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RETAGORE NERUDA CSAIREfor a reconciled universal

United NationsEducational, Scientic 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 Thbia-Melsan,Uma Das Gupta,Alain Sicard,Ren Henane

Editorial coordinationFranoise Rivire,Annick Thbia-Melsan,cipsh,Enzo Fazzino,Jacques Plouin,Nama Boumaiza,Nolle Aboya-Chevanne,Lamia Somai-Lasa,Chris Sacarabany

Graphic design, cover and illustrationAude Perrier

Printingunesco

isbn : unesco, 2011Printed in France

DiffusionThe publication Rabindrnth Tagore, Pablo Neruda, Aim Csaire, pour un universel rconciliis 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 unescos and do not engage in any way the responsibility of the Organisation.

5rabindrnth 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.

7pablo 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).

aim csaire

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.

9

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 csaire 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 worlds 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 todays 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.

Rabindrnth Tagore, Pablo Neruda and Aim Csaire 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 cultures 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 Csaire, 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, Rabindrnth Tagore (18611941), Pablo Neruda (19041973) and Aim Csaire (19132008) 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 worlds 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 Csaire help to refound the intellectual and moral solidarity required by the challenges facing humanity. At the 35th session of unescos General Conference, the Member States adopted resolution 46, proposed by the Executive Council, to launch the programme entitled Rabindrnth Tagore, Pablo Neruda and Aim Csaire: For a reconciled universal, and to include it in the Organizations medium-term revisable strategy for 20102013, in an interdisciplinary operational framework appropriate for sustainable action.

Indeed Tagore, Neruda and Csaire, 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 Aim Csaire 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 unescos 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 Csaire 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 Csaire 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 Csaire 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 Csaire 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, Andr Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Federico Garca 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 Csaire: 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, Csaire 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 Csaire, 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:


t 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.

t 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.

t 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.

t 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.

t 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.


unescos action areas to promotethe projects 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 projects 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, unescos 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 unescos 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 unescos 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 programmes 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 peoples lives.

7. This is followed by the projects 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 CSAIRE POETICS, HUMANISM AND ACTIONACROSS THE CENTURIES, LIVES, LITERARY WORKS

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

Rabindrnth 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 peoples 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.

rabindrnth tagore

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THE YOUNG RABIRabindrnth 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, csaire, poetics, humanism and action

31rabindrnth 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 fathers 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 Indias 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 Bengals 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.

rabindrnth tagore

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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 Molires 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 (Mans 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, csaire, 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. Spains 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 (19041905) 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 Kakuz Okakura, who in his book Asias 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 enemiesWhat 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 Tagores 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.

rabindrnth tagore

39rabindrnth tagore

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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 Andr Gide and Hlne 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 Tagores 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 periods most eminent Europeans, such as Andr Gide, William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound, taught him about the cultural and political debates of the time, in which growing awareness of the Wests 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 Rollands words of la dgnrescence de lEurope, 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 indias 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 poets 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.

Tagores influence was particularly evident on the most emblematic of his fellow-countrymen, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (18611944); apostle of civil disobedience, of satyagrah, on whom Tagore bestowed, for the first time publicly, the respected title Mahtm (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 Gandhis 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 worlds 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 worlds 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 Europes 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 ltroite coupe, in Andr Gides 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 countrys 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.

Rabindrnth Tagore passed away in the house where he was born on 7 August 1941, 22 Shravan 1348 in the Bengali calendar, six years before Indias 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 Indias national anthem by the constituent assembly on 24 January 1950.

With an active and still present consciousness, Rabindrnth 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 Easts patient darkness,India, keep watch!Bring your worship offerings to this sacred dawn.May the first hymn to welcome it spring from your voice.


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selection of works by rabindrnth tagore

1900 - La Petite Marie 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: LOffrande lyrique by Andr Gide, 1913)

1910 - Gora (Fair-faced)

1912 - Jivansmriti (My reminiscences)

1916 - Stray Birds

1916 - Sdhan (The realization of life)

1916 - Ghare Baire (The home and the world)

1921 - The Wreck

1921 Le vagabond et autres histoires, (French edition of Tagores 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 fantmes 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 Aim Csaire, 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 Neftal 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, Jos 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 Doa 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 poets 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 governments 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 poets 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 maana. 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 Temucos literary club, and at the same time wrote two unpublished works, The Strange Islands and The Pointless Fatigues. In 1921, while attending classes at Santiagos 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 cancin desesperada in 1924 , appearing in the newspaper La nacin 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 dAnatole 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 Csar 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 peoples 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 garca 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 Garca Lorca, the Spanish poet, playwright, painter, pianist and composer, and the emblematic founder of the Generation of 1927 with among others Miguel Hernndez, 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 Dal and Luis Buuel. 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 Lorcas 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 poetrys essential role as a catalyst for change and consciousness-raising, he founded and directed the journal Caballo verde para la poesa.

