi Laminaire…, Aimé Césaire © Éditions du Seuil, 1982, Points Poésie, 2006 ; p. 146, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Aimé Césaire © Présence Africaine Éditions, 1956 ; p. 146, Nouvelle bonté, in Moi Laminaire…, Aimé Césaire © Éditions du Seuil, 1982, Points Poésie, 2006 ; p. 147, Genève et le monde noir in Aimé Césaire, pour regarder le siècle en face, under the editorial direction of A. Thebia-Melsan, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000 ; p. 147, Lettre à Maurice Thorez © Mairie de Fort-de-France ; p. 147, Et les chiens se taisaient, Aimé Césaire © Présence Africaine Éditions, 1956 ; p. 157, Tropiques, Aimé Césaire © Éditions Jean-Michel Place ; p. 159, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Aimé Césaire © Présence Africaine Éditions, 1956 ; p. 160, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Aimé Césaire © Présence Africaine Éditions, 1956 ; p. 161, J’ai guidé du troupeau la longue transhumance, in Moi Laminaire…, Aimé Césaire © Éditions du Seuil, 1982, Points Poésie, 2006 ; p. 161, Tropiques, Aimé Césaire © Éditions Jean-Michel Place ; p. 177, Tropiques, Aimé Césaire © Éditions Jean-Michel Place ; p. 178, Une tempête, Aimé Césaire, © Éditions du Seuil, 1960, n.e., Points poésie, 2008 ; p. 178, La tragédie du roi Christophe © Présence Africaine Éditions, 1963 ; p. 179, La tragédie du roi Christophe © Présence Africaine Éditions, 1963 ; p. 180, Ferrements, Aimé Césaire © Éditions du Seuil, 1960, n.e., Points poésie, 2008 ; p. 181, Maillon de la cadène in Moi Laminaire…, Aimé Césaire © Éditions du Seuil, 1982, Points Poésie, 2006.

Official documentation Records of the unesco General Conference; 35th session, Paris, 2009, 35C/ 53http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001848/184890e.pdf

Records of the unesco General Conference; 35th session, Paris, 2009, vol.1 35C/ Resolution 46http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001864/186470E.pdf

Decision 180ex/58 of the Executive Board of unesco; 180th Session, Paris, 2008.http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0016/001625/162500e.pdf

Official website for the programme “Rabindrânâth Tagore, Pablo Neruda and Aimé Césaire, for a Reconciled Universal”http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/dialogue/tagore-neruda-and-cesaire/ Email: [email protected]

http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001848/184890e.pdf

http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001864/186470E.pdf

http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0016/001625/162500e.pdf

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/dialogue/tagore-neruda-and-cesaire

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