In Europe between the wars, peace was directly threatened in Spain where there was a political head-on clash between General Francos conservative Nationalists and the socialist Republicans. Following the Republican and Popular Front electoral victory on 18 July 1936, Francos 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 Garca 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 Espaa en el corazn (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 Chiles peoples, nature, landscapes, natural catastrophes, arts and poets. In 1941 he wrote A Song for Bolvar 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 Unions 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 Tarapac 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 Wests 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 nerudas political exile On 4 September 1946 Gabriel Gonzlez 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, Gonzlez 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 ntima a millones de hombres (Personal letter to millions of people). President Gonzlez 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 Zolas Jaccuse. 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 Pushkins birth and, together with Paul luard, 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 leador (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 Peoples 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 Gonzlez 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, Nicols Guilln 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 Nerudas 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 Shakespeares 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 Aragons Elgie 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 Joaqun Murieta, performed in 1967 by the University of Chile Theatre Institute in Santiago.


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nobel prize for literature and journeys 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 Unitys 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 Allendes 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 Allendes 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 Pinochets 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 Mara 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 Valparaso 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 cancin 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 capitn (The Captains 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 - Cancin 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 pjaro

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 da

1969 - Fin de mundo

1970 - La espada encendida Las piedras del cielo

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

1973 - Incitacin al nixonicidio y Alabanza de la revolucin chilena

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

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Poet, playwright, essayist, politician, pedagogue, Aim Csaire 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, Aim Csaire 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 Aim Csaire, 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. Csaire 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. Aim Csaires words are beautiful, as fresh oxygen, said Andr 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.

aim csaire 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.

aim csaire

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unanswered questions in the homelandAim Csaire 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 Pel 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 seas great hysterical lick.

The young Aim 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. Csaire 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 Lyce Louis-le-Grand with the purpose of getting him accepted into the schools hypokhgne class to prepare for the entrance exam to the cole Normale Suprieure situated on the rue dUlm. On the very first day in the course of enrolment, Aim Csaire would meet a young man from Senegal a few years older than himself called Lopold Sdar Senghor with whom he would form a lifelong fraternal friendship. He also met Lon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana, whom he knew from Martinique. The three founders of the Ngritude 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. Ren Maran, author of Batouala, vritable roman ngre, 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 mans 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 Bakers explosive beauty and nights at the Bal Ngre 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 Csaire was intent on discovering faced with the rise of fascist and racist ideologies that denied African civilizations 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, Csaire 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 Lgitime dfense, which advocated revolution. In September 1934 Csaire, together with other students from the French Antilles and Africa, among them Lon Gontran Damas and Birago Diop, founded the magazine Ltudiant noir, where the word ngritude appeared for the first time - a word invented by Csaire 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.


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ngritudeAim Csaire 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 worlds superiority, combined with an arbitrary hierarchy of races and the omnipotence of the Wests economic and strategic interests and civilization.

His neologism ngritude 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 Csaire declared, I belong to the race of those who are oppressed. Born with the conviction to overturn the oppression experienced by coloured people, ngritude 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 persons 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. Aim Csaires 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 cole Normale Suprieure, Csaire 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 dun retour au pays natal, a long prose poem he did not complete until 1938, and at the same time he wrote a thesis Le thme du Sud dans la littrature noire amricaine des usa.

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return home and the journal tropiquesIn September 1939, by way of a teacher, the journal Volonts published the first edition of Cahier dun retour au pays natal, Csaires first masterpiece whose fiery power and orphic quest make it a major work.

In 1937 Aim Csaire married Suzanne Roussi, a literature student and compatriot who, according to Andr 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 agrgation exam in literature. The Second World War had begun and the Csaire family returned to their homeland.

In Martinique he taught at the Lyce 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. Vichys special envoy, Admiral Robert, even installed detention camps. In reaction to the alienation and repression, Csaire and his wife Suzanne, together with other French Antilles intellectuals, founded the journal Tropiques, which defied the Vichy governments censorship.

The young teacher, Csaire, would soon influence an entire generation of young intellectuals that included Frantz Fanon, Joseph Zobel and Edouard Glissant. The journal Tropiques, directed by Aim and Suzanne Csaire, and supported by young intellectuals from the Caribbean, such as Ren Mnil, Georges Gratiant, Aristide Mauge, 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 Lvi-Strauss, the painter Wilfredo Lam, and most notably, the father of surrealism, Andr Breton who recounted his trip in a short book Martinique, charmeuse de serpents. When he chanced upon Cahier dun retour au pays natal on a haberdashers counter, Breton was stupefied and dazzled to discover Csaires voice. A deep friendship grew between the two poets. In Un grand pote noir, which Breton wrote in 1943 in New York as a preface to the bilingual edition of Cahier dun 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 Aim Csaires poetry and the profound respect that immediately inspired him through the poetic voice of the man who wanted to utter the great negro cr

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